Chapter One - Meeting at The Caffeinated Sea
Author's Note
Pronunciation Guide/extra details!
Tyran: Tie-ran (most common) or Tee-ron (least common) -- the name of the planet after Tyrani, a dictator, usurped Celestia and Luna several hundred years ago.
Tyrani: Tyranny/teer-in-nee
Equus: Eck-wuss -- the former name of the planet. Equestria is the country/continent that the show takes place on.
Chapter One - Meeting at The Caffeinated Sea
Ka-dung! Ka-dung!
Zolt jumped at the strange-sounding door chime, cursing it with an admonishing glare. Rather than a traditional pair of silver Crotal bells above the door, there hung a pair of tin cans. They were sealed shut, hollowed completely, save for a hooffull of miniature metallic objects that had been placed inside to further bell-ify the noise. To Zolt’s ear, though, it just sounded a lot like a wooden spoon banging on a skillet.
She tried to push the sound out of her mind with a huff, stepping through the doorway. At least the coffee shop had found some use for old rubble. Tyran certainly needs it… she thought, with a touch of bitterness. She had already been frazzled before the noise had assailed her, anyway. The act of being in the public eye, willingly, was more than enough to focus on as a source of discomfort.
The Caffeinated Sea was, in terms of decoration, notably emptier than the last time she had gotten coffee there. It seemed every month there were new decorations thrown up around the place that followed a designated theme, usually water- or ocean-related. Zolt must have happened to catch the place during the interior design equivalent of its ‘awkward hair phase’. She approached the barista’s counter. It was a strange layout for a coffee joint, admittedly. The counter was planted directly in the middle of the room, oblong in shape, with several different drink-building stations sequestered inside. The barista, with a 360-degree spin, could see any customer in the shop at any time, with little room for privacy on their part.
Zolt’s single-sided saddlebag, placed under her right wing, rubbed uncomfortably against her side as she walked.
“Hello there!” Poinsettia, the barista, glowed as she greeted the new arrival. Zolt had seen Poinsettia here before. Her mane was reddish-pink striped with cyan and she always wore a different color of – who could have guessed – poinsettia peppered throughout her mane. This time, they were purple with yellow stamens. “What can I get you today?”
“Uhh… hi! Yes! I’ll just have a caramel frappé, please, XL, with whole milk, whipped cream, and caramel drizzle. Low carb, i-if that wouldn’t be too much of a bother.”
“Of course it wouldn’t!” Poinsettia beamed. “Is there anything else I could get for you?”
“No, thank you,” Zolt dashed through her words before she could consider asking for a pastry, “just the coffee, please.” She tried not to be so outwardly nervous, but she was sure that she had the aura of a prison escapee at a traffic stop. Her left wing clutched onto a maroon book that she tried to not call too much attention to. She didn’t want Poinsettia to think that she was a dork.
Zolt’s eyes – well, eye, singular; her mane covered her right eye – refocused on the flower-donning mare as she tapped the required information into her work-tablet. “That will be $5.83. Name?”
“Zolt, please, Z-O-L-T.”
“Thanks! How will you be paying?”
Zolt paid with her debit card, feeling quite adult in the process (even though she was an adult and, therefore, paying in cash would have been ‘adult’ by default). While she waited, she peered around the room, trying to find the most ideal possible seating arrangement. Unfortunately, it seemed that there were currently no booths in the entire establishment. Only tables and chairs. Not ideal for being unnoticed and left alone, really.
Most tables had at least one pony sitting at them, but some areas were less cluttered than others. The least enochlophobic area appeared to be towards the southeast corner of the shop – the back left corner, when viewed from Zolt’s position. Three tables had one pony, and one table had two. While other parts of the shop had ponies that were chattering amongst their personal groups, this area seemed to have the unspoken rule of being at least marginally quiet. This worked for Zolt quite well.
“Alright, Zolt, here’s your coffee! Thank you so much for stopping by! Oh, and sorry that there aren’t any booths today. We had to red0 the leather on all of them after a… griffin incident.” Poinsettia grimaced and Zolt couldn’t help but wonder whether Poinsettia had something against griffins in general or just that particular griffin. She was too afraid to ask.
