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Mona could swear that money fell out of her bank account when she wasn’t looking!
Because, like – where was it even going? Even when she picked up extra shifts at the diner that, really, she probably didn’t have the time for, or extended pizza delivery hours to past midnight; and even when she made a budget, it was always the same. She’d check what money she had left and would be a good few thousand coins short of what she had thought she had.
The worst part was, she couldn’t even find anyone to blame. Once, she had decided to call up the bank to see what was going on, and it had been a sobering twenty minutes of transactions being read aloud to her and needing, unfailingly, to respond with “oh, nope, that was definitely me”. Still didn’t explain where all the money was going, but she had learned to come to terms with the torture of becoming a bit antsy over the last couple of days before that sweet, sweet, “Your Latest Payslip” email.
But she’d read it countless times in magazines – “make your budget and stick to it. It’s that simple”. It always made Mona feel kinda… bad.
For failure (and failure, and failure…), she could sometimes get a little obsessive, walking around the shopping district with friends on the weekends and thinking about how much she was Not Going To Buy. A piercing presence of absence.
She was in one of those phases now. She would count her money once and then count it again, and then again when she had to pay for something. So long as she followed her spending plan exactly this week, down to the very last coin, she’d be in the green. She just had to be focussed, and disciplined. She could totally do that!
What she could totally not do was predict that her scooter would break down!
It was unbelievable! She didn’t know if she had the money to get it fixed full stop, let alone with a budget as tight as this week’s! She’d have to just eat plain rice until the next payslip, maybe with some cabbage, if she was savvy, and after a few months of that, paired with working extra, she might just be able to find the coins –
And she had to go to school! There was a game today, and she was cheer captain! She could not be late, let alone not show up at all!
The side of the freeway on which she was stranded was, naturally, not made for incidental pedestrians, and certainly not those who needed to push their defunct scooter along with them. She couldn’t afford to have somebody come and tow it away, of course, so pushing it was. There was no footpath, just near-dead grass and grey wind and apathetic debris.
Mona felt like something was pressing on all sides of her brain.
“Hey!” A gruff voice. “Mona! Is that you?!”
In fact, the voice’s gruffness was smattered with the sound of the gale behind which it pushed, one that froze Mona’s eyelashes and lips and fingernails, but even with such obstruction Mona made out who it was.
“Dribble?”
And, therefore…
“Spitz?”
“Hey, Mona!” Spitz, until then hidden from Mona’s view behind Dribble’s silhouette, peeked out by leaning forward in his seat, and made a peace sign. “It is you! What’re ya doin’ on the side of the road?!”
It was, honestly, quite sweet of them to stop and ask Mona what she was doing, even if being coworkers under Wario necessarily resulted in a sort of preservatory camaraderie. After all, in doing this they were likely losing time they could be spending looking for customers.
“Aw, thank you, guys. I’m fine, I just… my scooter broke down, and I’m trying to save money, so I can’t get someone to tow it. And I can’t even really afford to get it fixed, either!” Things started to tumble down a hill on her tongue. “And I need, need, need to get to school for the game, the cheer squad will be so confused if I don’t show up, I don’t know if they can even do the choreo without me! But I don’t know how I’m gonna make it!”
It did not sink in for Mona until the end of the final sentence that, by accidentally launching into this emotional spiel, she had done virtually everything other than convey her gratitude for their compassion.
She had clearly conveyed, instead and above all, what they could stand to gain from her current predicament, because Spitz all but cut her off to say –
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Hop in, we’ll getcha to school!”
Mona forcefully and rapidly exhaled to prevent herself from gasping instead.
“Oh, I really couldn’t! You’re so sweet, but I’m sure I can find my way to school some-other-how…”
Some-other-free of charge-how, she mentally underscored. Cab fares were the surprise killer of all surprise killers. Mona had learned this much when, after a concert, her and her friends’ ride – one of their aunts – had bailed. The subsequent coughing-up had very nearly taken her lungs with it; frankly, she should have just sold her lungs instead of bothering with all the extra work it took to earn that back.
