Jenni

Jenni shifted uncomfortably as a rough palm shook her from warm unconsciousness. The warmth and comfort warred against the dull ache that throbbed where the wooden plank of the bench dug between her shoulder blades. The details of the dream were fading from her mind, but  the comfort lingered yet. She would have batted away the hand, but for the deep voice that accompanied it.

“Is everything alright, Ma'am?”

She groaned then, and blinked slowly up at the intrusive man. His steam-pressed blue uniform and the brass star pinned on his jacket was unmistakable.

Great. Just what I need.

“Are you well, Ma'am?”

She blinked again, glancing around the area. It could have been worse. She'd had far more rude awakenings than concerned ones. Such was life. The park was silent and empty enough to be early morning, and the chill to the blue sky confirmed the relatively early hour. It was peaceful enough, and when she'd just finished a long trip, the bench had looked wonderfully convenient. Her back would punish her for her laziness for the rest of the day.

The man, still frowning with concern, was probably gullible enough to buy a line if she cared to spin one. It would work to avoid fines, but if he really had just transferred from Pleasantville, it might incite more trouble from his misguided 'help', than it was worth. “I'm fine. I just...passed out waiting for a ride.”

It was a poor excuse, but it would hopefully avoid anything unfortunate. Regardless, the man seemed not to mind. If anything, his expression was chiding, rather than suspicious. “It's dangerous to sleep outside.”

She squinted up at him, maintaining her balance primarily with a steadying arm, rather than the back of the bench. Another slotted wooden support would do nothing for the ache in the middle of her back. Her gaze stayed on him for only a few moments, before her vision focused on the sky behind him. Through the trees littering the park, it was difficult to determine the the specific position of the sun. Not that she could really determine any accurate time from whether the sun was a little higher or a little lower in the sky.

The cop probably had a watch somewhere. Maybe a pocket watch to suit his style. But...whether to harass a currently benign cop for the time, or not? Sure, she liked to push her luck from time to time...but generally she drew the line at antagonizing policemen.

The point was moot, however, as he was no longer paying very much attention to her. Instead, he'd withdrawn a pad of paper from his pocket, and began scribbling on it. The shape didn't appear quite right to be a ticket for vagrancy—or any ticket at all, to be fair–but this was a new town. Maybe they used different papers in their court?

When he did rip the paper free and hand  it over to her, she frowned down at it without comprehension for a few moments. It had numbers on it, yes, but it was not a fine. Instead, the numbers were accompanied by a name and street. Maybe, in a very small town somewhere, they gave you the address to the courthouse and just let you work out the fine with the judge. That was possible. This was not a small town in any sense of the word.

“You'll find good people there. They serve dinner at nine, and offer a warm bed with no strings attached.”

The 'no strings attached' clause pretty much excluded a sly invitation to the nearest jail. She was fairly certain the grudging 'thanks' was her own, but it was hardly sincere. The insincerity was partly the fault of her general surprise. Usually such meetings as these ended with an impotent threat or fine, not a helping hand.

Had he not caught her so off-guard, she would have told him she wanted none of his manufactured sympathy.

By the time she'd recovered from her surprise, however, he'd already given some vague farewell and wandered off. She half expected to hear some sort of show tune drifting up from his retreating form. At this point it would be hard to say whether it was more likely he'd have something playing it for him, or whether he'd just hum it all by himself. It was almost like the man really was from some strange 'ville.

It was unnerving.

Still. That probably decimated the remainder of the good luck she'd stored up for the whole week. Freakish and strange occurrences tended to moderate themselves well. That was, obviously, why they were considered strange at all, rather than commonplace. She didn't mind the rarity that much. It was when Fate decided to royally screw her over afterward to balance things out that she had an issue with it. This was not always, of course. Generally speaking, it usually only distracted her, so she'd forget about where she left things, or which street was next on her list.

