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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!»
Chapter 3. Battle with taxi drivers
The guy in the blue robe raised his right hand up, as if wanting to create a large combat fireball and rain down fire on the unfortunate taxi drivers and their personal vehicles.
A colleague, a battle mage, for some reason Alina decided for herself. She was both afraid and embarrassed to intervene. And rightly so, who needs an incompetent sorceress? Her fireballs, which she used to light the burners on the stove, could not compare in any way with real battle spells. Perhaps the girl would have succeeded, but, alas, she had no practice in this matter, and she was afraid to get into a fight, hoping for the Russian «Maybe» that the spells from the books of Olga Gromyko or Sergei Lukyanenko would work as described. What if the guy gets out on his own? He has a dragon. Fire-breathing, judging by the smoke from its nostrils.
The orcs, sensing their imminent death, retreated back to the cars, and the guy, taking advantage of the enemy’s momentary confusion, rushed away from the parking lot.
The unfortunate dragon, who did not expect this from his owner, almost let go of the notebook from his front paws and, stumbling, trotted after him.
– Prey! – the monsters roared and rushed together after the fleeing magician.
He turned around sharply and, noticing the chase, jumped. He summoned a levitation spell and jumped over the almost ten meter high fence that separated the parking lot from the airfield. The black dragon, whose owner had thrown away its leash, looked with a sad gaze either at the magician standing under the wing of the plane, or at the orcs approaching him in the clothes of taxi drivers.
– Dan, who did you leave me with? – he howled, clutching the notebook to his chest.
In the animal’s gaze one could read only one thing: «For what, Judas?» He tensed his small wings, twenty centimeters in span, and tried to take off, but, alas, the carcass turned out to be too heavy to lift. No matter how hard the pet was scolded, it could only jump a meter and, comically flapping its wings, fall and crush its tail.
But the orcs turned out to be much more perceptive. After another attempt by the dragon to imitate a black Boeing, one of the monsters jumped onto its back and, springing, grabbed onto the fence mesh at a height of almost five meters. Then it was a matter of technique, and the orc climbed to the other side of the airfield. The remaining two did the same, despite the fact that the dragon was indignant and promised them something unflattering. True, he babbled all his threats not in Russian, and no one had a chance to find out what fate he had in store for the nasty taxi drivers.
The owner, realizing that there was no way to escape the chase, ran under the stationary plane.
«He’s not a battle mage,» Alina said quietly under her breath, watching the guy hide from the taxi drivers behind the landing gear of the plane. – And not a shaman. The asphalt is probably the work of these orcs.
The dragon, who sat down under a pillar and began to write notes, glared at the strange girl with a yellow eye with an elongated black pupil, but, realizing that danger could hardly be expected from an unarmed girl, he continued to do his job.
– Levitation! – Alina commanded herself, repeating all Dan’s intonations and spreading her arms wide.
From the films, the girl remembered that the magician did exactly this when taking off. It didn’t work, so she jumped and repeated the spell before her feet could touch the ground. Managed!!! She felt that she had suddenly become weightless and could fly anywhere.
The dragon followed her beyond the fence with a look full of envy and, stopping writing, also began jumping up and down, repeating the word ’levitation’. Alas, what is given to people is not given to magical mammals, so he had no choice but to cling to the chain-link mesh with his claws and climb over the fence, as the orcs did.
While the clumsy, fat-assed dragon, holding a notebook in his teeth, climbed onto the field, a real battle unfolded there.
As soon as Alina reached the Hungarian Airlines airbus, around which Dan and a trio of orcs were almost playing tag, she quite accidentally released a real combat fireball towards the pursuers of the stranger magician.
The spell happened by itself: the girl just imagined how a small light flies out of her hand and grows to the size of ball lightning. And as soon as she uttered the word «fireball,» something lit up in her heart, hot lava flowed through the arteries to the palm of her right hand and, flying out into the air, turned into a half-meter ball.
