Sophia Jackson
Stories
11
Chapters
5,834
Words
1.6 M
Comments
0
Reading
5 d, 14 h
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Class Trader, Part One Alden spent the entire afternoon sitting in the trading room. Gorgon stuck around for the first hour or so, answering what questions he was allowed to. But after that, he headed back upstairs. As long as Alden didn’t leave the room, the System still considered him to have been safely vouched for by an authorized witness. When he took bathroom breaks, though, Gorgon had to accompany him back and re-activate the table. The alien had told Alden that there would be no peeing in…-
128 •
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When Alden stepped through the doors of the consulate, he was surprised to find the lobby wasn’t empty. He’d expected it to be abandoned since the only weekday classes were in the evening. But there was a man sitting in Gorgon’s favorite chair, taking advantage of the free WiFi to play an MMORPG on his laptop. And there was a rowdy trio of two college-aged guys and a girl taking pictures with Gorgon in the background. They seemed to be trying to get some kind of humorous “Eek! A demon!” shot,…
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128 •
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It was supposed to happen differently. It definitely would have if Alden’s life were an action movie…or even a comedy. If the universe were a writer, there would have been some dramatic build-up. Some tension that needed breaking. Maybe even a small disaster that could only be overcome by the But it didn’t go like that. Instead, it was one o’clock on a Thursday. And Alden had just bombed a quiz on Hamlet because he’d somehow failed to see a reading assignment that had, apparently, been…
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128 •
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“Look at what you’ve done to me,” Alden said pitifully. It was evening, he was sitting in the cricket-filled lobby with Gorgon again, and he was picking chunks of tofu and pieces of lettuce out of a naan wrap that had been “Do you know why the bread at that place tastes fabulous? It’s because it’s grilled in butter. Do you know how I know that? “How long do you think you will complain about this particular topic?” the alien asked, licking coconut curry sauce from his own…
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128 •
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The shock took a while to hit. Probably because Alden was already processing a lot at the moment. Hannah’s funeral was coming up. Gorgon’s eyeballs had the power to make you recall in perfect clarity your time in the womb. He’d given the alien his own blood to drink, and he thought, upon reflection, that it might have been part of some kind of magic ritual and not just snack time. All typical stuff. Anyway, when an extra-dimensional being told him out of the blue that he had a seventy percent…
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128 •
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It was nearly eleven when Alden arrived in front of the consulate building. The street was quiet, which only made the angry sounds coming from the cat carrier in his hand more disturbing. Victor didn’t In Alden’s other hand, he carried a pair of overstuffed grocery bags. His pillow was tucked under his arm. Alden had always been a planner. He saw now that this was not an optional state of being for him, since without a plan he just…did random insane things. The consulate was closed. Obviously.…
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128 •
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Gorgon didn’t eat the crickets. Honestly, it was a real head-scratcher. Alden had been so sure that the alien What was the difference between flies and crickets? They were live prey. They were insects. Neither were poisonous. Gorgon couldn’t have come from a universe where they scorned all meat except for Alden was baffled. But even though he didn’t For a time, Alden toyed with the idea that Gorgon might only be able to eat live prey he’d hunted himself. But there was really no point in…
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128 •
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The courses offered at the consulate were not, for the most part, popular. There had been a two-week Artonan language intensive that was well-attended during the winter break, but now schools were back in session, and the people coming for extra classes in the afternoons and on weekends were mostly overachievers or geeks of some sort. The ten o’clock class on Saturday was the only one that was full of relatively normal people. Alden and his friends stuffed their shoes and socks into the cubbies that…
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128 •
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Fifteen minutes later, Alden and his friends arrived at the Artonan consulate building. It was a blocky gray cube of concrete and glass, surrounded by a security fence. A trio of poles out front held the multicolored streamers the aliens used as their planetary flags. Even in the beginning, there hadn’t really been enough Artonans on Earth to justify functional diplomatic consulates in major cities. And now that Earth-Artonan political relations had been settled for decades, the so-called consulate was…
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128 •
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“ ’s cold as tits,” Jeremy Levi muttered, rubbing his bare biceps with his hands as he stared out at the snow falling over the L’s tracks. “Alden, man, stop looking so warm. You’ve got a sweater His pale lips were almost as gray as the sky overhead, and his breath came out in frosty white puffs of fog. “Agree to stupid dares, win stupid prizes.” Alden leaned against a railing while they waited for the train. “It’s twenty-something degrees. Did you seriously think you were stronger…
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