Our new place was a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a former office building. There were thirty occupants within the building but things within the building were generally quiet.
The place didn’t seem to be riddled with vermin or on the verge of falling part. In fact decor within the building was tasteful if modest, jiving well with my aesthetic preferences.
The neighborhood was a fairly decent one with an adequate level of safety. There was a public library nearby and a school a few blocks north from where we were. There was a shopping plaza right next door to us and a gym right down the street for those who liked to keep active.
Overall, as new addresses went, 93 Kopfuber Lane, seemed perfectly adequate. There wasn’t too much unique or interesting about the place, but sometimes that’s a good thing.
If I had any gripes about concerning the new place, they were few and far between. The building ‘was’ a bit old. The heating and water pressure were lacking.
The apartment itself was a bit small, having clearly just been a normal one-bedroom apartment, barely a level above a simple studio apartment, that was being billed as a two-bedroom apartment.
Then there was the fact that the shopping plaza next to our building got noisy in the mid-afternoon, and bright in the evenings, and often brought a lot of traffic which would make finding parking a nightmare.
However, those things were all minor issues for Margot and I. Bright and noisy nuisances could be ignored once one whipped up some sound and light dampening streets. Cramped quarters were easily expandable for someone who knew how to manipulate space and time. Shoddy heating and low water pressure could be remedied by supplementing one’s supply of both with small magitech temperature regulators and hot water tanks.
In other words, with my magic and my tech it wasn’t hard for me to take even the worst of places and bring them up to standard. The only thing that couldn’t be changed was the neighbors and the landlady, who was also one of the neighbors.
In the worse case, all I could hope was that nobody did anything that imperilled ‘my’ mental health and ‘their’ life expectancy. Fortunately, for now it seemed that this was the kind of building where everyone kept to themselves.
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On the third day after the big move, I woke up. I took a shower, I dressed and then I headed out for breakfast. Briefly using my tether and my myriad senses to make sure that Margot was okay. A quick check-in confirmed that she was still in bed sleeping.
Despite not having to do much in terms of physical labor for the move in, the whole process had been quite exhausting for her and the change of environment had left her afflicted with a malady with symptoms that were strikingly similar to jet lag.
After confirming the continued survival and well-being of my contractor I made my way downstairs. There was a convenience store and cafe on the ground floor where I’d been getting breakfast for the past few days. Our apartment technically had the bare minimum for me to be able to cook on my own but both Margot and I had yet to take the time to go grocery shopping.
Though the atmosphere in the little restaurant was a tad gloomy, the food was fairly high tier, and the shop was generally quiet. As such, I expected that by the time I got around to doing the groceries I’d still find my way down here more often than not. Especially, since Margot seemed to like the box lunch-sets that the shop sold alongside its inventory of more traditional frozen tv dinners.
“Morning, sugar. May I take your order?” said a familiar voice.
I looked up from the menu that had been left on the table. I met the gaze of a tall woman with dark blue eyes. Her hair was the color of a soot colored sky, a dark and dingy gray-blue. She wore her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and held with a clip made of what looked like carved bone.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Her face was rectangular with a button nose and pronounced cheekbones. Her olive colored face was lightly marked with numerous smile lines and worry lines. Her eyes were large and angled outwards making her look permanently sleepy. Her ears were long, pointed, and tipped with furry tufts.
She wore a cardigan and a pair of high waisted jeans that might have only been a step away from being mom jeans but looked comfortable enough to make me wish I had a pair.
This woman was the head-waitress and owner of the Rob Roy Cafe. Her name was Cassandra Neuville. Our landlady. Besides owning this little restaurant she was also the own of this entire building.
“Good morning, Ms. Neuville. I’ll have a cup of coffee. Three stacks of pancakes. Some bacon. Some eggs. And some of those meatballs you sell if you’ve started making them already.”
“Nh, right away, sug.” said Ms. Neuville. Her jaw moving methodically as she chewed the gum that was in her mouth. Her expression dour as she eyed me.
