Roslyn Atwood- waitress, aspiring actress, culinary intern- had the most massive headache she’d ever had. It came on suddenly between one breath and the next. The pain was so severe she forgot who she was and what she was doing.
Roslyn was a beautiful girl. She had the cornfed grace of a Kentucky farm girl, coupled with the borderline anorexia shared by a lot of small town girls trying to make it in the big city. The city where one job that allowed for auditions and schedule flexibility could not successfully pay for an entire apartment, much less utilities.
One moment the young bottle blonde, with the improbably perfect hip to waist to bust ratio, was a 23 year old waitress at Finnegan’s a Manhattan pub. Her day consisted of serving finicky salads and four varieties of inauthentic Irish Stew to people who didn’t have to share a one bedroom flat with three other aspiring actresses just to make ends meet.
She had a side job as a culinary intern- unpaid labor with the nebulous promise of an eventual job- for a restaurant chef who abused her verbally and emotionally, but not physically or sexually.
The next moment the same girl was the 58 year old lieutenant who had barely survived what was supposed to be a triumphant entry into the final exam of the Nine Realms.
She blinked, started to shake her head and decided this was worse than any hangover she’d ever had. She winced as the bell in the window beside the bar rang twice.
“Order up, table three, Rose, where are you?” Chef Rob called from the kitchen. He was not her knife skills mentor. His shout and double tap meant a second attempt to hand off the food, he’d be unbearable if there was a third slap of the bell.
Ros, who couldn’t remember why anyone would be calling her Rose, responded through instinct and memory. It had been so long since this moment that she’d forgotten she used Rose as a work name, a precaution a lot of girls took in the city. The realization came to her slowly. She had one nickname for people who knew her; another for people she didn’t want to encourage.
She’d been working at this pub since her 21st birthday when she became old enough to work in a pub instead of an ice cream counter. If there was one thing worse than office dwelling adults getting midday cocktails at a pub it was the wealthy brats of wealthy office workers getting overpriced ice cream sundaes as they played hooky from their overpriced private schools.
She picked up the plates, and took a moment to peek at the ticket she’d written not twenty minutes before. She always wrote the tickets out the same way, table three was the four-top at the back. At some point the table numbering scheme must have made sense to someone, but it had been changed beyond logic many times before she started here.
She carried the tray with a brittle plastic smile. Fake and easily shattered.
The clock on the wall told her it was 11:22, beginning of lunch service. The date wasn’t visible until she was nearly to the wall, she delivered the food, checking to make sure she had each dish right.
“Emerald Isle Salad?” Eye contact with the presumed recipient, set it down when she confirmed. Although anyone who wanted basil aspic (jello) on a bed of romaine with odd shards of other vegetables inside the gelatin didn’t understand pub food at all. Or jello. Or salads.
She got the next recipient correct as well. Rinse. Repeat.
There. Her system really was efficient. She could do this with no memory and a splitting headache.
Roslyn glanced back up at the clock. June 19th. She swallowed. She was back where it started, at least where it had started for her.
At 12:45 or as close to it as she could estimate, ten million people all around the world would simultaneously disappear from Earth and she would be one of them.
They would appear, a thousand at a time, at uniformly scattered locations on a tide locked moon in some distant, unknowable star system.
Ros shook off the thoughts. She was busy and she wasn’t out of the weeds yet. She glanced at the kitchen window. Nothing up yet.
With a three syllable cantrip, more mumbled prayer than magic spell, Roslyn cast Warrior’s Ease, the first and only healing spell she’d ever learned. To her surprise it worked. Her headache faded from ‘worst ever’ to ‘manageable.’
In addition, with that small magical intervention, the younger version of Roslyn’s consciousness merged nearly seamlessly with the older version, all her memories and attitudes subsumed into the functionally identical history of the mind.
She fished her ticket pad out of her apron and reviewed what she had on her list. Under the guise of checking off that table three was served, she verified that the next food in the window wasn’t hers anyway, she didn’t have any tables without entrees. She rememorized the drink orders and glanced around to check drink levels.
She went behind the bar, ostensibly to pick up her tea pitcher. She winced slightly that Aiden was the bartender today. He was the owner’s son, and way too handsy for a professional establishment. Not that the rowdy pub seemed all that professional some days, despite the four-star, institute-trained chef in the kitchen.
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Aiden kissed the air in her general direction as she entered his domain.
Ros was sure it was a mistake to do anything except grab drinks and leave, but she crouched behind the bar and grabbed the first aid kit anyway. She opened it on her knee and fished out a headache powder. She put the box back and stood.
Aiden had been at the other end of the bar when she went down. He was way too close when she stood. She mostly forgave him when he put a glass of water in her hand.
She definitely did not forgive the hand honking her breast.
She acted before she could think it through, using her three decades of honed combat skills. The water glass dropped to the rubber mat and bounced. The headache powder fluttered next to it, unopened but miraculously not in the puddle of water.
There is a particular judo hold perfect for tearing an unwanted hand off a woman’s breast and twisting an arm up so the perpetrator could end up face down on a very wide wooden bartop.
Oh.
Where and when had she learned judo? Somewhere between the third and sixth realms, although she had several teachers over the years.
“Uncle. Uncle.” Aiden gasped.
