Chapter 151: Summer Day Afternoon

Hot and muggy.

When it’s like that it’s hard to even think let alone be productive or creative. In the modern world the city-state of Singapore had intentionally air-conditioned the entire city to overcome the stifling heat. They did everything short of putting a dome over the city. It worked, productivity went through the roof if you stayed inside. That wasn’t happening here though, we could simply pray for an afternoon breeze.

The soul-sucking part was that my watch had just ticked past 9am.

Sinclaire had returned from quitting her job uptown, focusing on this place was a smart move on her part in my opinion. Resurrecting this place would keep her busy and with a good income for years; my investment was tiny but far more than enough to jump-start this joint again. Had she tried to do both she probably would have failed at both.

Here I was willing to invest a minor sum and all she had to do is invest the work. I was quite sure she’d make this into a success in relatively short order. Particularly with the Byrnes involved to help with vendor accommodations and dedicated customers from my companies. This would also do me for short term accommodations but I still wanted a place here and I wanted it to be a bit nicer than this. I wanted a place with a pool for weather like this or at least a bath to cool off in.

Well setting up a big tub was a fun idea and a fun idea was just what I needed at that moment; something I could have a good time doing. This place needed a bath, something large if we could manage it. For today anything that would hold water would do, but for Rulo I needed to talk to Peter our handy engineer; we should be able to build a public bathing house with minimal effort. Public bathing was still a common thing in the Orient and other fun areas even in the modern age, I didn’t mind it at all but my red headed buddy had some disturbing incidents. Ah the tragedy of being a red-head, I still had thing for red-headed women regardless.

I should not forget to mention that my ginger-headed pal was also picked on for having the unfortunate name “Bob Harder”, jarheads aren’t easy on anything like that and every single one of us was singled out for something in our collective, youthful boredom. Do I need to go into depth for you what sort of hilarity they could find in the name Zachariah Ebenezer Narrater? Or even having a slightly oversized penis? “Seriously guys, it’s just in proportion with the rest of me, leave off already!” Marines are not easy on one another and you either get over it or get out. To be honest, it was how we kept each other sane; if you were too busy laughing at the wort on Buggies ear to remember what happened last night you didn’t lose it. We laughed at the world to spite our hatred of ourselves.

I drank to that, best thing ever to drink to.