devildom ambience - solomon’s room
• The clocks are almost never synced up. You have no idea how he manages to keep track of them all, each unlabelled and seemingly always operating on a different time, repurposed as stop watches and timers and then back to keeping track of time zones across the realms.
• His room smells a little different every time you visit. There's always a faint smoky undertone, mixed with parchment and the old yellowing books that fill his bookshelves. Still, it's almost always overshadowed with whatever chemical he played with last - thankfully he keeps the more unpleasant and dangerous ones (sulphur, mercury, the hundreds of unnamed plants and substances he makes use of-) contained, both out of consideration for you and to Simeon who despairs at the mess and clutter that no amount of cleaning is ever enough for.
• You run one hand across the deep button tufted leather, sleek and red, and less comfortable to sit on than you had initially expected. Not uncomfortable, per say, but there's a grounded firmness only found in unused furniture. (Solomon later confesses later that you are, in fact, the only one to really use it. Solomon is rarely one to rest, and he'd picked whatever he thought might seem welcoming for guests. He doesn't get many.)
• Crackling fire, bubbling, simmering liquids, concentrated fluids that drip- drip- drip- down into empty glass.
• He lets you help, sometimes, when he can trust that he can keep you safe, guiding you through the specifics bit by bit, shaving thin curls of some gnarled root into cauldrons, cutting up plants and peeling rough skin off strange fruits. It's an arduous and particular process, and Solomon ever-lighthearted, becomes remarkably critical, picking and choosing at each ingredient and transferring each piece to its proper place.
• He always has something new to show you, even when he invites you to hideaway in his room from everyone else provided you 'don't expect him to be a good host', he just can't help but get...distracted. Boyish, eager for feedback and admittedly needy, he can only spend so much time tinkering before he feels the need to show off just a little. Once, silently tapping your shoulder to show you dried, ashy seed pod heads on twirled stalks, pouring bright blue kernels into the mortar. He picks up the pestle - just as old and well-loved as its partner - and carefully, carefully, splitting the seed in two, and you watch as it crackles and pops, keening like a firework as it sputters multicoloured sparks and flickers of light.
• They'd offered to soundproof his room when he'd first joined - an offer he appreciated, but not one he ever accepted. The artificial silence that came with that sort of thing gave him headaches, he'd said. Listening faintly through the walls of the Purgatory Hall, you can't help but just...find it more homely. Footsteps in the hallway, students bickering outside the darkened windows, little things like that, and - on days where you're lucky - faint singing. His temporary home is alive.
• He shows you pointed crystal growths along the shed skins of strange creatures, glass-like teeth from the maws of sand dragons and the green, moss tangled furs of rain deers. Clay and ochre and blood and ichor, though he spares you his most unpleasant ingredients, he can't help but want to revel in sharing it with you, ever fascinated by the unending resource of learning, creation without exchange, or loss.