If he could grumble irritably, he would. Instead he blows another dry raspberry and keeps checking doors as they go along, fruitlessly, just out of spite.

Arthur figures she's just using some magical bullshit to figure stuff out. He is going to try and find some patterns, once he's settled, but he's not getting his hopes up yet.

"Yeah, this seems good. Thank you, Ms. Hearthkeeper," he replies, only realizing as he says it that the 'Ms.' prefix does not quite feel right, cringing just a little as the faux pas passes his lips. "The double moons are pretty neat. And, uh, is there just an invisible ceiling or does that opening go somewhere?"

Naturally, he's already sliding up the walls to check himself by the time the body's asked.

"There isn't a ceiling, exactly, but if you keep going upwards, eventually you'll find you aren't getting any farther above the ground."

"If you don't have any questions, I'll leave you to get settled. If you need something, you'll be able to find me in the great hall."

He'll see about that!

"I think I'm good for now."

And while the angel's doing...whatever he's doing right now, Arthur will get started unpacking and setting up. He's feeling pretty good, probably because he's had the first reasonably balanced meal in a few days this morning, and maybe some lingering buzz from the energy drinks, so it doesn't take too long. His first instinct afterwards is to sit down and check his phone...which obviously doesn't turn up anything useful. He doesn't have his books either, naturally.

His mind wanders for a while, wondering what caused a place like this to exist. Eventually he collects one of his fresher notebooks and a pencil and starts writing and occasionally doodling, switching between journaling about the last couple weeks, writing down things he wants to investigate about this place, and putting bits and pieces of story or setting ideas he's had onto paper. Occasionally he'll shift how he's sitting, or get up and stretch or go for a jog around the space. It's kind of crazy to him that people apparently think this is small. He's pretty sure this one garden is bigger than the park by his parents' house.

He wants to explore the refuge more, but the Hearthkeeper said that part of claiming a room is spending time inside, so he think he's going to try and sit tight for a while. He'll probably check on his books tomorrow, and maybe get another meal in the kitchen.

Well, he's gotten over the wall. He's not entirely sure what he was expecting, but it wasn't this.

It's kind of disorienting as he floats along the grid of rooftops he's come upon. He's going in a straight line, or at least it feels like he is, but instead of steadily getting further away from the body, he can feel himself getting further, then closer, then further, then closer, over and over. The roofs repeat. So does the garden.

He's read about this. It's like he's in a space with elliptic geometry, rather than euclidean. At least in the horizontal directions.

Eventually, after exploring the roofs for a while longer, he floats back down into the garden and sees what happens if he tries to go down.

Several dozen feet of soil, then a flat plane of that same impervious substance that's inside the walls. If he tries going underground and then underneath the building, it's the same.

He gives it another kick for good measure, then floats back to the surface.

The body is still just hanging around, but while it's stuck here waiting, he can at least go explore elsewhere in the refuge.

Let's see where else he can find.

Is he looking for anything in particular?

Sort of? He's not entirely focused on any specific thing. He's thinking about the rooms and people he's already seen, he's thinking about the magic in the kitchen, about that electrical engineering workshop the matron mentioned, he's thinking about the strange geometry of the garden the body's busy trying cement his claim on.

Mostly, he just wants to see what this place can do. He wants rooms that'll tell him what's possible here, information that he can start fitting together into an idea of how this place works.

Well, mostly there are a lot of rooms, and hallways, and staircases, and doors. The layout is... almost as if someone built a bunch of separate houses, then haphazardly stiched them together. Hallways bend all over the place, mostly at square angles, and refuse to stay straight for long. Rooms are grouped together with no logic or thought for functionality. Sometimes there are multiple kitchens in adjacent rooms, for instance. Staircases are less likely to go straight up and down than they are to wind around unevenly and have landings in strange places and connect with other staircases. Some of the hallways are fairly broad, some of them would be uncomfortably narrow for an adult man. Sometimes there are windows, more often in the rooms than the hallways, but their placement does not imply a consistent spatial relationship between the inside and the outside. For nearly all of the windows, it's dark outside. (If he goes through a window, or finds a door leading outside, he'll find a garden area.) Overall, the layout of the house implies a complete lack of the planning that an actual architect would do when constructing a building, or perhaps an active opposition to planning or things that look like they were designed with a purpose. It also becomes apparent that the geometry of the house is not euclidean, because it is possible to loop around to the same place you were earlier, without taking a path that would form a closed loop in euclidean space. Either that, or the house is just moving things around when he isn't looking.

