-~o~-
Mélodie deployed her newly-purchased air mattress right there in the living room, just to try to make the place feel a bit less empty. It didn't really work. Even once it was inflated and covered with the sheets she had bought, the room still looked pretty barren. She could probably have afforded to fill the apartment up with some cheap furniture with the $700 she had left, but seeing as how she had no source of income yet, the idea didn't seem prudent.
So what should she do now? She had never really have to worry about such... Domestic concerns as rent and buying food for herself. She really wanted to figure out what was going on with Yuriko – the eye thing that she had described was incredibly intriguing. It was, as far as Mélodie knew, actually impossible for something like that to have been going on before the Quake, but her knowledge of magic wasn't exhaustive and she knew it. That was assuming that she wasn't just pulling her leg, anyway, but she couldn't really see any reason why Yuriko would have lied about it, and that story about her great-great-whatever grandparents seemed a bit too detailed to be made-up.
Well, she had more practical matters that she was going to have to attend to anyway, didn't she? She supposed that she should make a list of things that she was going to have to take care of in the next few days. She picked her laptop up from the floor where she had knocked it over earlier and discovered that it didn't seem to have been damaged, thank god. She opened up Notepad and started to write:
-Find a job.
-Get internet set up.
-Figure out who to even call to do that.
-Buy furniture.
-Return rental car and find other means of transportation.
-
She sat there, her cursor blinking next to the last, blank entry. This was her life now. This was what she had to look forward to. The thought slammed into her like a truck, and she actually shook her head and stood up.
She was going to go explore the town. That counted as doing something productive, right? She didn't expect much - it was a small town in the middle of the Midwest, after all. Maybe there would be... A corner store? A... Farm? She'd only ever been to the big, populous parts of the US before, but this part of it was always depicted in media as sort of...
Well, she'd find out for herself, wouldn't she? She locked the front door to her apartment behind her as she stepped outside. She knew that the center of town was to the east of her, so she found the sidewalk and started heading in that direction. What she found was a lot of suburb, mostly. She walked for an entire mile and saw nothing but plain old houses with plain old yards filled with plain old grass. Everything felt very spread-out and spacious - even the small, cheap houses had bigger yards than she was used to seeing - and the place had a very quiet, cozy vibe to it.
She hated it. She was used to cities, people, noise and dirt and grime and life. This place just felt... Big and empty and dead. She had heard that Midwesterners were supposed to be friendly, but none of the very few people who she saw outside waved or smiled at her. The few who seemed to notice her at all just sort of nodded their heads as she passed by.
And this was where she lived now. She began to feel a crushing sort of despair gripping at her. There was no telling when she would be able to leave this place. It could be years. How could she live here for years?
She was just about to turn back around and go back to her apartment when she spotted something in the distance. It looked like... A tree? A tree the size of a small skyscraper. It was still very far away, but she could see its boughs peeking up from above the houses all around her. Well, there was something interesting. Buoyed a bit by the sight, she made her way towards it.
More suburbs, and then, after about another mile, the houses were abruptly cut off by a busy street. She crossed it, and found herself in...
Well. Hmm. This wasn't too bad. She suspected that she was Downtown now. There were suddenly buildings around her. Real ones! She spied a few off in the distance that surpassed fifteen or so stories in height – they were far bigger than anything that she had expected to see here - and there was that tree. It was taller than any building in the city, except for one enormous metal-and-glass structure in what looked like the center of town.
She kept heading for it and found that she was suddenly on a busy market street. There were people here! Not nearly as many people as you'd find wandering around in London or Paris, of course, but it was something. She found herself walking between little three- and four-story buildings, all fairly old, with shops and restaurants on the ground floors and townhouses on the top two.
This was... Better. It wasn't a real city, but it was something like a tiny approximation of one. There were people chatting on the streets, fashion boutiques with displays out in front of them, a couple of street performers...
And then she had found the tree. It turned out that there was a park built around it, which took up about half a city block. Or, perhaps, the park had already been there before the Quake, and the tree had grown in it? She wandered around a bit, glad for the now abundant shade after walking in the sun for several miles, but didn't see any signs or plaques that explained why the tree was there. It just... was.
That... Made her happy. Really happy. It was a mystery! Where had it come from? Why was it so big? And it was in the middle of a place that almost - almost - reminded her a little bit of home.
She considered asking one of the dozens of people in the park about it, but there was something appealing about not knowing for now. She would have plenty of time to find out. For the moment, she found herself parched. She should probably have found some water to drink, but there was a bubble tea shop right on the edge of the park, and the giant pictures of sweaty cups of boba on the windows were making her mouth water. Bubble tea, in Missouri! Who knew? This place was so far from... Anywhere, really, that she was a bit surprised that the concept had made it all the way out here.
