Chapter Nine

"I was too torn back then. That is why you won, you see."

 

Callana followed the Gina into the car, giddy. The Gina was going to let Callana make business today! Just like the humans on the teevee! She had watched a show for hours last night about jobs and the making of business in an office, and it looked like so much fun. She especially couldn’t wait for the part where a human would come in and say, “Have you seen the stock market today? Woof!” and then all the people in the “audience” would laugh in unison, and then words would pop up on screen, and everyone would freeze, and the show would be over, and the nice lady would come back and talk about how you should ask your doctor before trying “Zyroma,” and that you shouldn’t take it if you are pregnant or may become pregnant.

That would be the best.

“Alright,” the Gina said as she parked the car in the lot behind the restaurant. “Again, no eating anything on the job—especially if it isn’t food. And no saying ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or ‘shut it’ or anything like that, ’coz that’s only for around Von and Clenard and me. And no transforming or messing with magic or spacetime or science stuff, okay?”

Callana nodded with a toothy grin.

“Okay,” the Gina said. “Okay, this—this isn’t a bad idea, this isn’t the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, this is gonna be okay! Yeah. I’m fine. It’s okay.”

“Yes! It’s okay,” Callana said.

“Righty-o,” the Gina said, sweeping her black, tightly curled hair into a ponytail. She’d put on a strange outfit—a blue “dress” with a white “apron,” which she’d told Callana everyone at the business factory had to wear for people to know they were businessing.

After hopping out of the car, Callana trailed behind the Gina as she walked into the restaurant, a big building with checkered floors and a lot of grey, steel tabletops. On the other side of a door lined with half-empty cardboard boxes, she could see a bigger, emptier room with wood floors and a bunch of tables. That would be the “dining room” Gina had talked about, then.

“Hey, Rog?” the Gina asked, tapping a big human in a tucked-in, button-up shirt on the shoulder. He turned around, facing her and glancing up and down at Callana. “This is my friend Callana—she’s considering taking over for Ted. You mind if she shadows me today?”

The big human lumbered over to her, staring down at her as if she were the smallest thing in the world. At this point in her existence, she might as well have been, for how she felt.

“Rate’s four an hour. No backtalk, no coming in high. You show up on time, you clock out when I say you can, you do your job. Got it?”

“Yes!” Callana said, grinning. “I can do business very good!”

“Uh, she’s foreign,” Gina said. “She’s gotten better at Boraki pretty fast, though. Like, you wouldn’t believe how fast.”

“She got papers?” he asked Gina. “I don’t take illegals, understand?”

“Oh—yeah, yeah, absolutely, she has papers. Right, Callana?”

“Yes,” Callana said, getting the impression Gina wanted her to agree. “Paper is flat, and I have some. Yes. White paper.”

“Yeah, whatever,” the big human said. “Bring it tomorrow—assuming you do a good job.”

“Thank you, Rog!” the Gina said, looking relieved. “We’ll bring it!”

After “Rog” walked off, the Gina led Callana to the “bathroom”—a room everyone shed asked had refused to explain the purpose of—and handed her a similar outfit to the Gina’s. So, she changed into it, right then and there. Once again, the Gina yelped and turned around once Callana took her shirt off, so she supposed that wasn’t considered polite to do. Good to know!

Once she had gotten dressed, she tailed the Gina through the restaurant, winding around big, gruff humans in aprons who were messing around with human foods. At the Gina’s request, Callana stayed quiet for the first few hours, observing how the Gina interacted with all the people who came to the restaurants; “customers,” apparently, was the preferred term.

The Gina’s way of making business was to walk from table to table, hand out shiny “menus” that looked far more appetizing than anything in the kitchen, ask people what they wanted, write down what they wanted on a little notepad, then hang that notepad on a string by the kitchen. Eventually, someone would yell for her, she’d pick up a plate from under some hot lamps, then bring it to the customers. In between all that, she wiped down tables, answered questions, and led new customers to their tables. It was a lot, and Callana had never had to make so much business before, but if the Gina could do it, then Callana could do it too.

The hardest part was figuring out what words looked like. She’d eventually figured out that the weird symbols that popped up on the teevee actually meant something, but that was much harder to discern than speaking. So, Callana ended up paying much more attention to the Gina’s notepad than anything else, just to figure out what was what.

After a few hours of that, the Gina waved Callana over to the door with all the boxes. “Wanna try taking an order?” she asked.

“Oh,” Callana said. Suddenly, her hands felt a bit moist. “Yes. Yes, I can take an order. Yes. This is a good idea.”

It wasn’t a good idea.

“Hello! I am server, Callana. What is your order today?” she asked, stammering through the sentence. She cringed. It didn’t sound right at all. Why didn’t she just copy what the Gina always said?

“Yeah…” one of the humans at the table said. “Okay, can I do the triple-stack special, but with no pecans, extra syrup, and make it extra-large? And, uh, I’d like double bacon, and a caramel mocha frappe with two blonde shots, no cream, but extra whip. And actually, can I substitute the pecans for almonds? And make that two frappes, by the way.”

Eyes wide, Callana desperately tried to write something that looked like the words the human had just said, but her mini-tentacles kept slipping, and it turned out that writing took more dexterity than she’d thought, so all her letters kept looking bent and wiggly.

And before she’d even gotten through the first order, the human beside the first started ordering, correcting herself, asking to start over, and getting frustrated when Callana couldn’t keep up.

