Almost V

셋

Taehyung hands out the rest of his maps while the other group's voices fade away. We then followed him to the opposite side of the lobby, through the arch marked JAEHYUN'S WING, where we trade the cool lobby air for musty, too warm mansion air.

I feel like this is the part of orientation I should be enjoying, but I'm so shocked that Taehyung recognizing me that I'm not paying attention to my surroundings. I want to hang back and get away from him, but there's only like fifteen of us, and Anna happily drags me by the arm to the front of the group. Now we're walking right behind him - so close, he probably thinks we're interested of his butt, which is pretty nice, to be honest.

"There are 42 rooms in Jaehyun's Wing, also known as the world's biggest man cave," Taehyung says as he stops in the middle of a drawing room filled with all things related to vampires. Fangs. Pale skin portraits. Victorian figures of vampires showing their fangs. At the back of the room, there's even an old-fashioned coffin from England that's been renovated to a bar.

"Our beloved insane millionaire loved hunting, gambling, vampires, booze, and pirates," Taehyung said. "The pirates, especially. But who doesn't, really?"

Okay, so the boy's got a certain charm about him. I'm not immune to charm. And while he's talking, I realize he's got a deep voice that sounds like it belong to a video game voice-over actor - easygoing and cocky at the same time. Ugh, I bet he's so full of himself.

Why is he giving us this tour anyway? I thought security guards were supposed to stand around, waiting to yell at idiots for putting their hands on paintings.

When we head into the next room, I find out why.

"This is the slot-machine room," he says, walking backward as he talks. The room is filled with a maze of counters, at which you can sit and play one of a hundred antique tabletop slot machines. Looks like the rarer ones are behind ropes.

Taehyung stops. "You might be asking yourself at this point, Are all the rooms named after what's in them? And the answer is yes. The museum owners are not creative - unless it comes to stretching out the workforce, in which case they are extremely creative. Take my job, for example. Why pay a customer service manager to handle guest disputes when you can just send in your security team? You'll quickly find that the irrepressible Mr. Loser . . . sorry, Mr. Lopez" - he gets a few snickers for that one - "likes everyone to be able to do every job, just in case you  have to fill in for someone else. So don't get comfortable, because you, too, could be given the next wave of new hires a tour in a couple of weeks. Better memorize that map I gave you, ASAP."

Ugh. Great. I don't like the sound of this. Maybe it's not too late to apply for that vomit cleaner job Anna was talking about earlier.

Over the next half-hour or so, Taehyung breezily snakes us through the rooms in this wing. Rooms filled with: fake mummies (Mummy Room), weird 19th Century medical equipment (Medical Equipment Room), and walls of aquariums (Aquarium Room). There's even a collection of sideshow outfits inside a gigantic circus tent. It's major sensory overload up in this place, and it's all blurring together, because there's no rhyme or reason to the mansion's layout, and it's all confusing turns and secret staircases and hidden rooms behind fireplaces. If I were a museum guest and had several hours to waste, I'd be thrilled. Total eye candy everywhere. But knowing I was supposed to memorize all this? Headache city.

At the end of the first floor, the maze opens up to a large dark room with a double-high ceiling. The walls are all fake rock, and a night sky rigged with LED stars twinkling above fake buffalos, a glowing fake campfire, wax figurines of Native Americans in weird outfits, and a bunch of teepees. - which several members of the male in our group decide to explore, like they're kids. It smells like musty leather and fur, so I opt to wait by the fake campfire with Anna.