She hurried into the shop. It was a fashionable little place. There were a couple of small tables scattered about, but along the walls of the sitting area there were three big, poofy couches, just like the one in Yuriko and Rose's house, with long tables set in front of them. The customers seemed to be mostly young - about her age - and a bit hipstery.
She approached the counter, behind which an employee was talking on her phone, facing away from the front of the shop. "...so then our bard tried to charm the thing. I'm like, it's a giant frog monster, it's not gonna be seduced by your wiles, dude! It didn't work, and he got eaten." She was fairly thin except for her hips, which would have been wide even on someone twice her weight. She also had really pretty hair - it was dense and wavy and ombréd from black at the roots to bright, bubblegum pink at the tips
Mélodie cleared her throat, and the woman looked over at her. "Oh, hey, sorry, I gotta put you on hold for a sec. Got a customer." She turned around, and Mélodie was struck by a few things. The first was that she was really cute. She had a soft face, freckles, and round glasses with lenses that were tinted blue. The second thing was that she was pretty busty. She was wearing a fitted T-shirt, except it was fitted for someone who was about five letters down the alphabet from where she was and they absolutely strained at it. There were pictures of two twenty-sided dice on this T-shirt, one on each of her breasts, and over them the words, Yes, they're natural. The third thing was that, now that she had turned around, Mélodie could see a sign behind her that said We're Hiring!
"Hi!" she said. "What can I get for you?"
Mélodie looked at the menu for a moment. "Mm... A strawberry fruit tea, please. And also a job application."
She laughed. "Well, you gotta apply online for the job, but I can get that tea for you. It'll be $3.50." She rang up the sale and set to work mixing up the drink, with the quick, practiced motions of someone who had done this a thousand times before. "Hey," she said, "you smell great! Is that a perfume?"
"It's just me. It's my Gift." One of the benefits of it was that, since the magical scent was in her sweat, walking in the hot sun for an hour only made her smell better than normal.
"No kidding! I guess that's why you smell like plastic, huh?"
Mélodie blinked at that. "Plastic? Really?" Suddenly self-conscious, she sniffed at her shirt. She smelled nothing at all, of course - her Gift only worked on other people, she couldn't perceive it herself.
"No, no!" said the girl. "Like, in a good way! You smell like the packaging when you open a new game, or like, a fig. Or a new set of dice!"
"Oh. Huh. That's an unusual one. I smell different to everybody, but it's always something that you like. You like the smell of plastic?"
"Ohmigod, it's a great smell! It's the smell of anticipation! Of a new adventure that you're about to embark on, or a cool new toy for your collection!"
"How do figs come into it? My English is only okay, I know figs are the, um... They're like a fruit? There are those little cookies named after them."
She laughed at that. "No, no! I mean, yeah, that's what figs are, but it's also short for figurine. Like from an anime, or a game!"
Mélodie was pretty sure that she had seen some of those on one of the bookshelves in Yuriko and Rose's apartment. "There are figurines for games now? We are talking about video games?"
"Of course there are! Tons of 'em!"
"I think that the last time that I played a video game was when I was twelve. I had a Nintendo. The one with the controller that looked like a pitchfork."
Mélodie's tea was finished now, but as the girl set it down on the counter her eyes got wide. "You haven't played any games since the N64? None?"
"I don't think so. There have been a lot of new Nintendos since then, yes?"
"Ohmigod! You've missed so much! There was the Gamecube, and then the Wii, and then the WiiU, and then the Switch, but that's just Nintendo! There've been three new Playstations, and three Xboxes, and that's not even counting all the games that are on the PC, and... Gosh, I'm almost jealous of you! There's so much that you could experience for the first time, if you wanted to!"
In her adult life, Mélodie had never really had time to invest in video games. Hell, she hadn't really had the time to invest in them when she was a teenager, either. She did remember having a lot of fun with her Nintendo, though. And now she had nothing but time. "If I wanted to start playing video games again, where would be the best place to start?"
Tea Girl's face absolutely lit up, as if there was nothing that Mélodie could have said that would have possibly made her happier. "Well! I mean, it depends on what you're into. If you're just getting back into gaming you could probably start with something light and sandboxy, or there are more narrative-driven games if you want a good story, or if you like RPGs there are a bunch of good ones on the consoles nowadays, or if you want to just blow shit up there are a ton of good shooters out there. God, nothing since the N64? Really? There's so much good stuff that's come out since then, you're bound to find something that you like no matter what console you choose. And there's also tabletop games! That's a whole other world of awesome stuff! Do you want recommendations? I could, uh..." She trailed off and looked behind Mélodie, who followed her eyes and saw that a line had formed behind her. There were five people waiting, some of them looking annoyed that the two of them were chatting and holding up the line, and two more walked in and joined the queue even as she looked.
