Wait I almost forgot something important! "Hey," I turn to ask, "Before I go can I ask you a question?"
"Anything you want!" Ghislain answered.
"What does the blue symbol on my back do? Victoria said the Curators already know and since it's a part of me it's probably important I know too."
"Hmmm," Ghislain pondered. "I'm sorry but we generally aren't supposed to give out information about Antiques to the public. Safety concerns and things like that."
"But it's part of my body! I should have the right to know!"
"I'm sorry but my hands are tied."
"Damn it… Is there someone who can…" A familiar feeling swipes across the back of my neck sending my arms limp and shutting my mouth before I could finish.
"Home. Now." Victoria says, letting out a yawn.
No matter how I feel or what I want, it doesn't matter. My zombified body follows Victoria down one of the long white hallways where oak lamps hang from the ceiling until she picks one of the seemingly hundreds of identical doors and opens it, revealing an elevator-like chrome interior. Three floors down we're in a garage park that I think is under the Headquarters, and Victoria leads me past the collection of cars and opens up a black Sedan.
"Get in." I do just as she said and entered the car but my body neglects the seatbelt because she was too lazy to mention it.
The car pulls around the lot and up to a metal door, where Victoria scans something along a card reader next to the road and the metal garage doors lift like magic letting Victoria advance. And after following the back road from the Headquarters to the main street she uses the public road to break every traffic law possible. Running red lights, breaking speed limits, almost ramming into another car... twice, ignoring-
Wait is that a kid in the middle of the road!? Just eating a scoop of ice cream and passing through the crosswalk without a care in the world. At least he was until he freezes solid and sees us barreling down the street at top speed right toward him!
I want to force her off the wheel or yell at the kid to move out the way, but my body won't respond to me! I can't even stop myself from looking because I can't close my eyes! Damn it Victoria, stop the car, turn away, do anything! Victoria slams on the gas and the car's engine growls louder. You homicidal freak, stop the car!
A frightening smile swelled from her face, as she grips the car wheel, twirls it to the right as hard as possible, and finally pounds the brake. My corpselike body jerks with the car as it screams across the asphalt, and my head smacks into the side of the window. Gah! When I get out of this I'm going to- I'm going to-!
But, my reeling from the pain echoing from my head must have caused me to miss what happened to the boy. We're back to driving normally, but he's not in front of us, and I can't turn my head to look behind us. She hit the break but we were so close to him that we wouldn't have time to fully stop. And she turned too late to have been able to avoid him.
So the only other option is that she...
Victoria, I'm going to kill you. Not just everything you've put me through, but for running over a kid for no good reason.
After another fifteen minutes of driving, she eventually parks along the sidewalk in front of a small brick townhouse as the moon peeks out from behind the roof. The neighborhood looks like a quiet suburb hidden plainly in the massive city.
The locks click open, Victoria gets out, and walking up the stairs she says, "You're free" as she turns the key to her teal door.
My body comes back to its rightful owner, and my hands collapse in on themselves. "Victoria!" I scream, trying to recover from banging my nose on the dashboard one too many times. "Get back here Victoria!" I furiously thrust the car door open, sprint up the stairs to her house and grab hold of the doorknob.
She may have flipped me over her head last time but I'm ready for her now. She's going to pay for everything she's done!
The second I open the door, a noxious stink from inside the house assaults my face. Something like a mixture of a dumpster, and a gas station bathroom all topped off with a little air freshener to try and mask the crippling cloud. "Ack! What the hell is that!"
The inside can barely be considered a house. The trash mounds stand in every corner of the room, so much of it mixes into abstract, barely whole forms. The things I can recognize however are alarming. Rotten food, clothes hanging off walls, boxes of the most random things imaginable. The carpet is so crusty it feels like I'm walking on sandpaper. I didn't know you could get worse than my apartment, but she found a way. She lives like the rat she acts like, but if I'm being honest the stink made it feel a little more like home.
"Welcome to Casa de Victoria." She says atop a mountain of what I think are children's toys.
No smell or pile of garbage is going to save you Victoria. I plug my nose and claw up the pile she's sitting crossed-legged on, when she flashes her card in my face like a weapon. "Woah there Ren. I understand you're angry, but I had a very good reason to do what I did."
"You had a very good reason to run over a kid!?"
"Run over a kid... Run over a kid..? Oh you mean that little boy walking with his ice cream!?
"Yes!"
"Oh he's fine, I perfectly drifted past him! It'd take too long to clean off the blood if I hadn't. Kinda his fault for taking so long in the roadway" I don't know whether to believe her or not. But either way, she's still not exonerated.
"You still took control of my body, and treated me like a toy for your amusement!"
"As I was saying, I had a very good reason for that!"
"This better be good."
"I was tired and wanted to come home." she bluntly states.
"Card or not, I'll kill you." I hastily attempt to scale the mountain of building blocks and action figures and reach out to grab her. Instead, I swipe nothing but air as she tactfully jumped from the pile down to the ground.
"Come back up here you rat!"
"If you want a piece of me, you'll have to catch me first!" She said, gracefully leaping to another pile of garbage.
For an hour straight we hunted each other inside Victoria's landfill. She'd weave in between piles of trash at speeds I couldn't keep up with, and I'd lose her more times than I could count. And every time she noticed I'd lost myself she'd call out to me with an "Over here!"
She's toying with me! She's making my ears hot, but I just can't catch her! She's an acrobat, bending and contorting mid-air every time I get in arm's reach!
After the initial hour, she starts throwing things at me while I pursue her. Moldy pizza, chairs, and a dog bowl were just some of them. The final nail in the coffin is a large sky-blue exercise ball that Victoria jettisons into my face, and that, combined with my growing fatigue causes me to collapse onto a comfortable, but probably dirty, pile of laundry on the floor.
Seeing me lying down in defeat Victoria jumps high off a junk pile directly onto my exposed backside.
"Mmph!" I grunt.
"Defeated by an exercise ball. Maybe you're not Curator material after all." She gloats.
"I just need a breather. You have to be getting tired too."
"Yeah, I'm exhausted too. I only could've gone for another five hours."
"Five hours!? An hour ago you said you were tired!"
"Did I? I don't think I remember saying that?"
"You… ugh" I sigh "I'll get you tomorrow. Tonight, I need sleep."
"Feels like kinda a waste of time, but whatever floats your boat newbie."
My face sinks into the laundry even further. It doesn't smell bad, and there doesn't seem to be anywhere else to sleep around here. If I asked for a guest room would she give it to me? Do I even want to sleep in Victoria's guest room?
...I'll stay here for the night. I don't think I can bother getting back up.
Speaking of getting up, "So are you going to get off of me so I can sleep?"
"I'm fine right here. Your back feels like the perfect bed." I wish I could get her off, but she'll find her way back no matter how hard I try.
I'll have to learn to live with it. This is how I'll be living my life from now on. At least it beats sleeping back at the apartment, even if by just a little...