But the food, which the voracious trolls from Novosibirsk did not have time to gobble up, turned out to be very tasty – not semi-finished shortbreads of the non-magical world, but almost restaurant-quality food. After this, the spoiled mood from reading the article «Necromancers will bring back to life everyone who died in a plane crash if they pay the magicians ten million dollars» is forgotten. And after a delicious lunch, Alina decided to tune in to thoughts about the capital.
She has never been to Moscow. This city had always remained somewhat unattainable for her… but now what awaited her was not just an ordinary dream, but a capital full of magic and other paranormal phenomena. This fact did not frighten the girl at all, and during the four-hour flight, without closing her eyes, she waited until she finally encountered the capital’s witchcraft and remembered all the possible combat spells that she had read about in science fiction novels. As always, you know a lot, but only a few are extracted from memory, and not the most original ones.
And now my ears are getting unpleasantly stuffy again. Like taking off. The plane decreases altitude.
Of course, as a child, the girl imagined Moscow simply and clearly: the plane lands on Red Square, and happy October students Alinochka and Kostenka run to the mausoleum to admire grandfather Lenin, and then put a bold dot in the center of the square with a bright felt-tip pen. In fact, everything turned out to be much more prosaic – a typical airport, a banal stop, ordinary white and green Lipetsk buses and orc taxi drivers, impostors. It’s still a long way to get to the city center.
However, the newly minted sorceress remembered the text of the note; she did not need to go to the square at all, that she was not brought here from Siberia in order to look at the eternally sleeping Leader of the World Proletariat. They were waiting for her at the second, international terminal. She imagined a tall blond foreigner like «Ordinary Brad Pitt» smiling at her with sparkling snow-white teeth, walking with her arm and treating her to hamburgers at McDonald’s. Alina was never lucky in love. Either she lost her head over a man who had a girlfriend, or her lover turned out to be a female, or, oh, horror, perverts who wanted nothing more than erotic pleasures were interested in her. But why is life so unfair to her? She is an ordinary girl, no worse or better than her friends, half of whom lived with the most wonderful husbands. Fate didn’t like her. And so she dreamed: about Superman, a prince on a white horse, or just a strong defender. And when the girl fell into the magical layer of this world, her matrimonial dreams filled her head in double volume.
At the wheel of the bus sat a strange creature that could easily be dubbed an alien – red, with a large egg-shaped head and one single eye. The creature had no nose or mouth at all. The driver’s torso was much smaller than his head, and his three-fingered hands, like suction cups replacing nails, dug into the steering wheel.
«The fare is 15 rubles, buy a ticket from the bus driver,» Alina read and handed the money to the mysterious creature. The silent alien took the coins with the help of a thin string-tail and in the same way returned the change and ticket to the girl, and she, having punched her travel document, went into the cabin and sat down in an empty seat.
