✅🎊✂️ Hypnosis Won't Take Me There!! [alternative cut]

Chapter 455: Destination

"Kolechia?" Belle mumbled, as Toni Walker breezed into her house. She was followed by two more bikers Belle didn't really know, as well as the babysitter Caitlyn. She had no idea what this conversation was going to be about, Toni hadn't said a word more on the phone. But she knew that there was nothing to be gained by fighting her when she got serious, and she was sure the truth would come out sooner or later. A little weirdness was a small price to pay for the chance to spend a beach weekend with Reg and Vicky's friends.

"Right. You've got a place over there?"

"Yeah, but we can't go. There was a–"

"I don't need to hear excuses and lies. Where is it?"

"South Vedor, on the edge of the Gorsush mountains. Perfect for hipsters and backpackers, there's acres of beautiful woods all around, and picturesque little villages, and it's close to the border so you can spend a day in Grodno or even Minsk if you're more into galleries and museums. But seriously, why accuse me of lying? If that place was an option I wouldn't be here now, with or without Dean. we had our tickets ready and everything, no chance of a refund."

"I'm not calling you a liar. But I wouldn't trust your brother as far as I could throw him. Where are those tickets?"

Belle didn't have a clue where all the questions were going, and from their expressions she could guess that Caitlyn and the two biker guys were almost as in the dark. The only people not showing signs of confusion were two indistinct figures in the back of the truck outside, too wrapped up in each other to pay much attention to anyone else's problems.

She wanted to argue, but the easiest way to show that she was telling the truth would be presenting Toni with two bundles of plane tickets and visa receipts, useless now the departure dates had passed. She could show easily that they'd planned to go, and that the worst luck ever had kept them here. Or the best luck, now she thought about the possibility of quite a different summer break. She hunted through the pile of papers on the coffee table, and eventually found a thick envelope wedged under the corner of the television in the lounge. It wasn't a hard search; she only had a small house, and there hadn't been too many places to look.

She opened two thick envelopes, and tipped the contents out onto a clear area of the coffee table. For budget airlines there were so many unnecessary pieces of paper in there, a fact which everyone besides Toni tried to make some kind of joke about. They all fell flat in the face of the current tension. There were receipts, booklets about booking restrictions, charts of baggage allowances and rules for three different flights, a complimentary leaflet about Belarusian customs rules, a guarantee card, a list of numbers to call, and a table of the fees that would be levied if cancelling after particular dates.

The last envelope was larger, and disgorged a ream of duplicate application forms, with the front pages including repetitions of the same text in English, Russian, Kolechian, and two other Cyrillic-looking languages. The front page had an ornate seal that immediately gave Toni a first impression of some government documents, and that was confirmed when she picked it up to glance over the text. Visa application forms, receipts, and all the paperwork necessary for two siblings to enter one of Eastern Europe's most bureaucratically inaccessible states.

"I even completed the forms myself," Belle muttered morosely, pulling one document out of the stack. "Dean said he'd do it for me, but it's the first time I've been able to register a visa in my own name, and I wanted to show him I could do it. Took me hours, and then it's all gone to waste. I should have let him have his way, but I can be stubborn at times."

"You got separate documents?" Toni asked, leafing cautiously through the pile of papers. "I think we need Britney here to confirm, but–"

"Hey! Look, it's all here. I was looking forward to a couple of weeks away, and it got ruined. Why won't you take my word for it?"

"Because you've got all these papers, and I'm only seeing what isn't here. Budget airline, right? All the paperwork because they're not so high tech, changing planes at remote provincial airports." Belle started to nod, but Toni wasn't even looking for confirmation. "So look again, and tell me what's normally in these envelopes and isn't here."

Belle looked over the papers, trying to understand while the biker called Britney Wakefield. She could hear some of the words, asking Brit if she knew what a temporary non-domiciled resident visa was, and if she knew how to read the application forms. Belle did her best to think, but she was sure that these envelopes looked pretty similar to the document packs that were shoved in a drawer and forgotten when they got back from their trip every year.

"I don't know," she conceded when Toni turned to face her again. "There's so much of this junk. How do I know what I'm looking for if it isn't here?"

"Things you always need," Toni shook her head. Your visa's there, right. So where's your brother's? I see a ton of forms with both your names on, but only one sheet of that green paper. Your passport's in that stack as well, but no sign of his. And none of those stacks of paper from the airlines contains a boarding pass."

"You think they–" she spluttered, trying to deny an increasingly-obvious answer. "No way! It takes more than a week to change the names on the admission pass, he couldn't take... And you said she called home, didn't you? You need the billing password to make international calls from Kolechia. There's no way, and the roof was..."

"I think your brother lied to you as well," Toni did her best to sound comforting, but her tone made it clear she was almost as angry as Belle. It was one step closer to the truth, but she couldn't believe it had taken them so long to get there. "Now if you'll excuse me, there's someone else I need to call if we're going to get there in any reasonable time."