Love Tech and The Undeniable Star

Chapter One. Help Wanted

Somewhere across the cool, dark room, an alarm clock was ringing from beneath the hastily discarded clothing from the night before. Without opening my eyes, I manage to swing my legs around and groggily push myself up into a sitting position. I hear a murmur and feel movement from beside me. I open my eyes, a difficult task for me until I've had my coffee, and look over to see a body in the bed next to me. I start to feel the throbbing headache and warm haze of my hangover as I lean over to attempt to uncover the identity of the previous night's conquest, but the chestnut hair spread out to fan the pillow obscures the face beneath it. I can smell her hair.
At least she smells nice, I think as I give up trying to uncover who this person in my bed is. I rarely know anyway.
I stand up and stretch, hearing and feeling the popping in my joints. I make my way to the pile of clothes to shut off the alarm. I pick up the blouse on the top, knowing it isn't mine. I hold it up and kind of want to keep it as I see how sexy it is. I feel better about the lump in my bed now, thinking that if she was as cute as her blouse was, I may want to keep her.
I turn off the alarm and shuffle back towards the dresser near the bed. My foot strikes a beer can and I freeze in place as the can rattles into another. I look over the mass under my comforter, but she doesn't stir, so after a few heartbeats I finish my journey to the dresser. I find a fresh pair of panties and a bra and begin to get dressed. I pull some black tights out and wiggle silently into them. I pull a pink skirt up over them and slide a white t shirt on over my black bra. I think twice about sitting on the bed to pull my boots on and opt to sit on the coffee table instead.
In the bathroom I see that my roots are starting to show from underneath the pink of my hair. I make a mental note to do something about that tonight after work.
Once fully dressed, I stop in the kitchen before leaving for work. I tear off a sheet of paper from one of the drawing pads cluttering the table and quickly scribble a note.
"Thanks for a wonderful night. Here is some bus fair. Please see yourself out.-Ash"
I toss a few crumpled dollars down on the table with the note and make my escape.
As I start to close the apartment door behind me, I remember something important. and stick my head back in the door to grab the unopened parcel leaning just inside the door. I close my door and realize I can breath just a little easier now. I couldn't remember last night, at least the part that came after the fifth bar we stopped at. I don't remember a chestnut haired woman in our group, but I'm not too concerned with it, I tend to bring men and women home fairly frequently, but remember them fairly infrequently. It's one of the hazards of partying too hard every night, I suppose.
The sunlight blinds me as I step outside of my apartment building. I pull the little blue Neurogen pill from my pocket and pop it into my mouth before making my way to the bus stop a few blocks away. The bust stop's bench is littered with graffiti and rubbish as I arrive, so I give it a cursory sweep before sitting down.
I lean my head back against the hard plastic walling that has been erected to enclose the bust stop, and shut my eyes. I feel the blood pulsing through my skull as I swig the water and hope this hangover won't last too much longer. Last night had been wild. At least, the parts I remember were. I had been at a cd release party.. I think they had been called The Lords of Grey. There had been shots. Lots of shots.
The bus pulls up and wrenches me from my reminiscence with the screeching of it's obnoxiously loud brakes. I get on and pay my fare and begin to make my way towards an open seat in the rear. As I pass by the other passengers, I try not to notice the odd shapes of horns and claws and hooves and nubs as I pass them. To me, half of the people on the bus resemble the hideous mutations one would expect in a low budget grindhouse film.
Among them were a family consisting of a man, made of what appeared to be jello with several sets of teeth descending along his head, a obscenely large woman, with a mucus covered fly head, and their progeny, a sack of skin with a perilous mouth filled with needles. As I edged past them, the little sack of skin begins to wail loudly. As the fly-headed mother leans forward to attend to her baby, a monstrous roll of back fat cascades over her head towards me. I duck and hurried forward, but it would have futile had the back fat not gotten caught in the hanging hand rails.
The man's many rows of teeth begin rotating around his skull and from somewhere I hear him say, "Very sorry 'bout that, baby. Right strange one it is."
I made no reply as I hurried further towards the back of the bus. I sat in an empty row and set my bag next to me to hopefully keep anyone from sitting there. I hated taking the bus. It was always the worst part of my day. If I just got up a little earlier it wouldn't be a problem, but since I am always running late to open the store, I don't take my Neurogen in time to stop the hallucinations from ruining my commute.
I've gotten use to it. I've been seeing them since I was ten. The first time I saw one was when my foster parents had asked our neighbor, Herman, to watch me. I had screamed bloody murder when the lumbering giant had stooped into our living room. He had been man on the top, but half lobster on the bottom. I can still remember the sound his carapace made as he scuttled on his insect-like legs. I still have nightmares about it.
