device so it chose to ignore me. Or possibly the battery is just drained. It was cloudy yesterday. No matter, we will return to the Universe-Interpreter when you have better trained your brain to think like a slice of lime. To the laboratory!"
When he said laboratory he must have meant the entire house, for there were not a bunch of normal rooms that one had to pass through before reaching a sequestered lab room. Wondrous-looking things spilled out into the mansion, beginning right away with the intricate foyer room.
"I decided to make the very first room one of the most fascinatingly distracting," said Leafhead. "Visitors are comfortable and entertained enough that they rarely feel the need to move on to any other part of the house. Some people actually think this is the entire house. Helps keep nosey people away from the more important rooms where world-altering experiments are perpetually underway. I get quite a lot of people poking around here, you know. Some of them are undercover intelligence agents out to raid my brilliance for dark purposes."
I did not reply. I was dazzled by the holographic rooftop constellation chart, as well as the fact that the surrounding walls were a virtual jungle landscape down which cascaded an ultra-realistic 3-D waterfall. Robot arms descended from out of nowhere and helped remove my jacket. Another set of arms replaced the jacket with a crisp-white lab coat.
"You should find that to your fit," said Leafhead. "Sorry about the cleanliness. By the time all the white is gone you will have become a great scientist."
One of the robot arms decided to help out by flinging a globule of bluish matter on the coat.
"See! You're off to a great start!"
Before he could say 'follow me,' the floor below us suddenly turned into a moving walkway and I found myself being guided along at a leisurely touring pace.
"This is the Prime Hallway," he said as we moved through an epic space that defied the logic of being indoors. "Each sub-hallway, wing, room, attic, basement, library, secret chamber or any other section of the house at some point connects with the Prime Hallway."
I could see that an infinitude of doors, staircases and narrow hallways branched off in any direction. Nothing quite looked like the last. One door looked utterly futuristic, being made up of a transparent wall of turquoise vapors held in place by ultra-violet light shining through alien prisms, while many of the other doors were of the classic Gothic castle variety.
"That is the entrance to the South-Western section," said Leafhead gravely as he motioned to a wooden door locked up with an absurd plethora of bolts, boards and chains. "There will no need for you enter that part of the house at all."
Another room was being kept private by a thin blood-splattered shower curtain.
"That's just one of the kitchens," explained Leafhead. "I've been experimenting with new synthetic dyes for hilarious prank food products in my down time. I am very close to perfecting a line of perogies that are actually pressurized paint bombs. Whoever tries to eat one is covered with a splattering of putrid muck that is impossible to wash off for at least a month."
"Have you ever created any monsters?" I suddenly asked.
"Pfft," said Leafhead disdainfully. "Monster-creation is a sophomoric act that I perfected as a teenager. All it ever got me was a few near-lynchings by the village locals before I'd even graduated junior high school. Abnormal brain transplants? No way. My monsters were highly intelligent and well-behaved. But they were monsters, so I shouldn't have been surprised by their presence invariably causing fear and violent outrage wherever they went."
Out of nowhere I felt a painful sting to my elbow. "Ouch!" I shouted. "Something just stung me!"
"No, I think it was a bite," Leafhead had said coolly. He seemed to use the most casual tone when speaking about the most serious topics. "Remember how I said I turned some of the plants into carnivorous reptiles?"
"You actually did that?" I asked, looking around for any more of them.
"They were never meant to roam free around the house. Thought I'd gathered them all up by now but I guess there are still one or two hiding somewhere."
"Hey, I'm bleeding!" I said, noticing my entire left shirt-sleeve was suddenly drenched.
"I can fix that," said Leafhead. "Soon we will be at the StorageCentre, where there is a collection of probably the greatest hospital equipment on the planet. For now enjoy the sights."
I looked up at the roof of the Prime Hallway. It was a domed half-pipe like the psychedelic Fremont tunnel in Las Vegas. Except instead of the roof being a 3D screen like it was in the foyer, it was now covered with epic paintings of the animal kingdom.
"Up ahead is the Terrarium."