“It’s alright! I look forward to seeing how the new theme turns out,” Zolt offered Poinsettia a terse nod before speeding off to the seat she had preemptively picked out for herself. She laid her book, saddlebag, and coffee down with a heavy sigh, as though she had been relieved of a hundred pounds of pressure. “Thank every deity that exists that I didn’t throw up or something,” she grumbled, joking to herself in a tone that didn’t quite show the humor. She felt a chill that told her that somebody was watching her. She looked. It was a blue pony with an excessive amount of earrings, glaring at her, their expression a mixture of disgust and anger; or maybe simple disdain. Zolt offered back an over-exaggerated spiteful glare, mentally cursing them for having abnormally good hearing. Obviously, she thought to herself, I was being a bit exaggeratory… She couldn’t muster the courage to speak aloud.
Once she had managed to settle her nerves, Zolt flipped open her book, using her bookmark as reference for where she was at in her reading. Within a minute, though, a raucous sound started developing, steadily increasing: a lot of ponies had started talking and laughing. Zolt looked up, noticing that a group of at least seven ponies had entered the shop, and all were flippant with their volume control. They seemed to be teenagers, if not then certainly younger than Zolt herself. This was not good. She didn’t have the confrontation skills required to even ask politely for them to quiet down, and the conditions could easily become much too unfavorable for her to read effectively. It had been a risky move, anyway, expecting others to remain quiet while she tried to read at a coffee shop. But still! Did there really have to be an influx of talkative ponies the moment I start to read? She internally grumbled, folding her hooves and laying her head down, returning to her task. Attempting to, anyway. It was clear after only a few moments that she was going to have no success.
With a defeated sigh, she finally placed her bookmark back where it belonged and snapped her book shut. She rested her cheek on her hoof, looking around idly. Other ponies who were trying to work either perfectly masked any semblance of annoyance or distraction, or didn’t experience any inconvenience in the first place. Zolt wondered what that must be like.
There then came an endless rotation of new, irritating sounds, all occurring one after the other. When the group of seven loud ponies mercifully took their orders to-go, a mare came in with her clamorous infantile foal who could not find it in himself to stop wailing. Then, when they left, a stand-up comedian decided to practice their routine right near Zolt’s table. When enough ponies had booed him off of his ‘stage’ and he had left in a huff, his clothes soaked with coffee and whipped cream, a feral baby elephant – assumably a zoo escapee – tried to order a drink through the rudimentary usage of its blaringly loud trumpeting. Somehow, Poinsettia seemed to understand the elephant perfectly well and took its order as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Zolt would have thought she was going mad had it not been for a stallion sitting at a table adjacent to hers who seemed to physically show the anger that Zolt managed to keep inside. While Zolt’s face only showed mild irritation, if that, this pony looked as though he were designed by the Gods for the sole purpose of being infuriated.
Although the first thing Zolt noticed about the stallion was that he seemed to share in her frustration at this inconceivable turn of events, the second thing she noticed was that he, too, was trying to read a book. It didn’t seem to be a textbook, either. If it was, it was an eccentric one. It was yellow, with black stripes of varying thicknesses on its spine, its back cover devoid entirely of words and instead depicting a silhouetted bust of a bird with stitch patterns surrounding it — as though they were vines. She couldn’t make out the words on the front cover, though she did try. A quick glance around told her that not only were other ponies surprisingly calm with the presence of the trumpeting elephant, but none of them had books. There were laptops, tablets, phones, even a phonograph! But no books.
Zolt narrowed her eyes at the book-toting stallion she had taken notice of. He was so noticeable that she was almost put off by the fact she hadn’t seen him sooner. There was something incredibly amusing about his demeanor, so much so that it almost distracted her from everything else going on. She watched as he flipped through pages of his book, clearly too angry to actually read or process any of it, only to slam his book down and glare daggers at the elephant, who took no notice of him. He was grumbling to himself. Zolt was hit with the mental image of him telling the elephant off, demanding that it either learn to speak quietly or leave the premises — it seemed, after all, that he might actually start a scene. Zolt couldn’t suppress a small giggle at this thought. Apparently, the elephant’s appreciative toot-toot’s and happy stomps as it left the shop weren’t enough to mask the sound of her small laugh. The angry stallion’s snout whipped to point at Zolt as he glared at her, finding an immediate new target for his rage. She immediately felt the urge to shrink back, or perhaps gallop for the hills. She did neither.
“Can I help you with something?” The stallion asked her, drawing the gaze of a few surrounding ponies who must have assumed that he might be talking to them. They quickly returned to their respective tasks once they saw that they were not being addressed. Zolt shrugged, trying to appear unfazed.
