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Chapter 3
Angel
March 23
I paced impatiently throughout the room. I hated waiting, not knowing what would happen. I could not stay still. I was dying of boredom in prison. I was going to become mad.
I counted how many times I had crossed the room and passed Roger. 1... Back again. 2... Back where I started. 3... Back to where I came from...
I sighed again as I stopped pacing and looked out the window, hoping for a distraction. My breath fogged up the glass. It was so hot inside, there was no air; I felt like I was going to pass out. Great. I wasn't even going to be conscious when I died. It was the last straw. Forget I had dignity. I had to cool off. I zipped off my suit, which revealed my undergarments. But I didn't care. Such things were trivial at a time before death. I grabbed a book and proceeded to fan myself.
"Don't your people have a rescue plan?" he said. "I mean, won't they miss you for a while if you don't come back?"
"I doubt it. My client isn't that soft-headed," I said, turning around. I did not want to speak to him ever again. There was no time for this stupid talking.
I heard Roger mutter something in his surprise, something in a tone of voice that I've heard way too often. It was a very faint, "She calls herself an angel..."
Yet another wisecrack in Paradigm City finds it clever to comment on my fated marks. Oh, not again.
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Roger
March 20
The fishermen got scared because of the sea servants of the sea titan and the wrath of the sea. Until I SEE it for myself, I can't tell whether there is something there that can actually be negotiated with.
Apparently, strange sightings and sounds by the docks were noticed upon by the fishermen around two weeks ago. And along with these sightings came the presence of an overbearing fog, which according to sailor folklore was the medium that the evil servant spirits used to travel between the realm of living and dead. These frog-resembling portents with bright glowing eyes appeared usually during the late nighttime and certainly spooked the workers so much that eventually everyone went away and stopped fishing.
And so I investigated these highly skeptical claims. I entered an abandoned building that had previously been a restaurant. It had a clear view of the wharf, so I waited until 11:00, the time when the fisherman said that the spirits usually favored for their journey. By 10:50 I had my night-vision binoculars out, scrutinizing the shore closely for any fog or mysterious sounds. By 11:05 nothing of interest had surfaced and I had dismissed the so-called monster threat as figments of a wild seaman's imagination taken too far. By 11:07 I was ready to go home; it was meatloaf night and my mouth was watering at the thought of Norman's cooking. But then at 11:08, sure enough, an ominous curling fog started to make appearance. I zoomed to the dock on the far right and sure enough found the shadows of hunched, squat figures lined single-file diving into the water. Some of them had 'bright, glowing eyes', just like the old man said. I hid the binoculars for my suspicions were confirmed. The evil portent was in fact not a monster, just foul play.