Chapter two: The fundamental things
I had to admit it; I was confused. Granted, I was a newcomer, but I was fairly sure that it wasn’t normal for people to just disappear like that. Unsure of what to do, I looked around, and then picked up the flowers. They looked crumpled, as if they had narrowly escaped being crushed altogether. It made Dakota’s fate even more mysterious – was this some sort of test for newcomers, one I hadn’t read about? Or was there really something going on?
One thing was certain; I shouldn’t stay here any longer. I’d rather not disappear as well, after all.
I got to my feet and put the flowers carefully in my coat pocket and then approached the gate of what was to be my home city, Ixero. The guard gave me a look of admonishment, as if I was supposed to have gone straight in before, but at least he pushed the gate open. I wanted to ask him about Dakota, if he had seen what happened, but he merely pushed me inside and shut the gate behind me before I had a chance to even think about what to say.
From what I could see, the city looked like any other city. There were buildings of various sizes and colors, there were shops and restaurants, there were people in the streets. The only thing that stood out right from the start was that there was no cars in the streets, something which made the air seem almost too clear. A few people glanced in my direction as I entered, but nobody talked to me. Quite frankly, I was relieved. I wanted to get to know the place before I started chatting to anyone.
But before checking the city out, I looked at the map conveniently placed right next to the gate, and walked through the streets until I found the Town Hall. The building looked old, older than any of the others I had seen so far – it made me wonder if the Town Hall had been built before everything else, or if they had made it look old on purpose.
There was no line, and I walked up to the clerk sitting behind her desk, clearing my throat to get her attention. She looked as old as the building itself, with grey hair, thick glasses and a mass of wrinkles. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t like her.
“You’re late,” was the first thing she said, and then she handed me a form. “Fill this out, it’s your registration form. Don’t lie, don’t embellish, don’t ask stupid questions.”
I had the feeling that she had said the exact same thing a thousand times over, and merely nodded as I took the form and sat down at a table to fill it out. Name, birth date, occupation, education; all the things I had already filled out on my application form. I took my time, wrote down all the information as I had written them down before, word for word.
The clerk looked if possible even more annoyed when I handed the form in again. “Slow, aren’t you? Well, you’re not the first.” She skimmed over my answers, then nodded and handed me a folder, a key, and a name tag.
“This is all the information you need. Read it carefully. Your apartment is on the fifth street, the yellow house. Third floor. Use your name tag only when you get yourself a job, if you wear it everywhere you’ll just look like the newcomer you are.” She looked me over with disdain, probably wondering why they had let someone like me in. But she was merely the registration clerk, she couldn’t protest.
“You may leave,” she huffed, and then went back to her work.
I left.
Technically, the next thing I should do was to head to the Library to read the rules and regulations, but well, I had never been one for following the rules and regulations, so instead I wandered through Ixero to find my apartment. I didn’t have high hopes for it – I was a newcomer, after all, there was no reason so give me a luxurious place right off the bat.
I was right, too. The apartment I found was almost completely bare; it had a table and a chair, and a narrow bed, but at least it looked clean and whole, and the windows were big, letting in a lot of light. The walls were painted a delicate shade of blue-grey, and I had to admit that I liked it. I didn’t have many plans for upgrading the place, but a bit more furniture could be nice. Maybe some posters, maybe a wardrobe. I’d look less like a newcomer if I didn’t have such a basic apartment, and if I didn’t wear the same clothes all the time, like I was used to doing.
All in all, I was pretty satisfied so far. Satisfied, but confused. I still had no idea what had happened to Dakota, and there was nobody I could ask, either. It wasn’t as if the clerk had invited questions. With a small sigh I fished the remnants of the flowers up from my coat pocket and laid them carefully on the table, before I sat down to read the information I had been given.
1. Respect The Four Sisters. Disrespect, slander, bad-mouthing, etc. will not be tolerated.
2. Do not bother The Four Sisters with inane questions. They are not oracles; they will not answer your questions or offer you help unless there is a proper reason for it. Even if you have a valid question, they might not help. The Four Sisters do what they want, not what you want.
3. Respect your Town Elders, the Librarians, the Clerks, and the Rabbits. They are what makes this community run smoothly.
4. Participate in the community. Being non-communicative will be frowned upon, even if it’s technically not against the rules. If you spend enough time not participating whatsoever, you will be warned.
5. Said participation in the community should always be positive. Hateful, racist or sexist comments, disrespect and the like will not be tolerated. If this happens, you will be warned. If it happens more than once, measures will be taken.
6. It is encouraged that you get some sort of job to actively help the community grow and become even stronger. You are not required to get a job, especially if you participate actively in other ways, but you are not allowed to merely slack for years and years.
7. Take good care of your apartment! It is entrusted to you when you register, and if you abuse this trust, there will be consequences.