“Do you have permission to touch my tit?” Ros held him at a very precise angle that wouldn’t hurt if he didn’t struggle. She didn’t hiss or lower her voice. She only had an hour left here and she would gladly kill him. She had killed men for less.
“No. Ow. Stop. Ow.”
“Then do not touch my goddamned tit.” She growled, not caring in the slightest that she had an audience. She was going to be on a completely different planet in a little more than an hour, and this job meant less than nothing to her in the meantime.
She was only performing her tasks through sheer inertia. Well, also an implied commitment to both the kitchen and the patrons to deliver the fresh food as efficiently as possible. A repeated fetch quest with little reward and no significance.
Ros let him go and was quite startled to find several people in the restaurant were clapping. Someone whistled approval. She looked around, jaw dropping, as more people joined in.
She looked across the room and saw Susie, the other waitress on duty staring at her in horror. Just beyond Susie, the hostess Bianca, Aiden’s sister, was laughing. She had her phone out and may have actually videoed the whole thing. Not good.
Ros closed her eyes briefly. “Shit.” She groaned.
“Here.” One of the men at the bar handed her a business card paper clipped to a hundred dollar bill. “If he tries to press charges, or the owner tries to fire you, I’ll take the case probono. This is the best lunch show I’ve had all week.” He grinned and his bushy grey streaked eyebrows wiggled. The rest of him was perfectly manicured. He must like his long, wild eyebrows.
Ros looked at the card, and up into the face of Patrick Richardson III, mergers and acquisitions for a nearby bank she’d actually heard of. He was a middle aged metrosexual lawyer in a bespoke suit. He grinned, showing off perfectly white, ruler straight teeth. Caps, she thought distantly.
Roslyn took a deep breath and cleared her throat. “I’ll call.”
He winked. “I’ll be expecting your call.” He left the bar.
She dropped the card and the tip into her apron. She picked up the headache powder from where she’d dropped it and didn’t even hide she was taking it. She imperiously stuck out her hand while she held her breath for the powder to absorb under her tongue. Aiden placed a new glass of water in her hand without comment.
Ros rubbed her temples and went back to work.
She went to refill drinks at her tables, just in time to take the order of the party of six Bianca had just seated at table 15 in her section. Six IT nerds with actual pocket protectors. One even carried a slide rule, probably ironically, but you never know with IT nerds. The six were regulars who worked nearby and notoriously picky with the reputation of bad tippers.
She recognized one of them as an idiot with a sword and a savior complex who lived in a different section of her same station. She didn’t remember his name.
Ros saw that both Aiden and Bianca were on their phones, probably reporting in to Daddy with two versions of the same story.
“I’m hiring.” A stern, elderly voice announced under Ros’s elbow.
“Excuse me?” Ros stared down at Ms Rowland, a constant fixture at table 12 every Wednesday at 11 sharp. The grey haired old woman was possibly the most put together of any patron the pub ever saw, and in the financial district that was saying something.
“Typing, filing, running errands- mostly errands. Training on the job if you don’t type.”
“I…”
“Tomorrow morning, 7 sharp. You won’t like me as a boss, but you’ll learn a lot. I can’t move my current personal assistant up until she trains her replacement and it’s time. This is the address. It absolutely has to be more money than you’re making here.”
“I think the disappearances are due today, it’s been a year and a day.”
The woman looked up. “The…?”
It was almost a taboo subject. People had caught the third wave of the disappeared on their cell phones, a million people fading into dusty motes of light. The second wave had been mere rumors and the first wave had been missing persons cases and too few to cause a stir.
Ros shrugged. “If I’m here I’ll be there.” She took the paper. Six figures was her own apartment, a living wage in the city. It might even be sending money home instead of begging for more. It would probably make her abandon her acting dreams, but it would lead to a different kind of success, and being on Heaven’s Path had eliminated her acting dreams as well.
She finished tending her tables and ducked into the back.
She took a moment in the break room to move the one possession she’d thought about most often those first few weeks from her locker to under her apron.
She had begun working lunch service expressly so she could attend her 4 o'clock culinary internship where most of what she did was food prep for the restaurant where the chef she was learning under reigned.
Chef Carlyle required that she have and carry her own knives, which she had acquired at a thrift shop in Soho, battered leather roll and all. She pulled out her belt, and arranged the leather case down her leg under her stretchy yoga pants, which she had permission to wear under the uniform skirt. It made a bulge under her apron but she didn’t care. She wanted to have her knives, and since she was wearing them they had at least a fifty/fifty chance of transporting with her.
Four people stopped by to tip Ros from Susie’s section on their way out the door. She apologized to each of them for swearing.
The time passed extremely swiftly in the familiar tasks of lunch service. At 12:44, only halfway through the shift, she stopped moving and stood staring at the clock until the digital seconds ticked away to 12:45 and a few seconds past.
She’d about given up knowing the exact timing when she felt the shimmer. She heard her name being called in anger by Tristan, her boss, Bianca and Aiden’s father.
She turned her head to look at him while her body faded from view. He looked… stricken.
Bianca was behind him, holding up her phone again, recording her. Just behind them, one of the lingering IT men at table 15 was shimmering, the same one she’d already expected to see at the station.