Homeless (a Hetalia Fanfic, Book Three)

Chapter 3~!

The Chinese landscape flew by far, far below my feet. I couldn't help but watch it go from my seat at the window. It was... beautiful.

Okay, if I can make one thing clear here, it would be that I wasn't calling China the person beautiful. Sure, he's handsome; all of the nations are in their own way. But physical landscapes are just something else. They're... majestic. And foreign landscapes hold a sort of mystery as well that intrigued and captivated me. This had to be the best perk of being forced to travel the world constantly.

The plane landed in an airport in Beijing, and from there I took many different methods of traveling to get as far into the rural countryside as possible. Hey, I even asked a farmer if he would let me sit on the back of his cart for a few kilometers. He accepted when I gave him a little bribe.

My Mandarin felt strange on my tongue thanks to my lack of practice, but after a few hours in China my skill and good Chinese accent were coming back to me. It wouldn't take me long to blend in somewhere. I just needed to find a place to stay where I could be totally alone.

I'd turned a dial on my suitcase earlier, making it shift into a lighter and more manageable knapsack. Don't worry, all my stuff was still comfortably residing inside of it. The good thing was that no one could tell from the outside that it was full of objects: my huge stash of cash, for example, and my pictures of my family.

"Hopefully there will be some sort of shack I can hole up in for a couple of weeks," I said to myself in English as I swayed a little on the back of the nice man's empty cart. He seemed like a vegetable grower to me, especially since there were little bits of old veggies stuck to the uneven boards of the cart's floor. I was grateful that he didn't ask me any questions as he drove on, urging his ox to keep going every now and then.

After about an hour and a half, we stopped in a village and he told me he wasn't going any farther. I asked him if there was a place where I could rent for a short period of time, and he directed me to a pleasant-sounding woman at the far edge of the village's limits. I thanked him and started off toward the place, following the directions I'd been given.

To make a long-winded story short, I bartered with the keeper of the small house she was renting out to travelers and managed to get a better deal than what she initially offered me. It was a short distance from her own house, and the two were connected by a narrow dirt path. She led me down it and showed me the small house's quarters, including the gas-powered stove and rather unreliable electricity. I thanked her for letting me rent the shack and paid her half of my rent up front. When she was gone, I set my bag down and pulled out some clean sheets that had been hidden in the deep recesses of the magical bag. Alright, so I didn't have to live --or sleep-- in squalor if I didn't want to. I didn't exactly trust the bedding that had been provided, not that I doubted my new landlady. These sheets would just help me sleep better at night, quite literally.

With that taken care of, I began to explore my options around the house. It looked as though I didn't have any running water, but that wasn't something new to me. I'd just ask Changying, the landlady, for some buckets and directions to the nearest well.

I tried the light switch, and it actually worked! The sight made me beam, but I shut the light off quickly to conserve energy. Maybe I wouldn't have too many problems with it in these next few weeks.

"Hmmm... Looks like no microwaveable meals for a while," I said thoughtfully. "Maybe the local marketplace will be a good place to buy food." I continued to talk to myself as I moved through the house and toward the bathroom. "Yeah, I could use some actual meals for once. They're healthier, after all."

~

The next day, I rose early and got out a hot plate that ran on solar energy stored up in the power cells. I used it to boil some water, and then mixed in coffee powder to make commoner's coffee. I sipped the makeshift brew slowly, trying to get myself to wake up. With the day I had ahead of me, I would need all the energy I could muster.