Through the ... well, water.

Melancholia was sitting in her dressing room, in front of her wortable, but she was not working. she could not. The terrible sadness that had given her her name had taken hold of her, a heavy, paralising wieght.
"Mrrirr?"
Mordecai rubbed his and against her hand, as though to ask what was wrong.
"Nothing you can help, darling" she said, sighing.
She bent down and kissed the cats head, then rose. although she had not thought about it, she knew what she was going to do.
"Goodbye Mor. Take care of Mania for me will you?"
She went out, taking her little used coat of the hook, as it was chilly outside.

Making her way to the channel in front of their house

Marceline had not come home that night. That was nothing surprising, seeing as we are talking about Marceline.
She had been at some ball, which had gone on until early morning. She was drunk, most of the paint on her face had rubbed off, except for the orange-red smeared around her lips. She had managed to half-force herself into the carriage of some man that was going the same way as she, and when she got out of the carriage in front of her family's house, she stumbled over. The poor man, a little bit less drunk, worriedly asked if she was all right, but she just sat in the slush in the ground, laughing. The man gave her an exasperated look, climbed out of the carriage and helped her up.
"I'm fine, I'm fine", Marceline laughed and patted the poor man on his arm. "You just go home, I'm sure I'll be able to walk these few meters without falling on my face... Perhaps."
The man seemed very unsure, but Marceline almost pushed him back into his carrige and closed the door - the man was incredibly dull.
She waved as the carriage disappeared from sight. Then she started to catch the tiny snowflakes on her tongue, dancing in circles and finally falling on her bottom. The channel was covered in the same slush, and Marceline wondered why one could not walk on the slush. It did look almost solid, at least until Marceline rolled a bit of the slush into a ball and threw it into the channel, which let out a very distinctively non-solid "slush" when the ball it the slushy surface.
"Shluusshh", Marceline slurred childishly and stood up. Her dress was getting rather wet, and her coat had been thoroughly wet long time ago. Probably last evening.
The sky was slate grey, but Marceline was certain the time was not far from noon.

As Melancholia came out of the front door, she almost ran into her sister. Who was more than drunk. She wrinkled her nose at the smell. How vulgar..not to mention the way her clothes were dearanged and wet.
Typical of course, Mania never had taken care of herself.
Melancholia sighed.
But She could not go on being her sisters caretaker. She could not go on being at all.
It was not any dramatic sentiment that made her wish to die, no great despair of how her creations would never serve their purposes because their use was not acknowledged. It was simply that she felt her life to be quite pointless, and since she disliked pointless things, she would now end it.

"Levai Jelai." she said, then walked a little ways onto the small bridge and climbed onto the railing. She waved to her sister.
"Take care."
She executed a graceful turn, and arched herself down to the mirror of water, shattering it beneath herself. Shards pierced her skin, and cold nipped her fingers, her arms, her body. Slowly, she sank, she fell through darkness....