The assorted joints from her hips downward creaked and popped disconcertingly as she stood and shook off her lingering grogginess. If she was guessing right—and generally speaking, that was all she ever really had to go off of in the mornings—she had enough time to go and grab a coffee before she needed to get down to work. The weight of a pack filled with supplies was not a welcome one on her back, but it was simply impractical to carry it any other way. The last time she'd stashed one somewhere, some dog had ripped it open and strewn her things across the dirt path she'd kept it near. Frankly, she was not ready to start scraping and saving for another new one yet.

Despite her protesting back, the morning remained fortunate. She still had enough change left from the day before to afford a decently sized cup of caffeine. She didn't go all the way out to this city very often, as it was quite out of her way, and the citizen's 'generosity', if it could be so called, was considerably less than her own town. Still, it was a break from Officer Lincoln's crusade against 'rabble', and apparently the police of this city preferred the self-righteous angle to the self-possessed one.

She did, however, travel here often enough that she recalled a nearby coffee shop that served a mean—and more importantly cost-efficient—mocha about now. That sounded as good a breakfast of any, considering the state of the 'cafes' in her own town. It would be a waste not to stop by the place and grab something while she could.

It was several blocks from the park, if she remembered correctly, but she made good time walking. Primarily due to a level of experience she really would have preferred not to have at all, if anyone had bothered to ask. Obviously, no one did, but she felt that was more out of a lack of thinking on the subject at all, than blatant callousness. Most of them.

She figured she had a good idea how they thought about the situation. It was how she would have looked at it, given the chance. It was how she had looked at it, when she was younger. She didn't care to really think about how much younger...but looking back, it was long enough.

Jenni frowned, as some deluded mother of four thundered down the street in an SUV she must have been mistaking for a sports car. Generally speaking, she hated the fools with the money that hadn't parted from them yet. Occasionally, during sleepy moments in the mornings and evenings, when she lacked the lucidity of an intoxicated baboon, she missed the days when she was one of them. To be perfectly fair, she'd had the excuse of childhood at the time, but fool she'd certainly been.

Once upon a time, her father had held sway in some important franchise or another that she hadn't cared to know then and didn't care to remember now. It probably involved dolls, given the size of the collection she'd amassed. Her mother did something in local politics she never cared to learn about. If she ever did learn it, it was a memory that long ago faded into oblivion, as had many of her memories of her mother.

She remembered much more clearly watching the burning wreckage of her mother's plane on the television. She remembered her father staying home, and the arguments he'd had with the men she now recognized as lawyers.

She remembered his downward spiral, and she remembered watching through the rear window, as her home vanished in the distance. Sometimes the memories just blurred together in between those two events, but she generally understood the process when she stopped to think about it. She rarely did.

She chose not to remember the drafty apartment, or the dingy metallic trailer, but she did remember her first job, although of it, she recalled most the garnished wages.  She cared not to remember how long any of the three lasted, any more than she cared to remember the false hospitality of the 'homes' and 'shelters' they traveled through. Her father's health worsened with every 'halfway' step they took away from where they'd started.

Amongst the swirl of memories, she remembered her father falling ill with something that stuck, but not exactly when. She hadn't really bothered to keep track of time since walking alone out of the last ramshackle home. There hadn't exactly been a point to it, really. There was nothing important to track.

She'd picked up speed along the way as she walked, and it seemed she arrived at her destination sooner than she expected. This was hardly a bad thing, but it was somewhat jarring. Especially when her cafe was no longer a cafe at all.

In the place where her target cafe had been, now stood a half-price shoe outlet. By the looks of it, the outlet had been closed down for some time. The windows were mostly boarded over, and what she could see through the gaps in them revealed empty, stripped walls.

“Well, they'd better not have been surprised when it failed miserably.” Who ever thought that a shoe outlet would fill the gap of a lost cafe? Jenni pursed her lips, and glanced around the nearby street. Apparently, the entire street collapsed when the cafe went out, as the surrounding buildings were likewise closed down.

Jenni turned a slow circle on the sidewalk, and squinted over at the street sign. No, she wasn't wrong...this really was the correct address of the cafe she remembered. Besides that, the shoe store's shape was clearly the same as the cafe's. Apparently...progress in this city included dropping off the excess shops once it moved on.

How annoying.

