Visiting Vegas
Author: Spewilicious
Disclaimer: I dun own it/them. I just want to.
A/N: Guess why I wrote this! Because I was bored and I actually live in Nevada! And all my friends are real, believe it or not. Man, this is so much fun to write. I hope you all enjoy it! More soon!
It was your average is-it-over-yet kinda day. A few of my friends and I were being bored to death at the ticket counter. I mean, really, how hard is it to buy a ticket? Not that hard. Really. The guy in front of us over-complicating the issue and I'd had just about enough.
"Excuse me, sir, but can I help you?" I asked nicely. He glared. So I glared back and said, "Let me simplify this for you. Give the nice lady your money. She'll give you a ticket in return. See, watch." I took his money and handed it to the lady. She gave me a relieved smile and a ticket. I handed it to the guy. "There you go. Have a nice flight." The guy stomped off, grumbling. I almost laughed.
"How may I help you?" The lady asked me.
"Oh, uh. Yeah, we want some tickets, too." I could just see Melissa rolling her eyes at my brilliant statement of the obvious. "Yeah, tickets to Las Vegas, please."
"When would you like to leave?"
"As soon as possible." We all had decided that we needed a vacation. But we couldn't afford to go anywhere far away, so Vegas it was. The lady was typing like mad on her keyboard and we were all waiting patiently. Kind of. Josh was calling his mom. Daniel and Sarah were talking about love monkeys…. or gorillas… or something. I really didn't want to know. Christie was about to grind her teeth. Nikki was checking out the girls and randomly muttering "She's hot." Oh, goodness it was funny. I tried to stare straight ahead and not even smile but it was so hard! I always smile and everything was so funny right now.
"Okay, I have a flight that has room for all ten of you. You are all together, right?" I nodded and she continued. "It departs at 10:30 a.m. on March 17th."
My jaw dropped. "What? That's, like, a month away. Our vacation is NOW, our reservations are NOW, for a month or so. We'd probably be coming back around March 17th. Holy cow." I shook my head. This was going to cost a lot of gas.
"Ethiopian beef!" Melissa muttered and stared waving her hand up and down. Emily, Aubree and Josh started laughing. I spun.
"Guys, that was an accident. I didn't mean to hit the roof! Geez." I turned back to the lady. "Look, sorry about this, but I guess we won't be buying tickets. Thanks anyway." The lady nodded nicely, clearly trying to figure out if my rescuing her from that guy had been worth the trouble of putting up with us. We lost. Oh, well.
We held a quick pow-wow in the McDonald's/Burger King/Dairy Queen right smack dab in the middle of the ticket counters.
"Okay, we can either go back and take our vacation a month from now, or…." I shuddered at the thought of gas prices. "We can drive."
A small explosion erupted right in front of me.
"No way!"
"We can't NOT go now!"
"I'll drive!" This last came from Kelly.
"NO!" we all shouted at the same time. Kelly was notoriously not good at things like driving or holding on to rings. But we loved her anyway. We just didn't let her drive… or hold on to rings…
Three hours later we had rented the biggest van we could find. We ended up with one that was big. Really big. Kinda like the MAV's around town. Except our's was red. Ooohhhh, yeah. One big red hunk of van. And I was driving it. I might get labeled as a control freak sometimes, but mostly it's just because I don't trust people to do what they're supposed to do. That's why I always hated working in groups at school… So here we were at a gas station. I was filling 'er up and trying to think up a good name for the behemoth. Everyone else was inside the mini-mart, stocking up on junk food, the staple of our lives. Silly them, didn't they realize we were going home for the night? The pump chinked at me, so I squeezed a bit more gas out of it. Yep, if I'm not broke by the time we get to Vegas, I'm NOT paying for gas on the way back.
Soon, everyone was trooping back and squishing into our ride. It really was only meant for nine really small people, but heck, what's one more big one in the grand scheme of things? We left the station and were on the highway headed to our little town.
"Hey, I've been thinking." I heard Christie, my co-pilot, give a murmured "Uh-oh" so I slugged her on the arm. "We need a name for this thing. I was thinking George. Or maybe Hubert."