"Damn!" said Tea Girl. "Listen, it's about to get real busy in here for the next few hours, but if you want, come in again at like, eight-ish. Things will have calmed down by then, and I'll have time to chat some more. I'd love to introduce you to all the cool games that have happened in the past, like... Twenty years." She laughed a cute little laugh. "My name's Iris, by the way!"
"Mélodie," said Mélodie. "I might have plans tonight, but I'll consider it. It was nice to meet you, Iris!" She grabbed her tea and quickly got out of the way, so as not to hold up the line any longer. She considered, for a moment, hanging out on one of the couches in the tea shop, but it was already a bit crowded in here, and more people were coming in by the minute. She wasn't tired anyway, best to keep exploring.
The tea was wonderful - sweet and sugary, but not so much that it overpowered the fruit flavor. It was light and delicious, and it energized and cooled her as she continued along the streets of downtown Blanchepierre. The shops were mostly new and modern, but the buildings that they were housed in were all pretty old. If she had to guess, most of them had probably been built a hundred years or so ago. It wasn't nearly as old as the places that she had lived before this, but it lent the town an air of authenticity that she found comforting.
She passed by a few that looked interesting. She had been skeptic that there would be any good food out here - it was so far from everywhere else, after all - but in just a few minutes of walking she passed by a Japanese restaurant, two Thai places, two Mexican, and three Chinese. She stopped at one of the Thai restaurants, and was happy to discover that it was not only cheap, but the food was delicious, authentically spicy, and it came in abundance. She had come in extremely hungry, but she was barely able to finish the curry that she ordered.
It was at that moment, as she sat there patting her full stomach, that she decided that Blanchepierre was alright. Not an amazing place, but for the first time she was starting to feel like she could maybe make it a home. Satisfied with her meal, she took to the streets again and resumed her wandering, taking in the sights. The streetlamps were all made of cast-iron. That was nice. There was a large pizza place called Marlowe's Pizza. Was that the one that Rose had mentioned? No, the one that she worked at was called Tomino's, she would have to find that later. There was a tiny comic book shop wedged between two much larger buildings - a bicycle shop and a gym.
Hmm...
She approached the bike shop. She was going to need some sort of transportation soon - her rental car was already paid for, but she wouldn't be able to keep it forever. She looked in the window and...
Nearly had a heart attack. The cheapest bikes that they had on display were $900, and some of the more expensive ones ranged up to $3000. Good lord. She didn't even bother going in. She could find something much cheaper online, probably. Instead, she walked over to check out the gym.
Swole's Gym, was what it was called. Weird name, but it looked clean from through the window, and there were plenty of machines in there. She decided to take a peek inside. It was well-air-conditioned, that was good, and they had membership prices listed right there on a big sign at the entrance. Twenty dollars per month. Not bad.
"Can I help you?" came a deep voice from behind the front counter. There was a guy there who looked very, very bored. He was unshaven - stubble dotted his chin and cheeks - and was ridiculously broad-shouldered and pretty muscular. Something about the way that he was sitting behind the desk struck Mélodie as odd, but she couldn't put her finger on what it was.
"Hi," she said. "I was thinking about joining. Do you think that you could show me around?"
"Hmm?" He looked up at her for the first time. "Oh. Yeah, sure." He stood, and when he stood, boy, did he stand.
He was, easily, three meters tall. He wasn't thin or gangly at all, either. In fact, he was pretty barrel-chested and powerfully built - it was as if someone had simply scaled him up in all dimensions until his head was in danger of hitting the ceiling. His clothes - a polo that had the gym's name stitched on the breast and a pair of khakis - were perfectly fitted for him, amazingly.
"Wow. Do you have trouble fitting through doors?"
He chuckled at that. "Sometimes. Usually I can just duck and get through alright. C'mon, this way."
The gym, as it turned out, was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside. What was a relatively small storefront led back into a bigger part of the building in the back, which was filled with just about every sort of exercise machine that Mélodie could ever see herself needing. Vince (he was wearing a nametag) lazily pointed out all of the various sections of the place that the equipment was organized in. "So, uh, over there we've got freeweights. Here's the resistance machines right over here. Cardio stuff is over there if you want to, like..." He yawned mightily. "If you want to do some running or whatever."