She didn't bother looking across the road as she wandered through it. No one passed her on the street in quite some time. Clearly, this place simply wasn't trafficked often enough for her to care about crossing the street without a signal. This was doubly a shame. Fate was having a ball with her today.

She frowned, and gave an exasperated sigh. Now she had no food, no caffeine, and she would have to wander aimlessly through the streets until she found a place that actually had people. If she was lucky, she'd get there in time to find appropriately priced caffeine. It would be no small feat, given her general lack of knowledge about the city. Still, standing around in an ignored part of the city might have pleased a few police officers, but otherwise would do her no good. Finding caffeine it would be.

Of course, the deciding to find caffeine was the easiest part. She had to assume that the city wouldn't be crazy enough to outright ban the stuff, so there would be caffeine to be found in populated areas...but whether it would match her pocket change budget was debatable. There wasn't usually a wide variety of places that offered a pocket change menu.

Much as it pained her, she could likely put off any caffeine consumption until after she scrounged up enough for a decent meal, instead. That would widen her prospects, at least. Generally speaking, she could scrounge up enough for that. She was decent enough at it to manage a meal most days. She'd done it without caffeine, too, more than once.

That didn't mean she liked to. Generally speaking, she tended to scare the people she was hoping to win over when she went without her one little luxury. Granted, she never ruled out scaring a few passerbys anyway. Poor people frightened those with cash. Especially when those with cash might be expected to display some form of false generosity. Of course, on occasion, some people went above and beyond their society's call of rudeness, and just deserved to be spooked.

Not that they all didn't make it incredibly easy to scare them off if she wanted to, anyway. Some days it seemed as if she might as well be sitting inside a glass case labeled 'strange and dangerous'. She wondered occasionally if they were afraid poverty was a communicable disease, or if they just thought if they didn't see something, it did not legitimately exist, and therefore they could live their lives guilt-free.

She didn't really care one way or another whether they felt guilty. Their so-called 'guilt' was superficial and passing at any rate. She knew. She'd been there.

Regardless of whether she found caffeine, she would need to find somewhere that was actually trafficked if she was going to get started. It wouldn't hurt to look for decent coffee shops along her quest. The 'where' was always a bit of a science. Science, rather than 'art', because art was appreciated, and her methods were widely ignored.

Choosing where to stay and how long to stay there was best suited by calculation with only the occasional intervention of intuition. She needed a place with enough people passing by that the pittance offered to assuage conscience combined enough to matter, but not enough for that one person having a bad day to decide she was obstructing traffic. She needed a place with enough money for the conscience to be of any use at all, even combined, without so much that the conscience was long strangled.

She certainly couldn't use a place with competition—there was little enough to be found as it was—nor could she go somewhere that her very presence would detract from the pristine landscape so much that she'd be shooed away too soon.

She was only passingly familiar with the area, so finding somewhere suitable seemed like it could be nearly as annoying as finding a cafe to suit her needs.

Fantastic.

She paused at a traffic crossing, and glanced up at the sun. If she judged it correctly, she still had a short time left before the first peak of activity in the day. Another SUV passed by, and for a moment four sets of eyes flickered in her direction. They did not hold the irritation or malice that some might. Jenni figured they were maintaining their civil duty—oft neglected—and reserving their judgment on her threadbare outfit until they actually saw her sitting with a sign somewhere. God, she hated signs.

Usually, she stood, anyway. Unemployed did not always mean lazy. Sometimes it meant taxes, fees, fines, and various synonyms for things constantly demanding ones money that prevented any possible job she could pick up from having any useful effect.

Walking quickly, while useful in tracking down a fixed, known destination, and quite handy in crossing the street before the hilariously short lights swapped back, had very little practical purpose in searching. Oh, sure, it came in handy looking for screaming kids that were their own personal radar, and crawling wasn't going to get you anywhere no matter how intuitive you might have been, but other than that? Walking quickly tended to just be a distraction. What one needed when they did not have a specific destination in mind, was a balanced pace. She wasn't as good at a balanced pace as she was at simply walking quickly.

