“Tea or coffee?”

“Black tea! And with sweets! I love tea parties in good company!”

(from Rina's interview for cooking program ‘Chef’)

“Questions or news?” Gennadiy Sergeevich immediately asked when Nikolai called him at seven in the morning.

The colonel's voice sounded cheerful and loud, as if he was not talking on the phone, but giving commands on the parade ground. Nikolai involuntarily smiled and replied:

“Both.”

The coffee machine made a noise all over the apartment, grinding grains, and then snuggled comfortably, pouring a hot drink into a cup. Nikolai's morning began not with an alarm clock ringing and not with a cool shower even in winter, but with this rumble and the aroma of coffee filling the kitchen.

“Something is spinning in several places at once. I checked some things personally, some things were confirmed to me,” Nikolai said, approaching the window with a cup. “This ‘something’ has been in suspended animation for a long time, and now it seems to have woken up.”

Gennadiy Sergeevich listened in silence to the story about the study, and then asked Nikolai to throw off the coordinates of the places where the activity was detected.

“We'll split the work,” the colonel added. “Today I have a free day. Shusha's class was canceled, so I bought groceries yesterday. I wanted to ask a beautiful lady out on a date, but I thought what should she, young and beautiful, do with me, an old man.”

“Come on, Gennadiy Sergeevich, ‘old’!” Nikolai laughed. “It's better to invite your beautiful lady on a date, I'll go around all the suspicious areas myself.”

“No, Kolya, our business is urgent, so I will go to one of the places,” Gennadiy Sergeevich objected. “What else? Any other questions?”

“There are a lot of questions, and we are looking for answers to them. What happened that made our ‘cthulhu’ wake up? Why is everything happening so fast and right now? We need to dig in this direction - to look for the cause of the anomalies.”

“Think, Kolya, think, you're brainy. And I will be your ‘legs’ today. Call me when you have news,” Gennadiy Sergeevich said and said goodbye.

Vika dyed her hair and nails again – this time in bright yellow and, accordingly, tights under a short hoodie dress picked up the same shade. Nikolai froze in amazement at the door, even though he should have been used to the changes in the assistant's image for a long time. But lately Vika has been making frequent changes: she used to wear every color for a couple of weeks.

“Is it not harmful?” Nikolai blurted out instead of greeting.

“What is ‘harmful’?” the assistant asked, looking up from the monitor.

“Do you dye your hair so often? Won't they spoil?”

“If they go bad, I'll shave them off,” Vika replied with the same imperturbable calmness and involuntarily made Nikolai shudder.

He still wasn't ready for her bald skull.

“Hello to you, too, boss,” she greeted him with a slight sarcasm in response to his confusion.

“Hello,” Nikolai shook his head and went to the room.

“Wait, Kolya! I found something interesting here.”

“Maybe coffee first?”

“Didn't you drink at home?” Vika grinned.

“Pest! Okay, show me what you found,” Nikolai gave up with a sigh and barely restrained the reproach that he, unlike some, didn’t do hair and nails at night, but worked.

“I found yesterday's photographer,” said Vika, nodding at the monitor. “He is actually a blogger who is looking for sensations. I have already managed to upload a video and describe my adventures.”

“Nimble!”

Nikolai scanned the text, watched a video with a working Ferris wheel and reread the article.

“It's strange, we were in the park the same day, but we didn't see anything like this,” he muttered, scrolling through the few comments.

“Maybe just a successful installation?”

“Who knows… I would like to talk to this blogger. What's his name, Yuriy?”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Yes.Yuriy Vasilev. I have already sent him a personal office number with a request to call.”

“You're working ahead of the curve,” Nikolai admired

“Why waste time?”

“How did you even find him? He lied about being a photographer. And he didn't mention his last name.”

“I have my own sources,” Vika answered vaguely in a suddenly hoarse voice.

Nikolai looked at her suspiciously, but the assistant was already smiling broadly:

“Now coffee, boss!”

In the office, Nikolai again looked through the material laid out by Vasilev. He was usually skeptical of all Internet ‘sensations’, but this time the video did not seem to be edited. Most likely, Yuriy really took off the earned attraction. Nikolai returned to the article, but this time he noted not the content, but the good style of the author. Yuriy wrote fascinatingly, correctly placed accents and skillfully threw baits. Professionally, Nikolai would say, he wrote. He Googled the blogger's name and immediately received confirmation: Yuriy Vasilev turned out to be a journalist. Clear. Nikolai searched for the materials published by him and came across an interview with Rina, excerpts from which Vasilev posted on his blog.

