Fascinating geography

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.

It’s strange why airport workers didn’t immediately use the services of a teleportation specialist. Really, like Russians from the non-magical world, Russian sorcerers hoped to get by with cheap labor? Or did you want to feed the trolls so that they wouldn’t die of hunger?

Alina didn’t even have time to think about this topic when she began boarding the plane. And half an hour later, the battle magician and two hundred more magical creatures were flying high in the sky towards the capital of the Russian state.

When Alina was little, she flew on a plane with her mother and brother to the south, but this was not yet in Novosibirsk, where the family moved twelve years ago. Now her childhood memories were returning, but she did not feel the difference between flying in her homeland and in the magical world.

If you sit comfortably in your seat and immerse yourself in reading a magazine published by Samoletina Airlines, occasionally being distracted by the flight attendants offering food and juices, then you will not be able to distinguish the flight from a non-magical one. But the magicians had skeleton girls working on the plane, on whose bony bodies the uniforms sagged like low-quality mannequins. Alina was afraid to even imagine who the pilot was: a troll or a goblin! What if a fearless zombie? But the non-human was not inferior to the human in his skill: the plane did not sway in turbulent flows. What if this Boeing, filled with magicians, flies at the behest of a spell without fuel or engines. What then will happen if the magical powers of the wizards controlling the ship are not enough to pull the colossus to the capital? The latter scared the girl a little, so she decided to take a break from her dark thoughts and stared at the glossy magazine «Let’s fly!» in a pocket on the chair in front of her.

They didn’t write anything interesting there: the airline advertised its newfangled planes with reliable magical protection, which were actually purchased in Europe and written off there from the balance sheet. What kind of magic armor this was, Alina had no idea yet, and therefore she delved into reading – a magic plane cannot be rammed with a rocket, a dragon cannot shoot it down with one blow, and birds and small magical creatures could not fly closer than a hundred meters to the liner. This would be true in a non-magical world, otherwise there would be plane crashes, so many people would die. I was daydreaming.

Such a truth of life would not have been written in a philistine aircraft publication. The magical layer of the world is too sensitive to lies, which is why the magazine was full of interesting and sometimes cheesy jokes like: «Fun, quickly and without worries, our airline will bury you!» Anti-advertising, fear-mongering, was it really impossible to simply not display such pessimistic magazines? The reader’s nerves may fail. Consider the article about a crow that made a nest in the turbine of an old TU-134, which sat in Irkutsk for a whole year and did not fly anywhere; or a double-page advertisement – «Kukuruznik – the airliner of the future, a full-page advertisement – "…in the turbine of an old technical specification, which stood on the airfield in Irkutsk for a whole year and never flew anywhere. mi type.»

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.

She leaned her forehead against the glass and sadly looked at the landscapes – ordinary Russia: both in the provinces and in the capital. Clouds no different from Siberian ones floated across the same blue sky. Nothing special, as if the non-magical world had returned to her life again. Alina was sad. It was like she was replaying in her memory the circumstances of leaving for another, as they called here, the second layer, and still could not understand: whether she had died or been reborn in a new capacity.

The girl was torn from such thoughts by noise… A fight? She shuddered and looked out the window – she had already arrived. She jumped out of her chair and ran out of the bus.

At the exit from the arrivals hall at Sheremetyevo-2 stood a tall young man with blond hair, who looked like a foreigner, wearing a blue robe up to his hips, tight leather trousers and platform boots. The same one that the girl saw at the moment of departure, rebirth, death, or whatever you call what happened to her. Alina wanted to jump back on the bus and go away from this terminal and the person she saw. She moved back, but when she wanted to put her hand on the railing of the bus, she found that she was grabbing an empty space. Too late.

The face of the man from the dying vision was more likely to be unhappy than angry, and did not at all resemble a collector of the souls of innocent girls, an evil demon of hell, and others like them. In his hand the guy held a leash with a black dragon. The animal grabbed the notebook on a beautiful plastic spring with its front paws and looked at the attackers with a pleading look. It was obvious that this pet furry did not intend to attack.

The asphalt between the guy and the attackers was torn up. In all likelihood, the stranger defended himself with earthen magic. Is it really a shaman? The magician’s first attack against the three hooligans ended in his favor, but what will happen next?

The guy was attacked by three orcs wearing taxi driver jackets. The dispute, most likely, was over which of them would take the foreign guest to the city center. Although an inner voice whispered to Alina: «This is not so!» Intervene! He’s the reason you’re here!»