“I was just gigglin’.” It was such a matter-of-fact, straightforward response that it seemed to surprise the stranger somehow. He narrowed his eyes at her, suspicion cutting into his expression before the initial surprise could overstay its welcome.
“At what?”
Zolt considered. If she simply said, ‘you,’ that would probably be a bit rude, but it would be honest.
“There was a whole elephant ordering a drink, and the barista knew what it was saying and everything. She speaks elephant. That’s funny.” Zolt had opted for only a partial truth.
To the two ponies’ mutual chagrin, the pony who seemed to be repairing their broken phonograph had finally managed to do so and promptly became the next source of near-unbearable noise. The frazzled stallion looked as though he was going to break his coffee mug into pieces with how hard he was gripping it. He took a measured sip of black coffee, grimacing uncomfortably as he set the mug back onto the table.
Zolt, in a sporadic burst of confidence, grabbed her book, saddlebag, and coffee, and walked quietly to the free seat in front of the stallion. He looked like the kind of pony that didn’t have that many friends, and he was funny (albeit seemingly unintentionally), but most importantly of all, he read books. At the very least, she wanted to figure out what he was reading. She almost took the seat without even addressing the pony, but decided against it. She wouldn’t like it if a random stranger took a seat at her table without asking first. “Is this seat taken?” She asked, gesturing with her coffee-bearing wing, careful not to spill it in the process. She punctuated her question by taking a long sip of her drink.
The stallion glared at her for a long moment. His desaturated green eyes darted momentarily to her clothing. She wore a warm gray tuxedo, white button-up undershirt peeking out between its lapels. The outfit was accented with a bright red clip-on bowtie, whose strap was a different color from the “tie” itself: violet. The tuxedo, the stallion assumed, meant that this bizarre mare had some amount of money. Maybe a trust fund pony? The way her mane covered half of her face gave him the impression that she was either emo or alternative in some fashion. He tried to ignore the giant coffee her wing held onto (for fear of becoming nauseous), although he did take a quick mental note of the fact that she was able to grip things with her wings fairly well. As he understood it, a lot of pegasi hadn’t honed this particular skill much. Although she had been a bit of a smartass when addressing him before, now she carried a friendly presence that confused and stressed him greatly.
With a grunt, the stallion answered, “I suppose it isn’t.” He wasn’t sure what compelled him to allow the mare to sit in front of him, but she didn’t seem all that threatening – just a bit smartassy, as aforementioned.
Zolt clambered into the available seat, entirely lacking grace. She once again set her things down, although a lot more haphazardly than before. With her hooves gripping the bottom of her seat, she hopped her chair closer to the table, ignoring the affronted glare she received from the disheveled stallion she had decided to (attempt to) befriend. The stallion did not ask why she had felt compelled to hop as opposed to slide, so Zolt did not feel compelled to explain herself.
“I wanted to know what you’re reading,” Zolt had taken on the tone of a hiring manager interviewing a future prospect. Her attire likely didn’t help. Thankfully, the stallion didn’t seem to notice, or was too irritated to care.
“I was trying to read Imps Blinking Twice —” the stallion lifted his hoof, which had previously been concealing the cover, and title, of his book. It was only then that Zolt noticed that the stallion’s black tee had the word ‘JERK’ emblazoned on it, which immediately filled her with a sense of dread. She tried her best to ignore this and tune back into the words the stallion was saying — “but every infernal pony within a fifty-mile radius has apparently decided that this place is the perfect spot to host their hytetal get-togethers … urrrgh… and their gramophone repair sessions.” The stallion sent a pointed glare towards the phonograph-playing pony, his hooves pressed against his temples as he rested his head on them.
Zolt stared blankly at her new… acquaintance? “High-itl…” She tried to repeat the strange word that he had said, managing to pronounce it correctly, albeit awkwardly. “What’s that word mean?”
Her new friend seemed dispirited. “It’s like… rainfall, or rain-like. Greek, I think. Usually, purely meteorological. But these nincompoops are just annoying enough to justify slightly misusing a word. Annoying as the rain.”
