Fascinating geography
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At the wheel of the bus sat a strange creature that could easily be dubbed an alien – red, with a large egg-shaped head and one single eye. The creature had no nose or mouth at all. The driver’s torso was much smaller than his head, and his three-fingered hands, like suction cups replacing nails, dug into the steering wheel.
«The fare is 15 rubles, buy a ticket from the bus driver,» Alina read and handed the money to the mysterious creature. The silent alien took the coins with the help of a thin string-tail and in the same way returned the change and ticket to the girl, and she, having punched her travel document, went into the cabin and sat down in an empty seat.
She leaned her forehead against the glass and sadly looked at the landscapes – ordinary Russia: both in the provinces and in the capital. Clouds no different from Siberian ones floated across the same blue sky. Nothing special, as if the non-magical world had returned to her life again. Alina was sad. It was like she was replaying in her memory the circumstances of leaving for another, as they called here, the second layer, and still could not understand: whether she had died or been reborn in a new capacity.
The girl was torn from such thoughts by noise… A fight? She shuddered and looked out the window – she had already arrived. She jumped out of her chair and ran out of the bus.
At the exit from the arrivals hall at Sheremetyevo-2 stood a tall young man with blond hair, who looked like a foreigner, wearing a blue robe up to his hips, tight leather trousers and platform boots. The same one that the girl saw at the moment of departure, rebirth, death, or whatever you call what happened to her. Alina wanted to jump back on the bus and go away from this terminal and the person she saw. She moved back, but when she wanted to put her hand on the railing of the bus, she found that she was grabbing an empty space. Too late.
The face of the man from the dying vision was more likely to be unhappy than angry, and did not at all resemble a collector of the souls of innocent girls, an evil demon of hell, and others like them. In his hand the guy held a leash with a black dragon. The animal grabbed the notebook on a beautiful plastic spring with its front paws and looked at the attackers with a pleading look. It was obvious that this pet furry did not intend to attack.
The asphalt between the guy and the attackers was torn up. In all likelihood, the stranger defended himself with earthen magic. Is it really a shaman? The magician’s first attack against the three hooligans ended in his favor, but what will happen next?
The guy was attacked by three orcs wearing taxi driver jackets. The dispute, most likely, was over which of them would take the foreign guest to the city center. Although an inner voice whispered to Alina:
Chapter 3. Battle with taxi drivers
The guy in the blue robe raised his right hand up, as if wanting to create a large combat fireball and rain down fire on the unfortunate taxi drivers and their personal vehicles.
A colleague, a battle mage, for some reason Alina decided for herself. She was both afraid and embarrassed to intervene. And rightly so, who needs an incompetent sorceress? Her fireballs, which she used to light the burners on the stove, could not compare in any way with real battle spells. Perhaps the girl would have succeeded, but, alas, she had no practice in this matter, and she was afraid to get into a fight, hoping for the Russian «Maybe» that the spells from the books of Olga Gromyko or Sergei Lukyanenko would work as described. What if the guy gets out on his own? He has a dragon. Fire-breathing, judging by the smoke from its nostrils.
The orcs, sensing their imminent death, retreated back to the cars, and the guy, taking advantage of the enemy’s momentary confusion, rushed away from the parking lot.
The unfortunate dragon, who did not expect this from his owner, almost let go of the notebook from his front paws and, stumbling, trotted after him.
– Prey! – the monsters roared and rushed together after the fleeing magician.
He turned around sharply and, noticing the chase, jumped. He summoned a levitation spell and jumped over the almost ten meter high fence that separated the parking lot from the airfield. The black dragon, whose owner had thrown away its leash, looked with a sad gaze either at the magician standing under the wing of the plane, or at the orcs approaching him in the clothes of taxi drivers.
– Dan, who did you leave me with? – he howled, clutching the notebook to his chest.
In the animal’s gaze one could read only one thing: «For what, Judas?» He tensed his small wings, twenty centimeters in span, and tried to take off, but, alas, the carcass turned out to be too heavy to lift. No matter how hard the pet was scolded, it could only jump a meter and, comically flapping its wings, fall and crush its tail.
But the orcs turned out to be much more perceptive. After another attempt by the dragon to imitate a black Boeing, one of the monsters jumped onto its back and, springing, grabbed onto the fence mesh at a height of almost five meters. Then it was a matter of technique, and the orc climbed to the other side of the airfield. The remaining two did the same, despite the fact that the dragon was indignant and promised them something unflattering. True, he babbled all his threats not in Russian, and no one had a chance to find out what fate he had in store for the nasty taxi drivers.
The owner, realizing that there was no way to escape the chase, ran under the stationary plane.
«He’s not a battle mage,» Alina said quietly under her breath, watching the guy hide from the taxi drivers behind the landing gear of the plane. – And not a shaman. The asphalt is probably the work of these orcs.
The dragon, who sat down under a pillar and began to write notes, glared at the strange girl with a yellow eye with an elongated black pupil, but, realizing that danger could hardly be expected from an unarmed girl, he continued to do his job.
– Levitation! – Alina commanded herself, repeating all Dan’s intonations and spreading her arms wide.
From the films, the girl remembered that the magician did exactly this when taking off. It didn’t work, so she jumped and repeated the spell before her feet could touch the ground. Managed!!! She felt that she had suddenly become weightless and could fly anywhere.
The dragon followed her beyond the fence with a look full of envy and, stopping writing, also began jumping up and down, repeating the word ’levitation’. Alas, what is given to people is not given to magical mammals, so he had no choice but to cling to the chain-link mesh with his claws and climb over the fence, as the orcs did.