Nikolai finished his coffee and put down his empty cup. The interview was typical, but Rina again ‘reminded’ about herself. He grabbed the phone and dialed a familiar number.

“I'm on the road, Kolya. I have already left Moscow,” Gennadiy Sergeevich replied.

“Yes, information about Tivastopol. Remember we were talking about an island that disappeared and then reappeared?”

“Yes, yes,” colonel replied after some hesitation. There was noise in the background, words floated through the static. “Now I'll call one person, he will send.”

“Okay. Good luck to you, Gennadiy Sergeevich! In touch.”

Some time after the conversation, Nikolai received several files in the mail, opened them and plunged into reading.

According to Violet, an unknown singer appeared on this mysterious island five years ago and returned from it with the ability to open and close portals to other parallels. A sane person, to whom Nikolai counted himself, would have doubted the plausibility of such a statement, but there were documents in front of him, in which what he wanted to know was read between the lines.

Nikolai again glanced at the monitor with Yuriy Vasilev's open blog. Rina, without knowing it herself, gave him the answer to the question he had been asking all morning: why did they and Vasilev, being in the park on the same day, see different things there? What if the journalist fell into another parallel and saw the ‘wrong side’ of the park?

“Vika?” Nikolai called, coming out into the reception area. “Did the journalist call you back?

“What journalist?” she shuddered.

“Well, blogger! Yuriy Vasilev.”

“No."

“When he calls back, ask him to come to us.”

“Okay. Kolya, I need to go to the pharmacy. My head hurts,” Vika smiled plaintively.

“No problem!”

Returning to his room, he immersed himself in reading articles about people with unusual abilities, about abnormal places and portals and got so carried away that he forgot about everything in the world. He didn’t hear whether his assistant left, whether her phone rang, whether she herself came to him with some questions. Judging by the fact that cups with coffee appeared on his table, then plates with sandwiches, she came in. Nikolai caught himself only when Vika showed up in front of his desk and began to make some passes with her hands. He involuntarily shuddered, because he had already forgotten that the assistant had dyed her hair from blue to yellow, and asked with displeasure:

“Are you hypnotizing me?”

“No, on the contrary, I'm trying to bring you out of suspended animation.”

“I've been reading too much. It turns out that fairy tales about portals to other dimensions are quite exciting. And not so improbable. Maybe our journalist fell into one of these portals yesterday?”

“Maybe,” Vika suddenly agreed. “By the way, about him. We called, and I invited him to our office at five o'clock in the evening.”

“Very good!”

“He couldn't do it before. By the way, his channel was blocked. They worked quickly!”

“Which channel?” Nikolai didn’t understand, then, realizing, he entered the journalist's blog and really came across a record about blocking.

“Maybe he deleted everything himself?”

“No. His blog was blocked, and before that his article about Rina was deleted and fired from the editorial office.”

“Wait, wait, Vika!” Nikolai stopped her and rubbed his temples. “Don't be fast! I understand that you faithfully completed the task while I was reading everything here, but let's take it in order. By the way, what time is it?”

“Twenty minutes past three.”

“Damn, I missed lunch.”

“You've already had lunch, chief,” Vika grinned. “Ate four sandwiches that I brought you, and didn't even notice. At least you would say ‘thank you’!”

“Thank you. What were they with?”

“With toads and leeches,” the assistant calmly replied, sat down on a chair opposite and recounted a telephone conversation with a journalist.

It turns out that Nikolai recently wrote about Rina's parting with Lebedev, but the news was immediately deleted, and he himself was fired from the editorial office.

“He believes that Rina’s ex had a hand in his dismissal.”

“Lebedev again,” Nikolai muttered and involuntarily winced.

Vika, who was sitting on the edge of a chair with her hands folded humbly on her yellow tights-covered knees, immediately became alarmed:

“Does your head hurt? Should I give you a pill? I brought it.”

“Don't. My head hurts in the figurative sense of the word. I don't want to get into this topic with Rina's ex. I don't want to look for her at all, to be honest. But…”

Nikolai bit his tongue, realizing that he almost let it slip, even though he promised Violet not to tell even the assistant about Rina's abilities. However, if he manages to find the singer, perhaps she will be able to tell a lot about the portals. From personal, so to speak, experience.

Find Rina. Find… Nikolai glanced at the phone, which was flashing a blue light, notifying about unread messages. They were all from Gennadiy Sergeevich: he informed that he had arrived safely at the place, asked if Nikolai had received materials on Tivastopol, and then sent two photos.

“Here, look at it! You were right,” Gennadiy Sergeevich wrote in the last message.

Nikolai look. He enlarged the photos and looked at them again. And then he asked Vika to come out with a look and dialed the colonel's number.