With Rind looking over his shoulder the entire time Eric could not help but to make his every purchase as though they did not in fact have much time at all. The cash Rind had with her was, at one glance, more than enough to buy three pairs of jeans, a few packages of underwear and socks, several t-shirts, a sweater, toiletries, a tote bag large enough to accommodate it all, and as an afterthought, a towel. Only upon leaving the department store did he realize he could have gotten away with another pair of shoes, a discman, a few CDs, and anything else that might make this unscheduled trip more comfortable. He suspected he'd have plenty of time to make up for it.

The matter of food was taken care of with greater speed.

"I don't really feel like fast food," Eric had said more to be difficult than any preference. It didn't matter where he ate. His abductor would still be sitting there with him.

"I am not familiar with every dining ritual on this planet. I am afraid I cannot permit your meal to continue for more than one hour."

He had just stared at her, slow to realize she had no idea what the phrase 'fast food' meant.

"What?"

"We will depart from this city at 0400 hours. In order to maximize your opportunity for rest I must limit your—"

"Ok, ok. Just pull into the Carl's over there."

"What?"

"The drive-thru. Where the star with a happy face is."

"The word 'through' is mispelled."

Rind wisely abstained from eating anything that took less than five minutes from order to receipt, and while she drove, Eric ate. It took all of ten seconds for him to decide to let her pick the motel they'd stay in: visions of her droning on about things like tactical advantages, proximity to the freeway, and the like were more than enough to convince him not to express a preference in the matter.

Predictably Rind chose the first motel they came upon. It was the poster-child of seedy establishments, tucked away between the commercial district and the industrial. Eric knew it was the kind of place people went to engage in activities that were not strictly legal or moral, but he held is tongue, curious to see how the goddess would react.

Halfway across the stained carpet of the front office, Rind came to an abrupt stop. Eric had to lurch to the side to avoid running into her. Expecting a manager that was fat, balding, and wearing a tank-top with a myriad of unidentifiable stains, he was surprised to see a well-groomed man that appeared to be in his thirties. His smile was white and seemingly good-natured.

"How can I help you two on this lovely evening?"

"You cannot," Rind said and turned around. Eric blinked and followed her.

"Ok," he said when they were back in the car. "You know I could've told you it was a dive."

"His thoughts were perverse. Unclean. I cannot be certain, but the evidence indicates that that individual engages in video surveillance of the rooms of that motel."

"How do you know?" To him such a suspicion was natural for the type of motel he had known it to be the moment he had laid eyes on it. But his curiosity as to why a goddess would be suspicious treated him to a brief expose on electromagnetic radiation and ultrasonic squeals from cheaply-made crt displays. While bored, Eric was grateful that Rind provided much less detail on what the manager had been exuding in terms of spirit and thought. By that point he was embarrassed enough for not voicing his reservations about the motel sooner.

"Right. So no more places like that."

"Indeed."

The next place was a loser too, but for less obvious reasons. As pleasant in the front office as the motel looked on the outside, Rind still rejected it after the first question she asked the woman at the desk.

"I require a telephone in the room," she explained to Eric when they were back in the car again. "I must keep you in sight at all times. Were it necessary to leave the room to use the telephone I would need to wake you."

Despite her words, she did not sound thoughtful.

"A goddess needs a phone to communicate?"

"Other methods are too conspicuous."

It was another avenue of conversation Eric declined to follow.

The third motel met with Rind's approval despite the noisy bar across the way. Standing behind her he had listened to her brief interrogation of the desk clerk and left the office even more confused than ever by the goddess' standards; the complex did not seem particularly clean, and the clerk seemed as sleazy as Rind had implied the first had been. Yet she pronounced it adequate by producing a narrow stack of bills and asking for a room for the night.

The room itself contrasted to with outside. It seemed more effort and money was put into keeping them clean than was spent on exterior maintenance. The decor was, of course, as tacky as one would expect of a cheap motel and the in-room TV something out of the 80s. A quick look in the bathroom caused Eric to recoil from the floral print on the shower curtain, a riot of poor art twice as hideous as the designs on the bedspread.

Dropping his bag next to the bed and sitting down, Eric looked up at the goddess. She had been watching him from the moment they came through the door. Granted, it had only been for ten seconds, but his ideas on his level of self worth made it seem longer than that.

"So, uh, who gets the couch?" There was no couch. There wasn't even a soft chair.

