Supernatural Taxes

21) Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the baldest of them all?

The Green Machine politely decided to break down a few minutes after the stream concluded, so they made one more pit stop not far from Eindhoven.

Atla called the company that should have been transporting their made-in-china tie dyed shirts but got no answer. The shady machine translated website didn't even give a branch address but Atla finally found it with the magic of Noodle Maps.

Atla climbed back into the passenger side, even if the streets were pretty deserted Atla wanted to leave town driving to Nora.

In the CityLink building was a single receptionist who pointed to a sign saying 'busy please come back later on their desk' without even looking up from her phone. Atla and Nora approached anyway and managed to have a one sided conversation in which the receptionist could only shake her head. Eventually they got the forms sorted and collected their parcel from the warehouse which took up most of the building.

Atla could tell that the receptionist wanted to ask how they could talk, but didn't know how to do even that.

Time to start advertising. "We'll be running a little workshop stall on how to get around this curse over at Amsterdam University, tell, or maybe mime to your friends and family about it, it starts tomorrow."

Atla said that very confidently, now she had to deliver and get the university's permission, she wondered whether Thanos wasn't getting ahead of himself, telling her to start advertising already.

Nora drove on the way back while Atla tested and practiced with the merchandise and repeated her pitch like a broken record. Thanos already knew it by heart and was acting like her key cards.

Now Atla was getting quizzed by Thanos to remember the fancy colour names of her tie dyed shirt. They'd researched the colours and used dyes with fancy colour names to make the shirts giving them huge arsenal of colour names that the end of their sentences could rhyme with: Emerald Isle, Cardamom, Incarnadine, Pearly, Sky, Azure, the list went on.

These alternate names would also be taken into account along with the plain, blue and green but they'd only count if the wearer knew all those fancy names. In other words Atla had to know and believe that one of the cream colours on her hippy shirts was called vanilla shake if she wanted to rhyme with it.

As long a the wearer took the time to learn every colour on this undershirt the majority of their sentences would rhyme by accident but Atla and Nora's solution was more fool proof than that.

The infographic that they made served as a cheat sheet for all the colours and gave a list of generic phrases that could be logically pasted onto the end of most sentences.

This morning they'd proven their theory that by following a dozen or so sentence endings like, "Dude, bro, am I right, cool, aye," that they could circumvent the curse. Now it was just a matter of getting proficient enough in her solution that she could make it look convenient and marketable.

Atla called the university on their next pit stop. The receptionist picked up, nothing was said though. "Hello, this is Atalanta Fae, a student at AU, I have a few questions if that's fine, please could you cough once for yes and twice for no?"

"Sound a bit more confident Atla, you want a meeting with their boss, you've got to be at least a little arrogant." Thanos spoke like they were trying to set a meetup with the Yakuza.

"Cough."

"Okay, is the dean in, I need to see him."

"Cough."

"Could you arrange a meeting?"

"Cough cough."

"Even if I say that I can teach the staff how to get around this curse free of charge?"