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