It was almost as distracting to keep that vaunted 'balanced' pace as it would have been to scan decent locations while zipping by them. Zipping might have been a bit...overzealous a term, but it certainly felt as if she'd been zipping around, after a bit of the 'balanced' nonsense.

Eventually, as she found herself at another identical intersection, she ceded to the reality that she simply could not find a decent alternative to the defunct cafe with time to spare. If she could even find an alternative to the cafe at all. The city was really quite discouraging so far.  It was as if the residents lived on something other than the ever versatile caffeine.

Unnerving indeed.

It didn't help that only half a mile back, she'd come across a familiar looking neighborhood she could have sworn a strip-mall with appropriately caffeinated faculties had been lurking in, only to find it entirely residential upon further exploration. The closest she'd come to something that could have possibly once been a strip-mall had been an undeveloped plot of land a block from the main street she tried to keep to. Maybe it was just really unimaginative city planning clashing with her own rather well developed imagination. What a shame.

She would have to rethink any further visits here until she found herself a visitor's guide. Otherwise, she would have to sacrifice her caffeine every day she visited the city.

In her wandering, she did manage to find what seemed to be a decent spot, at least. While she could look at that as a fortune, it seemed something like an afterthought just to keep her from going postal and hunting down Fate, as clearly it was a malicious entity of some sort.

As often held true for the days she missed a solid breakfast of caffeine, the measure of her success was somewhat ambiguous. There was a high turn-out, due to her position, but it seemed like those who did offer anything were more afraid she'd key their precious car if they didn't, than feeling anything resembling genuine compassion.

Fear sold well, that was true, but compassion brought repeat customers. Acting out of compassion made people feel important. Acting out of fear just made people contemplate taking the freeway home.

Still, by the end of the day she'd scraped enough together for dinner. Maybe even enough for two nights. One of the people who'd scuttled up paused long enough to answer where she might find a restaurant to eat at. Frankly, she preferred the fantasy of one day saving enough cash to change her situation once all the aforementioned associated fines vanished, but when one had not eaten all day, skipping dinner was not the most appealing prospect.

It figured, of course, that her destination—for at least she had one this time—was quite a while from where she had stayed most of the day. With the arrival of the evening the traffic decreased to a more acceptable level for traveling, but she really would have rather not walked so far at all. It was a learning process, even now, to accept the many inversions of things that she would rather or rather not do.

One thing she drew the line at, regardless of consequence, however, was attending the homes such as those her father took her through, or the one Officer McFriendly recommended. Regardless of their masquerade, of any generous original intentions, or even lingering warmth provided by those who maintained the homes, their offerings always came at a price. Rarely had she seen the price worth what they offered.

As it so happened, however, in her walking toward the side of the city that actually had the restaurants she could afford, she found herself on Ivy Street. While she had lost the officer's note somewhere along her path through the city that day, she recalled the address it'd said. She'd stared at it for a bit there originally, and she had very little other things to remember that day. He'd had the tight sort of handwriting that only a prim, proper sort of mother would instill, rather than the gruff scrawl of most the other policemen she'd met.

The insipidly christened 'Prium House' happened to dwell on 4200 Ivy st. As a rule, she disliked going anywhere near such places, even when it was simply passing by unaffiliated with the building. They had an eye for those who might be wooed, and she highly disliked their attempts. Among all the other issues she had with them, they almost always remained surprisingly rude despite their proclaimed purposes, and very little different from the people she dealt with already, save for their supreme sense of entitlement. The big spenders who made a habit to tip heavily, and to make a good show to all those around when they indulged their 'generosity' only wished they could find such entitlement.

However, her set of instructions to her destination were rather exact, and would take long enough as it was, without trying to find an alternative route. Passing by the 'Prium House' was really the only way.

She could see 4200 Ivy st. before she arrived at it. She could see 4200 not long after she got onto Ivy St, in fact. She simply didn't recognize it as Prium House until she arrived at it. Upon arriving there, she slowed to a stop, and lifted a hand to partly shield her face. The colorful flashing lights surrounding 4200 Ivy st. would have otherwise impeded her night vision.

