by R. W. Holmes
“The Freak Quarter is downtown, though” said Jacobs. “And we don't have a car.”
“Yes we do” said Kiki.
Artemis, Jacobs, and Sauriel all turned to look at Kiki in surprise.
“What?” Kiki queried incredulously. “My summoner ran off with a bunch of stuff worth a lot of money. Did you really think he didn't buy a car at some point? Come on, I'll show it to you. It's in a garage about ten minutes walk from here.”
Jacobs shook his head as he followed the trio of creatures he'd somehow ended up working alongside out of the triplex and into the open, refreshing Mars noon air. Feeling his own pessimism, he pushed himself to see positivity instead.
“It's shaping up to be a beautiful day” he remarked with a smile.
“Not for long it's not” Kiki replied instantly. “Or did you forget we're going downtown?”
As promised, Kiki led the others on a brisk ten minute walk to a nearby garage, and within it they found their ride: a beautiful, brand new, but decidedly retro-looking roadster that belonged on the streets more than a thousand years ago. It was gray, with silver accents, and faux wooden spoke wheels that had been painted white.
The roadster also had no roof, leaving everyone just as glad for the nice weather as Father Jacobs was.
“This, is mine” Kiki said as she made her way over. “And only I will be driving it.”
“You're too small” Jacobs said immediately. “It's unsafe.”
Kiki turned to face Jacobs, an indignant glare on her face as she swelled to a larger, but still relatively short five and a half feet tall. “What's unsafe is trying to drive my car” she snapped at everyone. “I'm serious. My old summoner didn't care, he just wanted a chauffeur. This is my baby, and any damage you do to it, I will do to you.”
“It is a fine vehicle” Artemis said as he stepped forward and hopped the door into the front passenger seat. “Make sure we park it somewhere far away from the action.”
“Aww, Artemis, you're such a sweetheart” doted Kiki. “An ugly, goat-faced, murderous sweetheart.”
Father Jacobs and Sauriel awkwardly stepped around the two and took their seats in the back as Kiki started the car.
“That's okay, though” Kiki added with a smirk. “The uggos are driving the car today.”
The moments that followed, filled with Father Jacobs's screams as they were, were a testament to the fact that some people had a different definition of what 'driving' was. Despite her constant doting earlier, Kiki took every second behind the wheel like a race against other every other poor fool who happened to be on the road. Her 'driving' often involved using her turn signal responsibly, and then forcing her way through everyone still in the way after five seconds, or speeding through a red stoplight after taking a moment to assess that she'd make it.
Artemis and Sauriel shared Father Jacobs's sentiments when the drive started, but as time wore on and they managed to reach the highway without fatal injury, they arrived at the conclusion that Kiki had everything well in hand.
“You're very good at this” said Artemis.
“She's a damned maniac!” Jacobs called angrily from the back. “I'm going to develop a heart condition!”
“I've been topside for four hundred of the last thousand years” replied Kiki. “That's about five lifetimes of driving, give or take. Two of them involved a lot of time at the track, and another I raced professionally under the pseudonym 'Kitty Kinsman'.”
Father Jacobs burst into laughter. “I'm sitting in a car with the Kitty Kinsman, and that's supposed to make me feel better?”
“That wreck was not my fault!” snapped Kiki. “I was already accelerating when Higa cut that turn too quickly.”
“Do you have any idea what's going on?” Sauriel called up to Artemis.
“No” Artemis replied lazily. “But I get the feeling we're drawing close to our destination.”
Sauriel sat up and looked ahead, and almost felt his jaw drop. In the distance, the city grew noticeably darker as a veritable wall of concrete towers blotted out the horizon, and what wasn't blotted out grew dark anyway from the pollution in the air.
“A sanctuary of filth” said Sauriel.
“Nah, that's just the smog” said Jacobs. “These aren't the dark ages, Sauriel. Modern day pollutants are mixed with a counteragent when they're expelled that reacts with the pollutants to form more harmless chemical compounds.”
