For What Ails You
Rika was tired.
She hadn’t been sleeping well, you see. Her mattress, while not the most luxurious thing in the world, wasn’t uncomfortable. No no, her newly acquired source of insomnia came from something else - mostly thoughts, which all seemed to stir at once when Rika stopped moving around and attempts to distract herself finally stopped coming. What if’s and unanswered questions rose up from the dark corners of her mind, and rest became a feeble endeavor. This had the unfortunate side-effect of making it hard to go around and basically function at all during the day.
Medicine is nice. It tended to solve these kinds of issues. But see, there’s a problem with just going out to buy some: the stores around here? Yeah...not so easy to locate. It wasn’t that there weren’t any: it was that their location changed every couple of hours. Therefore, no one knew where to find any specific place, and maps were totally and utterly useless. That left it up to exploration, except that if you didn’t find it within a certain window of time, any searching up till then is completely undone, because now everything was in a new place again.
As you would imagine, shopping in Hive City (or at least sector 1) could be more troublesome than it otherwise had any right being. Rika was discovering this now.
“Hate this stupid place,” she mumbled, gruffly shoving open a door-
-before her demeanor visibly shifted and her features lit up oh-so happily, like nothing was wrong and she was just some kid looking for candy in the store she just entered. Just in case someone was watching. Call it a habit.
It was a general store. A convenience store, even - it was hard to tell. No matter what, Rika wasted no time heading straight to the back, looking for the one thing she was in dire need of right now.
Sleeping aids would probably help, and so would pain medicine, but Rika’s number one goal? Wine. She needed it. Badly. Even cheap beer would do, if she had to. Hopefully this place sold liquor...
