Guild of Tokens: Trainee

Bachelorette pad

The warm morning light washed over the bedroom. Well, it would have, if the one window in the room actually looked out onto something other than a brick wall. Still, a tiny ray of sunlight usually crept into the tiny "den" of Beatrice's Bowery apartment and it was enough to rouse her from her sleep. Her reward for waking up was a pounding in her head and a dry throat. She sat up and opened her eyes, trying to remember why she was here instead of in her much larger bed uptown.

The half-naked man beside her let out a loud snore. Oh, right. She had stormed out of the apartment, hopped in a cab downtown, and then had started texting the Quester guys in her phone to see if anyone would meet up for a drink and then some. Let Garrett deal with Jack Jack by himself for once, she had thought. If he was going to be so blatant about flouting their marriage vows, then she didn't feel bad at beating him at his own game. From the presence of whoever this guy was, and her own half-state of undress, she surmised that she had succeeded in some part of her plan.

Beatrice scooted down to the middle of the mattress. A set of built-in cabinets ran along the adjacent wall, with a clearance of maybe four inches from the bed. It made the tiny room feel even tinier and she had to move back onto to the bed to even open the doors. What clothes did she even still have here? The answer was one full-length black dress and one old down coat. Beatrice sighed and bent down to pick up her sweater from yesterday off of the floor, but it was nowhere to be found. She settled for the blue button down at the foot of the bed and walked to the bathroom.

Her reflection in the mirror could have been from ten years ago - the bags under her eyes, the hangover headache, the shirt that wasn't hers. She had been a typical wild child living it up in the city: out most nights, a new guy every other week. That was before the Quests though, before the curtain had been pulled back and Beatrice had discovered a truth about the world, a truth that would have made most people curl up into a ball on the ground and never get up. Except she was made of sterner stuff. Working her way up from the bottom, grinding out Quest after Quest after Quest, piling up all those tokens. Sure, she had caught a few breaks along the way, the diary being one, but if anything, that had made her work even harder.

Beatrice turned on the tap and let the rust-colored water turn clear before splashing some on her face. It didn't do the trick, and she tried to remember if she had anything in the other room that would help get rid of the throbbing in her head. She could deal with the aftermath of last night if she could just get in the right mindse--

Three successive pounds on the front door broke her train of thought.

Fuck.

It was Garrett, although she didn't know how. She'd already moved to a different apartment by the time they started dating and she never told him where she used to live. Maybe he had tailed her last night after she stormed out of the apartment. She laughed at the image of Garrett racing out of their building with a sleeping Jack Jack in a baby Bjorn, and decided it must just be the annoying old woman from across the hall complaining again.

Beatrice walked back into the bedroom, where the mystery man was still asleep, and tiptoed into the living room. The front door shook again. Too loud to be the old woman, she thought. A flick of the peephole finally revealed the perpetrator: it was Kate.