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During the course of the song, Era caught sight of a somewhat small child sitting down at a table. The kid (boy? girl? she couldn't tell from this distance) wore a paint-splattered hoodie and seemed to be alone. Era watched the child, who seemed to be enjoying the music, out of the corner of her eye. The child looked excited at first, but a few minutes later (around the point where Era was singing, "Sun, sun, sun, here it comes!") slumped over on the table in a way that looked just a little unnerving.

At the close of the song, Era stayed on the stage just long enough to make an excuse implying that she wanted a moment of quiet, before going over to check on the kid she had seen. On one hand, it was late and small children normally wouldn't be awake at an hour like this, so it was possible that the kid had just fallen asleep; on the other, there was always at least a slim chance that something had gone actually wrong. If the kid was actually hurt or poisoned or something, it would be better to find out as soon as possible so that maybe she could help.

Era approached the little paint-stained lump on the table, next to an abandoned lemonade, and gently shook the child's shoulder. It was warm and she could feel the kid breathing, so that was a good sign. "Hej, fëmijë," she said, her tone gentle, before mentally realigning herself to switch back to English. She wasn't quite sure how her native language had crept in, except that she automatically associated talking to kids with her own childhood. "Kid. Hey, kid. Are you okay there? Is everything all right?"

Chances were, everything would be just fine. Era just wanted to be absolutely sure that someone so much younger than the usual clientele wasn't having anything wrong. She certainly didn't want anything bad to befall a guest on her watch.

Era wasn't completely sure what kind of a response she had expected to elicit with her offhand mention of her ongoing disagreement with the London police force as a whole, but she was sure that this wasn't it.

“The policía are crazy! If anything, you're beautiful,” the woman declared laughingly, much to Era's surprise, before describing her further as “exotic.” Era could only blink, mildly confused. She thought of her own appearance as ordinary, about as far from “exotic” as you could get. Trying to wrap her mind around this reminded her of exactly how far away from home she was. She liked it here, but from time to time she realized she missed where she had come from, and this was quite suddenly one of those times.

“The police do not like me very much either,” Era's new acquaintance admitted. It was the sort of thing that Era probably could have discerned from the fact that they were both sitting in a jail cell right now, but at the same time it was something they had in common.

The woman's description of her taxi service piqued Era's interest. She wondered what kinds of customers such a job would get, and how much they overlapped with the customers she served at her own job. In addition, it occurred to her that if this woman did turn out to be trustworthy, a cheap, reliable, and unobtrusive mode of transportation could be very useful to her.

When the more complete story of what had happened with the sandwich came out, Era found herself grimacing in sympathy. She had never been reduced quite as far as stealing sandwiches out of strangers' hands, but she had flirted with hunger enough that she could understand the impulse.

Era shook hands with the woman, Camila Duarte, as she introduced herself. At the words “I come from Venezuela,” Era's interest was piqued. It was questionable whether she could have picked out Venezuela on a map had there been one around to test her knowledge on, but she was sure that it was on a different continent, one that she had never been to.

In her turn, the younger woman smiled and explained, “If you have heard of my homeland, you would know it as Albania. To me, it is Shqipëri, the land of the eagles.” For a moment, she appeared to swell with pride, almost as if a red flag blazoned with a black eagle might be about to spontaneously appear projected on the wall behind her. Then Era deflated a bit. “Then again, you might well have never heard of it. It doesn't surprise me, anymore, how many people haven't. We are not a large country, nor wealthy...”

When the door to the cell opened, Era looked up out of curiosity. Another woman entered, and the door was shut and locked again behind her. Era looked her over, registering in those first moments that the woman was a little on the short side, with long, wavy brown hair, not too different from how Era's own had looked before she had taken to cutting it short, and a look of high indignation on her delicate-featured face. The odd thing was that the other woman started talking, but apparently not to Era, and in fact seemingly without noticing the Albanian's presence at all. Something about a dispute over a sandwich, it sounded like. Whatever it was had clearly gotten the woman worked up.

Throwing a tantrum like that was a perfectly reasonable option for Era as far as reacting to her current predicament went, and if her day hadn't previously been going all right, she might have taken it. But this sort of thing happened to her so often that she just couldn't get that mad about it every single time. So she simply remained where she was, sitting politely with her hands folded in her lap, until the other woman was done expressing her frustration and turned to greet her.

Era responded to the woman's “Hi” in kind, with a smile that she hoped would demonstrate that she understood her soon-to-be-acquaintance's frustration just fine and didn't have anything against her for it. Apparently she was coming off as friendly enough, because the woman sat down next to her, making it clear that there was a significant difference in their heights. It was still a bit disconcerting to Era how many women around here were much shorter than her when, back home, she had been a woman of perfectly average height.

“So, princesa? Whatcha doing here?”

The woman had a pretty strong accent, but it was easy for Era to understand because it was surprisingly similar to her own. She wondered where this woman was from. Although Era's accent had faded to some extent over the few years she had spent in London, she found it flaring back up in her reply. “They wanted a suspect, and it seems I have a suspicious face,” she admitted, adopting a darkly humorous tone for the observation. “It happens from time to time. The police don't like where I'm from or where I work, so they think I must be involved with anything that happens around me. How about you?” Era had already heard the little sandwich rant, of course, but she suspected it would do her new cellmate some good to vent and explain the matter to another person.

The woman's taking off her shoes prompted Era to look down at her own feet. She had left her high heels in the handbag that had been taken away from her when she was being booked in, since she couldn't walk all the way back to her dorm from work in shoes like that. Instead, she was wearing sneakers, which perhaps didn't match her neat dress but certainly made walking easier.

It occurred to her that she hadn't really introduced herself. “I'm called Era, by the way. Era Kastrati. What's your name?”

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

-Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"

Era knew perfectly well that it was a bad idea to anger a police officer, especially with a record like hers, but there were some days when there didn't seem to be any possible course of action that didn't dig her into deeper trouble with them. She knew that perfectly well, too; after all, that was how she had come by that record in the first place despite her behavior being entirely unimpeachable if you cared about little things like facts.

This incident was pretty routine (as terrible as it was that this sort of thing could happen so often that she had a routine to deal with it), but dreadfully annoying nonetheless. Era had been walking home from work when some cop had confronted her, demanding to know where she was going. As usual, she had told nothing but the truth, but--also as usual--he hadn't believed her. So maybe she had gotten a little sarcastic when the cop kept pushing for her to confess to whatever crime he was out to pin on her. There was no way to construe her words as a confession, but she had apparently offended him enough that he decided that her actions qualified as "disturbing the peace." Again. Era's record made it quite clear to anyone who cared to peruse it that either she had it in for peace, or the police had it in for her.

Unfortunately for her--since this meant that she couldn't do anything about it--it was the latter case that had landed her in a jail cell again. Out of a perverse sort of determination to contradict the officer's claims about her, she was unfailingly polite to everyone she met in the station, doing her best to project the image of a gracious guest being invited to stay someplace. Within minutes, they had dumped her in a holding cell. I'm getting to the point where I can recognize these, she thought dryly. Maybe I should give them nicknames.

She sat down on the bench to the side of the cell and folded her hands politely in her lap, humming under her breath to keep herself company while she waited for something to happen.

{Here you go, Camila Isabella Duarte, sorry it took me a while to get this up! And to any mods who may see this: if you think this is in the wrong place, please let me know where the right place would be!}

Era Kastrati | Albania | My classmates are nuts | Have you seen this penguin?

And no, I'm not breaking the speed limit, I promise.