And if Dribble and Spitz were paid by Wario with as much consistency as she was, their fares were likely, well, market rate.
“Aw, Mona! C’mon!” Dribble bared his teeth in a huge grin – the massive incisors were, by themselves, pretty cool, in that sort of Wario-esque aesthetic to which Mona often aspired, but on Dribble they gave him a surprisingly goofy, affable look. Like this she could see more clearly that he was, at the end of the day, just a big puppy dog. “We’re the best in the biz, yaknow! You’ll be wishin’ ya scooter broke down more often!”
“I really, really only catch cabs in emergencies…” she accidentally muttered.
“Lookatcha!” Spitz quipped. “Ya situation can’t get much woise!”
“Guys, I-”
Her pocket buzzed, itching the outside of her thigh and causing her to reflexively twitch her head in kind. She automatically grabbed it. Her habit of checking her phone mid-conversation was perhaps her woist, as Spitz might put it, but at this precise moment it served as a few seconds of relief from this undesirable discussion.
MONA??? WHERE ARE YOU?????
She quickly shoved it into her handbag. While it meant that she didn’t have to look at the nauseating words, or further feel the anxiety of it picking away at her legs, it ended up being pointless, as it began to vibrate again – not once, but incessantly, insistently. She didn’t need to pick up to guess what would have been waiting for her on the other end of the line. The strain in her jaw tinged the edges of her sight with a mild brown.
“Mona,” Spitz softened, “c’mon. It’s no trouble. Ya can’t miss the game! Aren’tcha cheer boss or whatchamacallit?”
“I can’t afford it!” She nearly cried.
“No sweat,” Dribble recited instantly. “We have suuuper competitive rates.”
The way he droned on suuuper harmonised, harshly, with the mobile’s endless buzzing tone and the wind it fought against.
How long did she have? How long to haul her scooter by foot? How long to negotiate an IOU from the backseat?
“…Can you get me there in fewer than fifteen minutes?”
“We can getcha there in less than five!” Dribble responded. His teeth reflected the otherwise shadowed sun.
“…Dribble, what have I told ya about makin’ promises we can’t keep?”
“Hm?”
Spitz appeared to stand up in his seat – Mona couldn’t tell what his seatbelt situation was, from here – and began to mutter under Dribble’s ear, “if ya say that and we don’t make it, we hafta muttermuttermutter…”
Dribble’s eyes widened, not as dramatically as a human might have, but enough to bare the slightest sliver of white. “Aw, Spitz, you’re right! Why’dn’t I thinka that?”
“Mm,” Spitz nodded.
“We can getcha there in ten minutes! Plus!” Dribble nodded vigorously.
“I really can’t…”
“Ten minutes flat or your money back!” Dribble added.
Spitz smacked his arm. “Dribble!”
“…Or my money back?” Mona echoed.
Dribble did not answer her, nor did Spitz offer a concrete correction, perhaps because Mona had let herself slip too far into potential acceptance, and too far out of financial discipline.
For she had become far, far too cognisant of who was on the phone that kept buzzing at her angrily – enough to overpower the gusts of angry wind hounding her. There was empty space where Mona had to use her words. A place she was meant to fill, to be the foundations of a wall, an empty space, and she wasn’t there, the wall was collapsing, they were calling her, because she wasn’t there –
“Okay, okay, fine,” Mona whispered.
Dribble and Spitz didn’t answer, since she had responded so quietly, but when she began to push her scooter towards the cab, they clearly understood her answer – if not her reluctance.
“Hey, hey!” Dribble beamed, swinging his door open. “We’ll get that for ya. I think it’ll fit in the trunk!”
“The whole scooter?!” Mona gasped.
“Of coise!”
He promptly yanked it from her grasp, as though it were little more than a toy replica of itself, and he were a kindergarten-mate who had gotten fed up with her not giving him a turn. Mona had to close her eyes, so that her strain was only decorated with the thuds of the boot opening, and the scooter landing inside, and then the boot being slammed shut again.
