Travis's Journey Through the Apocalypse

Chapter 8

Settling in

We followed the alien for about thirty minutes before he stopped in front of a large, windowless stone building. It had larger columns that shot up three hundred feet to the roof. Each column had a huge flag mounted to it, flapping in the wind. There was a simple marking on each of them. A snake twisted around and biting a rat-like creature in the back of the head. I assumed it was the seal of Eight oh Eight City or something like that.

“Well, here we are. This is the central administration building of Bravitose City. The office where you can receive your G.I.C.s is on the second floor. Ask for Magda. She will be kind to you, two travelers new to the city, especially if she knows I sent you. I know her well. Tell her Takhona sent you her way.”

“Thank you for your help. I don’t think we would have found this place today without your assistance.” Janet said.

“Yes, thank you. Takhona was it?” The alien nodded. “Well, thank you again, Takhona. We really appreciate this. I hope we meet again.”

“Take care, you two, and I hope that Egight, oh Eight City, finds you well. We shall meet again as life wills. I leave you now.” The alien turned and disappeared into the crowd.

“Okay, that was weird, right?” Janet asked me as we stood there before the central administration building.

“Yeah, super weird for sure, but we’re here now. Should we go get these I.D. things?” I asked her.

“Yeah, fucking weird, but let’s get this over with. We still needed to find a place to stay for the night, and I doubt we would meet another nice alien such as Takhona. That will just lead us to a great place to stay.”

“This place is crazy. Let’s just get these I.D.s, and maybe the woman Takhona told us to go see can help us find a place. I know we both still have some of that gold from the dungeon runs we did back in the dungeon of the Wondering Howler. That has to be worth something. Come on. Like you said, let’s get this over with. I can’t wait to lie down in a bed. A bed, Janet!” I said the last part about the bed as if I was almost drooling at the idea, and I almost really was. Janet just rolled her eyes at me, and we walked into the central administration building together.

As we walked into the lobby of the central administration building, it was clear this was a place of business. Aliens were moving around, and everyone looked like they had somewhere to be. Clerks sat behind long counters that stretched the length of the walls on either side of the room, with a staircase and what looked like elevators on the back wall. It felt like a bank or the D.M.V., Maybe a mix of the two. We made our way through the crowd to the back of the lobby.

“Takhona said it was on the second floor. So maybe we just take the stairs?” I asked Janet. There was a long line for the elevators, and I really didn’t want to wait in line just to go up one floor. I could see Janet eyeing the line for the elevators before she answered me.

“Yeah, fuck that im not waiting in that line. Right?”

“Yeah, no way. Let go, come on.”

We took one last look at the elevator lines before turning and starting to head up the stairs. The second floor was much quieter than the lobby. It was just a long hallway stretching around the entire floor, with doors that looked like office doors leading off. There was a help desk at the entrance to the floor, and we figured it was a good place to start. We walked over to the desk and stood there.

A mousy woman was sitting behind the desk, and when I say mousy, I think she was some kind of weremouse or something. She had a tail, whiskers, and two large mouse-like ears, but otherwise, she looked like a Normal human woman. She was busy looking over some paperwork and had either not seen us standing there or was actively ignoring us. After, we stood there for a few minutes, waiting for the woman to look up and acknowledge us. When that still hadn’t happened after those few minutes, I figured it was the ladder, and she was actively ignoring us. I decided we had waited long enough, so I cleared my throat loudly and interrupted her.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” Nothing the woman didn’t even look up. That kind of pissed me off, so I decided to try again.

“Hello, Excuse me! Ma’am, Hello, ma’am? Excuse me!” I think it was the last excuse me that did it. I basically almost yelled it. The woman jumped as if I had startled her, and then she looked over at me as she held a hand to her chest.

“Young man, you should no better than to startle someone like that. You nearly gave me a heart attack.” I looked over at Janet and rolled my eyes. We waited for the mousy woman to get herself sorted. Then she looked at us, adjusted her glasses, and asked us what we wanted.

“Well, what do you want? You’ve made me lose my place on the paperwork I was working on, so what? What do you want?” Damn, she was so rude, but I guess I had scared the shit out of her. She really did need to pay more attention to her surroundings, though. I didn’t tell the mousy woman that, of course, I’m not stupid… all the time.