The Prime Hallway appeared to reach the end of the road at the Terrarium. A vast room appeared with a gigantic domed skylight, allowing god-beams of natural lighting to hit a centrifuge of diverse plant and animal life. Around the perimeter of the room was a deep moat in which swam the various aquatic acquisitions of Leafhead Incorporated. Protected by the moat was an island made up partly of grassy fields and partly of deserts, on which many different creatures grazed. Various trees, vines and shrubs grew freely. Ordinarily contrasting forms of life and landscape mingled in harmony, as if Dr. Leafhead had successfully meshed every type of ecosystem on Earth into one singular microcosmic bio-dome, which in fact he had. It was astonishing. I asked Leafhead if we could hang out in the Terrarium for awhile longer, but he reminded me that I was rapidly losing blood due to the recent reptile bite and that it was imperative we reach the StorageCentre soon. For this I thanked him.
Aside from the collection of expensive hospital equipment, the StorageCentre was endlessly occupied by shelves of categorized samples, electronic scraps and tools. In one corner a quarantined room housed hundreds of different mold colonies.
"Tomorrow we will bring everything from the shopping list into here," said Leafhead. "Except the jellyfish and the rye bread."
"Where will those go?" I asked.
"The jellyfish will be integrated into the Terrarium, of course," said Leafhead. "The rye bread is not to be eaten. It is an essential component for the Universe-Interpreter."
"About that hospital equipment?" I asked.
"Yes, it's over there."
The floor had stopped controlling where we walked, so we made our own way over to what looked like a functional medieval torture device.
"This is The Stitcher," said Leafhead proudly. "In the span of mere minutes this machine can painlessly stop the blood-flow and heal the wound of an injury of just about any level of severity."
"Wow, great."
"However those types of reptile bites are incredibly poisonous," he continued with a dark turn. "So first you must undergo a blood-session within the De-Toxifier."
There was another medieval torture device beside The Stitcher. It was a small, metallic egg-shaped room that looked as if one of its functions was to be a gas chamber or a prop in a Cronenberg movie.
"The De-Toxifier process is going to take a few hours. By now the mutation-causing poison has begun to permanently graft itself into your bloodstream. The machine will need to drain the entirety of your blood so that it can be filtered through a bleaching cycle."
"The entirety?" I asked.
"Only a liter or so at a time, of course, to avoid death."
Even though I was terrified of the De-Toxifier making a greater mess of my vital signs, I somehow knew that I could trust Dr. Leafhead. Even if I didn't necessarily trust everything I found in his house.
I opened the door of the De-Toxifier and climbed inside.
"You will be awake for the whole procedure," shouted Leafhead through a thick glass window. An alarm sounded while a computer counted down from 1 minute. "But not in pain. Hopefully. For something to do you can watch a film I made for new interns who require acclimatizing to the madness of my homestead."
Leafhead slipped away. After the minut
e had counted down, the alarm stopped, the machine started and the film turned on.
"Welcome to Chateau Leafhead," said the recorded image of the Doctor. "If you are watching this film it means that you have been hired as an intern. Congratulations. If you are watching this within the De-Toxifier, it also means you have already critically injured yourself. Do not be down on yourself. No intern yet, not even the great Melvin, has avoided a bout with the De-Toxifier in the first week. It is the only logical outcome when someone faces the many diverse and sudden threats of my home from a perspective of total ignorance."
Leafhead looked about the same age in the film, and had mentioned the most recent intern Melvin, yet everything about it clearly looked as if it had been filmed in the 1970s. I assumed he had added some visual effects like scratches and graininess in an editing program. But why he had made the room look like a set for a period movie made no sense to me.
"Navigating the house and grounds can be a daunting and dangerous task. For the first few days you will wish you had a map. There are somewhere between one and two hundreds rooms, but basically all the main aspects are divided into 8 sections following the 8 major points of the compass." The movie went into a split-screen, showing a digital map of the house while a poorly cropped Leafhead listed off the areas. They were as follows:
SOUTHERN WING - Main Foyer.
SOUTH-EASTERN WING