“Ready get in!” Dribble tapped her rather forcefully on the shoulder, and when Mona opened her eyes, they fell on him holding the door to the backseat open for her. He wasn’t, notably, doing the whole chauffeur-saying-m’lady thing; more like he genuinely enjoyed the act of opening his own cab’s doors.
“Thank you!” She managed a grateful smile.
Finally being able to sit down on an actual seat, one that was in a more climatised vehicle, felt like rubbing a glasses-cloth over her mind, in that it did not remove the yellow stain of tension but granted her some additional perception. She had, she recognised, ten minutes flat to figure out a way to make the drive take longer than ten minutes and fewer than fifteen.
“What music do ya like?” Spitz asked, looking up at Mona in the rear-view mirror. The octopus plushie that hung from it felt awfully familiar – maybe from a children’s cartoon she used to watch. “Customer gets first pick!”
“Oh, well, um, I’m happy with just the radio,” Mona said. The music choice was the last thing she could possibly pretend to care about, right now; she realised only after saying what she had that, really, she probably could have done without any noise at all, while she tried to reel her mental hurricane into a mere brainstorm.
Spitz, however, obliged, and after the cursory few moments of static, the borderline out-of-commission car speaker started to play…
An advertisement for Mona Pizza.
“Oh, hey, Mona! What a coinkidink!” Dribble grinned. He actually turned his head around as he did to look at her properly, which was slightly terrifying, seeing as he was the driver. “Yaknow I’ve always got that song stuck in my head?” He began to sing along, if with little regard for staying in tune or even for the lyrics. “This here, hm-hm-hm, pizza… makers of the world’s best… pizza!”
“Oh, wow! Really?”
Mona has spent far more time than she would care to admit trying to make that song as catchy as possible. She’d originally asked Penny for help, and Mike had even invited himself to that group ideas session, but Penny was a little too creative about it, while Mike had insisted he wouldn’t give over his “BRILLIANT. I-DE-AS” if Mona didn’t agree to give him the singing contract instead. She had been happy with what she’d come up with herself, but it did not take a genius to guess how much it had cost her to air that advertisement on the radio, with little knowledge of whether it was even the earworm she had hoped.
“How’s business, anyway? ‘S’stuff so expensive now you highschoolers gotta go to woik to make ends meet?” Dribble asked.
“Oh, no, I just like delivering pizzas!” Mona nodded. “I have such great knowledge of Diamond City now, I feel like I could get anywhere without even using a map!”
“Sounds like you’ve got what it takes to be a cabbie, kid,” Spitz scoffed.
Mona very much hoped – with no offense to such fine gentlemen as Dribble and Spitz, of course – that she had other career options besides. “Well, eh…”
“Dribble! Next light ain’t have a red-light camera!” Spitz pointed suddenly towards the windshield. “Now, just stay cool, and if tha coast is clear…”
“Wait!” Mona yelped. “You’re not going to run the red light, are you?!”
“Ya wanna get to school on time, kid?” Spitz said to her in retort, with a tone a bit like the one he’d used when Dribble had accidentally offered a five-minute journey.
“Please don’t! We could die!”
“Relax, just staaaay cool. Dribble’s been great at that lately. It’ll shave off those minutes you were so worried about.”
For the very first time, Mona’s desire for the trip to last more than ten minutes but fewer than fifteen was influenced by a survival instinct far less financial in origin. And yet, as she momentarily considered that much, it occurred to her she had, in this, quite an easy way to achieve what she needed.
“As your customer I demand that you do not run any red lights! And that you stay at the speed limit!”
“As our customer?” Dribble repeated. “But ain’tcha wanna get to school quick?”
“Yes, but to do that I have to get to school in one piece!”
“Hm,” Dribble hummed. If Spitz had spoken to her before as though she were Dribble, Dribble was, in this moment, appearing to listen to her as though she were Spitz.
“Ready, Dribble?” Spitz, in contrast, simply ignored her.
“Uh…” Dribble stuttered a bit. “I mean, now I dunno if it’s the best idea ta…”
“We hafta get there in less than ten!” Spitz snapped.