"Mel, we are NOT calling it George. You name everything George. Your cactus, that nonexistent monkey we always talk about." Nikki said in an annoyed voice. "My shoe."
Emily raised an eyebrow "Her shoe?" Kelly snorted.
"What, you think Betsy fits it better?" I tried to sound insulted. It came out as amused. Shucks. "Well, come on. Have you got anything better? I mean, it can't be the Ratmobile with out the dead rat, so help me out here."
The rest of the hour long drive was spent in friendly argument over what name fit the kidney-like van best. Just as we were about to hit my dirt track of a road, Daniel had a light bulb of an idea.
"What about Mervyn Bjork?"
I almost crashed. "DANIEL? How did you know that?"
After everyone recovered from the narrow escape from the ditch, he answered. "How did I know what?"
"Bjork makes me laugh!" I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. "No, really, I was filing a jacket at work and that was the last name on it! I about fell over and I had to go tell Raelynn how funny it was!"
So we voted and Mervyn Bjork our van became. Mervy for short, though I insisted on Bjork.
I had set three alarms to go off within five minutes of each other... at four in the morning. I, for once in my life, didn't need them.
"Up!" I hollered as I bound downstairs. "Upupupupupupup! It's morning and it's time to GO! Come on!" I started to pull at blankets and pillows and feet until everyone was up. I went for Kelly first because she always got up good. She helped me pull feet. Then we started our conveyor belt rotating system. Showers and clothes and breakfast were all eventually passed around and we were ready to go! I was SO excited. I hadn't been to Vegas since I was a kid… Crazy. We were all packed into the car by five fifty. I'm still not sure how we fit all of our luggage in, but hey, it was there and we were there and the doors were closed and it was good. Even if I couldn't see out the back… Seven minutes later we were waiting for the light to turn green so we could turn left at the court house and barrel on to Las Vegas. And then we were turning left at the court house and barreling on to Las Vegas. Yay!
Aubree, Kelly and Melissa instantly decided that we were in need of a live radio and began to serenade us with "On the Road Again." While I personally like this song under normal circumstances, these were NOT normal circumstances and they were butchering the poor song. So I cranked up the radio. Josh pulled out a book. Daniel and Sarah were drawing on each other. Everything seemed to be settling down. The three singers were discouraged and cancelled the concert. I turned the volume down enough for normal conversation. Christie and I quickly started talking about one of our favorite subjects. CSI!
"So, have you watched the new episode yet?" I asked. I had seen it, but she hadn't yet, so I didn't want to give anything away.
She threw me a look. "Oh, yeah. You were right. It was disturbing. And that scene with Grissom and Nick in the baby store!"
"Oh my gosh, wasn't that just hilarious? Poor Nick!" We started laughing at the memory. Kelly leaned forward and asked what was so funny.
"A CSI episode." She looked interested, so I continued. "See, this hugely important (though jerky in an evilly mean sort of way) was found dead on his front steps, so the CSI's are called out and…." We spent the next three hours going over the episode in detail and the show in general. Kelly decided that someday she'd make a crime scene just for fun. We'd reached Tonopah, so we stopped to stretch our legs. It was dull. But then Tonopah had never seemed very exciting to me. A short time later we were back on the road and discussing Area 51.
"No, seriously, it's real! It's there! Why else would those scary guys walk around with machine guns and permission to shoot people with out warning?" I said.
"Melanie." Melissa said, using that no nonsense, I-can't-believe-you-just-said-that-stop-being-dumb tone of voice. "I can't believe you just said that."
"Hey, I didn't say what it's there for, but it IS there." And I refused to partake in any further discussion of the topic. That led to a pretty boring three hours. We paused in Indian Springs for not even five minutes. We were so close! Just one more hour and we'd be there!