8. Prohibited behavior: Stealing, violence (unless staged), prostitution (unless sanctioned by The Four Sisters), abuse towards anyone – especially animals and children, abuse of Pets, bringing a car into the community, buying a house without clearance, taking anything out of the Library or the Town Hall. For a more comprehensive list, read the rules and regulations in the Library.
I shrugged. It all sounded like the normal, fundamental things that applied everywhere to me, despite a few oddities. What confused me, though, was the fact that this was apparently merely information, and not the rules and regulations I had heard so much about.
This place seemed to have so many different sets of rules that it could make anyone’s head spin.
I contemplated staying in the apartment for a while longer, but decided that it was rather pointless, considering that there was nothing here. Instead I went back outside to get to know Ixero better. Seeing as it was going to be my home for an indefinite amount of time, I better know my way around the place.
So far, it looked fairly tame, not all that interesting. Not to me, anyway – I had seen quite a lot of things, so maybe I was a bit jaded. But honestly, I had no idea what the intense appeal of this place was. I wanted to tell myself that the other cities were probably more interesting, that all the newcomers were placed somewhere boring to weed out the ones that weren’t determined enough to make a contribution, who didn’t want to do the work to get to the really interesting places.
However, everyone I saw looked content and even happy; a lot of them were deep in conversation, others sat on benches eating ice cream, yet others were shopping in one of the many shops. In short, it looked like just another city, and not one populated by newcomers, either.
Maybe I really was too jaded.
I passed by the Library, but couldn’t be bothered to go in – I could read the other rules sometime later. It wasn’t as if I was planning on doing anything out of the ordinary, after all. In fact I didn’t have any plans for a while, apart from getting to know the place properly. I always took my time when I was starting something new like this.
After a while, I decided that Ixero was just like any other town. Nothing more, nothing less. As far as I could tell, anyway. And yet, I kept walking, figuring that the more time I spent looking around, the more familiar I would become, and I’d become less of a newcomer at the same time.
It took me a long while to register the fact that I was being followed. Most likely because I didn’t really pay any attention to anything behind me, or possibly because whenever I glanced at the street behind me, I saw no one – except a couple of quick movements here and there. But I wasn’t paranoid, so I didn’t think much of it, until the person came closer, close enough for me to hear the footsteps.
When I turned around, abruptly, I was surprised to find myself face to face with a mere child. A boy, by the looks of it, who could be anything from eight to fifteen years old from his appearance alone. He was unnaturally pale, however, even more so than Dakota. This was a different kind of paleness. The boy looked downright sick to the point of being ghostly, something which was accentuated even more by the grayish tint to his lips and cheeks, and by his white and grey hair.
By now I had seen people with hair in all colors of the rainbow and then some, so I didn’t really react to it all that much – it seemed to be simply the way things worked here. The boy looked up at me and bit his lower lip, as if he wanted to say something, but wasn’t quite sure what. I had to admit it, I could sympathize. I never knew quite what to say when I met new people either, and it didn’t particularly matter whether it was children or adults. However, seeing as I was the grown-up in this situation, I should probably be the one to speak up.
“Did you want something?” I asked, trying my best to sound kind. I was never very good at sounding kind, but at least I tried.
The boy merely shook his head and kept looking up at me, giving me a chance to take in his appearance beyond his face (which was a cute one, as far as sickly boys went). He was dressed strangely, in an oversized white top that reached down to his thighs, the sleeves so long that they nearly reached his knees. Oddly enough he wasn’t wearing any pants; instead he was wearing black and white striped stockings that went up to the middle of his thighs, though one had fallen down below his knee. I found it even stranger that these skimpy clothes were combined with sturdy black leather boots that looked about four sizes too big for him.
Very strange boy, I concluded.
“Am I home? Where’s my home?” the boy finally asked, looking confused. Probably about as confused as I looked at the very same moment. Of all the things I might have anticipated the boy to say, that was certainly not one of them.
“I don’t know if this is your home,” I replied, almost carefully. The cynical part of me wondered if this was some kind of test they put all the newcomers through, to see how they handled these kinds of bizarre situations that were no doubt bound to come up every now and then in a place like this.
“Why don’t you know? I just want to go home. Please tell me where my home is,” the boy said, his voice slightly unsteady. He looked like he was on the verge of tears, but even though I felt immensely sorry for him (and I don’t usually feel sorry for random boys that talk to me on the street), I didn’t know what to say in response.
I didn’t know where this boy’s home was, after all, even if he somehow seemed to think that I did. “I just came here,” I explained, unusually patiently. “I don’t know you, so I have no idea if this is your home, or where your home is. I hardly even know where my own home is.”
The boy seemed even more confused about this new information, and he looked up at me with wide eyes. He reminded me of one of those lost puppies you see in pet stores, one of those that are just begging you to bring them home with them. But I had never taken any of those puppies home with me, and I didn’t intend on taking this boy with me either.
“Listen. I don’t know if you’re trying to play a prank on me or what,” I said, starting to get slightly irritated. I figured that wasn’t really all that strange, even if this boy hardly looked like the type to play pranks.