Ms. Neuville wasn’t a big fan of mine. I wasn’t sure why. My best guess was the fact that she couldn’t read me. As was evidenced by the woman’s furry pointed ears, the woman wasn’t human. She was a Koparka. One of the rarer breeds of non-human.
Two other names for the koparka was luck miners, or prospector badgers. Their kind were born with sharp senses and a hyper-developed ability to “read the room” that overlapped with precognition and empathic powers.
Basically they could feel when good and bad things were coming, and they were good at getting a strong feel for the people they met. It was a power that was as handy as it was vague and was one of the many reasons why their kind were hunted till the point where they became an extreme minority.
I was the exception. My mind and my future were sealed. I’d seen that ages ago. I couldn’t read my own mind fully and it was ‘my’ mind. If that sounds like a bad thing, don’t worry, it wasn’t for the most part. Existing in this state semi-detachment was part of what kept me sane and agreeable.
The machine parts of my brain and the ‘aeon’ parts of my brain were a bit too alien for me to be able to run anything that even faintly resembling “human” sentience on them. If I didn’t develop the ability to sort of ignore the fact they were there. This came with the side-effect of having those parts of my mind ignore that I was a person.
Add to this my myriad mental defenses against psychics, and evil spirits that I either put in place purposefully or gained due to my adaptive biology and it made reading my mind in any fashion kind of impossible. The tether was the sole exception and even that was probably just giving Margot a lot of random noise.
My future was unreadable because of all the quantum hickory pokery I was always doing. The issue exacerbated by a number of spells and stealth runtimes that I kept online to keep from showing up on the radar of the powers-that-be.
Ms. Neuville seemed to be a friendly sort normally, at least to everyone else who wasn’t me. She was downright motherly to Margot when they met.
I imagined that to her I was probably just a tad unnerving. Imagine going through life being able to see people especially well.. Now imagine finding yourself talking to someone that every instinct in your body is telling you isn’t really there.
For Ms. Neuville interacting with me was probably a lot like a normal person having to deal with a ghost for the first time, or like meeting the monster that lives in your closet for the first time.
Even if I did my best to be polite and non-threatening, the experience would still be unpleasant and uncanny till she grew accustomed to it.
This was actually something of serious concern. Serious to an extent that made it something of a baffling miracle that she’d still decided to rent the apartment to us. Maybe she just really needed the money?
(The expansion of the planet’s size meant that nowadays it was the renters not the landlords who held the most power. If you wanted to own a place and didn’t mind a little danger and bit of a commute, most governments were all but giving land away. Everyone knew that leaving land uninhabited and unvisited for too long was just asking for trouble.)
Ah, well. I wasn’t too worried. The lease was already signed, and I had a feeling that given enough time I’d grow on her. Everyone came to like old Monty in time and I do mean everyone. It was one of my many gifts.
The food came. I ate and then I ordered a little more. Asking it to be prepared for eating outside the shop. Then I went back upstairs.
When I entered the apartment, I saw Margot sitting in our tiny living room playing games. Humming beneath her breath as she swayed one way and then the other.
She was playing a fighting game. Her character clearly a joke-character since it seemed to be some a piece of anthropomorphized toast with a mustache.
“...Morning.” I said.
“Agh?!...I-, I mean. Morning.” said Margot. Blushing. Her hair still standing on end as she tried to play off how startled she’d been.
“I brought you breakfast. Pancakes, eggs, and bacon from the cafe downstairs.” I said. Placing the paper bag full of styrofoam containers on the ground next to Margot.
“...Thanks, Monty.”
“No problem. So this is a pretty decent place.” I said. Looking around at our little apartment.
“Yeah…”
“It’s still a bit small but I can fix that later. It’s still a bit empty but I can fix that too. What say you we go do a little shopping later today?” I said.
“Er...That sounds good. I think.” said Margot. Her onscreen character pummelling some kind of karate-mummy.
“Cool...Well, then I guess I’ll just go take a nap or whatever for now. Wake me up whenever you’re ready.” I said. Heading for my room.
“Okay. Will do.” said Margot. Her eyes still glued to the screen.