Zolt snorted at the word ‘nincompoop’ — the stallion took a mental note that this mare was easy to amuse. Excitedly, Zolt grabbed her own book from the table and thrust it in the stallion’s direction, showing off the cover. The book was definitely an older one — it was obvious even without looking at the contents. Two bipedal figures sat on seats reminiscent of emeralds. One, made of metal, reached forward t0 clasp the other figure’s — made of straw and fabric — hand, all but crushing the appendage. The characters were incredibly recognizable, but the earth pony was not excited in the slightest to see them. The mare’s excited sputter of words were only barely registerable. “I was trying to read book two of the Oz series. Did you know there were books? For the longest time, I’d only known about the movies. But nowadays, I’m mad when other ponies don’t know about that.”
“I’m aware of them,” The stallion huffed, measuring his annoyance carefully, a task he was not used to at all.
“You are?” Zolt’s eyes gleamed. “Have you read any of them?”
Zolt received only a slow blink in return. She wasn’t sure how to interpret this response. She realized that she was still holding the book up to the stallion’s face and, embarrassed, placed it back onto the table, tapping on its cover awkwardly. Struck by a sudden thought, she undid her tuxedo’s button, opening it by the left hoof. The inside of her tuxedo was lined with a vast array of pockets. It was difficult to tell what was contained in a majority of them, but the first that caught the stallion’s eyes was a very wide pocket that held a small notebook. With a nonchalant sweep, Zolt scooped the notebook up with her right hoof. Hooked into the spiral was a mechanical pencil, which she swiftly grabbed. As she flipped through the first several pages of the small blue book, she asked, “How do you spell it?”
The stallion ran a hoof through his messy mane. “Spell what? Nincompoop?”
This drew another small laugh out of Zolt as she rolled her eyes. “No, I know how to spell that one. The funny rain word.”
“Hyetal?”
Zolt nodded.
“...It’s like if the word ‘hyena’ and the word ‘metal’ had a baby.”
Zolt knit her eyebrows together, eyes darting away as she thought. It wasn’t long before she made the connection and scribbled ‘hyetal’ onto her page.
“Thanks!”
“What’s that notepad for, anyway?”
“...It’s a little dumb…” Zolt cautioned, splaying her notebook out on the table and turning it so the stallion could see. One of the two visible pages was filled to the brim with seemingly random words and phrases. Ante meridiem/Post meridiem… Equestrianism… Paradigm… Bugula… Fugue state… Each page must have had the capacity for nearly one hundred words, and there were at least several pages filled in this notebook alone. “But one of my main hobbies is writing. I took a creative writing course in high school and our teacher had us keep a ‘writing diary’ filled with words and phrases we found and liked, so that we could use them later in our own work. I’m actually going to be taking a college course in creative writing this upcoming semester!” Zolt looked as though she might combust spontaneously from sheer excitement. “Needless to say, I’ve been extra attentive for good words to log in preparation.”
“I don’t think that’s dumb,” The stallion mumbled, flipping back a page to look at the words on the previous page. Zolt would have batted his hoof away and snatched her notebook back, muttering something about privacy, but her surprise stopped her in her tracks. It hadn’t necessarily been a compliment to say that the notebook wasn’t dumb, but it had been much closer to one than Zolt would have expected to receive from a pony like this. Especially when she’d only just met him. “It’s good to be prepared for when you need to use a good word.” The stallion glanced back up at Zolt as he spoke.
The stallion shut the notepad carefully, sliding it back over to Zolt’s side of the table. He took another begrudging drink of his coffee. “What kinds of things do you write?”
“Hmm. I think I’m capable of writing about lots of things, but I have a strong affinity for science fiction. I like creating and writing about different planets. But I have been wanting to experiment with other genres, too.”
“So, just creative fiction in general?”
Zolt exhaled harshly — the stallion couldn’t tell whether it was a scoff or a laugh.
“Fiction, yes, but I’m not so sure how creative it could actually be considered. I don’t find myself to be very good at that part. Most of my writing turns out sounding like ramblings of a madpony.”
“What are ramblings of madponies if not creative?” Realizing that the phonograph pony was no longer around and relative quiet had fallen over the shop, the stallion picked his book back up, flipping to the page number that he had memorized for his placement: 127.
“Heh. I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Err…” Zolt glanced back at the ‘JERK’ displayed on the earth pony’s shirt. “What’s your name, anyway?”
After a long moment of silence (Zolt assumed he was finding his place on the page), the stallion replied with a quiet, “Dan.” He offered his hoof to her, the book sagging on one side without his hoof to hold it up. He didn’t look at her this time.