"Long day?" asked Mélodie.
"Not really," he said. "I was up late last night. Monster hunting."
She raised an eyebrow at that. "Is that a video game?"
"Nah," he said with an easy grin. "My buddy says that he saw a werewolf the other day, so we got a bunch of flashlights and walked around in the woods south of town to see if we could find anything."
"Really." This was setting off alarm bells in her head. Missouri was supposed to be a low-activity area, with Blanchepierre itself being even lower than the already low average for the state. There might have been a handful of magical critters in the woods outside of town, but there should definitely not be any lycanthropes here. "Was it the type of werewolf that was just a really, really big wolf, or the type that was actually standing on two legs?" she asked, taking care to keep her voice conversational.
"He said it was walking on two legs, like a human. Personally I just think he saw some guy in a fursuit LARPing in the woods or something, if he saw anything at all. He's kind of a weird dude, he might have just been making it up.
That set her at ease a bit. Both types of werewolf were real, she knew this from experience, but the ones that walked around on two legs were much less dangerous. They still had a lot of human in them, and could be reasoned with, and weren't as strong or as big as the four-legged kind. And that was assuming he had actually seen anything at all. "Did you actually find anything? I mean, with all the weird things in the world now, who knows what could be real?"
"Nah, we didn't. One of my friends - this was a different one - said that he thought he saw a fairy, but he was pretty blazed at the time. We're pretty sure that it was just one of our flashlights."
Hmm. Fairies were alright. The average fairy wasn't any more dangerous than the average human, and the ones that lived in out-of-the-way woods typically wanted nothing more than to get on with their lives without being bothered by people, much like humans who did the same thing. She felt herself relax. "Sounds like quite an adventure."
"This is the third time we've done it. We never find anything, but it's a lot of fun to get a little drunk and go fuck around with your friends in the woods, you know?" He paused for a moment. "Oh, right, I'm not supposed to say ‘fuck' to customers. Pretend you didn't hear that, I guess."
"I'll forget about it immediately," said Mélodie, amused.
"Anyway, over there's the yoga rooms, there are classes every Sunday. Lockers are over there, aaand, that's about it. Still interested in a membership? I can give you a trial session if you want - you get an hour to do whatever you want in here for free. Gotta pay if you want to use the gym more than that, though."
"Mm. I just ate, so not now, but I'll keep that in mind. By the way, what's with the name? Do you own this place? Are you Vince Swole?"
"Heh. Nah. It's the name of the founder, some dude from back in the 70s. Gym's been bought out like three times since then." They were back at the front desk now, which he casually sat down on top of. He must have just been sitting on the floor behind it earlier. "I like how you pronounce my name. Veence. Where're you from?"
"France."
"Long way away. What brought you out here?"
"Work," said Mélodie, and she was surprised at how quickly the answer slipped out of her. It wasn't even really untrue, either. Work was the reason that she'd had to come out here. Hopefully he wouldn't ask-
"Oh yeah? What do you do?"
Shit. "Oh. Uh. This and that." That one was much less smooth.
"Do you work for the University?" he offered.
"Yeah," she lied. "The University. I'm, uh... I teach French." She immediately kicked herself internally as soon as she said it. Never add information to a lie, dummy! That only made it easier to check up on.
"That must be interesting. Do you enjoy it?"
"Wouldn't have moved all the way out here to do it if I didn't. Um, anyway, I need to get going now. It was nice to meet you, and I'll consider using that free hour sometime."
"Sure," he said with a smile. "We're open until ten PM seven days a week. Feel free to pop in whenever."
"Will do!" She had wanted to ask whether or not they were hiring, but she'd mucked that up. Oh well, there were plenty of other potential places to work around town, as she was discovering. She said goodbye and scampered back out of the gym.
The University. Huh. She hadn't realized that this was a college town, but now that she knew, it made sense. The overwhelming majority of people that she had, and still was, passing by on the sidewalk were around her age, all in their early to mid-twenties. She wondered if it was a big university. Probably not. She had been walking for a total of maybe thirty minutes and she was pretty sure she had already seen most of the downtown area, so it definitely wasn't a bigger town than she thought it was - it just had more interesting things in it than she'd initially assumed.
Would it have a library? Probably. She decided that she would have to look into that. Information on magic had been slowly spreading around the world ever since the Quake, and research libraries tended to be a decent place to find that information. She doubted that a tiny university in Missouri would have anything on what she was interested in - magical anomalies that happened before the Quake - or that it would have any information about magic at all that she didn't already know, but she had nothing but time now, and it was worth a shot.
