Rising Shards

A night in the bright lights of Litus Empirica, the big city, with Kitty Kilander? Sounds ridiculous, but I was living it. I imagined Kitty would pick me up in a fancy limo, but she made me get us a cab and made me pay for it.

"Is your money gone too?" I asked on the drive to the escape room.

"Shut up," Kitty said, huffing and staring out the window.

The cab driver, an older gent who hadn't said a word to us so far, glanced to the rearview mirror at that.

"Do I have rich guests tonight?" He asked.

"Formerly rich!" I said. "But..." I whispered, "It's a bit sensitive a topic."

"It's not sensitive, I still have money," Kitty said. "This shit-ass fucking dumb as bricks world just decided I don't get to be fucking goddamn famous right fucking now is all." She made a quacking sound, but a sad one. I was surprised she didn't get one more 'fuck' in mid-quack.

"Famous? Who are you?" The driver asked. "Have I heard of you? Would my granddaughter know who you are? Can I have your autograph?"

"Do you not know?" Kitty asked. "Hello? Kitty Kilander? Right here! Sitting right in front of you!"

"You're in the back seat, madam," The driver said.

"Fucking fine! Behind you I mean! What the fuck ever! Do you not know who I am?"

"I'm afraid not..."

We reached our destination, the escape room was right by an entertainment store that had a bunch of cardboard cutouts in front of it. One of them was of Kitty in her Haven fighting gear. Kitty stormed out of the car and held up the cardboard and brought it to the driver's side window.

"See? Same hot as fuck and badass lady that is on the cardboard standee now standing directly in front of you!"

"I don't see it," The driver said. "And you're standing to my left, not in front of me."

"Rgggh!" Kitty growled, smacking the car with the standee as it drove away. I had the driver app up, and Kitty noticed. "Do not give him a tip. In fact..." She swiped my phone from me, rated the guy one star, then wrote "RUDE ASSHOLE WITH BAD TASTE AND NO POP CULTURE AWARENESS" as the comment.

"Er, sorry about that," I said.

"Stop talking, let's just do this escape room," Kitty said.

The escape room was about as fancy as I expected, a higher end place in the city for big corporate parties and such. Really, my coworkers were missing out not going.

But the front desk person got Kitty even more pissed immediately, asking, "Party of sixteen?"

"Party of two," Kitty sighed. "Just me and my idiot coworker who sucks."

"Wow, coworker! That puts us almost on an even playing field!" I said.

"I just want to get this over with," Kitty said.

"You know, you can get a refund if over half of the registered group isn't present," the front desk lady said.

Kitty sighed again and looked at me for some reason.

"Er, heh, your call there Kitty," I said. "I mean, we're here already? So?"

"Fine, let's go," Kitty said.

"I do have to note that room three of the game you've selected has a bit of an issue," the woman said.

"Ugh. What?" Kitty asked.

"It's just, in every other room there is a system in place for you to phone for help and security cameras are rolling; room three's are broken, so just speed through that one? We've had a lot of people taking stuff from that one so there's only like two puzzles you have to solve in it, and they're easy."

"Mmhm, I bet you guys get lots of people having sex in there," I said.

"Ew," Kitty said. "Why would you say that out loud?"

The front desk lady just laughed nervously.

"Ohh, wait, maybe it's the kind of thing where the cameras are working and they're trying to get people to have sex in there!" I said.

"I can assure you that's not the case," The front desk lady said. "But if you do run into an issue there just shout really, really loudly. We can hear loud shouts."

"I bet you figured that one out when people were having sex really loudly in there," I said.

"If you keep talking I'm just going to do the rooms on my own," Kitty said.

I managed to stop myself from talking there, and didn't speak again until we actually started the escape room games.

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