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A quote: “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.” ~~ Vincent Van Gogh
I’ll start with a story …
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I worried when I saw her all alone.
The city’s rail was more ghost town than transportation, train cars the domain of the feral. Especially at night. My cop shift.
There she sat, little more than a fawn not realizing the wolf’s approach — this time in a hoody with loops of chain in his fist. But he wasn’t fully through the door when she moved, a swift blur of motion that opened a crimson rip in his chest and shoved off the train.
She sat back down, nodded at me. “It’s my city, too, and I want it back.”
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Navig8r says: Weird dream, but I recognized the scene. It was from a low budget knockoff of the computer game “Myst.” Why that would pop into my head after all these years? Remember the right question, she would give me a clue to get out of here. My mouth formed words but my brain would not process them, nor the words of her answer. I felt suffocated and clawed at my face. The VR headset came off and I was alone in my sleeping pod apartment. In the Metaverse economy, you only get what you can pay for. Even in your dreams.
Cameron says: I’m not normally impulsive or prone to make rash decisions but when I saw her on the train, I had to approach her.
I boarded and walked over before my courage gave out. She didn’t seem afraid. And then she gave me a little smile of acknowledgment.
As I sat down, my mouth engaged before my brain could stop it. “Hi, will you marry me?” My eyes went wide and I felt the blood drain from my face.
But she just laughed. “Shouldn’t we have a date first?”
Our anniversary was this month. Sometimes, it pays to just be spontaneous.
Back home, cosplay is something you do at a convention. So it took me some time to get used to the idea of people walking down the street dressed like a sailor senshi or a cyclone ranger, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Out here there are even people who go to their office jobs dressed in Star Trek or Babylon 5 uniforms.
So I didn’t think anything of it when I saw the guy in the Captain Harlock cosplay as I got onto the BART train. Even when he climbed aboard and took a seat several rows ahead of me, I was still just admiring the workmanship, until I noticed there was something familiar about that profile. Where had I seen that low, sloping brow, that long plowshare beak of a nose?
I’d been in sixth grade when the Soviet Union came crashing down in the upheaval of the Lanakhidzist Revolution, but I was already taking an interest in world events. With the terrible scars he’d brought back from Afghanistan, Marshal Leonid Gruzinsky had been one of the most striking figures in a time filled with colorful characters.
Except that was almost thirty years ago. Even if Gruzinsky had escaped having his headquarters dropped on him at the end of the Red Resurgence, he’d be in his seventies by now. This guy’s hair was as black and glossy as I remembered from the nightly news. Could the stories of super-secret anti-agathics be true?
Dupin says: So lovely to watch the scenery go by. Clears the head. Luggage scanned fine, of course. Nothing to find, even if they hand-searched. That’s not how I work.
Sigh. My mind’s back to business. The excitement of the next assignment before the thrill of the last one is gone. This one’s almost effortless based on the dossier.
He’s between wives and girlfriends and slightly older, so I’ll turn on my charm at the party. I will sleep with him before I kill him. Pleasure before business. It’s so much better when they don’t know how vulnerable they are.
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