“Dan?” Zolt repeated, shaking his hoof enthusiastically in greeting.
Dan nodded.
“What a strange name!” Zolt sounded endeared, but Dan was still irked by the wording. He glared at her pointedly.
“What’s your name then?”
Zolt immediately reddened with embarrassment. “Thunderzolt.”
Dan barked out a laugh. “Your parents misspelled the least difficult part of the word ‘thunderbolt’ and you’re going to bully me for having a weird name?”
“They didn’t misspell it!” Zolt insisted. “It was intentional!”
“Intentional idiocy is still idiocy,” Dan spoke in singsong, flipping with a sly grin to the next page of his book.
“I’m going to read my book now!” Zolt said with much more venom than the sentence called for. She shoved her notebook back into her tuxedo’s pocket and angrily threw her book open to the bookmark’s designated page.
After only a few moments of quiet, Zolt grumbled, “What’s Dan short for, anyway?” Dan managed to conceal a laugh at her whiny tone with a noticeably fake cough.
“Really fixated on my name, aren’t you?”
“I’m just curious. I told you my full name, not my nickname. Pony names aren’t usually so short. Is it short for ‘danger’ or something?”
Considering Dan’s appearance and overall vibe, it actually didn’t seem too out-of-the-question.
“Hah! Danger. I like that. You should call me that.” Dan maintained a smug grin even as he continued to read from his book.
Zolt’s cheeks puffed for a few moments, but she eventually released her breath in a loud, dramatic exhale. “As long as your name isn’t four letters.”
Dan’s expression morphed into complete confusion, before it connected. “You think I’m a demon?”
Zolt immediately went on the defensive. “Hey! It was fair for me to be worried. Your shirt says ‘JERK’ in all-caps! That’s, like, the exact format of a demon’s name.”
Dan looked down at his shirt, mildly surprised. “I … guess the concern is more fair than I previously thought. But I don’t have horns. I’m an earth pony. And my eyes are both the same color.”
Zolt desperately wanted to change the subject. “Right, right, right. I know. I should have known. Sorry.”
The shift in demeanor was jarring to Dan, but he thought it would probably be best to drop the subject. Maybe she had experience meeting demons in the past and was just extra cautionary about it. That, Dan could understand.
The conversation eventually melted into the two ponies silently reading together, occasionally drinking from their coffees. Dan remained relatively still the entire time whereas Zolt shifted her position often, and in ways that were both immensely amusing and distracting. At one point, she was so twisted around that she was sitting (practically laying) backwards on her chair, leaning back against the table, holding her book up over her face as she read. At times, Dan couldn’t tell whether she was doing it on purpose to be funny. He decided to play it safe by stifling any laughter that threatened to emerge.
After some time, Zolt caught a glimpse of Dan finally finishing his black coffee. She wrinkled her nose with distaste. “I still can’t believe there are ponies alive on Tyran who can enjoy coffee black.”
“Oh, I don’t enjoy it,” Dan’s eyes widened at the suggestion, “it’s fucking disgusting.”
Zolt raised an eyebrow. “What? Then… why not order coffee with sugar and flavoring in it? It can still wake you up,” Zolt lifted up her half-empty caramel frappé and swirled it in a circle to stir it before drinking.
“Too poisonous,” said Dan nonchalantly. Zolt gawked. “I’m lactose intolerant.”
“Oh!” Recognition flashed in Zolt’s expression. “Like, super bad?”
“Almost as bad as it could get,”
“IT KILLS YOU?!”
Dan couldn’t hold back an amused grin. “I said almost as bad as it could get.”
“It almost kills you?” Zolt’s surprise was a lot more feigned now; joking.
“Feels like it, sometimes.”
Zolt grimaced at the idea. “I would die if I ever developed lactose intolerance. I love dairy…”
“S’not so bad. There’s some excellent alternatives out there.”
Zolt hummed. Then she realized: “Wait, but The Caffeinated Sea has sweetened, dairy-free coffee alternatives. Why didn’t you just order one of those?”
Dan stared at Zolt as though his soul had just left his body.
“They what?”
Zolt twisted her body to look towards the barista’s station. “Right…” She scratched her mane gently. “The menu isn’t on display right now. They’d have it on their website, but—”
“I looked at the menu on the website!”
