Chapter Three
The PIZZA Office
Senshi stayed in Kenny’s laundry basket. “I’m pretty sure foxes don’t need to report to the Immigration Office,” was what Dad said about it. And luckily he didn’t say anything about foxes needing to burrow in holes of actual dirt. Evan worried that the little fox would run off if they left it outside for any length of time.
Kogane kept his eyes glued to the window during their entire drive downtown. The boring stretch of freeway offered nothing more scenic than parking lots and buildings, but to someone from an alternate dimension it must have seemed like Wonderland.
They parked in a three-story garage. As they walked passed the other parked vehicles, Kogane stared in wonder at the ceiling. “Did dwarves carve out all this?”
“Dwarves?” Evan didn’t see any mine tracks, lost princesses, or even maybe a roller coaster. “No, I think this kind of thing is all done by Construction Workers.”
Kogane ran a finger across a pillar they were passing. “I’ve never seen stone like this before. It must have taken ages to hollow this all out.”
Evan tried to imagine a solid building-size block of stone sitting downtown, just waiting for the Seven Dwarves to come along and start whistling while they worked.
“Actually,” Dad said, “it’s concrete. They pour it into forms and it hardens up. Steel rebar helps reinforce it in case of earthquakes.”
Trust Dad to take the magic out of something. Thumper and Bambi no doubt tended the grass and flowers outside, while Tinkerbell changed the light bulbs in the streetlights nearby.
“You have earthquakes here,” Kogane asked, fear in his voice.
“Not so far,” Dad replied. “But it only takes one.”
Although the office building was huge, everyone seemed to be stuffed into the lobby, waiting in the longest lines imaginable. Evan was bored out of his mind, but Kogane looked at everything with fresh curiosity.
“I have never seen so many different varieties of people,” Kogane observed.
“Well, this is the Immigration Office,” Evan replied. “Although, if I have to stand in line for three hours, I would hope it would be for some new ride at Disneyland.”
“Disneyland? What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s a theme park.” After saying it, Evan realized the words were probably meaningless to Kogane. “You wait in long lines, just like this, but then you get to do something fun and exciting, instead of boring to the point of death, like here.
“My brother could help with these lines,” Kogane said. “He’s a warrior.”
“He could help? How?”
Kogane waved at the hundreds of people in front of them. “By shortening the line. He’s terrific with a battle ax.”
Evan imagined the police dragging off Kogane’s brother, the ax confiscated. Would they be satisfied just taking him? “Oh, no! We can’t– He wouldn’t really? Would he?”
A big grin spread across Kogane’s face. “Nah. He’s a big whimp. It’s the fox you have to worry about. Good thing we left him home.”
When they reached the front of the line a couple hours later, the bored woman behind the counter didn’t even look up from her computer screen. “Last name, then first name.”
“Uh.” Dad looked at the note app on his phone. “Watanabe, Haruto.”
The woman looked up with a frown. “What-a-what? That is the last name, right?”
After a couple minutes of spelling and then verifying the spelling, she pointed a finger at Kogane. “How’d a short guy like him wriggle his way over that border wall? That thing’s thirty feet high.”
“Oh, he’s not from Mexico,” Dad replied. “He came from an alternate dimension”
The woman’s eyes popped open. “Well, you should have told me that at the start. We don’t do tricky stuff down here. Head up the stairs to the third floor, then ask for the Pizza Office.”
“Pizza Office?”
“Yeah. Don’t get your hopes up. It’s just an anagram.”
Evan’s hopes had already shot up, so now they came crashing back down. Who named an office after food so close to lunch time. There had to be a law against that.
Up the stairs they trudged. After a few inquiries, they finally reached a door with an official name plate designating the office as: “Personnel Interlopers, Zebras, Zombies, and Associates.”
The door stood ajar, so Dad nudged it wider and led the way inside. Three desk occupied the far end of the room, but greeting them up close was a large table covered with several pizza boxes. The three occupants of the room looked up in surprise, each busy selecting, eating, or admiring actual, real live pizza.
A woman hurriedly swallowed a mouthful, they rushed to her feet. “Good afternoon. What department can I help you find today?”
“Actually . . .” Dad glanced at the assortment of food in front of them. “The lady downstairs directed us to the ‘Pizza Office.’”
The woman looked even more surprised. “The Pizza Office? Really?” She gave a nervous laugh and looked to her colleagues for help.
A man with a blue tie set down his slice of chicken Alfredo pizza, even though it looked like he really wanted to take a bite. He clumsily rose to his feet. “Uh, yes. This is the Office of Personnel Interlopers–” He winced, probably realizing how silly the name might actually sound out loud. “Yeah, we made that up. It was lots of fun. Anyway, we don’t usually have pizza in here. It’s pure coincidence you happened at lunch time.”
The third man, wearing a white shirt that he somehow avoided getting stained with pizza sauce, interrupted. “Wait, you meant to come here?”
Dad nodded, then pointed at Kogane. “He’s from an alternate dimension.”
All three pairs of eyes went wide at the same time. The white shirt guy scrambled to his feet. All three started talking at once, then they stopped and looked at each other. The woman apparently won their staring contest and said, “I’m the secretary. Normally I would schedule an appointment for you to return, but since you’re the very first being from an alternate dimension we’ve ever seen, I think we can help without any further waiting.”