He shook his head frantically, taking a step closer to me and taking a hold of my coat sleeve with a hand covered by his own sleeve. “I’m not playing a prank, I… I don’t remember where I live,” he muttered, so quietly that I almost had to bend down to hear him. “I don’t remember anything. I don’t know my real name, who my family is, where I belong, anything.”
“Hm,” I said, and then fell silent, while the boy kept looking up at me with those big pleading eyes. I noted absentmindedly that they were grey as well – it made me want to take the boy to a clothes store and get him clothes with some colors. He seemed to be stuck in grayscale, when the rest of the world was painted in brilliant colors. Something was definitely off with this boy, there was no doubt about that.
“So you don’t have a name?” I asked at length, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
He shook his head again, then hesitated. “Well, I’ve been calling myself Rei, because I have a locket with the initials R.G. engraved, so I think something with R is my first name. That makes sense, right?”
I nodded, even smiled slightly. “Yeah, that makes sense. So Rei, huh? My name is Kai, so we have pretty similar names, whether they’re real or not.”
The boy, Rei, beamed up at me. Apparently it didn’t take all that much to cheer him up. But still, I couldn’t keep talking to him forever; he was interesting, sure, but I didn’t come to this place to talk to little boys without memories – especially when I had no way of telling if he was actually telling me the truth.
“Well, Rei, what do you say we go to either the Town Hall or the Library to see if we can find out where you belong?” I asked, thinking that no matter what, I should be able to get rid of him in either of those two places. He had to be registered, after all.
But the boy surprised me. “We can’t do that,” he replied insistently.
“And why not?”
“Because I’m not registered,” he said, almost shamefully. As if that was something to be ashamed of. Though, come to think of it, it probably was.
“Why aren’t you registered?” I asked, half out of genuine curiosity, half out of frustration. My first day, and I end up dragging some lost kid around? Not exactly my idea of fun.
He looked down on the ground, kicked it with his boot. “The clerk says that there’s no one with the name Rei registered. She looked it up in all the other cities as well. There’s no one registered with the name Rei. So… I guess I registered with a different name, but I forgot it. So now I don’t know where my home is. Do you think Ixero is my home?”
I didn’t know what to say, though I figured that his explanation made sense. And, it relieved me to know that I didn’t have to go talk to the clerk again – I had a feeling that she would hit me over the head with something hard if I came back on the first day, asking questions already. “I don’t know, Rei. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. How long have you been walking around not knowing who you are or where you belong?”
He shrugged a little, and it seemed like he was almost embarrassed by not remembering anything, even though I doubted that was his fault. “For a few weeks now, I’m not really sure. I haven’t been keeping track of the days.”
I nodded, somewhat relieved. “At least you’re not a newcomer anymore,” I offered, and got a small smile in return. Rei still looked lost, however, and I felt genuinely sorry for him. For a few minutes we merely stood there without saying anything, before I finally sighed.
This was definitely not something I wanted to do, and especially not on my first day. I was still a newcomer, after all, I had no business taking in lost children or trying to right things that had somehow gone wrong. But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that this was a test of some sort, and I was pretty sure that telling the boy to get lost would not be the right solution if this was indeed a test.
“Okay, this is what we’ll do. You’ll come home with me, at least for tonight. I’m a newcomer, so my apartment isn’t exactly much of a home, but you’ll have a roof over your head, if nothing else. Then we’ll try to figure out where you belong in the morning. Does that sound good to you?”
Rei seemed to think the suggestion over, and then nodded, taking my hand as if I was his older brother or caretaker. I flinched and pulled my hand away – not because the touch was painful, but merely because I wasn’t comfortable with that kind of closeness. He looked slightly confused, but didn’t try to take my hand again as we started walking, back towards my street and my apartment.
“I promise I won’t be in the way,” Rei said quietly, and even if I had always been a longer, I did sort of like the idea of having someone in my apartment for my first night in Ixero. Couldn’t hurt. Unless he was some kind of tiny serial killer sent out by the city owners to have me murdered in my sleep, of course. Not that I thought he was, but in a place like this, it was difficult to really trust anyone.
Once we reached the apartment, Rei made himself at home, roaming around the whole place and I smiled over just how enthusiastic he was, even if I had a feeling that he was putting on a show so he wouldn’t hurt me.
I told him to go to sleep not long after, and he curled up on the floor even if I said that he could have the bed, that I was used to sleeping on floors anyway. He countered that he was used to sleeping outside, on whatever surface he could find, and seeing as it was rather difficult to argue with that, I let him sleep on the floor. He curled up like a kitten, underneath my coat, and he looked almost peaceful.
“Tomorrow we’ll figure out where you belong,” I told him, and I honestly believed that myself. Rei would sleep here tonight, and then we’d find some way of finding out where his home was and what his name was in the morning.
Four days later, he was still living in my apartment.
Somehow, I was starting to think that none of my plans were going to work out.
~tbc~
No comments:
Post a Comment