Chapter Ten - Past

The rest of the meeting with Melnyk didn't quite go as Alice might have hoped. The man clammed up, and he went from moderately helpful to hovering between patronising and just plain rude. The man thought that they were going to die, through their own fault, and he couldn't muster up the energy to truly care.

She could imagine a little. Alice and Crystal weren't the first people he had talked to about this kind of thing, and she had the impression that he'd seen a number of people head out and fail to return already.

In that light, it was hard to hate the man.

But his constant dismissal of their problems eventually got to her. "You are not very helpful, you know?" Alice said.

"I'm being very helpful by telling you that you're in over your heads. The zone is no place for children, let alone two young women. There are horrors there that you couldn't imagine."

Alice resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It would have played too much into the look of a young woman done with someone's crap. She'd literally been to hell. There were plenty of horrors beyond imagining that she'd seen and destroyed.

This guy was so uninterested in helping that at this point, she figured that any more time spent in his office was time lost. "Thank you, we'll take all of that into advisement," she replied as she stood.

"Aww," Crystal said as she stood as well. "I'm sure I could convince him, eventually."

"It's not worth it," Alice said.

"You're going to try it anyway, aren't you?" Melnyk asked.

Alice shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. In either case it's not your concern anymore, is it?"

The man tsked, then pulled open a drawer on his desk. He pulled out a small notepad and fished out a ball-point from a cup. The man scribbled something onto the page in a cursive script that Alice was positive she wouldn't have been able to make heads or tails of without magical girl powers to translate for her.

"What is this?" she asked as she took the paper. It was a dull question to ask. The paper had a name and an address on it.

"That's a place that shouldn't exist, but does anyway," he replied. "The Last Refuge is a shithole on the edge of the city. It's not a place for good, upstanding citizens, but it's there anyway because sometimes you need people who are neither good, nor upstanding."

"And this... Pavlo?" Alice asked.

"He's a bitter old fool. If I can't convince you not to cross the wall, then he will," Melnyk said. "Now, stop wasting my time."

Alice nodded her thanks, then tapped Crystal on the shoulder before leading her out of the office. They slipped through the bar, then regrouped a little ways away while Alice looked at the address again.

"Do you think that Pavlo guy will be able to help?" Crystal asked.

"Maybe," Alice said. "It's a lead. I'm half-tempted to just leave and try to reach Meagan on our own."

Crystal frowned. "I don't know. I mean, yeah, we're strong and you're super capable and cool, but... well, I only have one world's experience to go on, but I think rushing in without knowing and without making good friends first is just a bad idea."

Alice considered it for a moment. In the past, she'd... sometimes done Crystal dirty by ignoring the younger magical girl.

In her own defence, Crystal's initial enthusiasm had been a little much. She was far, far more mellow and calm now than when she'd initially become a magical girl, and as the last of their group, she came in at a time where some of them, like Alice herself, had been magical girls for years.

Saving the world was old hat, by that point, and having a bubbly newcomer who was hyper-enthusiastic about everything and charged headlong into trouble was a bit of a chore.

It was half the reason Alice had taken Crystal under her figurative wing. She was quite certain that Crystal's... Crystalness would have caused some issues with others.

Meagan, the very girl they were aiming to save, had once left Crystal in a time bubble for nearly a whole day after Crystal was too much of herself near her.

It was a mean-spirited thing to do, and Meagan had been chastised for it, but privately, Alice kind of understood her.

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Still, it wasn't right to bully the newest member of their group, and setting everything else aside, Crystal herself was a nice girl. She didn't deserve to be mistreated just because she had all of the social skills of an untrained puppy at first.

Now she was a lot calmer... like a year-old puppy that knew not to pee on the carpet or jump at people's faces.

A few times, Crystal had proven invaluable. She had a surprisingly keen instinct for people, second only to Happy Sparkles.

Alice sighed. She wished Happy was here.

"Okay, fine. You might be right, but if this doesn't work out, I think we should give it a try ourselves."

Crystal nodded, conceding the point without making a fuss. "So, let's go see old-man Pavlo?"

"Let's," Alice agreed. Then she ran into an immediate issue. It was all well and good having an address, but without cellphone GPS, or internet access, or even a paper map, she had no idea where this bar was except that it was supposedly close to the wall that ran all the way around the city.

Crystal had to skip over to an older lady trudging along the street and politely ask her for directions.

That, at least, got them pointed in the right direction, but it took asking three more people before they narrowed down where the Last Resort was located.

The bar wasn't just close to the wall. The bar was practically part of it.

The entrance they had come in from had a large set of gates with towers on either side. These towers, at the bases, were basically barracks with a bridge running between them. Alice had assumed that there were offices in there too, and maybe amenities for the guards at the gate.

The Last Resort had taken over one of these buildings, right next to an exit out of the city that was bricked over and blocked out. Its only exterior decoration was a small sign carved out of wood and an overfull ashtray by the entrance.

She could smell the place before she was even at the door. Liquor and stale cigarettes. The smells she was coming to associate with the entire city at this point. There were no guards at the door, though as Alice and Crystal approached, it banged open and two men stumbled out. One of them had the other by the collar.

Alice and Crystal both paused on the sidewalk as the smaller of the two men shoved the bigger, drunker, one away.

He stumbled a few steps and almost lost his footing before regaining his balance and spinning around. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Tossing you out," the smaller man said. Both were dressed somewhat bizarrely. Like the men at the Office of Zone Exploration, but with less uniform gear. They were armed, but neither were reaching for guns just yet.

Strangest of all was something that caught Alice's eye. The smaller man had a dog's collar wrapped around his thigh, the loop on it hooked onto... a clothes iron? One of those old cast-iron ones that were meant to be warmed up on a woodstove before use. It was strapped awkwardly to his leg. She might have dismissed it as just cheap armour, but there was something about it.

"You can't!" the big man roared. "I'm the best damned Stalker in this city!"

"You're not even the best Stalker on this street. Go home."

The big guy squared up, and Alice was worried that she was about to see one or both men go down in a scuffle. He roared, swinging his fist around in a big sweeping punch.

The smaller man disappeared in a blink and reappeared behind the bigger man, then with a casual backwards kick, smacked the heel of his army surplus boots into the back of the big guy's knees.

The big guy, rather predictably, went sprawling onto the street with an oomph.

"Go. Home."

Alice glanced at Crystal. "That was Meagan's trick, wasn't it?"

"Looks like it," Crystal said. "In the last world I was on, a lot of people had magic that was really similar to yours. Do you think...."

"Maybe," Alice said. It was always possible.

The smaller man helped the big guy up. Even after that bit of violence, they didn't seem like enemies just yet. "Let's get you up, come on. Your place isn't far. The walk will do you good. Take some air."

"Right," Alice muttered. "Maybe we've come to the right place after all."

***