Why did she decide to help this strange boy in a blue robe? Why is he good, but the orcs must run away with their backs scorched? If it weren’t for the memories of the moment of her departure from the banal world, the girl would not have paid any attention to this tall, strong guy in a blue robe and his problems. And since this was the only witness of her transition to the world of magicians, then he must be saved from the orcs, even if these monsters are «good» gentlemen. But what about who to interrogate if they kill the magician?
Three non-humans, seeing a strong combat spell, collapsed to the ground, pressing the backs of their heads with their paws. It’s not without reason that they say that the orc offspring are not distinguished by intelligence and intelligence: the monsters bowed their heads, but they placed their butts just right so that the fireball thrown by Alina would set their pants on fire in the most indecent place.
The magician, who was escaping from the nonhumans, stopped and stared in amazement at the savior who had appeared out of nowhere, muttering a single word under his breath: «Lina.» There was no end to his surprise, but it was too early to relax and celebrate the victory. And Alina herself wondered why he was so scared that he knew her name and called her in the European manner.
– Letistenote 2! Let’s go! – the black dragon sitting on the fence screamed as if he had been cut, which brought the guy out of his stupor about the girl who saved him, and the sorceress – well… also out of her stupor.
The sorceress, who did not know the language in which the animal screamed, only looked where the dragon was pointing with its paw. The magician also stared there.
The fireball that set the orcs on fire did not melt in the air, but continued on its way… towards the small Boeing at the next exit. And the plane had already turned on its engines. You don’t need to be an aviator to understand what happens when a fireball touches fuel. So it’s not difficult to demolish the airport. Bin Laden will be jealous.
Why do fireballs go out on their own only in cartoons and science fiction novels? However, Alina did not waste time thinking about it.
– Water cannon! – the girl blurted out the first spell that came to her mind and extended both hands forward, palms out.
It didn’t take long for the force to appear again. Now it seemed to the sorceress that her heart had drowned in the depths of the ocean, and a stream of water gushed from her palms under great pressure, so that she could hardly stand on her feet.
I must say, Alina made it just in time, and the hissing firebrand fell to the ground literally five meters from the plane’s wing.
– Phew!
Dan, smiling contentedly, looked at the heavily breathing magician.
But, alas, it was too early to relax again. She was guaranteed a meeting with the asphalt that the sorceress would remember for a long time. Two orcs took a tactically correct action and, knocking her down, sat on her like on a log: one on her shoulder blades, the other on her knees.
The cheek with which Alina hit the ground ached with pain, but she could not even raise her head.
– Why did you interfere, bitch? – barked the orc, who settled on his shoulder blades. – Pink FIFA doesn’t like amateur performances!
No matter how much she wanted, the girl could not say a word. And while two disgusting taxi drivers were holding her back, the remaining one attacked Dan with a knife. And he would not have lived if not for an accident.
– Hey, orc, wait! – the black dragon shouted in Czech, having already climbed over the fence and settled down not far from the battlefield with his notes.
The taxi driver, who obviously did not know any language other than Russian, stared questioningly at the animal, which spoke a language very similar to this Russian, but in a slightly different language. Ukrainian? Moldavian? Bulgarian?
– What are you staring at? You must attack Dan with a brutal expression on your face, and my master must skillfully dodge you. Otherwise there is not enough pathos in the poem.
The orc, blinking his eyes, looked questioningly at the foreign dragon, who, after his fiery speech, again began to diligently scribble in his notebook.
Dan, who really disliked his pet’s penchant for poetry, winked at him. It turns out that sometimes the stupid speech of a graphomaniac has a stronger effect on the enemy than a spell. All the orcs abandoned their prey and went to the writer. Have you really decided to read his heroic poem?
Alina, of course, got up, without ceasing to rub her cheek, which was torn and bleeding.
– Jak se jmenujete, Linanote 3? – Dan looked sideways at the girl.
Alina stared questioningly at the magician with a stunned look. His phrase was similar to a stupid student stem: «Who wrote Turgenev’s Mu-mu?»
«I don’t name anyone,» she snorted. – And I’m not Lina. You’ve made a mistake.
