Ment
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Hey, Officer, how's life treating you?
We are high above the dark gray clouds, on some small planet. Everywhere, within the thick clouds, fiery flashes are visible. The cloudy surface seems endless, but no, the planet is actually quite small, and its optical properties are such that, when looking into the distance, you can see your own reflection.
The fiery flashes are dragons. They don't like our presence. Whatever our purpose for being here, we realize that we can't stay any longer – the dragons are trying to attack us, and there are more and more of them. We need to somehow avoid the largest concentration of them... We try to do this by moving into the heart of the cloud, but we don't успеваем – in the center of the greatest concentration of dragons, a large fiery bubble appears, which turns into the same red gates, and something is happening there... A celebration. A wedding of some ancient god.
Ironically, that's exactly what it was all planned for. We don't want the bride, who is known to one of us, to be there. By the way, there are three of us, two guys and a girl, and we have already prepared pieces of paper, stylized as playing cards. Each of us did this according to a principle we invented ourselves, with unique symbolic drawings. As if to test our luck, but on only one card from each of our sets, each of us wrote their phone number.
We throw all this into the thick of events and quickly leave so as not to get caught.
The next day, another place. Some house or cafe in a beautiful, European-style, green town. We're eating, but the mood isn't great. No one called. Either the bride didn't draw the right card, or something else... Maybe they were incinerated along the way. It also turned out that the guy in our group messed up with the cards – they turned out to be minimally informative, with an emphasis on the fact that he wins some kind of game with the cards. In short, they're useless. A wedding is playing outside the window. And then the girl in our group notices, "Did you know that a Roman wedding is traditionally celebrated three times?" Holy crap. We run out of the building – yes, it is, the procession is heading into a dense, "Celtic" forest. We repeat the card trick.
Later that day, a girl calls me, with a very worried voice.
– What happened? I found two cards, one has the first part of the phone number (burned?), the other has the second (?), what does this mean?
– I have a friend... He knows you, and you should know him... He lost you a long time ago and really wants to talk to you... There's still time before the third wedding. Do you understand that this is... I'm struggling to find the right words in this conversation... serious... People don't climb into the clouds for trivial reasons.
On the other side, sobs begin – the girl is crying. Either from my anxious tone, or because she's starting to remember...
– Who is he?
– Marat (ugh, don't laugh! For some reason, at that moment, my brain decided that the one who suffered from unrequited love must have been Arandor!)...
– M-Marat... – she repeated, sobbing again, – Can I somehow find him through your friends (like, on social media)?
– Yes, probably. In any case, I'll send you his phone number in a text message.