And Dribble straightened up a slight, smacking a paw on the dashboard in determination. “…Right! Yeah! Okay! Get ready, Mona!”
The red traffic light that was the topic du jour was quite easily in view by this stage. Mona could only notice, in the panic, how the metal it was made from matched the colour of the car plastic on the side of the freeway from which they had so promptly turned off.
It might have been nicer, somehow, to have been dealing with that nightmare instead.
“Guys!”
“It’s all clear! Slam that paw down!” Spitz half-commanded, half-cheered.
It was the sound, above all. Maybe because Mona screamed and squeezed her eyes shut until it physically hurt. She had heard Wario’s motorbike when he had overestimated how much speed he could get away with when trying to park in front of the company building – it was a bit like that, now. To be inside the vehicle that made such a terrifying noise tackled her bones.
“No sweat!” It was Dribble’s voice.
Mona breathed twice, manually, and her being able to hear herself do it was her first sign that they had made it through, alive, and that she was not currently trapped in a sort of endless taxi purgatory.
“D-D-Don’t do that again!” Mona cried.
Spitz made a raspberry noise. “We’re gettin’ ya there on time, bucko!”
With that, Dribble tapped his paw on the dashboard again, like a celebratory fist-bump with the vehicle itself, and then said, “check this out, kid!”
Mona very much did not want to “check out” much of anything, but Dribble did not seem to be asking permission. He pulled a sort of string lever that hung feebly from the interface and, with a circus-esque squeal, a big red button revealed itself under a plastic emergency casing.
“This is how ya know you’re a reaaaaal VIP. You’re gettin’ the teleporter service!”
Teleporter.
Mona had always had a mild curiosity for what riding in Dribble and Spitz’s taxi would be like. That much had to be conceded. She knew they had a sci-fi thing going on, and while she had not known whether to take their anecdotes about space literally, she had nonetheless determined that it probably would not be all that standard an experience.
“Teleporter.” Mona said.
“Yup! It only goes in little bursts, but we can get there waaaay faster this way!”
“D-Does it hurt?!” was all Mona could think to say.
“You’ll see,” Dribble grinned into the mirror.
Much like her lack of desire to check out things, she did not wish to wait and “see” whether it would hurt. She squeezed her eyes shut again. Spitz’s voice reached her ears, somehow.
“Don’t worry, it’s a hundred and ten percent safe. Ya don’t wanna be hurtin’ ya most special customers, right? Oh, the paperwoik! The paperwoik, Mona! You know we hafta avoid all that paperwoik! Ready, Dribble?”
“Ready!”
“No-!”
Mona gripped her hair with her hands, dislodging all she had so painstakingly brushed and sprayed into place to match the cheer code of appearances. She was relatively sure she screamed, but the only sound in the entire universe, in the moment she did so, was a “blip”; it sounded a lot like one of the stock audio files he had used in making her Mona Pizza advertisement, actually.
“Lookathat!” Spitz cheered, and Mona felt a nudge on her knee. “Was that cool or what?!”
Mona opened her eyes to look at him. “Hm…?”
“The teleporter! D’ya like it?”
“That’s it?! Did you use it just now?”
Dribble turned in his seat to flash a grin at Mona again, in a way that was absolutely no safer or more reassuring than last time. “Sure did, kiddo! We skipped a bitatha road!”
Mona peered with more fervour out the windshield, and then out the right window; frankly, all the road looked the same, and she had kept her eyes shut for so long that she had no previous location with which to mentally compare what she was seeing now. And yet she did, in fact, get the feeling that they had moved a good hundred metres or so further upwards.
“Wanna try that again?” Mona looked up at the rear-view mirror now, to see a Spitz who was pulling an awfully smug expression.
With space freed in her mind, where she had expected to accommodate otherworldly pain from sudden teleportation at the hands of hasty animal cabbies, Mona was able to find room for a different anxious undertone – more than ten minutes, fewer than fifteen.
“No! It hurt very much!” She lied.
“…It did?” Dribble sounded genuinely stunned.