The doctors had never been able to determine exactly why I see the things I do, but it wouldn't matter anyway. I'm just lucky they didn't lock me away. Instead they found a convenient little pill that made them go away. Neurogen. All I had to do was take one at least thirty minutes before I went out into public. At first I tried really hard to do this and for the longest time I did. But I'm a forgetful person and before long I had forgotten. The first I forgot, I saw a giant, human-headed squid and a minotaur with a half formed fetus drooping off of it's left cheek before I had gotten to the end of my street. I ran back to my house and locked myself in my room for three whole days. I had been as terrified as when I first saw Herman.
Over the last fifteen years, I began to become somewhat comfortable with these horrific visions during those inevitable times I had forgotten or had run out of Neurogen. I had even made a good amount of money selling sketches of them on the Internet for a little while. I had stopped when I injured my hand last year. I made my four hundredth mental note to get back into it, logging the image of the horrific family for later.
I got off the bus in front of the old, worn down record shop. The shop was a remnant of a time past, on a street budding with new businesses threatening to swallow it whole. The words Spanky's Record Shop were fading on the white wooden sign that hung above the storefront window. Inside the window, a display of antique porcelain dolls sat around an open record player that displayed the Sister's Band's latest album. I bent down and unlocked the padlock that secured the drop down gate. The gate rattled stiffly as I rolled it up and opened the door to the store.
Inside the store, which was little more than a room, I navigated the rows of folding tables, running my hands over the records in the cardboard boxes that sat atop them. I walk around behind the glass counter, flicking on the light to the display. The fluorescent bulb slowly flickered to life and illuminates the various glass pipes inside. I sit the parcel down on the counter and pull out a dusty record player from below the register. I disconnect the speaker wires from the cd player and connect them to the antique player. I turn around and pick up the parcel. It's wrapped in brown paper and secured with a thin piece of rope. I tug one end and the knot falls apart. The paper slides off and I lift up what may be the one.
Along with hallucinations, I suffer from another condition called auditory agnosia that the doctors can't fix. This condition preventa me from hearing music. I can hear the sounds, but it doesn't translate to music inside my mind. I've never liked a song, because I've never experienced a melody, harmony, or rhythm. My foster parents had never understood. Music was everything to them. They had met while playing in the same band back in the eighties. They had fallen in love playing music and opened Spanky's together. One of the first things they wanted to share when they took me in, was favorite songs. They had been so concerned when I told them I didn't have a favorite song. They had started a ritual of ordering obscure recordings for me, hoping to find a song I could hear. A new one used to arrive the first of every other month. We would get up early and go down to the record store before it opened to listen to the new albums. My foster parent's would chatter excitedly with Steed, my foster father, insising on explaining where the album came from, what the music was inspired by, and it's cultural background, while Harmony, my step mother, would explain the album art and make us drink special teas from the appropriate region. Every time, though, I would hear the instruments making some strange noise that I couldn't understand. I kept the tradition after they died, though. It had always been a good morning when a new record came, even if it didn't bring with it the beauty of music.
I lifted the album up and looked at the cover art. It was an old black and white photograph of some South American native tribe sitting in two rows on the porch of some half built shelter in the thick of the forest.
"Look at that, Harmony," I said to the empty record shop. "You'd love this. It's a photo taken by Darren Douglas in 1932. As I pulled the record from its sleeve, a bright white card freed itself and fluttered down to the ground. 

I picked it up and turned it over. Shimmering in a deep ruby red in were the words "Help Wanted". At that very moment, the phone rang. I took a moment to set the needle down on the record, and crossed the small room to the phone. 

"Hello?"

The voice on the other line was bright, cheerful and somehow immediately charming. 

"Hello! Would this by chance happen to be Ashley?" the voice inquired. 

"Um, this is Ash. I mean, yes... yes. May I ask who is calling?"

"My name is Marshmallow!  I am calling to ask if you were interested in our job offer?"

I was immediately confused as I looked down to the business card I was still holding. 

"How did you- is this a joke?" I demanded. 

"No joke, I assure you! We have a very specific job for someone with your... gifts," the voice replied. 

From the other side of the record shop, the record began to play the second track. I hadn't noticed it until this moment. The room was filled with shapes and lights. The imagery was connected to the music, but I had never seen anything like it. A star manifested in the room and smiled at me and said, "Take the job"

I can't remember what I said, I just remember accepting the job and scribbling down an address. 

The next thing I remember, I was outside of a white building that said Love Tech.