Prologue
After he married his wife, James Slope designed their house from scratch. He wanted a big house, a mansion. It was a large place, over 50 rooms. It had 20 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms upstairs, not including the master bed and bath where James slept with his wife, also the maid had a small room in the Northwest corner on the ground floor.
On the ground floor, from the entrance into the foyer with the grand staircase leading upstairs, directly to the Master Bedroom. To the left of the foyer, in the West Wing you would find what the Slope family referred to as the Front Office. It felt more like the secretary's station at the principal's office at a high school, or a welcome desk at a fancy hotel. It was directly attached to a smaller office with a small desk with a computer, but the Slope family had never really used it for much more than collecting dust.
Another unused room was what they called the Classroom, because it was a fairly large classroom situated directly behind this first room in the Southwest corner of the mansion. James had intended to homeschool his kids but ended up being too busy for work. His wife, the trophy that she was to him, he didn't see her as the brightest tool in the shed, though she wasn't the dullest either, he still didn't trust her to teach his kids and sent them all to private school instead. Until his youngest daughter, Erika, flunked Senior year and he made her go to the local public school for her final year. The Slopes' Classroom now mostly held James' boxes, now abandoned there as he had the rest of his family. It was setup with desks screwed into the floor and a stack of chairs in the corner that had never been taken down before.
Between the Classroom and the Front Office, was a long hallway leading north, at the south end was a bathroom that looked much like a bathroom in a school with three toilet stalls and two sinks with two mirrors. In the hallway itself, locker's lined the walls, as if it were a high school again. As to why James added all these into the southwest corner of the house never made sense to his wife Liz or their children Brooke, Nathan, Lexi, and Erika, but this section had so far been unused by them for any reason outside of play when the kids were much younger. Now they were all young adults.
On the north side of this hallway, beside the Classroom, was the dining hall, directly to the north of the Front Office, with a really long dining table made of superior wood. It was so long people thought it was part of the "school" motiff to go along with the classroom on the other side of the south wall and half expected large groups of students to dine there. It was so large the family tended to eat just to the southern side of the table all bunched together.
To the west of the dining area and north of the classroom was the kitchen which was much larger than needed to be for just a family of six. It was more likely there to feed 50 people a day with four fridges, a walk-in freezer, and enough storage space to keep food for a year and enough counter space to make all that food in a day. Next to this was the maid's room.
In the North Wing, next to the kitchen there was first a movie theater, that had exactly 150 seats. To the east of this was a medium-sized library with over ten thousand books, but still had a reference desk to the side where a librarian has never stood. Beside this was a large Family Room with a couch that lined the wall and turned the corner with the wall and a large flat-screen TV was held out from the wall on a metal stand so it could easily be flattened. The couch itself could easily seat 15 people with space in between, where there were armrests that could fold out from the couch. Liz always wondered why her husband needed to have so much room all the time, but his excuse that it was for when "her sisters' families came over," kept her quiet afterwards. Liz's sisters tended to visit an awful lot, especially Jenna, Liz's older sister by a few years who had been trying to convince Liz to let her family move in there practically since Liz married James.
On the East Wing was first another bathroom, this one smaller that James called his "Executive Bathroom," and the name stuck though James himself hardly ever used it even when he was at home for his brief windows between long-distance business meetings. First there was a room that led out to the garage and that was it. North of this was what the family called the Doctor's Office, which was exactly that, with an examination table and a smaller doctor's desk. North of this was the "Therapist's Office" which was also that, with a desk, a Freudian styled couch for people to lay on as they explained their problems and another chair. Again, though they would keep their medicine in the Doctor's Office, and their family doctor, Laurel Scots, would occasionally make house visits and could set up in there, these rooms weren't really used otherwise. There was also the "Costume Room" which was originally just an empty room for storage until a few years ago when Brooke, deciding to pursue her dream as a clothes designer, had her brother Nathan help her move all the boxes into the classroom, and she immediately used her father's money to order all the things she needed for clothes design.
In the basement was the rec room with a pool table and a few arcade machines, which doubled as the exercise room where Nathan spent a lot of his time pumping iron. Beside this was the showers. Which everyone always thought was odd, it was large enough to fit a hundred people at a time but contained no privacy at all having the showers just out in the open all over the room, and a long line of showerheads near the edge along with many scattered throughout the place on large spouts coming up out of the ground.
The backyard had the pool, which was big enough an olympic swimming team could practice in it comfortably, it had tables and lounge chairs for tanning all along the side of it. And beyond this was their wide backyard which had a track along the whole perimeter of it. James, always going overboard, wanted to give Liz a place to jog everyday and not have to feel she had to drive to somewhere to do so. This she thought was overkill again, to have a track that went around their full backyard in an area for over a mile. She also wished there was something in the center of this wide area, but for now it was just their yard, taken care of by her gardener, Rosa, who also took care of the garden around the house's exterior. James felt the gardener shouldn't stay on the premises so he built a small house for her, about the size of a trailer and only big enough for one person to live comfortably. Liz always offered her to live with them in the house and stay in one of the many empty rooms, but Rosa said she didn't mind.
James designed this whole house as a place for people to live and work in relative comfort. He told his wife that he always planned to hire more help for every station, a doctor, a therapist, a front secretary, anything they might need while he's off on his business trips, always there for whenever they needed them. Of course, most of these places had been used so little, Liz questioned why they didn't just turn them into something else. Though James let their eldest child Brooke turn the storage room to her own "outfit room" as he called it, though the rest of the family called it the Costume Room. James told Liz, "no," without any other explanation whenever she brought up the subject of using any of these rooms for anything else.
There were four slope children, and James always pointed out that they didn't get out of the house enough when he was around. The maid Brianna usually told him off for this, but she had never liked him much. James knew this was because she was secretly in love with Liz, something he could tell by the way she longingly looked at her best friend when she knew Liz wasn't looking. She wasn't paying attention to anyone else though, and both James and their children knew Bri's secret without ever having to ask. They never mentioned this to his wife and their mother, of course.