Jenni blinked away the dots in her vision, and scowled after a moment. “Prium House indeed.”

And there went Officer McFriendly's faux persona. There was no possible way the ridiculously expensive hotel in front of her could be friendly toward the homeless. The security cameras that ringed the perimeter made it rather unappealing as a whole.

She scanned the surrounding street for some sign of a nearby home that might fit the 'Prium House' style. There were no shacks, no trailers, no conveniently placed houses, and certainly no signs, welcoming or otherwise. It was highly doubtful there would be anything more low-profile than that, and she was  nowhere near so naïve as to believe it might be. She could recognize a cruel joke when she saw it.

She almost admired the officer for being so dedicated to his setup. Clever or not, however, he was still an ass, and she really should have known better. There was no one like that anymore. She strongly doubted that anyone ever had been.

It was likely he didn't even remember what he'd done longer than it took to get a few guffaws out of it with his co-workers.  Or...co-policemen. All things considered, that was probably for the best. She didn't need some sort of follow-up from one of them tomorrow. She'd be more than grumpy enough to cause herself trouble if they did.

So that ruled out that. Not that it'd ever been an option in the first place.

Jenni frowned softly, and trudged onward. She still had a long walk ahead of her, and nothing to eat until she could find an appropriate restaurant on the other side of the city. In the end, it didn't affect her that Prium House didn't exist. She didn't need it. She wouldn't have indulged in its services even if it had existed.

The walk was shorter than she expected, and somewhat helped along by the lack of traffic in the mid-evening. The night was cool, and the occasional gust of wind was bracing, but the street lights and the ambiance of the businesses nearby kept a constant glow ahead and around her, keeping it from being too difficult—or too dangerous—to make her way to the restaurant.

Her severely limited funds kept her options minimal, and hardly the ones she would have chosen if she had the luxury of choosing something to her tastes, but it was functional enough. It filled and warmed her, and that was really all that was important in the end.

Maybe filled wasn't exactly the word she would have used to describe her stomach, but she wasn't as ravenous now as she'd been before, so it was better than nothing. She'd had worse days, and given that this was essentially her first day in the city, it wasn't such a bad result. Which wasn't to say she hadn't had better first days, either.

In reality, she needed to return back to her own town tomorrow. She knew the place much better. She understood where everything was, and how everything worked. This place she would have to ease into, and at any rate, it would give her greater variety to go between the two places often.

Logically, she probably should have started off for her town right then.

However, he legs hurt, her feet made a convincing case of simply wearing right through her shoes if  she continued onward, and frankly she had very little interest in walking all the way back to her town when she'd already walked all over the new city today. It was enough adventure for her for one day.

Besides, walking around after midnight, as it would end up well beyond midnight by the time she would make it back to the town if she started off now, tended to get you harassed more than walking at day. True, some days they were close competitors, but for the most part, constant suspicion of criminal activities at night tended to edge out over the general displeasure and occasional suspicion of criminal activities in the daylight.

Even without one of those pedantic 'homes', she supposed she could have devoted some time to finding a decent shelter, but she'd spent enough time looking for things that might not really have existed at all in the city. The nearby bus stop appeared to have an oddly comfortable bench, and the glass encasement would provide decent enough protection from most of the likely elements she'd encounter just now.

She had some cash left. It might have been just enough for a ticket to her own town.

Whatever reason they felt they needed to indulge the citizens for, the bus stop was nearly as comfortable as it appeared. Perhaps the drivers in the city were extremely lazy or unpredictable, and the bus rarely bothered to be remotely on time? If it did, at least it would guarantee her a good amount of sleep before they'd arrive.

Maybe if fate was feeling especially decent, they'd be late enough to actually show up at a perfectly convenient time, and the weather would manage not to about-face into an unreasonably fierce storm in the meantime.

Jenni gave a soft sigh, as she stretched out as well as she could in the stop, blinking wearily up at the roof of the bus stop and the occasionally flickering yellow lights.

Yeah. Maybe fate would be decent. Maybe it would, and then maybe she'd find a way to take the bus stop with her, too.