She picked up a wrench from the shop floor and held it like a club. "I don't want any trouble from you people, but I don't like the sound of this conversation we're having," Alyss said.
The trio's eyes burned with fire and bat-like wings sprouted from their backs. "Bad move, my friend, to hunt daemons with plain steel," the second hissed.
They advanced on her.
An old woman stepped out of the air in front of her. "No, I don't think this will do at all. Boys, you are forgetting your manners. International law states that you are required to retrieve and utilize food without their awareness. Clearly you have forgotten that one." She shook her finger at the target of her ire. "As for the rest, you have behaved very irresponsibly."
They hissed at the interloper. The old woman shrugged and snapped her fingers, opening a portal. "If you are going to be like that, then we're going to have to send you back to the Daemon Realm so you can pull yourselves together. In the future, please be sure to act more professionally," she said. With a snap of her fingers the three daemons were sucked into the portal which quickly shut after them.
She tucked her long grey hair behind one mahogany ear and looked at Alyss. The teen was still holding the wrench and facing this stranger, but she was obviously shaken. The lady tutted. "Now, that will not do. Tell me what's happened," she said.
Alyss looked her over, obviously doubting the reliability of the kind of strangers who literally popped up out of nowhere. Eventually the strain of all she'd gone through got to her, though, and the girl told the odd stranger everything--the imprisonment, strange tales of danger brewing in the Shadeworld, and another world full of monsters like they'd just seen.
The old woman nodded. "Yes, well, that all makes rather a lot of sense, doesn't it? But I can see you're in a muddle about it all," she added. She looked at Alyss and nodded.
"Well, we'll have to see about some of your issues. The name's Galacina, by the way," she said. Galacina held out her hand, and the girl cautiously shook it. She nodded in approval again. "Well, I can fix some of your problems," she said. Galacina snapped and opened another portal that opened onto a bathroom stall. "We can't have you just pop into existence out of nowhere, but if you walk out of this stall here, you'll find yourself in the LAX airport," she said. She pulled out a thick bundle of currency in a few different colors, but a good chunk of the bundle was green. She gave these to the girl.
"I think these are the American dollars; I can never quite keep track of them. This money should be enough for at least one plane." She pulled out another stack of more colorful bills. "This here should get you around in Russia. I expect you'll want to head over there. Biggest bunch of wild territory you can find in this world if you don't count Antarctica, which I must say it's best not to. Wild forested land is really the best chance you have of being hard to find, you know." She stuffed these bills in her hand as well.
"I'm busy with my travels and I have to run, but I think I'll be seeing you again very soon. This reality has an awful lot of interesting things going on right now, and I think I'm going to come back to enjoy the action soon enough."
She opened another portal. This one had a view of endless white expanse with cube-shaped worlds floating around.
"Wait!" Alyss called out to her. "When will I see you again? What's going to happen here that's so interesting?"
The woman paused with one foot in the other side. "Everything is interesting to someone," she said. "I'm just here because I'm afraid not enough people have interest when they really should and I'm a sucker for helping people like that. Tootles," Galacina said. Then she was gone.
Alyss was shocked by her abrupt visitor, but still she followed her directions and got on a plane. She took the money she'd been offered and went even further afield. Alyss knew she had no time to waste on fear of a repeat of what had happened, because being trapped again was even worse than dealing with some hoodlums. She had taken a bus, and another, and then a plane, and a second plane. On the third plane she got off at the transfer point on the off-chance it would slow down those following her.
Then in Beijing she picked up the Trans-Siberian railway, the route taking her into the heart of Russia. After weeks in a third-class compartment where she had to ask the old ladies on the train to help her with at least daily tea and a few stops along the way to pick up basic groceries next to the train stations--third-class passengers did not get served any meals after all--she stumbled off at the smallest station she could find and waved goodbye to the one old lady that had helped her so nicely. She stumbled away from the station and walked on shaky legs that weren't used to the solid terrain of ground under her feet after spending so many days on rocking compartment floors. In the West it was deep into fall, but up here it was close enough to being winter to make no difference. She had a sleeping bag and a basic Mylar blanket used in emergency kits, but it wasn't enough to prevent an average human from getting terrible frostbite. She survived each night of shivering to continue walking each day. Her progress was slower and slower each day, her icy feet stumbling, but still she continued on.
A normal person might have turned tail days ago, but there was no turning back at this point. Not only was the way back lost to