Eventually, though, she wrote it all down, said a quick, “Thankyougoodbye!” and left to tack the paper up on the string outside the kitchen.

“Huh,” the Gina said. “Not half-bad for your first try.”

“Yes. It was bad,” Callana agreed.

“Wait, no, I said it wasn’t bad.”

“Oh. It did not feel not bad.”

“Well, it wasn’t bad.”

Callana slumped against the doorframe, while the Gina went and cleared a few tables. Nobody new was walking in, so the Gina came back and stood beside Callana, sighing. “Yeah, it’s a tough gig. But it’s money, and you can’t really live without money.”

“You can’t?”

“Well, I guess you can, since you’re a god or whatever, but us mere mortals? Yeah, we’re stuck needing money. And work’s just about the only way to get money without, you know, getting shot or locked up. So, that’s that.”

“What is money?” Callana asked.

Nodding, the Gina reached into her apron and pulled out a wad of blue paper some of the customers had handed her. “This, my friend, is five gnollens. With this, you can buy one bottle of beer—a cheap one, at least. I make four gnollens an hour, so yeah.”

 Callana thought back in horror to the pile of beer bottles in the living room. Four gnollens an hour, and the Gina worked ten hours a day. 349 days per year, so 13,960 gnollens, times nineteen.

The Gina could only afford 53,000 bottles. And she’d already given hundreds to Callana.

Clear, salty liquid began to flow from Callana’s eyes, and a low moan escaped her lips—she wasn’t sure what was happening, but it felt good, so she didn’t stop it.

“Whoa, whoa,” the Gina said, “what’s going on, Cal? I know it isn’t much, but I get tips! It’s okay, Cal! I’m not gonna die or anything.”

But it was too late. The Gina had called herself “destitute,” and she’d purchased hundreds of bottles of beer, all for Callana. And since the Gina could not live without money, that implied she had traded her own life for Callana’s sake.

Callana had no idea how to process that. But mid-way through her sobs, the Gina sidled over and wrapped her arms over her, the same way the Von had done to the Gina after she had seen Callana’s true form. It felt… warm. Yes. This was nice. Callana sniffled, squeezing the Gina tight—but not so tight that she would say “getoffme,” just tight enough that it felt good.

“I am sorry you will die,” Callana said.

The Gina took a step back, her eyes wide. “W-what? Hold on, what?”

“You have traded your life for my comfort,” Callana continued, looking away. “So many bottles… So many hours. The Gina has done so much for me.”

“It’s no big deal…”

“But the Gina will still die!”

“Not soon, I hope…”

“No, she will die. She will die, and I will not smile again. I cannot let that happen. I am sorry.”

“Wait a minute—”

Time stopped. Callana Willed herself the knowledge of All Things, stepped to the , and left the third dimension behind. From there, she stared at the Gina’s form, inside and out. Every cell, every blood vessel, every atom. The atoms within the Gina were made up of smaller particles, thanks to this universe’s awkward physical laws, so Callana fixed that, Willing them to be continuous and infinitely divisible, as all proper atoms should be. Then, she realized that the Gina’s body required external energy to sustain itself—a fragment of poor design. The really messed up on these things, as far as she was concerned. No matter. She Willed the needless complexity of the Gina’s metabolism away, opening a singularity within her belly so she could eat whatever she wanted, no matter how big and supposedly inedible. Then, she slipped billions of microscopic tentacles in between the walls of each of the Gina’s cells, rearranging her molecules much more efficiently. Now they could feed off the endless energy of that singularity—it was a bit of a hack job, but Callana prided herself on thinking outside the box.

Hmm. Now that Callana thought about it, she realized what Gina had been lacking this whole time. Tentacles. She could use more tentacles. Yes. Callana Willed every cell to have a few tentacles of their own, making sure they were small enough that no one would notice unless they looked under a microscope. But, of course, she ensured that the Gina had enough room to expand them, if she wanted to. And with a bit of jury-rigging, she figured out how to get the tentacles to automatically repair any cell that got damaged and obliterate any foreign entities that tried to invade the body.

There. Much better.

Now that that was done, Callana took a moment to Will the knowledge of All Things away—some of that stuff seemed pretty dark, so she decided she didn’t want to know it anymore. Stepping back into the third dimension, Callana Willed time to resume.

“—you aren’t, like, radioactive or anything, right? I’m not gonna get cancer or anything, right?” the Gina said. For a moment, she looked around and blinked. “Wait—w-what?”

Then, the Gina doubled over and clapped her hand over her mouth. Moaning, she ran over to the nearest trash can and vomited the remains of her old lungs, stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, blood vessels, blood, bladder, and spleen.

Hmm. Maybe Callana should have just sent those into the singularity.

No matter. She’d done it! She’d fixed the Gina!

“Congratulations!” Callana said.

 

Hello, friends! If you're enjoying this story, consider supporting me on Patreon! If you'd like more stories, I post new chapters to my mainline series every Monday and Friday, and I upload a new short story every other Wednesday! Below are some of my other stories.

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The Old Brand-New: Lena lives in a lonely mansion, but one snowy night, a vengeful clone of herself comes to make her pay for the life she never got to live.
Little Comforts: The world ends, and two men, Dan and Andrew, must rush to the shore for safety, pursued by a vengeful soldier and the remains of her family.