– You don’t understand me, Russian woman. I’ll ask you what your name is. And Lina… You look a lot like her.
The girl introduced herself and smiled back, as much as her broken cheek would allow her. But the magician opened his mouth in surprise. Even if it’s not Lina, Alina, what’s the difference.
– Are you a foreigner? – she asked in response. – But you know Russian quite well.
– I’m coming to Moscow from Prague. My name is Dan. I study Russian at school. I am a necromancer. I will get…
But he didn’t have time to finish. The orcs, who suspiciously quickly ceased to be interested in the dragon’s poetry, looked at the victim with a grin. But Alina understood perfectly well that the magician she met at the airport did not know combat spells. It’s a shame not to be able to use levitation, but other bells and whistles require strength. If Dan is a necromancer, then all his abilities are in resurrecting the dead, and not in throwing fireballs. That’s why the guy chased the orcs around the plane, because the only thing he could do to them was to exhaust their physical strength.
The sorceress stretched her hands forward and whispered:
– Fuck-tibi-doh-tibi-doh! Kirieshkus-dimedrolus!
She closed her eyes and imagined small crackers, filled with sleeping pills, flying out of the palm of her right hand. For some reason, out of fear, she decided that the stupid orcs would certainly rush to the crackers scattered on the ground and begin to devour them. As if the movie Shurik’s unsuccessful experience with the professor’s sausage didn’t mean anything.
But, alas, even the first point of Alina’s plan failed. She has not yet reached that absolute level when any imagined spells would be translated into reality. I rolled my lip, as they say: it was one to noon in the magical world, and I already wanted to throw homemade spells.
So it turned out that instead of a hail of crackers, a pack of «Kirieshki’ suddenly fell out of the sorceress’s hand. This would have been the end of the stupid idiot if one of the orcs had not picked up the crackers and swallowed them along with the packaging. Alina grimaced, how unsympathetic she was to such a habit of monsters.
Suddenly the non-human grabbed his stomach and spat out a pile of white rounds onto the ground… sucked diphenhydramine tablets. In the best traditions of «Operation Y», as you would expect!
However, the effect of the spell immediately manifested itself, and the orc, unable to overcome gluttony, fell to the ground, snoring loudly.
«You are a very powerful magician, Alina,» Dan patted her on the shoulder. «You are no worse than Lina, with whom I confused you.»
The two remaining monsters, having recovered from putting their comrade to sleep, grabbed him by the arms and ran towards the airport service premises, loudly shouting to the skeletons in the trucks that hooligan magicians were operating at the fence.
«I would probably die if Alina didn’t save me,» said the necromancer, taking the girl’s hand and touching the back of her hand with his lips.
Oddly enough, in her twenty-three years of life the girl had never met such a gallant gentleman as the young necromancer turned out to be. And even if he doesn’t look like Sylvester Stallone or Leonardo DiCaprio, it doesn’t matter that his long-nosed face is not at all photogenic, and his amber eyes combined with thick silver hair made him look like a Japanese cartoon character. But despite all this, there was something attractive about him. She lowered her gaze and covered her bruised cheek with her hand.
– Is a Russian girl embarrassed? – the magician pouted, – Dan doesn’t understand.
– Hey, what are you doing there? – a skeleton on a cart, driving towards the place where the sorceress and the necromancer stood, shouted into a megaphone. – Who allowed you to walk along the runway as if it were Arbat?
The skeletons in Novosibirsk and Moscow were in exactly the same uniforms, only on the back of their orange vests were different airport names.
From her past life, Alina knew very well what the risks of walking along the tarmac were: if you weren’t arrested and called a terrorist, you’d be run over by an airplane or blasted with such hot air that you’d turn into a chop. Airports in the world of magicians were no different, with the exception of the skeletal-goblin staff, of course.
– Levitation! – Alina and Dan said, each in their own language, and jumped over the fence.
– And what about me? – the dragon howled, starting to climb the net in the opposite direction.
«You’ll catch up, poet,» the necromancer waved his hand and walked towards the transport stop.