Walking (wobbling) towards the front door, Marceline almost got hit on the face by the door, and then her sister almost ran into her. Marceline stood for a second, trying to get her eyes to fix on her sister, who, however, was already walking past the drunk girl.
Marceline turned (wobbled) around to look at her sister. She said good-bye. Marceline wrinkled her eyebrows, confused, and started to walk towards the bridge Melisande walked onto.
Marceline closed her eyes for a second and opened them, her blood chilling as she saw her melancholic twin perch herself onto the railing, wave at her, tell her to take care, and go down. She screeched when her sister fell. And then she ran, her clumsy spaghetti feet wobbling under her, her ankle getting twisted, but no matter, she had to get to the channel.
She ripped her coat open (unneeded weight), dropped it to the ground and dove after her sister. Whatever fog there was in her mind was immediately driven away by the cold flush of sobriety when the icy water invaded her senses. The channel water was dirty, but nevertheless, Marceline opened her eyes and tried to see her sister.
Where was she? There was only a few seconds between Melisande hitting the water and Marceline diving after - Melisande could not have been able to swim far, not with the way she tight laced. In fact, she had probably lost consciusness.
Marceline saw something light deeper down, and ignoring the searing need for oxygen, dove towards it. It was Melisande. Marceline wrapped her arms around the skinnier girl, perched her feet on the grund, and pushed upwards, surprised to see how close the surface seemed to be. And the water looked clear...
They burst out of the water and tumbled over the low railing into the ground. Marceline coughed for a while, and ripped fresh air into her searing lungs. Her sister just lay there, and Marceline figured she must have breathed in water, so she dragged her twin's feet over the railing and rolled her on her stomach, ripping open the bow in the ribbon keeping clsed the collar on Melisande's nech, and then proceede to unbutton her gress and fight to open the knts on her corset. After getting the back of the corset open she started to push on Melisande's back to get the water out of her lungs.
Marceline saw water run out of her sister's mouth. She turned the girl over after emptying her lungs and took a second to wonder what to do next. This was not quite the same as saving the life of some drunk "friend" that has been snuffed out like a candle and almost choked in her own vomit, mind you. Here one at least did not need to dig liquid laugh out of the other's mouth...
Her sister was not breathing. There was no time to sit and wonder. Marceline removed the upper part of her sister's dress to do away with the corset, then used her hands to push on Melisande's chest, then leaned over, closed Melisande's nostrils and blew her breath into her sister's lungs. The darker haired girl started to cough, a little bit of water rising up with the cough. Marceline slapped her sister on the cheek for good measure, since the girl still seemed relatively phlegmatic, and she was angry. Her sister could get ready for the mother of all lectures.

When Mely woke up, the first thing she noticed was that her cheek stung. Then she noticed her chest and throat hurt. Then, she noticed she was awake. Which meant she was alive.
Which meant she had failed, and was probably on her way to an insane asylum as a suicidal. She felt around her, expecting wood or fabric, and found dirt. How strange.
She opened her eyes. Above her was a clear blue sky, and Mania´s worried face. She also noticed that, even though she was wet, she was not cold.

Was she perhaps not alive after all? But Manias presence would then mean she was dead too... had the poor fool dived after her and drowned as well?

"Are we dead?" she asked in twin.

Melisande seemed to slowly get back to her senses. Marceline was furstrated, angry, worried and relieved.
Melisande asked if they were dead.
Marceline let herself fall backwards on the pebbles and looked at the sky.
"I feel quite alive", she said matter-of-factly after studying her feelings for a moment. "I don't remember my lights going out, either", she continued, "so I suppose I am alive." She lifted herself to seating position and leaned on her arms.
"And since I'm alive, I assume you are alive too. Which definitely cannot be merited to you..." her voice turned into a growl by the end of the sentence, but in stead of attacking her sister (which she truly wanted to do), she stood up and looked around. A white fountain. Small little pebbles on the ground on the yard. A victorian house, not in a perfect condition anymore. Grass, bushes, a few trees, a forest further away. It rather seemed like it was the warmer half of the year. The sky was clear, blue, with a few white clouds sailing in the skies. The air was fresh.
"Or maybe we are dead, but if so, then this is not heaven nor hell."
She looked at her sister and wrinkled her nose before striding towards the victorian house. She wanted to explore a bit, and she was fairly sure her sister would nt be able to drown herself in the fountain. While walking, she removed the remaining pins from her hair and wrung it dry. Her dresses were also dripping water, so before climbing up the stairs to the front ds, she did what he could to the hems of her dresses.
Then she climbed up the stairs and banged the knocker to make sure the house was as empty as it looked.
As she had expected, nobody came to open the door, but the door was locked. However, the windor that opened to the porch, was not closed, so Marceline creaked it open and lifted herself onto the windowsill with her hands, leaning forward and falling into the house in a manner anything but graceful. She perched herself to a seating positin, then stood up.
'Doors are for people withut imagination', she thought and brushed off some dust ff her dress. Then she proceded to unlock the front door. She flung the double doors wide open, turned arund, opened the next pair of doors and came into a wide space with two staircases, one on the left and one to the right, the both staricases curving and meeting at the top, where another double door opened somewhere. In front of Marceline was another double door. She walked a bit further and noticed that there was a door by the foot of both of the staircases.
"Ams, tram, gram,
Pic et pic et colégram,
Bour et bour et ratatam,
Ams, tram, gram", she sung the counting-out song, pointing at each door.