“Sound suspicious to you?” Kiki chimed in smugly. “Why would a priest know that? It's almost as if propaganda has ingrained the excuse into every member of soci-,”
“Or maybe it's because every structure has a waste footprint and needs to be permitted, and I've subbed in to run several different churches in my life” Jacobs retorted quickly.
“Ugh...” Kiki groaned in dismay. “I just want the air to not be black when I go downtown, okay? Let the counter-propaganda make things pretty again. I don't care if they're technically healthy, birch trees aren't supposed to be black.”
The drive toward the Freak Quarter grew increasingly interesting as they drew nearer. Large, plain billboards lined the highway as they approached, but enormous, holographic displays took over the roadside advertising world as they reached the city. The towering monoliths of the modern era; corporation headquarters, one hundred and fifty stories high apartment buildings, and commercial centers; sat upon a foundation of multistory car garages, department stores, restaurants, public offices, schools, hospitals, recycling centers, police stations, and the occasional convention hall or auditorium. The roads in the inner city were ten lanes wide, with crosswalks that entered tunnels that went below the road to avoid traffic, and air lanes for helicopters and other smaller, flying vehicles.
“This is your first time, right?” Kiki asked Artemis. “Being in a real city, I mean.”
“It is...” confirmed Artemis. “Humans are very good at making you feel small.”
“Ah, and that is your weakness” mused Sauriel. “You are intimidated by the sight of something you could never conquer, but humans, humans revel in something seemingly so infinite. They have an endless appetite for all things, and only endless possibility ever seems to sate it.”
“Well, that's not necessarily true” said Father Jacobs. “I grew up in a small town, and personally I don't care for the city.”
“Of course not” Sauriel said quickly. “All the land is taken, and it makes the world feel small compared to the wide areas you're used to. That's perspective, and understanding foreign perspectives is the root of all peace.”
“Professor, is that going to be on the test?” Kiki mocked. “Minding your own business is the root of all peace...”
Kiki cut across several lanes at once then, eliciting another scream from Father Jacobs, and putting them in position to enter a tunnel that wound up, around a nearby building, and came back down to another section of the city.
“Alright” she said with a smile as the lights of the tunnel rolled by like a staccato for the eyes. “We'll be there in a moment. The Freak Quarter is about eight city blocks large, so expect to do a lot of walking while my baby is parked somewhere safe away from the action.”
“Oh dear...” Sauriel murmured uncomfortably as Kiki steered them out of the tunnel and down onto the wide laned streets of the Freak Quarter. “These people, they're very, uh, not people.”
“Sauriel!” snapped Jacobs.
“What!?” Sauriel snapped back indignantly. “Look at them! That one has holes in his cheeks! She has horns, and rings in her earlobes big enough to slip on her wrist! How much pain did that one endure in mutilating themselves to have a more feline-looking face?”
“It would be safe to assume that the comforts such things bring them outweigh the struggles of getting it done” Artemis remarked nonchalantly. “Assuming they're happy with it, of course.”
“Leviticus 19:28 clearly states-,” Sauriel started.
“And 1 Peter 3:3-4 says beauty should not come from outward adornment”
replied Jacobs. “These are not efforts to make themselves more beautiful, but to express and develop their inner self, as the bible says we should.”
Sauriel scoffed and shook his heads. “You humans will justify everything given enough time to twist God's words.”
“It's not twisting anyone's words, Sauriel” Jacobs said with a sigh. “Many things a person can do are not inherently sinful, rather, the reasons they do them are. If that were not the case, would God not punish all who've taken a life equally, and make no distinction between the madman and the doctor who slipped up during a life-saving surgery?”
Artemis looked to Kiki, and found her already returning the same bored, unamused look. “So much arguing about right and wrong” he said drearily. “Is the endgame not to ensure as many people have a happy and prosperous life as possible. Has sight of that been lost for the rules.”
