And she suddenly realized that she wanted to become visible again. Something seemed to click at the girl’s temples; the surroundings lost their color for a moment, but soon the whole range of bright colors returned to their proper places.
– The hares are on their way to the zoo! – the old man laughed, coming up to her from behind. – And you can’t go anywhere without a ticket!
His appearance seemed unusual and somehow familiar to the girl, as if the intellectual, dressed in a strange fashion: in a long red coat and a wide-brimmed hat, was a character in a popular film. It looks strange for modern life, and does not fit into the monotonous crowd at all. But the suit is not everything. The old man smiled and bared his long fangs, which is why the girl just squeezed out:
– A vampire?
«Yes,» he smiled.
Alina shook her head and stared at the old man again. He saw her! Those red eyes, from under those yellow round glasses. He stood two meters from her and could easily touch her by taking two or three steps towards her. Realizing this turned out to be more difficult than believing in grandfather’s vampirism. It seems like nothing happened. Just now no living creature could see Alina, and suddenly a suspicious person appeared. Grandfather’s glasses aren’t magic! People walked around the vampire and the young lady standing opposite each other. But at the airport, nothing seemed to have changed, but the girl felt that something was wrong in Tolmachevo.
Alina did not know the Novosibirsk airport at all. She and her relatives couldn’t afford plane tickets. But that’s not even the point: for example, the policeman at the metal detector, after she wanted to become visible and her grandfather noticed her, for some reason he turned green and stopped looking like a person. «Goblin,» she thought for some reason.
«You pass, madam,» the vampire nodded towards the metal detector.
– Can you see me? – Alina finally asked the question that most worried her.
The girl examined the elderly man even more carefully: he was at least five hundred years old. Although, no, this is too harshly said, they don’t live that long, but one hundred and fifty is quite possible!
– Come on, come in, battle magician, don’t torment the old vampire!
After this phrase, she stepped back and almost tripped out of the blue, but grabbed the metal detector stand in time. Not only did this, so to speak, honest vampire somehow know her status (although she never considered herself a battle mage), but he was not going to bite and drink liters of blood from her young body. Alina took a deep breath and walked under the arch.
Marriage…
«Welcome, combatant,» the goblin policeman suddenly said to her, saluting.
If only all law enforcement officers were so polite, it doesn’t matter that they are green and pimply, and, in addition, they are non-humans.
And then it dawned on the girl that the gates at the airport were not intended to look for bombs and other terrorist problems, but to scan the passenger’s status. On the goblin’s monitor Alin’s name was shining, and next to it was a «battle magician».
Surprised, as it turned out, the sorceress moved out of the way and looked at how the status of the old man following her was determined. After him, two alchemist girls, three demons, a chimera man and several sorcerers passed under the scanner. They look like ordinary people, but in reality they all have paranormal abilities.
Alina did not observe further. And so it is clear – she is in Novosibirsk, which was suddenly inhabited by magical creatures, the city was transformed, and again took her into his life, made her visible, began to reckon with the presence of her body. But life turned out to be completely different, fabulous, the kind she dreamed of while reading science fiction novels.
Interesting, but true – the same airport, the same flights, but completely different creatures around. And there was no trace of the life that the girl left: full of banality, dust and soot.
After walking a few meters to the reception desk, she found that she was no longer limping and walking was much more comfortable. Imagine Alina’s surprise when, looking at her feet, she noticed that she was wearing two identical brown boots with thick soles. When did she manage to conjure them? Or did someone else decide to help her and change her shoes?
«Boarding begins for the Samoletina flight to Moscow,» a melodious female voice announced through the speaker.
Hearing the name of the carrier, the girl involuntarily burst into her fist.
If all the creatures here are magical, then this pleasant-to-hear voice belongs to some disgusting lady of inhuman appearance, she thought for some reason. Alina had never thought about the voice of the announcers even once in her twenty-three years of life. But after meeting the goblin guard and the vampire passenger, the mysterious announcer became an object of curiosity.
Check-in and waiting for boarding went too quickly for the newly minted sorceress. A charming skeleton woman, covering her empty eye sockets with black glasses and her bald skull with a wig, gave the young magician a boarding pass: an ordinary one, no different from its counterpart in the non-magical world.
The girl looked at the servants for a long time, but didn’t get the chance to speak to the living skeleton. Therefore, all that she had time to think about Olga the skeleton from the reception desk was regret that her friends, who wanted to lose weight in every possible way, had not seen the skinniest woman in the world. After this you will want to be chubby and forget about all diets.
The entire time Alina was waiting to board, she wandered between the aisles and carefully studied the fantastic society into which, by someone’s grace, she had found herself. Among the short, bearded gnomes and long-eared elves, there were many ordinary people, magicians of various specializations. One stocky man explained to his neighbor that he had checked his son in as an animal because he didn’t have enough money for a ticket. A werewolf, no less. A normal person would not allow himself to do this.
As the newly minted sorceress managed to understand, those who were more like people belonged to the highest caste and were very wealthy, but the more a creature resembled a monster, the less it was valued. For example, there were no skeletons or goblins among the passengers.
What amused the girl most was the scene when three giant trolls were dragging a box of food onto the plane. She was standing at the window next to the gate door, and monsters vaguely reminiscent of Shrek, dressed in colorful red-and-black skins, were operating on the take-off platform. Well, the real «Swan, Crayfish and Pike’.
– Was it really impossible to take the car on the first layer? – the young man who was watching the same trolls was indignant.
Alina’s memory flipped through the pages of the books she had read at great speed and she recalled frames from the films she had watched: judging by the bluish tint of her skin, this man was a total freak. The girl looked back at him, and then continued observing the careless trolls. The monsters, deciding that the food box was too heavy for their pumped up muscles, tore off the nailed lid and began to eat the contents of their burden along with the wrappers. Seeing this, Alina grinned. Pitchman muttered something to her about «This is not fun» and walked away to another window.
Meanwhile, two tall skeletons in orange vests with the words «Tolmachevo’ on their backs ran up to the trolls and began beating the monsters with glowing batons. Funny. From the outside. This is absolutely boring, he’s been seeing things like this for decades. And to her, Alina, this kind of production sabotage in magical Novosibirsk is a novelty.
When the ashamed trolls put the lid back in place and ran away from harm into their kennel, an elderly woman in the same orange vest as the skeletons approached the box. With one wave of her hand, she made him fly to the required compartment of the plane.
