This is the first part (of thirty parts) of a Nanowrimo story that my collaborator and I will be writing, as one post every day, throughout the month of November.
It really didn’t seem like that amazing a place when you first saw it. The sign on the glass door was old (but could have been older), its text faded (but still legible). To the left of the street entrance was an old grocery store whose food was nearly all rotten or infested with some sort of bug — to the right, a restaurant that never got any customers. A fluffy white cat was sleeping in the window. From the outside, the agency looked more like a dentist’s office. The only clue to its true nature was the small, badly-drawn symbol on the aforementioned old, faded sign — the sun, eclipsed by the moon, and a simple phrase in plain text: SunMoon detective services.
Of course it was a run-down place, but that was probably a good thing. Those girls, the SunMoon detectives, were so smart that a place any nicer would have flooded them with customers and undoubtedly burnt them out within a month and a half. They liked it here. Or rather, they didn’t particularly dislike it. None of their neighbours talked to them much, and they had to do the occasional odd job to pay the rent, but when they got their cases, they solved every one. Whether it was lost cat or a murderer on the lam, they could find it for you.
The self-proclaimed ‘Sun’ half of their service was exceedingly bored at the moment. Her office was littered with bad drawings of smiling faces and rainbows. On her desk, in place of the customary picture of a loved one, she had a newspaper clipping from the last time they’d solved a really big case a few years ago. Her computer ran a screensaver of a bustling city during the day, but it was of no interest to her at the moment. Right now she was wrapped up in one of her doodles, trying desperately to draw a lion basking in the sun purely from memory. Or at least that was the picture in her head. To anyone else the drawing looked a lot more like an anorexic cat right after being run over.
But that wasn’t the kind of thought she would have. She was the sun, and the Sun should be bright, productive and cheery. Oh! Productive! That’s right, she was supposed to be doing something worthwhile. She straightened herself up, pushing orange curls off of her right eye, and wrote in large letters on the top of her doodle-filled page: NOTES. Smiling and having accomplished her goal, she slouched again and continued drawing her lion. Julia Strype, after all, wouldn’t be caught dead doing something non-productive.
Speaking of non-productive, in an adjacent office, one door down from Julia the ‘Sun’, sat the ‘Moon’, although this title was not exactly self-proclaimed. She couldn’t remember exactly how she had gotten to be the ‘Moon’, but suffice to say it was not her idea. Her room was far less cheery than that of her partner. On the wall were miscellaneous prints of waterfalls and mountainous landscapes, neither of which particularly ignited her interest, and on her desk was a faded newspaper clipping from when they were still Genius Teen Detectives. On the back wall there was a colourful dartboard, festooned at the moment with about a dozen magnet darts, none of which were even vaguely close to the center of the board.
She glanced over quickly at her computer’s screensaver, which displayed a number of tropical fish swimming across the screen, back and forth, back and forth. Quite mesmerizing, she thought, if you stared at it long enough. Right now it was the angelfish. Sighing, she pushed her straight black hair out of her left eye and threw another dart, missing the dartboard completely. Maybe it was her lack of depth perception… why did they have these stupid haircuts, anyway? Concealing one eye each from the rest of the world only debilitated them, didn’t it? Anyway, all things considered it probably hadn’t been her idea. She decided to throw her next dart straight up into the air and catch it, but it ended up hitting the door behind her and landing, broken, on the ground. She sighed again, frustrated.
It had been months since their last case, and their last case had been way too easy. They needed something big. Umbry Stykes, the ‘Moon’ detective, really hated being bored. A whole world full of crime, and yet it seemed there weren’t any interesting cases they could get their hands on. Friggin’ FBI and the police and all the other acronyms got all the good ones. Maybe the days of the PI were really over. Maybe they should shorten their name. S and M? Oh wait, that didn’t sound too good at all. She wrinkled her nose, stretched and stood up, walking out into the lobby. She was greeted by an apathetic college guy and a sleeping cat. She patted it (the sleeping cat, that is, NOT the college guy) on the head and it purred. The college guy, on the other hand, didn’t even acknowledge her presence.
“Any calls, Lindsay?” She asked, trying to act as if she hadn’t come out here for the express purpose of knowing if there were any calls.
“What do you think?”
Umbry sighed. “Good point.” She gave the fluffy cat one last scratch behind the ears and left. The cat turned lazily to gaze up at Lindsay. He smiled back at it before going back to looking at funny pictures of other cats. Oh, how he loved cats.
A few minutes later Julia emerged from her office. She scratched the white cat’s ear and rubbed its belly, and the cat purred loudly in contentment. She smiled.
“Any calls, Lindsay?”
“What do you think?”
“…Oh.” Somewhat disappointed, she gave the cat one last belly rub and left for her office, closing the door behind her.
Lindsay rolled his eyes. “What weirdos. I swear, as soon as I get a better job than this…” He leaned back in his chair and yawned, pushing shaggy brown hair out of his eyes. The cat stared at him for a second through half-open eyes and then curled back up in a ball to continue sleeping, apparently having had enough excitement for one day. He grinned in appreciation at the feline’s economy of expression, and was about to continue perusing his catalogue of comical cats when the front doorbell rang. Startled by the unexpected sound, he jumped out of the chair, quickly scooping up the mess of doodles, darts and candy wrappers and sweeping them into the desk drawer. If he’d been able to get to the door faster, he could have told his customer that their bell was very old. Now he could only watch as half of the bell detached itself from the glass door, making a very depressing muffled ringing as it hit the ground. Bashfully, he massaged his temples, and proceeded to flip his long bangs away from his face. He put on an obviously fake ghost of a smile. The cat, now awake again, watched this unexpected bustle of activity with clinical interest.
“Welcome to SunMoon detective services. We solve your cases, night or day. How may I help you?”
🙂