Kiki chuckled quietly to herself and added, “So what you're saying is, Heaven is the very first case of bureaucracy ruining a good thing?”
“I am sitting right here” snapped Sauriel.
“Awesome, I'll be ready for your reply in two weeks after your superior has approved it” replied Kiki. “For now, though, we're gonna park.”
Sauriel glowered poutingly as Kiki pulled into one of the nearby monoliths of concrete and steel, before navigating up through a parking garage and finding an area near the top with very few cars nearby.
“We're on the corner of 82nd and Jefferson” said Kiki. “The address of the Fae agent is about half a block north of here. As far as Doug and I knew, the only Fae living in Eiffel was Petyr and his summoner Glen Forsen, so I imagine this is them. Petyr is a Yaksha though, so it's best if we're a little careful. They can go from nice to mean real fast if you set them off.”
The elevator ride down to the ground floor of the parking garage was a short one, if only because they were designed to move extremely fast, a fact that often unnerved people with feelings of vertigo. The uneventful descent was followed by an equally uneventful march out onto the sidewalk.
Sauriel bit his tongue as they passed the 'freaks' that called the place home, remembering full well who he, an angel, had taken for company, and instead focused on the other sights to be hold.
And there were many.
Nothing had quite prepared the angel for the way every building seemed to ooze steam, or how something as cacophonous as car horns blaring constantly could become an easily ignored ambient sound. What truly struck the angel, though, was the indifference of the people around him.
He was invisible to them, nonexistent in every way that counted, and the feeling it instilled was almost maddening. How, Sauriel wondered, could a sense of community ever flourish in a place where so many were so keen to pretend the people they passed every day didn't exist?
“Are you alright, big guy?” asked Jacobs.
Sauriel looked over at the priest curiously. “Yes, why?”
“You're pale” said Jacobs. “You don't need to hide it, the first time being in a city like this gets to a lot of people.”
Sauriel clenched his jaw, resolved to say nothing, but found doing so too adverse to his own nature.
“There is a feeling of insignificance here” he replied. “Everyone is precious, important, and yet in this place they are just a face in the crowd. In a way it feels Godless, because God's presence makes you feel the exact opposite.”
“That's heavy” said Kiki.
“And incorrect” Artemis said immediately. “Try Hell for a day, angel. Your opinion what constitutes Godless might change.”
“You presume to know more on the subject than me?” Sauriel queried incredulously. “I am an angel.”
“Okay” said Artemis. “I'm a demon. Satan is dead. And I have acquired the perspective needed to leave the well-meaning people of this world alone. Stop and ask yourself: How are we different? Because I've realized, without the snake in the garden to play on my kind's weaknesses, we're both serving the same God in the exact way he intended.”
Sauriel scoffed and opened his mouth to speak, but found no words to rebuke Artemis with. Mostly because, so long as Artemis did what he was meant to, he wasn't actually wrong.
“Enough with the identity crisis shenanigans” said Kiki. “There, four buildings down. That's Glen Forsen's building, he lives in a basement apartment.”
“How deep?” asked Jacobs.
“It's the whole basement” Kiki replied ominously. “He's the only one there, but it's designed to house a small army of Fae personnel if they find it necessary to be active on this hemisphere of Mars.”
The immense structure Kiki had pointed out housed a gas station on its lowest floor, one which also operated as a repair shop, car wash, and convenience store. Several elevators were located around the various sundries offered, but only a single, concrete staircase in an alley off to the side went below the building.
Steep as they were, the staircase took everyone down a good thirty feet before finally depositing them before a small and unassuming, if extremely reinforced, metal door.
On it was a note that read: The hatter is out.
“What does that mean?” asked Sauriel.
“It's code” said Kiki. “I was with a summoner working for the Fae about six hundred years ago, but it's been a while...”
