CHAPTER 2 : REMEMBER THESE TOYS?

*** Planet Earth – year 1987 ***

Riona gave her baggy green hoodie a little tug and prepared herself for escalated battle conditions. A frown creased the brow of her round face as she was confronted with the meagre amount of empty space she had cleared out on the shelf thus far. She had to make room for so much new stuff – most of it still sitting packed in cardboard boxes between the aisles, or even spilling out onto the street. This toy store was managed a bit like those book stores which were more book than air in terms of total volume occupied.

Her boss had gone out for lunch without specifying what could be moved aside and not. Except for the absolutely massive U.S.S. Flagg hangar ship box which had stood unsold for full price ever since she got the job two years ago. He insisted on keeping it as a sort of centrepiece. Some idiot kid had scratched a swastika on the box, getting one of the legs backwards because of course they would. Riona had covered it up with a Cobra Commander puffy sticker.

She now somehow had to make space for a new, equally massive box with some sort of space shuttle waffle. Riona didn't like that particular toyline and much preferred the Zoids when it came to mechanical stuff. Her mom had worked as a machinist making elaborate interlocking parts for various industrial applications, and her dad had been into building World War 2 airplane kits. Perhaps this had fostered her preference for construction toys over dolls – a term which she felt very much also included action figures for boys. The articulation and factory finish was simply too crude to be interesting.

Riona had tried taking a few classes in mechanical engineering in school only to quickly discover that the practical reality of the trade was significantly less appealing than the idea of coming up with cool stuff. Then just before entering university her parents both died in an accident, leaving her with little in ways of inheritance due to debts to unsavoury characters. Thus she entered work life, eventually ending up at this store by the age of twenty.

Having now worked here for two years she couldn't really complain. Her boss was a bit of an oddball but Riona liked the atmosphere of the shop, despite her current predicament. The local competitor ran a store which was significantly more air than product and it carried a very limited range of stuff sitting all tidy in repetitive rows. The best looking girl in her parallel class had gotten a job there straight out of school and now looked like a haggard thirty-something. If Riona was more superstitious she might believe that the poor woman's life force had actually been absorbed by the shop's cursed VHS player. They had one of those auto-rewind models set to constantly repeat a particularly obnoxious three minute commercial. It had been running for years.

Riona's boss only had a discreet little black and white TV hidden behind the counter and it was just used during idle hours. She had turned it off earlier to dismiss Ronald Reagan's vexing visage.

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No, Riona wouldn't trade places for a million bucks. Even her average looks were now comparably preferable. Presently her biggest problem in life was this elaborate game of inventory Sokoban. She really had to get the boxes outside in before some suspicious character snatched them or it started to rain, and then maybe figure out why some of the Spiderzoids were red and had a different name in case some random kid asked.

Tackling the problem without delay, Riona took a few of the spare Lil Playmates Space Station boxes away into the cramped storage room at the back and desperately looked around for a free spot.

Her eyes momentarily stuck to the poster on the wall. It was incredibly inappropriate for the locale just outside. It showed an overly curvy topless black woman with a rather voluminous head of hair, her ample chest turned just out of sight. An out of fashion low triangular bikini pulled taut to bridge the cleavage of her generous butt, clearly losing the battle of containment.

The picture bothered Riona, but not because it was lewd or because of the bikini – her boss knew she was gay and would put something new up each month as a weird prank, usually a centerfold from what she suspected was the man's stash of old 1970s magazines. No, it bothered her because the woman evidently didn't have the right body type to sport that sort of thing. Nor did Riona sadly – she was short in a way which made her chunky. Her only girlfriend however had been this thin-bodied and awkward – but also two year older and cool – punk girl who refused to engage with the modern high cut tanga trend and instead mostly wore a rather queer but cute assortment of bikini panties. Their relationship had ended when Riona moved away for the job, and she hadn't gotten laid since.

Returning back to her task, she had to stand on her toes to slide the boxes with the space stations up on top of a disorderly stack of various black plastic robots and those fake telephones with creepy eyes that wobbled. A spooky skeleton figure popped out of a nook as she jostled. An unruly kid had "ha-ha busted!" it with a stomp, crushing the poor guy's ribcage. That was a year ago; her boss just couldn't throw anything away. She squeezed the thing back into its haunted crevice.

When exiting the back room she shot a glance through the storefront window – well, through a sort of embrasure formed by a brickwork of Meccano boxes on display – and out there she saw something alarming. A seemingly abandoned baby carriage across the street had begun to roll on its own. It was heading right into the street, drifting out through a gap between two parked cars, unseen to any oncoming traffic.

Riona acted immediately, crashing through the impedance of unpacked goods before finally tripping on a box left lodged in the store's door. A bunch of blister packs scattered onto the sidewalk – the brown puppy and green larvae windup toys which could carry a pencil around for some reason. They were cute in a dumb way so Riona had foolishly tacked them onto the last order. She herself now lay on the ground like a stunned larvae – the green hoodie helping to complete the semblance. Several seconds thus passed. She got right back up when she saw the baby carriage in the middle of the street, just about to be rammed by a white truck which didn't even seem to be breaking. And how could it – it didn't even have a driver.

She wasn't able to remember what happened next, but she could remember something – which surely meant she wasn't dead. Now, why was she in the "Wasteland of the Ancients", and how did she even know that name?