What Freedom means (13)
The night was spent uneventfully. Jeff had spent the night so that we could get an early start in the morning, and we headed out shortly after the day workers did. Tal'ena was wearing a simple dress that was tailored for her frame, while I was dressed in my usual well-worn kilt and shirt. Jeff took one look at me and declared that we'd be stopping by a clothing store as well to get some additional clothes for me that "don't look like they've been run over by a truck", according to him. He also asked if we wanted cell phones. When I asked why, he explained that it would make it easier for either of us to get a hold of someone in case of an emergency. I did not fully understand his reasoning initially, but I shrugged and went along with it. "I suppose. I'm not sure that I would use it, but if you think we should have th-YEEEOWWW!!!" Tal'ena had taken the opportunity to pinch my tail. As I glared at her, she stated that the phones were a good idea. With that settled, The two of us piled into the back of Jeff's company car for the trip in town. We arrived downtown, and Jeff parked the car in a garage and we walked to the bank, and passed several shops along the way. Two of these were phone stores, and one was a clothing shop that had a sign proudly proclaiming that they catered to morphs. Another was a smallish resturant next to the clothing store.
The bank was interesting. We walked in, signed in for new accounts, and waited about ten minutes. Tal'ena had a few checks that Jeff had given her a few days ago. They were for back pay and one was a bonus check for her "job" working at the farm. My deposit was the cash I had placed in a satchel that Jack had loaned me, along with a check from Jeff for my time restoring the car, and from the settlement. All this went into our accounts, except for about a thousand credits which I held onto in order to go shopping afterwords. The clerk at the bank informed us that we would be getting the debit cards in the mail in a few days along with a box of paper checks.
That having been done, we started walking down the block and went into the first phone store. They refused to talk to us, talking only to Jeff. And when he told them that we had no master, they actually made offers on us! We turned around and walked out without a further thought. The next store was much friendlier, and ended up selling us two phones that we could use. (They had several models that were well suited for a morph's larger and slightly clumsier fingers) The person that helped us turned out to be the owner, and he was very helpful about figuring out what plan would suit us. we ended up choosing a "pay as you go" plan, which he said we could easily upgrade at a later time if we needed to. To avoid confusion, Tal'ena choose a slightly different model phone then mine, although they did use the same power supply and battery pack, which was convenient. Thanking the owner, we left and headed off to our next stop, which we all decided was to be the small shop with the sign.
When we walked in, we were greeted by an older man who looked us both over and spoke to us. "You two must be here for clothing, I'll wager. Especially the male, his clothes look shot." I could feel my ears turning bright red in embarrassment. The shop owner was pretty quick about noticing this. "Oh, don't be embarrassed. We get this quite often. You're an M02, right?" I nodded my head. "How did you know?" He chuckled. "Your model was quite popular. Fortunately, the builds are similar too, which made it quite easy and somewhat economical to outfit you folks." He turned to an curtained opening just behind him.
"Thom! Get up here! I need some measurements taken!" A somewhat smallish morph came out with a tape measure. He looked at the owner first, then at Jeff. "The male, the female, or both?" Jeff shrugged. "Ask them, I'm not their master." The morph turned to Tal'ena and repeated the question. "Him first, he definitely needs it." She paused a minute, and then added, "Can I see what you have to offer before I get measured?" the morph got to work by leading me to a screened area and had me strip. As he took measurements, I heard Tal'ena taking to the store owner about what clothing he had for female morphs, which he apologized by stating that he did not have much, but was able to have commercially produced clothing altered, or entirely new designed done for her if she wanted. I was thinking as just how expensive this might be when the smallish morph tugged on my tail gently. I looked down at him. "Where is your indenture? I don't see it anywhere on you." I showed him the key around my neck, and his eyes boggled. He took two steps backwards out of the booth. I hurried to put my clothes back on, and stuck my head out the curtain. By this time he had told the owner, who was talking with Jeff to verify this 'supposed tale of nonsense' as he put it. I stepped out of the booth and went over the Tal'ena. The morph had disappeared into the back while his owner was arguing with Jeff about if we were freed or not. Tal'ena and I showed him our keys. "Well, I'll be damned. Thom wasn't lying to me after all." I looked up at me. "I'm assuming that something similar to what you are wearing will suffice, or does your mate here want something a bit fancier?" Tal blushed a bit, but she asked what they had for me. Thom had returned from the back fo the store with a small-ish rack with a variety of clothing that would fit me. We picked out a number of outfits, during which time we found out that the restaurant next door didn't look like much, but had some very good food, and they also were morph friendly. We related to out adventure with the first phone store, and he stated that they were snobby to anyone who didn't have a high end designer suit on. He wondered how they stayed in business, frankly. One of the articles we ended up buying needed some alterations, so he suggested that we go next door for lunch while he worked on it. We could leave the rest of the clothing we were buying, and we could pick them all up at once. We agreed, and went next door.
The relatively sedate store was a total opposite to the organized chaos when we walked in the door. We did not see anyone at one table, and there was a sign by the front door stating "seat yourself", so we did just that. A morph came by in short order and took our order, although he nearly dropped his ticket book when he saw Tal'ena. When he saw the keys hanging around our necks, he vanished, and a short time later a wizened old Japanese lady came out with a tray holding our drinks in one hand and a soup spoon in the other. She came right up to Jeff, set the spoon down, served our drinks, and swapped the tray for the spoon. She fairly glared at Jeff. "So. Why you have to bring more trouble to my place? I don't have time to baby-sit every morph in the city in two hours when they all show up!" Jeff smiled. "And 'hello' to you too, Isha-san. Yes, I brought them here as quickly as I could arrange it, in order to get it out of the way. I also remember the trouble we had with Jack." "You glad we are in a public place. I wipe smile off your face otherwise!" she countered, and started laughing. Turning to face us, she asked me a question. "So, how long have the two of you been free?"
Tal'ena nudged me. Glancing at her, I replied. "Almost 48 hours, Ma'am." She looked at Tal'ena, who answered the same. "I see." By now, the entire resturant had gone silent, and everyone was looking at us. I idly noted that out of the 25-30 people in this place, nearly all of them were morphs of some model or other. One of them stood up, a large hulking bear morph model that I had only seen in product literature. He spoke in a deep, booming voice. "So what we saw on the news is correct? You two are Free?" We both nodded. "How did you pay off your Indentures? Or were they revoked?" Jeff spoke up. "The Indentures were released by a combination of improper acts by their former Masters, and some legal wrangling." The huge ursine nodded. "I see. Master treats me well enough, all things considered. Still, I am glad to have met you. Although I wish I could stay longer, I must be back to work in ten minutes." He bowed as well as his form would allow him to. We both stood up and returned the bow. As he left, we returned to our seats. This was good, because our food was arriving.
It took a while for us to eat, with us being politely joined by other morphs (and the few humans as well) who said a few congratulatory words to us as they left. Eventually, we left, and collected my new clothing and waited outside for Jeff to bring the car around. While we waited, we noticed two humans walking up the street. They were looking at us funny. I found out why shortly thereafter...