Greg had rarely used public transport. Whenever he needed to go somewhere, he either walked if it was close enough, biked if it was too far away, or carpooled if he could. Gas, insurance, repairs; all things he didn’t have the budget for. His bike had been in the garage when the house burned down, and Taz didn’t own a car. They had decided to start their apartment hunting with the least desirable of their choices, which just so happened to be far enough away and near a bus stop. So, the bus it was.
---
Taz did not like public transportation. His nose burned and eyes watered from the stench, and the effluence of psyche did nothing to help either. The majority of the passengers were anxious, worried, or worst of all, scatterbrained. Those minds emitted a static noise that made Taz’s skull itch if he didn’t actively exclude them from his empathic sense.
Humans, unlike demons, had no way, nor reason, to hide their minds from supernatural senses. Demons all had varying degrees of this empathic sensory capability, but Taz’s was above average in range and sensitivity, not that that mattered much. Demons were taught from a young age how to guard their psyche. By adolescence, a demon’s mind was an immutable fortress. Well, nearly immutable. Beings from higher planes of existence tended to regard plausibility as a suggestion rather than a fact.
This is all to say, while it wasn’t difficult for Taz to deal with the para-mental aspect of a bus ride, the olfactory side of things still caused him to gag a bit.
“Do these people not know what soap is?” He questioned, glaring at a particularly disheveled man.
“That’s rude,” Greg replied. “Maybe they have a reason why they smell like that. I’m sure they don’t want to smell like a dead rat.”
The man in question turned around and glared at them. Though, that only last for a brief moment before the man seemed to lose interest and return to staring grumpily at the back of the seat in front of him.
“Gotta love the bracelet,” Taz smirked.
---
“Seriously? Another one?”
In the last thirty minutes, the bus had picked up enough passengers that there wasn’t even standing room left. No one had departed, and yet the driver still let more board.
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Greg had been elbowed accidentally, twice, as passengers shuffled to make room for others. He had long given up hope that this ride would be an uneventful one.
Now, Greg had never called someone a freak, at least not in an insulting way, but there was really no other way to describe some of the characters that the bus had somehow collected during this short journey. Highlights included: a suspicious group wearing tactical vests; a couple clearly either returning from or heading to a BDSM convention; an atrophied corpse of a woman that practically vibrated in her seat as she snorted a line off of her thigh; and not one, but two separate groups of people carrying live chickens under their arms. Greg knew they were separate because they frequently shot hateful and disgusted glares at each other.
Greg couldn’t say he knew much about laws regards transportation of livestock, but he was pretty sure that they couldn’t take them on the city bus. If dogs needed to be in carriers or have a vest that indicated they were a support animal, shouldn’t chickens need at least that much? Were chickens somehow an exception? Why chickens? Why this bus, in the middle of the city? Greg had many questions that he feared would never be answered.
Nearing their destination, Greg had a thought. A quick glance confirmed his fears. “Taz?”
“Yeah?” he grunted, as he was nearly thrown out of his seat as the bus hit a pothole.
“We’re stuck.”
Taz took a moment to look around them. Indeed, the bus was so crowded that the duo could not even shove their way to an exit. “Yup.”
“We’re going to miss our stop.”
“Yup.”
“Dammit,” Greg groaned. A chicken wailed in response.
---
In the end, they had lucked out, having only missed their stop by a handful of blocks. It still added an extra ten minutes of walking.
“That was an incredibly cursed bus ride,” Taz commented.
“Magic-cursed or just normal-cursed?”
Taz shrugged.
---
As they had expected, the first location turned out to be a no-go. It was in far worse shape than it had advertised, and Greg had only just set foot in one of their available spaces when he decided that he needed to leave as quickly as possible. Between the sleezy used-car salesman smile, and the obviously embellished state of the room, Greg could practically see the trouble the landlord would cause them if he stayed here. Crappy fixes to ongoing problems, if they ever even addressed them, being charged for non-existent damages or violations of contracts. Nope, Greg was not having it.
They moved on.
---
They struck gold on the fifth location. While a bit close to their budget, it hit all the marks, and none of the red flags. The manager was forthcoming and friendly, not shying away from any concerns they had. Taz had even pulled a resident into the conversation, one who had genuinely good things to say about their time there.
Greg would have been suspicious, if not for Taz’s repeated assurances that they hadn’t been lied to. Greg wasn’t sure where that confidence came from, but he trusted his friend, and he seemed certain that this was the perfect place for them.
They signed some papers, and promised they would move in by the end of the week.
Their bus ride back had been, gratefully, uneventful.