Evan breathed a deep sigh of relief.
“Really?” The man with the blue tie stepped forward and extended his hand to Kogane. “It’s a pleasure to meet someone from an alternate plane or dimension. How did you manage to get here?”
Kogane stared at the man’s hand as if he wasn’t sure why the man was holding it out.
Evan whispered to him, “Shake his hand. It’s a greeting.”
“Ah.” Kogane shook the man’s hand. “So it all started with my fox and the old sneeze-a-roo–”
The man in a white shirt waved both hands in panicked warning. “Wait! Don’t say any more! All information on alternate dimensions is strictly classified Top Secret. None of us in this room, including yourselves, are authorized to discuss such a sensitive subject.”
Kogane frowned.
Evan frowned.
“But . . .” Dad sputtered. “That’s why we came. We need to get him official papers.”
“Oh, yes,” the man in the white shirt replied. “We can definitely help with that – but someone else will contact you to gather the technical stuff.”
The secretary gestured at the pizza boxes on the table. “Help yourselves while we get the paperwork started.”
Evan carefully lifted the top of one of the pizza boxes. “Yeah! Olives and pepperoni.”
Dad passed out paper plates and Evan started loading his up.
Kogane stared, the plate idle in his hands. “What kind of animal did this come from?”
“Oh, various.” Dad loaded his plate with a third slice of pineapple pizza.
Evan rolled his eyes. “What my Dad means is – it comes from the store in a box, or you walk up to the counter in a pizza place and they just hand it to you. Animals aren’t involved, except for the pepperoni, ham, and sausage. And the less you know about where those come from, the better.”
Kogane did not look convinced.
“It tastes great,” Evan insisted. “Pizza is the best!”
Dad settled into a chair and picked up his first slice. “Sausage and ham come from pigs. Pepperoni grows on trees and is perfectly safe to eat. We’ve got a pepperoni tree in our back yard.”
Looking reassured, Kogane took a couple of slices and sat next to Evan.
Huddled around a desk in the back of the room, the three PIZZA office workers whispered furiously. Perhaps they’d never done anything but eat pizza and now they couldn’t agree on what to do with a real task at hand.
After a few minutes, the secretary wandered over with a clipboard. “So let’s start with the usual questions. Name?”
Kogane glanced around nervously, but Evan gave him an encouraging nod.
The boy from an alternate dimension cleared his throat. “Haruto Watanabe.”
The woman nodded like he had just provided a correct answer. Her pen scribbled across a page only she could see. “Now, of course, we can’t put your real name on anything non-classified. So, do you have a nickname?”
Kogane looked at Evan, his eyebrows raised.
Evan was tempted to call him “Nick,” but finally responded with, “We call him Kogane.”
“Ah.” She nodded again. “We’ll put that down as Kogane Smith. Now what’s your birthday?”
Kogane frowned. “I was born on the full moon on the March of Cheetahs.”
The woman raised her eyebrows, then frowned. “Okay. I’ll guess we’ll put that as January 1st. How old are you?”
The man in the white shirt, busy at typewriter, spoke up. “That’s probably also classified. His planet, or whatever they have in his dimension, might not orbit its sun at the same rate as our, etc, if they even have a sun. Any statement of age might reveal details–”
“Okay,” the woman cut him off. “I’ll just make something up. At least it’s fairly clear what you hair and eye colors are.”
They had to photocopy Dad’s driver’s license and insurance card. The blue-tie man almost made them run outside to get the license plate number on the car before the secretary, clearly annoyed again, decided that information must be classified as well.
Evan was stuffed full by the time the secretary finally came back with a stack of papers to hand to Dad. “Here it all is. Kogane is now completely legal. As my co-worker keeps reminding us, many details we avoided discussing today are Top Secret. At some future point in time – I can’t say when because I’m not authorized to know – someone will contact you to gather this very sensitive information. Here’s how it will work. They’ll knock on your door and ask, ‘Did you order some pizza?’ To which you reply, ‘Yes.’ Then they’ll take you off to an ultra super-secret facility to ask – I don’t know what, because I’m not allowed to know. Any questions.”
Dad was frowning. “Are you sure that question and answer combination is sufficiently unique?”
The woman nodded with a bright smile on her face. “Absolutely.” She clapped her hands together. “We have had such a lovely time assisting you today. Please return anytime a random person from an alternate dimension happens your way.”
They shook hands all over again. The man with the blue tie wanted to take a group photo, to commemorate the occasion, but the man in the white shirt insisted Kogane would have to wear a brown paper sack over his head to hide his identity – and no one could find one at the moment. So they waved their goodbyes.
When they were safely down the hall, Kogane said, “I’m glad that’s over. Now I can just stay in your house and never come out again.”
“Oh, no,” Dad said, as he pressed the elevator button. “It doesn’t work that way. See here.” He held up one of the papers from the stack the secretary had given him. “By law, you’re required to register for school.”
“A school of what?” Kogane asked. “Fish?”
Evan felt a sinking sensation in his stomach. School. How were they going to pass a “being” from an alternate dimension off as a typical schoolboy?