Chapter 1

Next Station Please

by Snowy

As always Lataily drove her bike like a mad man to the station and ran up the side entrance stairs to the platform of the train station. She literally almost collapsed on to the seat and took in long gasps of air to catch her breath. Nothing new or occasional, just her daily routine of leaving home too late.

After putting her keys away carefully, cause it certainly wouldn’t be the first time for her to lose them, she took another look at the display of her cell phone. Almost a quarter to eleven. She knew she should have dragged herself out off bed half an hour earlier and aimed for the "10.15". While looking out of the window and trying to make the train go a little faster with her mind, she just started wishing her connection would have a fifteen minute delay so she would still be on time to catch it.

As the train entered the station Lataily was the first to get up and out of her seat and made her way through the waiting crowd who wanted to enter the train, she sprinted across arrival platform 14, up one escalator and leaned a little forward going down another, then quietly scolded at herself for thinking that would make her go any faster and finally ran down departure platform 7.

All this effort was just in time to see her train slowly making more speed as it wheeled out of the station. Pissed off at the train for leaving on time every time she didn’t want it to, and maybe even more angry with herself that she now would be late (again) for the comedy show rehearsal and performance she and her fellow students where about to give tonight, Lataily dropped her bag on one of the platform benches and sat down cross legged, next to it.

Next, as if things just couldn’t get any worse a woman’s voice kindly made the announcement that due to an interruption there would be no more possibilities to get to the capitol city, unless you were willing to take the international train and pay two dollars extra to board. Her gestures must have been great at this point, because everybody looked at her a little strangely as if they would never get so excited just because one or two trains fell out.

As if..., she thought to herself and wished her acting teacher could have seen her right now. But since she didn’t want to let down the others or ruin the presentation because of her coming late, she decided that for this one time she would take the International city express. And well, that one just happened to arrive together with her thoughts.

Lataily hopped on board and stood in the beautifully decorated and luxurious hallway for a couple of minutes while she took a look into the second class and decided that it must be said that this was a lot of luxury for the two dollars extra.