“We are here to see Magda for our G.I.C.s.” The woman rolled her eyes in annoyance.

“you interrupted me for that? Damn it, the names and room numbers are on the wall over there.” We looked behind us, and sure enough, there was Magda’s name on the wall, room number 254B. That was super embarrassing.

“You see, there she is, Magda, room 254B. Now I have to start all over.” She said that last part more to herself, and then she was back in her paperwork and ignoring us all over again. Janet and I walked away from the desk and left the weremouse woman to her work as we headed into the hallway, following arrows on the walls that pointed toward the room we were looking for. Once we were a reasonable distance from the desk, Janet turned to me and said,

“Wow, that woman was a bitch. I laughed, and then we heard the mousy woman from all the way back at her desk say,

“I heard that, bitch.” Janet and I froze briefly, then started giggling quietly before moving on to find Magda.

Magda’s office wasn’t too far from the entrance to the second floor, and we found the room quickly. There were large gold numbers on the wall next to every office.

Some had two or three numbers next to the door with a letter accompanying it, like A, B, C. I assumed they were like sub-offices or some shit. When we found Magda’s office, two numbers were on the wall beside her door. Her number had a B next to it. With no better idea of what to do, we opened the door and walked inside.

The interior of the office was simple. The door opened onto a small waiting room. There were three chairs, plane things made of metal with ugly yellow-green cousins. Two doors led off the room, with the office numbers above them and a window with a clerk sitting behind a desk. The woman behind the window looked up as we entered and waited for us to close the door behind us before speaking.

“May I help you?” the woman asked, curious at our presence.

“Um, yeah,” I said, looking at Janet for support. She just pushed me forward a little. So I turned back to the woman and continued explaining why we were there.

“We’re here to see Magda. We were told by a mutual friend that we could find her here.” A bit of understanding dawned on the receptionist’s face.

“Well, I can reassure you that you have at least found Miss Magda’s office. She doesn’t have any meetings for the rest of the day, but I believe she planned to leave early today. She should be fine seeing you now, however.” By then, Janet and I had walked over to the window and stood before the woman. She passed a book through the window to us.

“Please sign the visitor’s log. Then I can let you in to see Miss Magda.” We signed the book, and the clerk then gestured towards the door to our right.

“That’s the office you want. Have a good rest of the day now.” We had obviously been dismissed, so we walked over to Magdas’s office, opened it, and walked inside.

Magda’s office was, well, a nice way to put it would be cluttered. There were papers and folders everywhere. Filing cabinet with half of the drawers pulled open. Files shoved in and left poking out. A woman was sitting behind a desk that occupied most of the room. It was a massive old wooden desk that looked as if it weighed a ton. It’s not a metaphorical ton but an actual one, as in two thousand pounds. The woman sitting behind it must have been Magda. She looked caught up in some paperwork but looked up as we entered the room.

She, just like the receptionist, looked confused at our presence. I was starting to get the feeling this wasn’t the typical way of obtaining a G.I.C.

“Hi, we’re new to the city, and we were told by a mutual friend, Takhona. You might be able to help us obtain our G.I.C.” As I figured, the woman looked utterly confused at my words until I mentioned Takhona.

“Yeah, sure. You’re in the right place.” Magda said in a half-hearted tone. Then under her voice, I heard her say something along the lines of, “Fucking Takhona. I was almost out of here early for once.” I couldn’t help but let a small smile creep onto my face. Magda was an alien. She looked like a werefox or foxkin of some kind. Magda looked to be in her mid-thirties and was wearing a business suit of an alien design. Her hair was tied back in a tight bun, and she looked exceptionally well put together. The opposite of her office.

“What do you need from us?” Magda swiveled in her chair, grabbing a few forms from here and there while she spoke.

“Well… first, you’ll need to fill out these forms, and then once you’re done with that, you put your hand on the Power Stone. Then, we take a blank G.I.C., place it on the stone, and place it on your finished paperwork. Oh, and then you prick your finger and mark the card with blood, and you’re done.” She gave us the rundown, and it seemed relatively simple.