Mely smiled at her sisters singing, which floated out the open window.
Since Mania was busy inside, she decided to explore what looked like it might have been a garden.
And got exactly nowhere, as it was overgrown with a prickly vine of some sort or another.
Thus she fled onto the porch, where the door had rotted strait off it´s hinges. The room inside had once been done in a mellow amber wood, that much she could see.
However, the prickly vines had grown in right through the door and windows, and taken over the room.
In here, they were blooming the most beautiful lilacflowers she had ever seen. A spiral staircase curved up from one corner.
Following it led her into the strangest room she had ever seen.
It was made of glass. Three of it´s walls were windows of glass tiles (much like church windows, but abstract and unbroken) and the fourth had glass mosaiks on it, all of which were stripes. the furniture was also glass, tables, chairs, teatables, even the fireplace. Only the door was made from wood.

The entire room made Mely afraid to step to firmly, for fear she might break it. She opened the door. and stepped out into the hallway.

Marceline's counting-out song finished on the double doors at the top of the stairs. Thus, Marceline made her way up the stairs. The steps were wood which loked like it had been used for decades; all sharp angles had eroded away. Marceline reached the top of the stairs and opened the duble doors, entering the hallway. There was a slight movement to the whole house, like a shudder, and Marceline could have sworn one of the walls moved. She Touched the wall, which fealt totally normal and solid. She continued down the hallway, looking at the lit candels in their holders on the wall. She peeked int ne f the roms, looking at the hald bed for a moment. It loked like the wall had swallowed half of the room. Somehow the bed still stood even though two of its legs were missing. Marceline continued to the next door and pushed it open.
The room was messy, in a very homey way. There was piles and piles of books, small ridiculous ornaments, one of the walls was white (there was paints and brushes beside it), the roof was slanted, there was a very cozy-looking chair in the embrasure, and a very familiar-lokind old sofa with mismatvhed pillows and stufed animals on top of it, but what really drew Marceline's attention, was the leg that had been replaced by books. She nudged the improvised leg, causing the whle sofa to fall over.
She stared at the bed, at the see-through, multicoloured scarfs hanging above the bed in the shape of a tent. The rugs on the floor were also multicoloured, some of them thin, some thick and soft like grass, all placed on the floor in a totally erratic-looking manner. She slid her hand along the bookshelf and entered the small dressing room stuffed with clothes. There was even a roof-window here...
Marceline turned around and ran to the hallway, eager to find her sister and tell her... What? That somehow the house knew what they liked and changed itself according to their wishes? Melisande would never believe that.

Out in the hallway, Mely found yet more stairs.
'How many starcases does this house have?' she thought, but went up anyway.
It led to a towerlet. There were small, high windows which cut the light into crisscrossing beams. The wall were covered in indigo brocade with small designs in black and pale grey repeated over them little silver lines made them into stripes.
Directly opposite the door was a marble fireplace made of arches within arches, around wich was the most beautiful, complete laboratory she ahd ever seen. In front of the door, not quite in the middle was a silver spiral staircase, leading to a seconf level.
This level was lined in bookshelves, and at the end, above the door, was the bed, set on a black dias and closed off with chinese screens.
Otherwise, the upper floor held only a small table and chairs, and a single wardrobe and vanity. The floor was covered in deep black rugs here, while the floor below had been polished ebony.

It was perfect, right down to the pot of tea just finished brewing in next to one of the small upstairs fireplaces.

