Soldiers [Detective Conan] [Crow series 1/2]

so tell your mother

29 July , 2010
New  York City, N.Y., USA

Jen's civilian phone buzzes loudly, startling her awake.

Groggily she tries to slap at the remains of her dream (something wading through a moat filled with eyeballs to get to the Brussels Palais while the most beautiful people in the world watch with delight), but instead she just hits her glasses next to her on the carpeted floor and it hurts her stiff and sore fingers.

Floor? Where am I? What-!

Jen hastily slams her glasses on and looks around, ready to tackle and run-

All she finds around her is the familiar server room of the Wall Street IT office she works at. Beside her is a stack of post-it notes, a printout of a spreadsheet, and both of her phones. Her eyes feel dry and crusty, her throat is totally parched, and a growing headache is mounting at her temples.

The memories trickle back gradually: the emails, the redistribution, the office clean-up, the conversations with Lou and San.

She must have fallen asleep while writing up instructions for the server stacks. She has no idea how it happened because the floor is everything but comfortable; and now that she's awake the stinging pain of her injured knuckle is very hard to ignore.

First full day at age thirty. Shaping up to quite the fucking decade.

Jen stretches and accidentally plops out her headphones (which she hadn't even noticed were still in her ears), but she's too busy wincing at the soreness under her bra. She must've slept on it funny because the underwiring has dug into her skin, leaving her to awkwardly readjust herself.

At least there's no-one else in the server room, which raises the question...

Jen glances at her watch. It's half past six, though she can only guess whether it's the evening or morning.

Probably still evening. Otherwise Sangria and Kahlua would've come and woken me up. And I'd have wasted over twelve hours that I could've used packing...

Though, regardless of where she's going, packing for her personal move should be fairly easy. All her winter stuff is already put away for summer; stacked in suitcases above her closet. There should also still be moving boxes in the basement, so books and art prints and beloved pieces of crockery are ready. The glow-in-the-dark stars in the bathroom are gonna be a pain to peel off. Her PC, furniture, and motorcycle will have to be heavy freight.

With a pang, Jen remembers the Eileen the Crow cosplay she's been working on. It'll be far too warm for that in Ghana, with that heavy black fabric and the many feathers... but she's put too much work and money into it to scrap it now.

Would it be too petty to volunteer to go to Japan just because of this?

Jen giggles weakly to herself. What a stupid idea.

She clicks her neck and puts her headphones back in (it's still the Nine Inch Nails Ghosts album she left it on, it must've looped around), with the intention of going back to the post-it notes. But it turns out that most of them are actually already filled in, maybe with ever-worse handwriting but (as she flicks through them) definitely with the competence Jen expects from herself.

That's a relief. She wasn't looking forward to her back being even sorer.

She gathers her stuff and gets up, and starts striding down the narrow corridors created by the server stacks and sticking colourful post-its on corresponding hardware.

Japan wouldn't be a good choice when it comes to Jen's personal connections.

Honestly, none of them would be – but Ghana might be the best of an unideal bunch. It might not be in the MENA region, but Jen learned enough history from Shiraz to understand the geopolitical position Ghana (through Kwame Nkrumah) occupied. As such, she's fairly sure that her relative familiarity with Cold War veterans like Pinot or Mahia or Italicus will carry significant weight even where Arabs like Shiraz or Zinfandel might be less known.