But first, she needed to find a job. To do that, she was going to need a résumé. She wandered around a bit until she found a coffee shop. It didn't take long - there seemed to be one practically on every block here. She found a seat in a corner and connected to the wifi with her phone. She wouldn't be able to actually write a résumé here without her laptop, but she could start taking notes and look up places that were hiring, at least. She did a search for how to write a resume.
Okay, first result. 'You will want to start with your contact information. This should be provided front-and-center at the top of your resume. It should include your name, address, phone number, and email address.'
Hmm. Name, Mélodie Monet. Address... She had already forgotten it, but she knew how to get back there, she would look that up later. Phone number. She didn't have one that worked in the US yet. Email address. She didn't have one at all.
Okay, she would do that part later. It wasn't the most important thing, after all. 'Next you should list out your education or your job experience, depending on the job that you're applying for.'
Her education was... Eclectic. She probably had the equivalent knowledge of something like a Bachelor's Degree, but it was in the field of Magical Studies, which she was pretty sure no accredited university in the world offered at this point. As far as job experience went... None. At all. Or at least, none that she could actually tell anyone about.
Huh. This might be more difficult than she anticipated.
Okay, forget making a résumé. She was going to have to approach this from a different angle. Maybe if she could somehow land an interview without one, that would be enough? She was good at talking to people, and her Gift tended to make things go smoothly once she managed to have a conversation with someone face-to-face. She looked over at the coffee shop's counter...
And then she looked down at herself. She wasn't exactly dressed to impress at the moment. Her tennis shoes were dirty and caked in long-dried mud, and her T-shirt was stained with sweat. She didn't smell bad, because she never smelled bad, but she certainly didn't look very interview-ready.
She could do some preparatory stuff, though. On her phone, she quickly set up a free email address for herself. It was just her name followed by @ the site's URL, nice and professional. Then she looked through a map of the area and was delighted to find that there was a phone store not three blocks away. Fifteen minutes later she was there, haggling with the salesman, trying to get it through his head that no, she was not interested in buying an entirely new phone, and after a while she walked out of the store with a new SIM card that worked with the one she already had, tied to a cheap, $50 per month plan.
And from there, she walked into the nearest business (it was a clothing store), and asked for an application. It turned out to be like the bubble tea place - you had to apply online - so she wrote down the name of it and continued on to the burger joint next door. They actually gave her a paper application to fill out, as did the candle store she tried next, and the make-up store after that.
She spent hours doing this, so by the time she was walking through the dreadful suburbs back to her apartment, she was carrying seven paper applications with her, and she had URLs to do ten more online. Not a bad start. Maybe a little overkill, even, but with no job experience she was going to need as many opportunities as she could get.
It occurred to her, as she passed a particularly dreadful house with a family of ugly lawn gnomes in the yard, that she should probably look up what the average wage in this area was. As low as the businesses around her could legally go, probably. Such was the nature of capitalism. She utilized her newly-activated 4G to look up missouri minimum wage on her phone, and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the number. Was... Was that correct? She found Missouri's Department of Labor website and double-checked, and yes, it actually was that low.
Her brow furrowed. Rent for her apartment was $600 per month. That didn't include the cost of water, power, gas, internet, and her phone bill. Or food. She did some quick calculations, and found that she probably wasn't going to be able to pay for all of that each month on minimum wage. And that was assuming that she found a job that would let her work for 40 hours per week. Nearly every place that she had gotten an application for was only hiring part-time.
She ran her fingers through her hair. Phew. This was, perhaps, going to be harder than she thought. Working multiple jobs could be an option. She could also try to find a cheaper apartment. She had to stay in Blanchepierre for the time being, but that didn't mean she had to live in the the place that she'd been provided. If worst came to worst, she could probably camp out in the woods somewhere just outside of town. It certainly wasn't her first choice, but it wasn't as if she hadn't had to sleep outside for extended periods of time before.
With a long sigh, she continued on, pondering what she would do for the rest of the night. Hanging around in her empty apartment didn't really appeal, but she'd found plenty of reasons to leave it this evening that she could take advantage of.
---
Update
The poll is now closed! Here's the results:
Visit the bubble tea place again and talk to Iris. 50.00% (10 votes)
Visit Rose at her pizza shop. 40.00% (8 votes)
Visit the gym and use that free trial to work out, and maybe talk to Vince again. 5.00% (1 votes)
Visit Yuriko in her apartment. 5.00% (1 votes)
Check out the University's library. 0.00% (0 votes)
Iris and Rose were pretty close there for a while, but Iris won! Writing has begun on the next part, so keep an eye out!
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