Strange Aeons [Book 1]

5.That Went Fairy Well

Eight o'clock was a cruel time. The only one of the three who looked remotely rested, or that at least didn't look different from usual, was Vopros.

They knocked at the door and waited. As the permission to enter was given from the inside, from quite a grumpy voice indeed, they entered. The door shut behind them.

And disappeared.

That was not Garaham's office.

They were in a strange place. It was a very large room, quite larger than one would have expected from what it looked like: a garage. They didn't even need to use their magical sight to feel that the place had been enlarged with magic, and that, surely, from the outside it would have been much smaller than what it was.

All around them there were grey walls ten feet tall. It wouldn't have been less than a hundred square yards, it was incredibly vast. On one side of the room there were three mops, two buckets, some bottles of floor wash, rubber gloves and a scrub. Over them, a sticky note.

Clean everything by noon.

G.

«What the fuck?» exclaimed Banshee, watching all around her.

«Mira, there's something written on the other side of the sticky note.» pointed out Chico.

Break anything and heads will roll.

Literally.

They picked up the cleaning material and looked around, with a sigh.

«A garage. He's making us clean his garage.» Banshee grumbled.

«Oh, well, it's better than the Order's parking lot no?» Chico tried to find the silver lining.

«Have you seen floor? There are three inches of grease and who knows what.» Vopros pointed out.

«I can bet there are alien civilizations that had melt with the spiders here and would be more than happy to attack us. Man, he must haven't touched this place in ages.» Banshee looked under a shelf and immediately straightened her back, her curiosity suddenly dulled.

Tue quite large room was literally filled with office shelves, every shelf covered in dusty brown file boxes, transparent boxes with sheets and objects, . It truly seemed no-one had come to clean in a while.

Boxes of things, rather than just files, were orderly stacked against the walls. In the center of the room lay a series of what seemed covered furniture, and from two shelves peeked anonymous volumes and books.

«It will take us ages, forget noon. The scrubbing of the floor alone would take days with just this!» Chico scoffed at the cleaning material.

«We use magic, we botch something, Chief kills us.» Vopros summarized, as heavy as stone. The three exchanged a defied glance and then, sighing, each one of them took a side of the room, and started working.

Chico decided that the floor was his enemy. He half-emptied a bottle of floor cleaning liquid directly on the dirt material made of dead insects, dust and dampness, and started moving his mop with energy. Vopros, absent-mindedly, had taken up a duster and was dusting with energy, dust that fell inevitably on Chico's attempt at purifying the unholy mess on the floor, and sparking up a violent discussion between the two men.

Banshee walked, barely daring to touch anything. Many boxes were transparent plastic, there, and she could peek at their insides. Some of them looked like clothing, others were miscellaneous objects. She was quite sure one, piled up under many, had some kind of trophy in it. The furniture in the center revealed themselves to be an old bike and cheap furnishings that could come from a college bedroom. She browsed the shelves, through kid books and old law college tomes, to find something that made her eyes shine.