One hour later, I was trying to find out how to get into the parking lot at New York, New York. Not as easy as one might think… But I managed. After half an hour of trying. But it wasn't as bad as Disneyland. A short bell hop guy came to get our luggage while the valet eyed our Bjork with a wary eye. I almost laughed. The bell hop guy was having problems with our luggage, so he called three more bell hop guys over to him to help. After prying our stuff loose, they loaded up two of those cool cart things and stood by to whisk them away. We went in to get our suite. After standing in line for, oh, no longer than an hour, we were given ten keys and a number. We bounded for the elevators with big silly grins, all our road weariness falling from us at the prospect of our own suite in Las Vegas for a month!
Finally getting an elevator, we went up in an excited fervor, almost exploding out at our floor. We ran up and down the halls looking for our door.
"Here it is!" Sarah called out. We dashed over and she unlocked the door.
"How cool is this…." I whispered. Then the door was open and we exploded in.
"Wow!"
"Check this out!"
"Look, here's the next room!"
"My word, our own living room thing!"
"Our bath tub is a swimming pool!"
"Ha, guys get this room!"
I unceremoniously ran to one of the girl rooms and tossed open the curtains. "Check out that view!" I grabbed the latch and pushed the window out as far as it would go… About four inches. Gotta keep those suicide jumpers in and all. "Man, this is just SO cool!"
We rendezvoused in the living room thing and set up our plan of attack for the day: Wander around the Strip and get a basic grasp on things. And maybe take a spin or two on the New York, New York coaster. And begin on the zillion rolls of pictures we'd be taking.
"Sounds good! Let's go!"
We all trooped into the hall, into the elevator, out of the lobby, and into the sunshine. February in Vegas…. SO much nicer than home. Amazing how much of a difference three hundred some odd miles made. Looking around and drinking deeply of the migrating populace, I noticed that our group was getting odd stares. So I looked around at us. Okay, so we weren't your average group.
I mean, we had Kelly and Aubree looking cute and young, hair curled, make-up perfect, giggling for no apparent reason; Daniel looking too tall, but comfy in his loose pants and flaming shirt; Sarah looking too short in her black jeans and red shirt; Josh looking absolutely un-Spanish, unruffled, and tan in khaki's and a plaid shirt; Melissa looking innocent in jeans and that cool shirt that goes so well with her Korean complexion; Nikki looking half goth in her black shoes, red and black striped stockings, black skirt, black shirt, black hair dye, black eye liner, and checking out all the girls in the near vicinity; Emily looking totally relaxed in her red Chucks, jeans, red t-shirt, and red hair dye; Christie looking ready to cut something (or someone) open in her combat boots, jeans, and a fanged Happy Bunny t-shirt that said "Cute but kinda scary"; and me, looking… fun? happy? colorful, at least, in my green Chucks, jeans, red belt, rainbow striped t-shirt, cat eye glasses, and with a yellow ribbon in my hair…. So not exactly a normal group, but does that matter in Las Vegas? Heck no! We were ready to have some fun!
We set out in search of what we wanted to do.
"Oh, let's do that some time!"
"We should go there!"
"I heard about this thing…"
And so it went for three hours. Then we went back to our suite to get ready for dinner. We had reservations for this big ol' fancy place to celebrate our first night there, and it required nice clothes and ties and combed hair. So we took turns with the three showers and the six mirrors, getting gorgeous (or handsome). It was loads of fun because I made Christie do something with her hair. And we made her wear make up. Heh heh. I skipped over my pretty colored outfits for my super cute black one: A cute black skirt with a bow, a low v-neck black-and-gray striped shirt and cute heels with buckles over the toes. Of course I couldn't be completely with out color so I used a green ribbon in my hair. All the other girls were in varying shades of black, gray ,or dark shades of blue or purple. We looked awesome. The guys had spiffy dark suits and fun ties and looked super shnazzy.
We took the bus. That was loads of fun! I think most of the other riders were confused by our presence and it made me laugh. Twenty minutes later we disembarked a block from the restaurant and strolled up the sidewalk, chatting like mad. You'd think we'd get tired of talking…. Naw!
