Welcome to the 200th Kreme book. Almost 100,000 words in total.
Welcome to Grey Manor.
No Kreme epic has dared to take readers on a journey so massive in scale, to a destination so mysterious in nature. After a bus carrying fifty seniors breaks down, they find themselves at the home of an eccentric billionaire named Mr. Grey. This man has one rule, a warning. The rooms on the second floor of his colossal home are off limits. Period.
Penelope Price, or as most of her students know her, Penny, is a prim and proper young school teacher, but nothing can prepare Penny Price for the turn an otherwise regular school field trip is about to take. Their high school is small, the school bus old and well past its prime. Rough roads have taken their toll, and rougher roads lay ahead with an untimely breakdown off old route 13.
Traveling back from a trip to the city, Joseph does his best to steer the old bus packed with fifty seniors, each and every one of them merely a passenger unprepared for the ultimate destination of their trip home. Broken down in a desolate overly wooded region where traffic seldom passes by, with no cell phone reception and a storm fast approaching, it seems that little can go right for chaperoning school teacher, Penny Price. Fortunately though, Joseph remembers seeing a private drive barely a mile back down the road.
Maintaining control of fifty seniors in high school is never easy, but Penny decides the best option of what limited options are available is to gather together and make the walk back, gambling on the home at the end of that private drive offering a haven of help when otherwise they are on their own. She never imagines the man she will meet in that home, and the students could never fathom the home itself.
The owner and sole occupant, a mysterious and eloquent man known only as Mr. Grey provides welcome relief from the drizzling rain outside, offers the teacher and driver an immediate available phone to use in reporting their breakdown, and hides something none of the fifty students can imagine.
A man of wealth and a man of power, Mr. Grey is used to having control. He has worked his life to acquire it, and therefore very little can faze him, much less fifty-two unexpected guests on a rainy evening. Inviting them all in, he only has one solitary rule for the fifty students waiting in the parlor as he takes Penny and Joseph off to his private study where the nearest phone is: Never go up to the second floor, and if by any chance they were to go up there, absolutely never open one of the doors to the twenty-five rooms waiting there.
Upon leaving the fifty students, a natural curiosity common to all once they reach the age of eighteen and still feel the world revolves around them arises. A plan is hatched, a scheme to sneak away for just twenty minutes while Mr. Grey is off with Penny and Joseph. With such limited time, the plotting teens conspire to pair up and check each room simultaneously, snooping around to find what this mysterious billionaire might be hiding in such an estate as Grey Manor.
What follows is a surreal journey to the depths of their imagination and to the heights of their raving passions in ways none of them could ever have predicted.
The rooms hide secrets, some more than others, and each varying secret is all about control. Can the control of the angles in billiards change the minds of the players? Can the control offered by something simple as a remote control manipulate much more than electronics? Can a video game control the player? So many questions, so many surprising answers await, along with the occasional unexpected figure within those rooms, figures like the little man dressed as a leprechaun, the big man dressed as a demon, and the even more odd character of a humanized bunny. Are these merely costumes, is Mr. Grey merely an eccentric man who has sought control as a rich man's hobby?
There are fifty students, fifty minds, and Fifty Shades