Now, finding Melisande was not quite as easy as Marceline had thought. The house was vast. There was a curving staircase in the opposite end of the hallway from where Marceline's room was, and the staircase opened into a hallway of even more stairs. Marceline followed one of them up into an empty room, returned down, and by a lucky guess chose the staircase Melisange had climbed up.
She gaped at the sight of the room, that seemed to scream "Melisande" in a most obvious manner.
She climbed up the central spiral staircase and found her sister there.
"These rooms are gorgeous", she told her sister, looking around in awe. "There is a room downstairs which looks like it's created for me. And these rooms look like you'd have planned them yourself."
Marceline plopped herself on one of the chairs by the small table and looked at her sister. "I think the house wants us to stay", she said, smirking.

Melisande smiled at her sister
"You, jelai, are a little fool." she said, "how can a house want anything? But I like it here."
She pulled one of the books from a shelf
"Creative engiering...how intruiging."
She sat down on another chair and was soon completly absorbed. Some hours had passed when the sisters heard a loud rumbling from somewhere beneath them. The instruments in the lab shivered soft notes as they knocked into each other, and the chair and tables danced a bit.

Had the sisters looked out, or left the room, they would have seen the house rearanging tiself, putting beds left in half together (even if the halves did not match) and generally setting rooms into a recognizable order.

Soon the shaking stopped. Melisande had hardly looked up from her book all through it.
"Just a small earthquake" she said.

Marceline did not look up at her sister when she said that the house could not want anything. Perhaps not a house, but this house seemed to be rather... lively. Or maybe it was just that she wanted to believe it was so? But, what, was there some servants here lighting the candles and whatnot, then?
Melisande started to read a book about creative engineering.

After a while there was another shudder through the house. Marceline supposed that the house was rearranging itself again.
"Mely, I think I'll go to find something to eat", Marceline told her sister, stood up and ran down the stairs as fast as she could, back to where her room was, and noticed that the romms had indeed been rearranged. The bed she had earlier seen half-swallowed by the wall, was now full again, but the halves were mismatched.
"House, you fail", Marceline muttered in good humour.
"I suppose the kitchen would be downstairs", she continued muttering, and made her way through the double doors and downstairs.
Through the downstairs double doors was a drawing room, and through a second pair of doors, dining room, from where Marceline made her way into a kitchen with a breakfast area. "Perfect", she muttered and started to look through the cupboards and drawers.
"Um... Darling house, I assume you are able to generate food if you're able to generate tea." In the next cupboard was a tin of crackers. Marceline took the tin and opened it and started to eat the crackers, continuing to look throught the cupboards and drawers.
"I need something I can bake with, because I am unable to cook. So help me", she kept on muttering, and the house seemed to sigh a bit, but when Marceline turned around, there was a bag of flour on the floor, sugar, a bottle of milk and cream, eggs, chocolate and cacao powder, and a piece of paper. "The food does not come from nowhere", it read.
Marceline picked a feather from one of the eggs. "Seems so", she muttered.
Marceline found a bowl and poured the cream into it. She found a whisk and started to whisk the cream into butter.
"We'll need hen and a cow", she muttered while making the batter. "Wonder if not giving us food is some sort of principle? You won't just let us just lay here and get fat." She found a cupcake tin, buttered it, poured the batter into the tins, and remembered that she had forgot to heat the oven, but apparently the house had not forgot, and had done that for her.
"Oh, thank-you", she thanked the house, and wondered if she could give a few cupcakes for the house. Did a house eat?

Violet felt a shiver through her body and rose from her bed. It was in the middle of the day, but she usually just slept when she felt like it.
The shiver was caused by the Asylum moving around her. She looked around her cell and noticed a note laying on her bed-table.
"New girls, they are utterly amazed. Clubhouse." it said. She smiled and grabbed the nearest shawl, and ran out in the hallway.
"Girls! New girls in the clubhouse!" she cried and waving her hands at a surprised girl walking the other way. She ran down the staircase leading down from Ward B, and tumbled into into a group of girls, who were holding a race - A girl in a wheelchair versus a girl in a hospital-bed. "New girls in the clubhouse!" she said loudly and grabbed the nearest girl's hand. "Come on! We'll go welcome them!" Some of the girls followed her out the door, leading to the garden. They continued through the big hole smashed in the garden wall, and ran on the path towards the Clubhouse. After a few minutes of running they could see the house. Violet ran up to the door and knocked. "Come out and play!" she cried.

