Planet B

Moonie's Bar & A Pickle Jar

(hey there vote if u like please and thank you. enjoy. eat some good snacks. I like goldfish.)

Moonie's was a pure black monstrosity of urban life, unblemished glass, and blaring blue light that could've been confused for a metropolitan space bar rather than a regular Friday night establishment. It screamed expensive on every corner, from the gaping double doored entrance, to the bold white letters spelling out its name, to the people covered in silver waltzing in or out throughout the night. Upper west, locally prestigious, and packed with nothing but pricey trouble.

A fun time, really. Or at least it looked like it in the pictures on my G search.

You walked past Heart Hands making sure the intoxicated didn't get behind a set of wheels, or go home with any of the wrong people, although let me tell you, people sure tried. From the outside, it was cryptic and unaware and mysteriously unconscious.

Inside was different.

New models of every tech imaginable spread itself out in display on black marble counters, glass tables, high hovering shelves, sprawled out couches. Open windows were threaded with micro-speakers, walls were embedded with heat-sensitive thermostats, wires wrapped itself around pillars, flashing in time with movement, like starlights. Hanging from the ceiling were moon spheres, blooming with azure light, and painted the cushions of seats or sheer tabletops with something purpled and otherworldly. Beneath the heavy bass of the music, it almost was.

Everyone everywhere wore skin-tight dresses and heels dipped in jewels, golden belts and pressed pants with brand-studded shirts that were left half unbuttoned. Hair fell in curls or ironed straight strands, others curled atop heads or fell in front of drunken eyes. Diamonds dripped from ears and necks and wrists and ankles like stars inside a distorted night sky.

It was strangely beautiful, or pathetic. Depending on how you looked at it.

A single blue train ride away from Moneda. Less than thirty miles between them, and if I didn't know any better, I would think I had disappeared to another planet entirely. The scene made me remember the scholarship in my pocket and the address I had to go back to. It wasn't shame as much as it was curiosity, that so many different worlds could exist so close next to each other, and how oblivious they could all be of the one next to it.

The age old trope of rich versus poor had died out slowly as power drifted from the people to the government with time and it was more so the citizens against the officials, but it also made social classes spread further and further apart. Money was more and more of a factor for the growing gaps between the high and low class, the middle a shrinking island between the gaps of green sea.

In places like university, the grocery store, on the streets, it greeted me with a few stray threads and shiny reminders. But here, here it nearly blinded me entirely. 

I stuffed my hands in my pockets. G shuffled closer to me. She was at APU on scholarship, too. Her family lived even farther down than mine did, despite having once lived so further up. Her only nice clothes were hand-me-down dresses and blouses from AZ.

We were quite out of place surrounded by the aristocrats of the late 24th century; me in washed out jeans and a half-stylish button up covered by a two-sizes-too-big jean jacket, and G in her white pants and faded blouse she got from her cousin last summer.

Very high end, we were. Only the best of the bargain bin for us.

That was a joke. Kind of.

"Briar! Hey! Over here!"

We spun to see a glass table in the far corner surrounded by a white tufted couch, circular pillows propped up on either side. Drinks were already scattered across the table in an array of colors that looked colder under the blue light of the moon lamp above.