The Host knew our party immediately; it was the largest of the night. We were, of course, placed right in the middle of the dining hall. Forty-five minutes after ordering, our food arrived and we tried our best not to fall on it like ravening beasts. At least, that's how I felt. It was a fun evening. We made more plans, dreamed of what it would be like to live like this always… Very relaxing. When dessert was served (chocolate cake for me!), we began toasting… The food, us, the trip, us, life, us… It was loads of fun. We got pretty creative for a while and would bust up laughing after each new random toast. I'm sure the Host was more than ready for us to leave. We did finally leave and we gave a huge tip to thank them for putting up with us.
We walked back towards our hotel, mingling anonymously with the crowds and the lights of the Strip. Then… I heard music. Good dance music. A club! Yes! I immediately made every one come with me. Nothing could make this night any better than a few hours of dancing!
The club was crowded, hot, and loud. I loved it! Most of my fellows headed straight for tables placed around the dance floor, but me? I was out there with the music. You didn't really need someone to dance with; it was so crowded every one was pretty much dancing with everyone. After a few songs I finally pulled Daniel out on to the floor. If anyone I've ever met can dance, it's Daniel. After getting him to loosen up a bit, he was the hit of the night. After that, he was dubbed Dance Man Daniel. At about two we finally left, this time to go all the way back to the hotel.
We were piling out of the elevator three floors below our own because we wanted to use the stairs, give them some exercise, when we heard an odd noise. We looked all around and suddenly this chick comes tearing out of the room five doors down from us. She screamed when she saw us and turned and ran to the far end and the stairs there.
"O-kay… Any one else confused?" Melissa asked. We nodded. Then Christie grabbed my arm.
"Mel, it's just like a CSI episode! We've stumbled onto a crime scene! Don't touch anything!"
"I think she was drunk, chick." I replied.
"No! She's running from a crime! Let's go see!" She began to pull me toward the open door. Looking back at everyone, I shrugged. They shrugged back.
The two of us crept up to the door, and Christie nudged it farther open with her shoe. The sight that met us made me gasp. I grabbed Christie's arm. There was someone half on the bed and half off with blood by his head.
"Oh my gosh, Christie. It IS just like CSI. Only now we're suspects because we were first on the scene! What if they arrest us? This is supposed to be our vacation!" She just stared at me. "Maybe we should call the police." I dug out my cell phone and called 911. A lady answered. I thrust the phone at Christie.
"Wha? Talk to her!" she hissed at me.
"I don't know what to say!" I whispered back.
Sighing, she took the phone and spoke. "I'd like to report some kind of accident…. No I don't know what it is exactly…… Well, we're in the ninth floor hallway of New York, New York, outside room number, um, lemme look… 912. There's someone inside hanging off the bed with blood by his head…… No, I don't know if he's dead! I'm not gonna go tromping across a crime scene! Do you think I never watch CSI?... Ok, we'll be in the hallway." She pushed end and handed my phone back to me. "We get to be interviewed."
"Oh, gosh, you've always wanted to be interviewed!" We began to walk back towards our friends.
Reaching them, we were bombarded with questions.
"What is it?"
"What's going on?"
So we spent the next fifteen minutes telling them what we saw and what was said on the phone. Then the police and paramedics showed up. Man, talk about scary! They were all official and uniformed and… scary.
Two minutes later one called out, "He's still alive! Get a stretcher in here!" Then they carried him out and it was weird. I mean, come one, not every one stumbles on an almost murder their first day on vacation… Then this almost familiar detective guy came and talked to us for a moment, asking really general questions, where were we standing, where did we go, who saw what. Then he told us that the main detective for the scene would be with us as soon as he was done talking to the CSI's. Christie and I started to vibrate. Real CSI's! Right here! Whoo!
I looked over at Christie and said, "You right! This is so much like CSI!" Then new voices came from the elevator drew my attention and I glanced toward them. "Just… like…" My mouth stopped working and Christie stopped vibrating and we stared. "Just… like…." OH MY GOSH. "…like…." My mouth wanted to hang open, but my subconscious wanted to finish the gosh-darned sentenced so my chin wobbled up and down for a moment. "….C….CSI….." Then my brain shut down and I stared open mouthed like a big mouth bass as Detective Jim Brass paused to point us out to CSI's Nick Stokes, Sara Sidle and Catherine Willows.