"There is no couch."

Eric sighed. "It was a joke. Let me guess, you don't sleep. Or you sleep standing up."

Still facing him, Rind's pose looked every bit as formal and stiff as Eric pictured a military cadet would be when facing her superiors. "I will remain alert until I am permitted a rest period."

"When will that be?"

"Unknown."

"That sucks."

"Clarify."

"You know, idiom. Its not cool that... it's, uh, bad that you can't rest until you're told to."

Rind moved at last, only to stiffen further. "It is my duty. I will not deviate from it."

Eric had the image of someone standing before a colossal blackboard, chalk in hand.

"Terrific," he said. He pivoted, bringing his legs up onto the bed, stretching them out.

"I must bathe. Stay within sight of the door."

Eric waved assent, thinking. The goddess had not smelled of anything, least of all dirt or sweat. Perhaps, he guessed, she was like some people, himself included, that liked to bathe daily, whether or not it was necessary. A more correct explanation hovered at the edges of his consciousness.

Trying to be more interested in the TV than what Rind was doing, Eric picked up the remote from the bed's nightstand and hit the power switch. The flickering, occasionally static-ridden, images did not immediately distract him from the wedge of light shining through between the partly open bathroom door, but after a few minutes a sitcom took hold.

Not that it would be all that safe to see her naked if she doesn't want that. Oh, hey, this is a funny one. He turned up the volume, drowning out the sounds of running water coming from the bathroom.

Between moments of amusement he thought about the goddess and the half-open door. Was she modest or just considerate? Or maybe it was, as she said, her duty to watch him always and would have not otherwise deigned to allow a mortal's attention intrude during a moment of privacy.

Well I just won't look. Probably can't see the tub anyway.

But if he couldn't see her, then how could she see him? Why leave the door open in that case?

The commercial break ended and he plunged back into the TV, absorbed. The sitcom was not that funny after all, but it gave respite from the seriousness of the day. It was almost as though, like alcohol, it took the edge away and made things seem so much less urgent, less immediate.

No, this drugs me. Not like her.

Her? But he knew. Her face came drifting down into his awareness. If everything he'd been 'shown' were true, and why shouldn't it be, there was a goddess taking a bath ten feet away, then Belldandy would be real too. The other goddesses. The college boy, K-something. In a TV-induced haze he let the images returned to him.

Yeah, drugs me. But she... softens the world.

In the images were a talking cat, two personable robots, and angels.

The hair on his neck prickled. Something was watching him. From the bathroom doorway.

Now he was even more afraid to look, not because of what he would see, but because, he discovered then, he still doubted. If he looked he would see, there in the doorway, undeniable proof that Rind and the images that had been plaguing him since that stop at the bookstore, were truth.

Eric rolled onto his side, back to the bathroom, as though something frightful was peering at him from there. He almost wished there were, because the unknown of his own making seemed somehow worse, the unknown he forced upon himself by lingering with doubt.

In the silence between the sitcom and a commercial, he heard that the water had stopped. All at once the feeling of being watched withdrew. He turned down the TV and turned at last when he heard a soft sound behind him. Rind was standing there in the doorway, dressed as she had been before. The only evidence that she had bathed was the steam issuing from the bathroom behind her.

"Are you ill?" she asked.

"What?"

"You're physiological state is distressed."

It wasn't until then that he felt like panicking. He rolled off the bed, stumbled, and shot to his feet. Waiting out a head rush he knelt to his new tote bag, grabbed something at random, and went toward the goddess.

"No, no. Just need... I'm fine. Just need to take a shower. It's been a long day."

He felt like a coward. Afraid of something that would never harm him, that made the world a better place just by its being.

Wouldn't be my world. I'm just somebody's baggage.

Though Rind stepped aside so he could go through the door, Eric stopped and headed back, never quite aware that he had picked up a package of socks. Guided alone by the suspicion that he'd need most everything in his new tote, he picked it up too and hauled into the bathroom with him.

"Leave the door ajar."

He mumbled something in response.

"With the use of proper techniques a closed door can provide far more resistance than the physical construction provides."

"Ok, ok. Got it." He didn't care if she saw him naked anyway. In fact the image of her avoiding it, curled up on the bed, back to him, as he himself had been positioned moments before, was so ridiculous that it lightened his mood.

The goddess was not in sight when he began to undress.