White Player: Ballroom Blitz

Pulsating with fear you dive into the room through the door-space and find yourself in a BALLROOM that is echoing the remaining clatter from the gunfire in the hallway behind you. There is a moment of sweet relief as you note no more immediate danger. Your mind is almost angry at itself for not seeing that deathtrap machinegun and wonder still upon its source as you begin to scan the room.

The room is lit with the warm reddish light of a fire place amplified by the cold white light of a lamp in the far corner. The corner opposite that you note a safe imbedded in the wall. It is a dial safe that is currently shut and locked. The walls are a blank and dull lustre grey that ache with scratches and stains demonstrating an apparently bloody past. Bullet holes and blood stains break-up what might have been a truly beautiful room. The walls are lined with piles of cardboard boxes and junk making for a general mess. You can make out the shape of a grand piano but it is so covered in stuff you cannot see any of its physical manifestation. There is another opened door to this room and you can even make out that through the hallway beyond it there is yet another door.

Then the shape of a sofa clear of stuff has contrasted the cluttered view of the room. On the far wall before a window lies a smooth piece of furniture and what you can now make out to be a woman lying upon it. Her sleek, thin, silk-smooth skin has matched her greyish dress so precisely that if it were not for her crimpled locks of dark hair she might have been presumed part of the furniture. She is wearing long black arm length gloves that trickle down her body towards her equally as black purse with an involuntary motion that confirms her as startled from her sleep. She lazily rises up from the sofa and wipes her hair back into perfect shape. The silence aftermath of the turret gun is now apparent to you and with it you begin to hear another sound. A faint static with a rhythmic “whumping” sound that repeats every few seconds.

In a voice as smooth as jazz itself and with a tone so harmless it seems to harmonize you to her, she speaks. “Ah, I must have dozed off”, she says with a no real consequence, “I didn’t realize it had started.”
And now she has placed a long cigarette into her ruby red lips and clenched between her pearly white teeth while her other hand has reached into her purse in pursuit of something tangible.
“Be a sweetheart and turn the record over dear” she utters matter-of-factly.