Nanowrimo Day 10: Checking In

So we have one full week of Nanowrimo under our belts and so starts week two. This is the tough week where most people feel the doldrums and I can tell that I am already feeling them myself. I knocked out the first short story last week fairly easily, but this second story is turning out to be a bit longer and more complicated than I anticipated. I was hoping to keep it under 10,000 words, but we are rapidly approaching that limit and I am hoping I can wrap it up here soon. 

This particular second story features Apath and Spice who get caught up in an animal burglary when an eco-terrorism entity steals animals from a research lab. These animals are more than these seem. APath gets caught in the middle of a trade deal gone bad and they end up transporting the thief and the stolen animal while being chased by another syndicate. Their only chance of coming out unscathed is to strike a deal with the same organization that the animal was stolen from and may be they can find out in the process what is just so special about this stolen animal. 

 Apath and Spice are sitting at an outdoor cafe in the city of Ensenada. It is a late August afternoon and the temperature is a surprisingly mild eight two degrees. Large roll up doors to the cafe are up and the small street market outside is packet nearly shoulder to shoulder with people buying their goods for the day. The vendors on the street range from fish mongers with their fish laid out on ice in front of their stalls, to vegetable grocers, to spice merchants, to cellphone brokers and everything in between. To the uninitiated the entire seen seems like a chaotic mess as goods and funds are traded back and forth. This is a fairly common market that is found in most of the cities and there are perhaps dozens of them spread across Ensenada serving its population of nearly eighteen million.  

They both had just finished making a delivery and their ship the Purefold was sitting in a shipping hanger waiting for departure. 

What attracted Apath and Spice to this particular market was its proximity to the Ensenada's bay. Near the water front there were relatively few of the super blocks, towering skyscrapers that sometimes held up to a million residents, which resulted in a pleasant view overlooking the waterfront. True, that waterfront was mostly a makeshift shantytown of floating barges and houseboats, but there was something serene about the small neighborhood that existed inside of this large, super metropolis that was run mostly hi-tech suits and robots and AI. Most of the city was surprisingly clean and sterile for being what some considered a post-apocalyptic world, but as it would have it the world sort of just continued to progress on.

Forgetting all of that philosophical stuff though, Apath mainly liked this place for the fish tacos. He picked up a soft shell taco, with lightly breaded fish, shredded lettuce, onions and a drizzle of lemon and took a large bite. The sauce and piece of lettuce hang from the side of his mouth as he wiped it with his napkin and then washed the food down with a sip from his mojito.