All Inclusive

The taste of ozone lay at the edge of her tongue, the faint pull of muscle and skin knitting too slowly back together at her calf keeping the rush of days just past firmly in mind.

Having found herself from one step to the next transported from the beginnings of a chase she had come to find familiar through the halls of one lush hotel and into an entirely different setting of one, Mystique had thought little of the consequences of her actions and pulled the door closed after her. One shape had melted smoothly into another at the sound of voices approaching, the skin she had worn as her only for so long one she pulled over herself then out of habit and without thought. Gone were the blue skin and red hair, the yellow-gold eyes lacking the human whites that people so preferred. Gone too was the shape of a lobbyist she had borrowed for the sake of a key and a room charged to an account that was not her own.

When a pair of strangers had rounded the corner, swept up in their own conversation and too busy to notice her as they passed, she stood the same blue-eyed blonde young woman she had lived as so long before.

The hotel had made little less a mystery after two days within its walls, an ear kept ever open for anything she might learn in overhearing the conversations of others. The others spoke easily of strange worlds beyond the doors studding the walls of the hallway. Those that served behind the desk had handed her a key to a room of her own with no question of how or why she had come to be there. She had moved through those days with little more than skimming the surface of everything around her, unsure of what to make of the collection of people who walked and lingered through the many bright-lit rooms, less sure of what to make of herself.

She had been drawn in her uncertainty to the massive library, the shelves heavy with books and comfortingly familiar in that same feel all libraries held within their walls of words and of knowledge and of quiet. She stood then fingering the edge of a book's cover on a shelf before her, a smile pulling at her lips as she considered the twisted sense of humor chance had had in her fingers catching over the gold lettering of its title.

The Metamorphosis, indeed.