Adventure Location, The Mall

The mall is everything one could imagine it to be and more. It rises from a gracefully bulldozed hilltop on white marble pillars, and is roofed over by a high, glassy dome.

Within, time does not exist.

Soft music fills the air, and subtly arrayed lights please the eye with an endless variety of shades and textures, rendering shadows edgeless, gleaming from brass bedsteads and joyously leaping away from the mirror balls that spin among the banners overhead. One feels ennobled just being here, one of a thousand gracious shoppers whose tastes all the soft interior world seeks to please.

The air smells of lilies, leather, and chocolate chip cookies.

The mall contains a hundred perfect shops, each one a jewel box of treasures. Sound systems, cloth-of-gold gowns, emerald shoes, row upon row of identical riches fill the tacks, wealth multiplied and repeated upon itself in such profusion the mind cannot contain it. Cut crystal goblets, ashtrays, decanters, paperweights, and bowls, each diamond-sharp facet throwing off flecks of rainbow. Nutmeg trees, fountains, and escalators.

You occasionally find yourself before one of those three-paneled department-store mirrors and stare at yourself replicated to infinity, wondering which, if any of them, are you.