“Here you go,” Magda said as she passed us a few forms attached to a clipboard. We thanked her for the forms and started filling them out. It was just basic info like name, place of birth, visa number if not local to the planet, and stuff like that. We finished the paperwork quickly, and the rest of the process was painless. The whole process was over and done within maybe five minutes. Magda looked pleased as well that things had moved right along, and soon, she was pushing us out the door and looking it up behind her as she left for the day. We walked with her until we stood just outside the central administration building.

“Well, thanks again for all the help, Magda,” Janet said as the people on the street rushed past our little group.

“Yeah, we really owe you and Takhona for all the help,” I told her. “

“Think nothing of it. I’m going to head off now, so take care of yourselves.” Magda said, then disappeared into the crowd. We watched her go. Then I turned to Janet.

“Well, she was nice.”

“Yeah, I guess. It seemed more like she just wanted us out of there so she could go home, and I don’t think we would have gotten anything out of her, let alone our G.I.C. if it wasn’t for you name-dropping Takhona like that.”

“Oh yeah, that was super clear. Takhona did us a huge favor by telling us to go see her. I feel like we skipped a lot of red tape.”

“Oh, definitely, that’s so real.”

“Honestly, that makes me even more wary of Takhona’s motives. We’ve got to watch out if we ever see that guy again.”

“Yeah, that’s a good fucking point, but more important than anything else right now. Where are we going to sleep tonight? It’s starting to get dark, and im not sleeping outside in this place.”

“Shit, we totally should have asked Magda if you knew of somewhere reputable to stay at.”

“Well, it’s too late now. Come on, let’s go, Travis. The longer we sit here talking, the later it gets.” Janet dragged me into the crowded street, and we were off to look for a place to spend the night.

Oaky, so that excursion was worse than looking for directions to the central administration building. Mainly because we were fucking lead there but finding a decent place to spend the night that had a room available and was up to Janet’s standers was not fucking easy. The problem wasn’t money. We had the coin. We found out we had a good amount of currency after watching a few transactions go down in some of the inns we visited, trying to find a room for the night.

We eventually found ourselves in a wealthier-looking district of Eight oh Eight City. There were larger shops with space between them, as well as parks we passed with things like fountains and sculptures. It was definitely for the upper crust. We were actually stopped by a guard when we first entered the district, but Janet put a gold coin into the man’s hand, and he let us through. Janet had just smiled at me after that encounter, telling me,

“See, money talks were ever you are.” I had just rolled my eyes at her, but she was right, and I had to applaud Janet for her quick thinking. Not out loud, Janet didn’t need a bigger ego. Shortly after entering the more affluent district, we finally found an inn that Janet said “would do,” we paid for five nights and meals upfront. We’d get two a day, breakfast and dinner. We had paid three gold and were shown to our room. Then we were told that dinner would be brought up at seven o’clock in two hours.

The room was nice. It actually had three rooms altogether. There was a living room-main room type deal. Then there was the bead room and a bathroom off the bedroom. It was furnished plainly but richly. The main living room space had a couch, a table, two chairs, and what looked like a mini fridge in the corner. It was not much, but everything was extremely comfortable. I nearly fell asleep when I sat on the couch to test it out.

The bed was equally comfortable and large. It would have been considered a Califonia king if it was preintegration times. Besides two side tables and two lamps, one on each table, the bed was the only thing in the room. The bathroom was the main attraction. There was a giant tub that would fit both Janet and me easily. There was a shower, and attached to the bathroom was a sauna. A fucking sauna. I was so glad we had booked the room for the week, and the first thing Janet and I did was fill the oversized bathtub and jump in.

The hot water was amazing. It was scouring weeks of dirt away. I had washed myself at the Incoanmentie village, but that was just a bucket of hot water, a rag, and a soap bar. This feeling was incomparable. It was like the hot water worked its way into my bones, restoring me to my very core. That night, we ate our dinner with an atmosphere of exhaustion hanging over us. After we ate, we soaked in the tub a while longer and then went to bed.

Oh my god, the bed. The mattress was like a cloud, and the sheets felt like a cool breeze grazing my skin on a hot summer day. The comforter kept me at just the right temperature while feeling light as a feather. It was almost a religious experience just getting into that bed, and that night, I slept better than I could remember. I let my thoughts drift as I faded into slumber. Tomorrow, we will really start to explore Eight oh Eight City, and I couldn’t wait.