Kiki increased her height a little so she could reach the intercom beside the door. Pressing the receiver, she cleared her throat and said, “Alice is knocking.”
The door clicked, and it swung open for her.
“You'd think they'd change their codes if their rivals knew of them...” Artemis murmured disapprovingly.
“Outcasts and Fae end up doing a lot of work together” replied Kiki. “I know that seems strange to you, what with everything that happened at Enterprise Island, but-,”
“I mean, I hear Emily killed several Fae” said Artemis.
Kiki groaned and turned around. “Death isn't as serious in our world as it would be in a typical war” she explained. “Everyone just goes to Fairyland anyway. Hell, they have something in The Fae called 'marriage missions', and they are the most depressing things you've ever heard of.”
“But we haven't heard it yet...” Sauriel remarked curiously.
“I'm getting there” Kiki replied as she pushed the door open and took a cautious peek inside. Satisfied that no additional security had been set up, she led the group through the door and into a deep, long hallway with rows of doors on either side of them. “A marriage mission is a suicide mission. It's what someone volunteers to go on after their beloved dies, so they can meet with them in Fairyland and 'forget' their old lives together and preserve their love.”
“That's... haunting” Jacobs remarked uncomfortably.
“That's not actually the sad part” replied Kiki. “Because in case you didn't know, half the group here has a human soul. You die, you go to Fairyland, or Elphyne if you wanna get really technical, and the moment you start eating the food is when your fate is sealed. The stuff actually kills you if you get there while you're alive, because eating the food makes it impossible to leave. From that point on, you're losing a piece of yourself every day until you become a part of Fairyland like everyone else.”
“I pray you're not about to tell me that these optimistic loved ones tend to drift apart during the process” said Jacobs.
“No, that's the happy version of the story” said Kiki. “Because they never do. It's hedonist heaven, you're allowed to keep the love. What's depressing is when you see a human show up, and they wait, and they wait, and they wait, until finally they realize that the person they're waiting for isn't coming. You can get some pretty gnarly and bitter fae out of that arrangement, especially after stories of that person they're waiting on moving on get back to them.”
Kiki paused as she was walking and looked about herself. Doors continued to line the hallway on either side of her and the others, each unmarked and completely hiding the secrets behind them.
“Did w
e pass the room?” asked Artemis.
“No...” Kiki muttered awkwardly. “Living quarters are always at the end,” she added as she started moving again. “It's just that, when you're as old as I am, you tell people sad stories and don't realize till you're finished that you're talking about things that happened to yourself.”
Artemis, Sauriel, and Father Jacobs all exchanged alarmed looks as Kiki continued on absentmindedly. The torturous few moments it took them to reach the end of the hall filled them with dread and regret for not thinking of something to say, but the tasks ahead demanded they push the feeling aside and focus.
Carefully, Kiki reached out and opened the finally door in the hallway, and it swung open to what was an extraordinarily ordinary looking basement apartment.
“Yeah, something tells me these guys weren't expecting any trouble” mused Kiki. “You all sit tight while I look around, it's protocol to leave a note when you're going out to do work for The Fae.”
“Right, of course” Jacobs said as he looked about the bland and completely ordinary apartment foyer. “But is there any reason we can't also look around?”
“I mean, I guess” Kiki said with a shrug as she walked off. “Don't complain to me when we get caught and they add theft to the breaking and entering charge, though.”
Artemis shrugged and went to the kitchen, whilst Jacobs donned a petty grimace and pushed himself to take a seat in the living room.
Sauriel, meanwhile, was left quietly contemplating that without Heaven itself guiding his actions, he really had broken the law and was guilty of a crime.
“You know, this is actually a nice place” Jacobs called from the living room as he took a seat in one of two dark, leather armchair recliners. “I live a frugal life, so this sort of finery is... Well, I don't get to see it much.”
Artemis joined Jacobs in the living room a moment later with a bowl of fruit salad he'd found in the fridge.