Exhausted from the gyrations of her long day pounding the Hathian sidewalks, Tamarra Cyr greatfully opens the locked door of her (seedy) motel room and immediately slams and locks it behind her. Her briefcase, takeout supper and purse hit the bed, closely followed by her suit-jacket. Tam steps out of her fashionable (and fasionably uncomortable) heels and pads in her stocking feet over to the air-conditioning unit, where she makes a somewhat vain effort to coax a bit more "cool" out of the wheezy artifact. Five minutes later and no cooler, she surrenders and begins stripping for a trip to the shower.

Some time later, after having dried and done her hair and dressed in her most comfortable (designer) jeans and a sportsbra - she begins picking at the (somewhat wilted) chef salad and flips open her laptop to add another day to her jornal. Between sips of bottled water, words begin appearing on the computer screen.

Day one in Hathian and my feet FUCKING hurt. I checked in with the bar, the judicial bench.....made my manners with some court clerk who spent most of his time looking down my blouse, and finally got my accreditation recognised. That was my morning, so I stopped for lunch before going to see what assets they've given me to work with here. I had an address of a local office, so that was going to be my next stop.

So...stopped for somehting that resembed a fish taco, bought from someone who looks ready to declare jihad almost any time (he REALLY did never stop his tirade about westernization of women, but he took my money despite the fact that I'm in a skirt and not a Burkah and it was actually the best meal i've had since I got here...including this bowl of dead veggies i'm forcing down right now). It was warm and edible, and I'm pretty sure whatever it was was at one time actually swimming...so i'm not going to examine the protien source too deeply. Heck, if all the eateries around here are like the place I got this salad...I'll go listen to the Mullah again tomorrow and tru the gyros he was selling.

I'll wear a shorter skirt, that'll really piss him off.

Anyway, the short story about looking up the "local office" is that there isn't one. The door was locked, an eviction notice was posted and the place stank to high heaven. I've smelled that particular odour before, so I finally managed to get a cop over there and the cop got the bulding superintendent. Sure enough, the "managing partner" was still at his desk, quietly decomposing after an apparent heart-attack. Kinda like when old Mrs. Winters (who had the apartment over us when I was eight) passed and no one noticed till she started dripping thru the celing.

So..the morgue took my now-late boss out in a bag they could not completely zip closed around him, and the building super informs me that he's not leasing to me since our Firm messed-up the place (I'm guessing he thinks the bloated corpse in there was an act of vandalism on our part.ah well, he looks like the brother of the fish-taco-guy). So, I got the parent-firm on the phone and the answer was for me to "do what I could to get the office set back up". No word about why they never noticed my predecessor hadn't phoned-in for over a month - but I'm thinking I might not wanna be noticed looking too closely into that.

I stoopped off by a local dive called the Titty Twister for a shot on the way home. Its not what you'd call fashionable but several of the girls there look interesting or at least "affordable" and the place looks like a 'client-rich-environment". I'll dress down and make it a regular visit, looks like the places I used to hang in when i was in high-school and way underage.

Maybe I'm getting sentimantal, or maybe I just need to get laid. Ok...I need to get laid......

Anyway, I have budget for an offfice (so long as its modest) and posibly a secretary. Nothing for paralegals or any froo-froo stuff like a company car, but I knew going in that this wasn't that kind of job. I'm supposed to go see the detectives tomorrow and hopefully I can get his case files released - copies anyway. Oh, and I have to find office space and a place to live. Staying here at the ritz is nice, but I'd rather have my own place with its own private supply of hot-and-cold running cockroaches.

Tomorrow's gonna be busy, so I'm gonna visit B.O.B. and get some sleep.

Tam shuts down the computer, sets her phone and PDA on their respective chargers, slips her taser under the pillow and bolts the door. She flips off all the lights except for the dim bulb in the bathroom and begins strippng in the semidarkness. The other item she requires is extracted from the nightstand and soon the days tensions are melting away. The real thing beats substitutes any day of the week, but she's new in town and she doesn't have time for "real" right now.

Any port in a storm.......