“---Yeah. It’s a bit hidden that they have dietary accommodations. Is it your first time here?” After Dan nodded, Zolt continued, “Yeahh… I’m sorry about that. But now you know for next time! They have tons of dietary accommodations, you can pretty much ask for whatever and they’d probably do it.” Zolt offered Dan a polite, sheepish grin.
Dan groaned, rubbing his face with disdain. He glanced at his current page number — 162 — and closed his book. “Just my luck that I show up on the one day their menu isn’t on display. Why isn’t it?”
“They’re in between store themes right now, and usually the menus rotate out, too. I guess they just have customers rely on the online menu — or asking at the counter — when they’re rotating out.”
Dan, only somewhat listening, took a beat-up cell phone out of a shirt pocket that Zolt had no clue was there. Glancing at the time displayed on its screen, he groaned. “Urgh. I guess I should get going. I have classes in about an hour and it takes me forty-five minutes to get there…”
Zolt was surprised. She didn’t expect a pony like Dan to be at all punctual. “Oh, you take classes? At MSU?”
Dan nodded. “It’s my Screenwriting class first, then Print Media. Unfortunately, I like the classes, so I want to be awake for it —” he gestured towards his empty coffee mug — “and on time.”
Zolt bounced excitedly in her seat. “What degree are you working towards? Journalism?”
“English. Film Studies, specifically.” Dan kept his expression neutral despite noticing how obviously giddy Zolt was at hearing the news.
Okay, so it wasn’t the exact major that Zolt was working towards, but it was the same branch! Dan was the first pony that Zolt had ever met outside of classes that seemed in any way enthusiastic about English, or English courses, or was even working towards a degree for it at all!
Dan stared at Zolt — practically through her. She, with a shaky hoof, retrieved her notebook once again, this time flipping to a blank page. For a split moment, Dan thought that she was going to start interviewing him and asking him a deluge of questions about what his favorite parts of the English language were. Instead, she started scribbling something nondescript down, using her free hoof to hide what she was scribbling from Dan. He glared.
“Well, you should go if you want to make it on time… But if you want to be friends, or something, maybe, then this is my phone number.” Zolt slid the sheet of paper halfway to Dan before stopping, apparently thinking of something important to clarify: “This is just as friends, by the way. Some ponies are really-super-weird about stuff like that. I have a boyfriend. And even if I didn’t, you’re not…” Realizing that what she was about to say would surely come across as incredibly rude, she cleared her throat and adjusted her angle: “I’m demiromantic, so I wouldn’t be giving out a phone number like that, ever, anyway. By the time I ever like anypony enough to date them, they’ve already had my number for, like, a million and a half months.” She finally handed the paper to Dan. The number 714-9782-2733-01777 was scrawled mostly-legibly on the top of the paper, a rushed, doodly self-portrait of Zolt scribbled directly beneath it. A small huff of a laugh left him.
Dan decided to avoid acknowledging Zolt’s trainwreck of words with anything other than a grunt and a nod, although he did feel compelled to ask, “Why did you write down your number when you could have just had me input it into my phone?”
Zolt, who clearly felt incredibly awkward, was staring at the cover of The Marvelous Land of Oz as though she had never seen it before, picking apart every small detail she could find. After a long moment to process his question, she answered, “There’s a bajillion numbers, which is annoying, and you could hear me say something wrong. Or yell at me for saying numbers too fast. Or slow. Plus, you just said you have to leave!”
Dan debated on whether to inform her that it probably took up much more of his time for her to prattle on about being in a relationship and not wanting him to mishear her words, but ultimately decided against it. “Alright,” he relented, promptly setting Zolt’s pencil down on the table and tearing the sheet of paper near-cleanly in half. He saw Zolt’s horrified expression in the corner of his eye and tried not to smirk. He made a point to slide one of the shredded pieces of paper in Zolt’s direction before grabbing his book and mug. “Ciao,” he said coolly, before his snout wrinkled with distaste. “That was gross. I’m never saying that again. Da svidanya. No. Euhh… Salut?” seemingly satisfied, he left, grimacing with distaste at the ka-dunk of the tin cans.
Zolt, crushed at Dan’s maiming of her phone number, glanced down at the shred of paper that he had left her. She almost screamed when she saw it. Dan had, apparently, written on the blank half of the page while she had been staring at Oz’ book cover. 724-2947-3821-07222 — succeeded by a scribbly facsimile of Dan himself, angrily frowning at her.
