(After the overwhelming response to last week's installment (when I said read it in parts, I didn't mean to take a month... sheesh...) we continue with excerpts from my Nanowrimo project. In this installment, we meet Danielle Brightstar, the would-be sidekick who ends up more of protagonist than I expected her to. Behold the opus that is tentatively entitled: Enter the Walkabout...)
“You have to stand behind the line, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry?”
The man behind the counter made a pushing gesture with his hands. “Behind the line, ma’am. It’s for safety purposes.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Danielle took a small step back to accommodate the clerk, bumping into the person behind her in the process. She offered a quick apology to the disgruntled woman, who responded with a series of odd clicks from beneath her cloth-wrapped face. Danielle tried to play it off and focus on what was ahead of her: the city. It was an entirely new concept for her. She had heard the word and seen the pictures, but to actually be at the gates of one was a completely overwhelming feeling. She made a futile attempt at remaining calm as she waited behind the line for her chance to get her pass. In her mind she tried to convince herself that if she couldn’t keep it together long enough to get through the gates, she couldn’t possibly handle what was past them.
No. That’s not an option... She adamantly told herself. She had set out to prove that she could make this work, and it was the exact wrong time to start having doubts about it.
“Ma’am?”
“… Yes?”
“It’s your turn, ma’am.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Danielle bit the edge of her lip at having lost focus long enough to lose track of being next. She wasn’t even inside the city gates and she had already managed to irritate a man behind a glass and a female… she still wasn’t quite sure what the thing was behind her, except to glean that it was female. Or at least she thought it was. This would take some getting used to.
* * * * * * * * *
Having cleared the main gates, Danielle made her way out of the visitor’s center and into the city proper. If she had any prior knowledge of things like stadiums or coliseums, she might be inclined to compare the walkway with the entrance to one of those. As it was, she was more able to equate it with a clearing at the end of a forest trail. She would, naturally enough, have been disappointed had what met her at the end of the walkway been as simple as a field of lilies. Needless to say, she was not disappointed.
The confining nature of the visitor’s center only led to amplify the effect of being in the city’s open space. It was like letting out a big breath to be exposed to the open air again, and Danielle found herself stopping for a moment just to take it all in. The city spanned outward into streets and buildings of various sorts, the first ones being the obvious ones you’d expect to see at a city entrance. The main street (named appropriately enough Main Street) split the city in half as it ran in a straight-line north. Side streets led off to the east and west, as the wall’s curvature made the ones nearest to it simply fade into the distance. The vendors and the wares they had for sale were both varied, spanning from the mundane and practical to the flamboyant and bizarre.
Danielle fought the voice in the back of her head trying once again to convince her that this was a big mistake. She tugged awkwardly at the edge of her animal skin skirt as she watched the various individuals make their way into and out of the area. She had figured that with the city’s diverse cultural background she wouldn’t feel quite out of place in her tribal garb, but she couldn’t help but feel that way as she watched the way things moved about.
“Hey. Nice staff.”
Danielle heard the comment from behind her and turned her head to grasp what the source was. She almost expected the individual to be addressing someone else despite the fact that she was carrying a rather large wooden staff. She was so used to carrying it with her that half the time she barely remembered that she had it. Danielle regarded the man who had come up behind her with an odd expression. “I’m sor…" She stopped herself short of saying that same phrase for what felt like the one hundredth time and instead offered a gently spoken, "Excuse me?”
“I said, ‘Nice staff.’” The frail looking man darted his head around in an attempt to avoid eye contact. By his manner, he seemed worried about what he’d just said.
Danielle had noticed as she turned her head that the man had not been looking anywhere near the vicinity of her staff. In fact, his need to repeat himself seemed more an attempt to make her clear that he had said staff, although why he’d need to do so she wasn’t entirely sure. She couldn’t think of any words that sounded like staff that she might have confused with something lewd, but she didn’t have the largest vocabulary when it came to that particular dialogue. She decided to ignore the fact that the guy had been staring at her and focus more on the fact that he chose to speak. “Can I… help you with something?” Danielle offered as a safe avenue of conversation.
The man squirmed around the issue, his head continuing the same darty movement it had before. It only helped to emphasize his uncertainty. “Are you… Bright-Star?” He chanced to look her directly in the eye for a second before darting his gaze away again. “I asked the girl with a tail and the Amazon lady, but they weren’t Bright-Star. So, um… are you her?”
Danielle turned to face the man fully. Her staff, as it had many times before, pressed into the ground next to her as she planted her feet again. Her face pressed into a soft state of confusion as she replied, “I am. Did the Guild send you?”
“Guild?” The man treated the word like it was an obscenity. “I ain’t part of no stinkin’… uh…” He tried to adjust his tone along with his response. “No, no. I’m not with the Guild. Although the guy… you’re supposed to meet a… he said to… I…”
“Just relax,” Danielle interjected with the start of a smile. “So, Mr.…”
“Weasel. Not Mr.… They… just call me Weasel.”
She could at least see where he got the name. “So, uh, Weasel… someone sent you here, right?”
Weasel bobbed his head in a weak nod.
“And the person is connected with the Guild, right?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“Okay. So why did they want you to meet me here? I thought I was supposed to meet my Guild sponsor at the hall.”
“You are. You were. There was a change of plans.”
Danielle’s grip on her staff tightened a little. “Change of plans? What kind of change of plans?”
Weasel shifted a little as he noticed the slight change in the woman’s demeanor. Just when he looked like he was about to dart off, he began to blabber again, “O’Bannon. He said to tell you… change of plans… new meeting… since he’s not there… He’s supposed to…”
“Calm. Down.”
Weasel snapped to attention at the slow talk like it set off some kind of trigger in his head. He took a deep breath, then started over, “O’Bannon. He’s the guy that you were supposed to meet at the hall. He told me to find you and tell you to meet him somewhere else. Somewhere closer. More convenient. For him, anyway. Uh… but I wasn’t supposed to tell you that last part.” Weasel tried to play off his miscue with a weak chuckle.
Danielle surveyed the man cautiously. For all of the things he seemed to know, she really had no idea that anything he said was true. The guy had a nature that made you feel like he shouldn’t be trusted, but at the same time he didn’t seem to be all that dangerous, either. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt for the time being.
“All right. Where does he want me to meet him?”
(Yes, Danielle's entrance is deliberately designed to offset the initial dread felt by an entire clan's worth of hardened bounty hunters. Of course, maybe her presence in the city really is the beginning of something hazardous. Time will tell. Ooh, suspense...)
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