Most of the rooms can be described as bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, sitting rooms, or dining rooms. The style of the furniture, furnishings, decor, etc. varies a lot, though the lanterns are consistent. Sometimes there are fireplaces. It's pretty clear that, when the house creates these rooms for him, what it wants to be is a house. Everything he finds could conceivably be found in a domestic setting of some kind, or maybe a hotel or inn, and he's more likely to find things that are more likely to be found in a house. Everything appears to be sized for and designed for human bodies. The tech level of the things he finds ranges from fairly primitive (though not to the point of straw huts—all the rooms have solid walls) to something like victorian era. Unlike the layout of the house, the content of the individual rooms themselves is fairly logical—no half-bedroom, half-kitchen monstrosities. The furniture is placed in a way that makes sense, the decor looks like it all came from the same planet and even the same culture most of the time, and overall the rooms clearly have specific functions and would suit those functions reasonably well.

The angel wanders through hundreds of empty rooms before he finds a bedroom with a woman sleeping inside. She seems human.

He wonders why it's so often dark. It was morning, even if it wasn't exactly bright, back in the garden the body's hunkered down in.

Given the whole 'temporary rooms get destroyed' bit, and the weirdness with over the garden wall, he really wouldn't be surprised if rooms are moving and it's all non-euclidean, except for where the walls and floor keep space nice and straight.

The nigh-on anti-planning of the structure also gives him the vibe of, like, procgen in a game. Like there's just a machine whirring away somewhere around thinking up random plausible rooms and just sort of plopping them down whenever someone opens a door, modulo whatever magic the matron's done to make it play nice. It's not hard to imagine how this could get dangerous without that. He wonders whether all the rooms being reasonably complete is fundamental to the substructure or something the matron's magic is enforcing. Hell, maybe even the space looking euclidean if you stick to the normal parts of individual rooms is something she added too, and the rest of this place is full distorted.

The fact that she said the substructure as a whole was called the Eternal House does make him think the fact that the rooms are all orbiting around this handful of archetypes is inherent to it, though.

He wishes he could see the guts of this thing, or at least of what the matron's built on top of it. Hopefully the body can worm its way into her good graces and get her to teach him some magic or something.

Oh! Another person. He doesn't think he's been gone long enough for it to have gone from morning to night, but it's hard to tell with the windows, and who knows what kind of time zone this person was coming from, or even whether her sleep schedule is sync'd up with anything in particular.

Should he leave? Maybe.

Will he leave? ...If looks like he's about to get caught.

He'll give the room a once over for anything interesting or valuable seeming, before hanging out over the door and see if anything happens before he gets bored.

The woman does have a diary, some books, and some jewelry.

Ooh, a diary. It's been a while since he's read a closed book, but he's pretty sure he's still got the trick. Let's see just who this lady is...

"I think that's enough."

The Hearthkeeper is right behind him, apparently. She's speaking quietly.

Damn. At least he knows she's spying on him now, though.

He'll back away from the diary slowly.

"Leave."

She firmly points her finger to the door.

He'll try and trudge away through the door as miserably as he can, given his lack of a body.

Now probably isn't a bad time to check back in on the body, anyway. He wonders how snapping back will work, given the whole spatial weirdness going on. Might as well give it a try!

He can't really tell where Arthur is, but is able to snap back to him without trouble.

A few moments later, there's a knock on the door.

Arthur's briefly overcome by an odd and very sudden feeling of nausea, bad enough that he thinks he might hurl for a second, but it clears up almost as a quickly as it came on. Weird. Maybe he's adjusting weirdly to this garden or something.

"Just a second!" he says, steadying himself and making sure there isn't going to be a second wave of nausea before heading over to open the door.

"Hello. I'm here to speak to the angel." She looks at it. "Don't intrude upon the privacy of my guests. If you enter a room that belongs to someone, leave immediately. Do you understand?"

Freaking seriously? He pivots to look at wherever the Hearthkeeper is looking with genuine betrayal on his face.

How, exactly, is he supposed to reply to that? He doesn't have a throat! Or hands!

Looks around for a moment, then flits over to where the body left his notebook and pencil, tries his damnedest to write 'I understand' with as much ire as he wish he could speak with in the corner of one page, tears it off, and drags the paper back over through the air and does his best to 'toss' it at the matron.