“Yes, yes, it mustn’t be good for humans. See? My hair’s all messed up, even!”
“Huh,” Spitz made a low purring sound. Mona could only guess that he, too, was digesting what Mona was saying. She almost felt bad; or perhaps she would start to feel bad, if this ended up working and she managed to wriggle out of paying a fare.
“…Aight,” Spitz continued. “That’s good ta know! When we next pick up humans, we’ll stop doin’ that to ‘em! Or maybe we’ll just stop picking up humans… Is that legal? Would that be discrimination?”
There was very nearly an elongated silence, only jeopardised by the radio nobody had thought to turn off. “For a limited time, ten kids’ meals for half price! Perfect for your larger-than-life family!” Mona would have to look into that. Might be a good way of getting some cheaper food, if she had to pay today and had to shuffle her budget again.
“Well, Dribble, it’s time to make the most of your driving skills,” Spitz said. “I wanna see driving that might as well be teleportin’!”
“On it!” Dribble nodded.
“Guys, guys!”
Mona had clearly not gotten used to the roar of such petrifying acceleration, because when the taxi started screaming and hacking under Dribble’s command, she had to press her forehead to her knees and make a silent prayer for her final coins, and her final breaths, in that order.
They didn’t bother parking. The tires vocalised their agony from the skid as Dribble forced the cab to an abrupt stop. The fact that the carpark in front of the stadium was too full to find a park served as an unwelcome reminder of how much time Mona had to get inside.
Inside the taxi itself was an unwelcome reminder of how much time Mona had saved.
“And the meter says…” Spitz began, doing a drumroll with his paws, “…nine minutes fifty-three seconds!”
“Aw, yeah!” Dribble went to high-five him. Or, rather, Mona thought that was what he was going to do, but then he simply moved his paw down onto Spitz’s head, near-smothering it. If this was an unusual thing for Dribble to do to him, Spitz did not react to imply as much.
Mona rubbed her eyes.
“That was sooooo good,” Dribble laughed. Mona had to open the car door to feel the grey wind on her skin in the hopes it might distract her.
“Oh, when ya needed to overtake that old lady, so ya just went, zoom, and then, kablam, that was great!” Spitz continued to chatter. Mona lamented that she could hear it, despite the wind and despite the ache in her stomach that crawled up to her nose and ears. She moved to open the boot.
“Hey, hey, Mona!”
Mona did not answer. It was not as though she would be able to avoid paying, but to actually say anything that might invite Dribble and Spitz to request she do so was too much, right now.
“Mona! Don’t try to carry the scooter by yaself! I’ll come get it for ya!”
Dribble launched out of the taxi and, once again, yanked the scooter like something over which he felt compulsive possession.
“I’ll just put it here, with the other bikes, mkay?”
Mona could only stare at him. She needed to get going, if nothing else, which was the only thing that made her even slightly desire to hear the fare.
“Aight!” Dribble did a little salute. “Thank ya for choosin’ Dribble and Spitz! We hope ta see ya aga – well, we’ll see ya at woik soon, so.”
Mona blinked.
“See ya!”
And then, with nothing else to say, Dribble disappeared into the taxi again, and they both waved cheerfully before they drove off.
Mona inhaled forcefully through her nose, manually. She could feel herself blinking quite hard. She could also feel an insistent, evocative buzzing in her bag that she held to her chest.
Then she bolted.
“…Dribble, how much’d’ya charge her, in the end?”
“Hm?”
“I didn’t check the meter before we reset it,” Spitz clarified. He was focussed on getting something out from under his claw. “How much’d we make?”
“…Hahahaha.” Dribble turned and gave Spitz a well-practised look.
“Oh no. Not again. Did we really forget again?!”
Dribble nodded sheepishly. Spitz slammed his paw on the inside of the door next to him, before exhaling.
“Stay cool, Spitz… I’m sure we can ask her for the money when we see her at Warioware…!”
Spitz opened his mouth, as if to speak, and then jammed his voice halfway between a word.
“…If ya remember to.”
“Aye.”