Even though she was at the other end of the house, Melisande heard the knocking so loud, she jumped. Who was this? She went to her chamber door and opened it, but found the hallway empty. but she heard laughter from somewhere....

After some ineffective searching she stepped, and nearly slipped, on a piece of paper.
"Check the front door, silly" it read.
"Houses," said Mely,"do not speak."
A second note fluttered off the ceiling. "Indeed not, my dear, they write." this said. Mely stared at it. Could Mania be right? Could the house really be alive? The thought made her shudder.

She decided that whatever was at the front door could not be quite so disturbing, so she went down and opened it, revealing a largish group of girls.

Marceline was just taking the cupcakes out of the oven when the heard the banging at the front door. She flinched at the sound, but placed the tray on the table and closed the oven. Whoever it was, banging on the door, they surely would not mind getting some cupcakes, Marceline thought, moving the cupcakes on a tray she had found in one of the cupboards.
She left the room, leaving three cupcakes on the table for the house. She reached the door almost immediately after Melisande had opened the door, and saw the girls behind it.
"Would you like some cupcakes?" she asked, showing off the plain cupcakes on the tray. There had been no cream left for decorating.

Violet gave a big smile when the girl opened the door, and opened her arms, as if she was about the give the air a big hug. "Welcome!" she said in a dramatic voice, while the girls in the background made weird snake-like movements with their arms. They usually did some weird thing to welcome new girls, and apparently this time it was snakearms.

"Welcome! To our home - Luniere! Everyone is welcome here, and you certainly are too! Now tell us..." She, and the girls moved towards the girls in the door, until she was just a few inches from the first girls face, "...how did you end up here?"
"Oh, so rude am I - My name is Violet. Vicious Violet, and girls, you may introduce yourselves," she said, as she had forgot her first question. The other girls went up to the new ones and introduced themselves - None of them had lastnames, only things like 'Poisonus Pauline' and 'Vile Victoria'.

Marceline frowned and placed the tray on a nearby table. She crossed her arms and watched the little show of the flock of girls. Apparently they were here to welcome her and her sister.
The bluish-haired girl asked how they got into here (Luniere, apparently), but immediately continued by introducing herself, after which there was a choir of other curious names from the rest of the girls.
Marceline took one of her cupcakes and took a bite.
"We are Miss Mania and Miss Melancholia", she told the girls, wrapping her arm around her sister's twig-narrow waist. "And we got here through that fountain", she said, pointing towards the fountain with the forefinger of the hand she held the cupcake in.
She changed her cupcake into her other hand, the one snaked around her sister's waist, then took another muffin into her other hand.
"Catch!" she said happily, and threw the cupcake towards Vicious Violet.

Melisande was speechles, taken aback by the girls´ forward behaviour.

From Mania, she was used to it, but these girls seemed to posses even less modesty than her, dancing around, showing their ankles and, while eating, spilling crumbs all over themselves.
When Mania threw the cupcakes, she wished she could just leave, but manners forbade it, and her sisters arm held her as surely as a vice. finally she found her tongue.
"Would you like some tea?"
She asked, in an unwantedly curt manner. Not waiting for an answer, she went inside to prepare it.

Violet caught the muffin, and took a bite. "Mm! Delicious! You will be loved, if all your cakes are this good!"
The girls finished their introduction, and accepted Melancholia's tea offer, even though it seemed a bit unfriendly.
"Though the fountain, huh? Yes, that's one of the ways here. Though the water. I myself am a mirror-girl. Most of us are. But there are a few water girls here. We even have a single girl who jumped through a window. I think she believed she died, and this is heaven!" She smiled and finished the muffin. Her whole attitude was very rough, and must seem quite manly and dirty for two girls from the 19th century. She could tell by their clothes. Violet herself was wearing a faded yellow dress, that revealed both her shoulders. Her hair was partly braided, and had a few ribbons in it.