New Character #15: Imogen
A weekend in New York – for a reasonable price.
Imogen leaned back in her chair and stared at the title of her project. A simple thing to write, most would argue, and definitely not something you would need to actually head to New York to write; there were enough articles about it available on the internet to get you through the writing. However, Imogen wanted something unique, to talk about things that no one else had talked about before. Because that was what got you noticed, what marked you as ambitious. Also, by actually going to New York she was able to do a short documentary about the things she wrote about. She planned to film short snippets at every location and then edit them and add a commentary track.
So far, though, she had nothing. Every time she had come up with an idea she had checked how many that had included it in their articles and quickly decided that none of the things she had thought of were unique enough.
With a disappointed groan she closed down the empty document and opened up Twitter instead. A series of new tweets from her friends and various celebrities passed by on her screen as she absentmindedly scrolled down. She favorited and retweeted a couple of them, such as a tweet from her sister about a passed exam. Then she closed down her computer and got out of her chair, instead throwing herself onto the bed and taking out her phone.
Imogen had been playing various games on her phone for almost an hour when she felt the slight headache that signalled a coffee abstinence. She had been drinking coffee several times per day since her early teens and now, at 21 years old, she was as close to an addict as you could be. However, she had tried to cut down on this type of drinking while here in the US because she thought the coffee here was way too weak. It tasted more like water with a slight coffee-flavour than coffee. She knew, however, that when she got an actual headache she could not avoid drinking at least a small cup.
"Well, then", she said to herself and sat up, "let's get this over with."
She put on a black coat and a green scarf and rummaged through the pile of clothes on top of her bag in the corner of the hotel room until she found what she was looking for; her umbrella. Then she headed out of the room, double-checked that the door locked behind her and then headed towards the elevator.
Once outside she opened up her umbrella and started walking down the road. She always walked a lot longer than she needed to in order to get her coffee, because she knew that on the way she might spot something that might be worth writing about. Every time she passed something interesting she had to stop and check the internet for articles about it.
Right now she walked a road that she had walked several times before during her stay here, so there were not many things that she found new and interesting popped up. Not until she was half-way up Wooster Street on her way to Spring Street she noticed something that she had not seen the last time she walked here. A sign was placed out on the pavement outside one of the last buildings before the crossroads. As she got closer she realized it was a notification of a new café.
The Enchanted Forest Café
Two floors up
She smiled slightly at the sign, then hurried over to the other side of the street to take a photo of the place. A café built into an old apartment complex; that was not something you saw every day!
She then hurried back across the street and stepped inside the black door, rang the doorbell to the café and then almost ran up the stairs. Her journalist mind smelled a scoop, sure enough, but her nose smelled coffee. Real, proper, strong coffee.