Thursday, November 28, 2013

Black Friday 3

Start of Story | Previous Part (2/5)
The demon-faced golden coins rolled across the floor, clittering and clattering around Sophia as she crawled to her feet.  The sensations of all the rampant greed and black friday rush started to feel like a ocean to her.  She felt sick.  But part of her started to persevere through it.

Ick.  Was this what it was like to be used to all of this?  Sophia shuddered.  She hoped that being able to see in her magical senses and not topple over from all of this negative emotion wasn't a bad sign for her sanity.

Her eyes followed the gold coins.  each customer in the store seemed to be dropping them as they shopped.  They couldn't seem, since in a fashion, each coin was really just ethereal.  Symbolic of something else, but that was the best symbol her mind could put to them.

"Lucy, Lucy, Lucy..."  Right.  She needed to stay on track.  Sophia could feel traces of Lucy on the floor, a sort of path of her resonance moving backward, in the same direction as the coins themselves were rolling.

Sophia decided to follow the coins, hoping that they and Lucy were heading the same direction.

After a few attempts, she also gave up on trying ask employees about Lucy- none of them seemed to remember or care long enough to talk to her.  They all looked mummified, to her, after a fashion, dried out.  The Black Friday customers were troublesome, however.

People cut her off, running with their cart in a eternal hurry.  Others would spontaneously appear behind her and start yelling at her to move.  Sophia felt at least one pair of hands almost try to knock her over, and she struggled to focus on following the path of coins.  She tried to stop to keep her bearings from time to time, as waves of greed or anger or hunger would overwhelm her.

Ugh.  Would anyone notice if I was knocked over?  Sophia worried.

A nearby display of televisions exploded, hands and customers washing over it in a torrent of frenzied grabbing and pushing.  Someone was crying.  A employee tried to yell something, but Sophia couldn't make it out.

She continued to follow the gold coins.  They rolled and rolled.  They made their ways to the back of the store.  Roll, roll, roll.

Sophia made her way to the back room of the store, in a break room.  No one in sight.  She ignored the 'Employees Only' sign.

She acquired a hanging employee vest.  In Sophia's magic sights, the vest looked more like a long black robe.  It almost felt like it, heavy and much too warm.

She went back to following the coins and their path through the back of the GenMart.

The golden coins rolled through a set of double doors.  Then bounce, bounce, bounce.  Down stairs they went.  Sophia followed them.

Her eyes adapted to the growing darkness as the stairs turned to concrete and descended downward.  After twenty steps, there was a corridor, lined in pipes and cinder blocks.  At the far end of it stood a steel door, bright red with a paper on it:

"Management."

And each golden coin rolled under the bottom of the red steel door.  Sophia could feel it grow hotter and hotter as she neared the door.  She could hear laughing.  She shivered, her stomach filling with butterflies.

She pressed one of her pale hands onto the red steel door.  It felt cold.  It felt wrong.  It felt like screaming children drowning in neglect and starvation framed with contempt.

Lucy, I can feel her aura here too.  So many auras, but her path leds here.  Oh Lucy, I never thought to expect this here.  Damn it, I should've realized GenMart would be such a dark pit of despair, but why didn't I DO anything about it before this?

The red steel door creaked open.  Golden light greeted Sophia as she looked into a vast room, covered in golden coins.  They flowed up to her knees, and more coins added themselves to the pile with every minute Black Friday carried on.

A marble altar sat in the middle of the room.  Upon it, making it crack and sag, sat the most disgusting thing yet.  A massive lump of red and grey flesh, a demon at least five times her size.  It was massively obese, coins stuck on its sweat, greasy skin.  It had a long toothy mouth.  Rolls of fat framed its lump of a head.  Other mouths covered it, each licking coins with needle-thin tongues.

On top of all that, it wore a GenMart vest.  The GenMart garish green clashed so badly it made Sophia cringe.

Sophia recognized the large fat demonic figure from the golden coins around it.

The Demon smiled at her.  "Hello.  Can I help you?"

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