;; @veinlaced
While Isaac hadn’t set out with the bar in his mind, his path seemed to take him there directly. Dark had settled, signalling the long awaited start of the weekend and like him, people filtered out into the streets downtown. This town was more alive than others Isaac had passed through. Smokers clustered around the mouths of the few watering holes scattered along the main streets, and already drunk gaggles of laughing young people, drifted aimlessly between them. It was his first night in town, and Isaac had booked himself into the motel, dragged his bag into the room, and then he thought he might use the night to begin gathering information. Get a head start on his investigation so he could leave sooner, but leave sooner...to go where?
He didn’t even remember what the town was called anymore. Franklin? No, that must have been the last one. Never more than a few weeks in one place over the last year, every new town Isaac passed through had just overlayed itself over the last. He’d always prided himself on attention to detail, but now embarrassingly Isaac wasn’t sure he could have given a distinguishing feature of a single town he'd passed through, even if pressed.
And this place, whatever it was called, was no different from the rest. Bigger than some maybe, but its main street was still riddled with For Lease signs in boarded store fronts. People were moving to the cities, another Agent told him when he asked, but it was difficult to get clear answers about things like that, and everyone had an opinion they were eager to explain to him, before he’d decided to stop asking. At least some things never changed.
Still, Isaac avoided the cites. Even in his own time he had tried to, but now more than he’d thought possible they were too loud, busy, people moving through the densely packed streets like insects through a hive. Someone told him there’d been cities just as busy when Isaac had been born, just on the other side of the world, but Isaac had never seen those.
They didn’t allow smoking inside of bars, apparently not since it had been discovered it would kill you. So before he went inside, leaning against the patio railing Isaac took the time to roll himself a cigarette and smoke it slowly.
