Tim had set himself up on a street corner in the heart of downtown. How long he’d been standing there, exactly, he couldn’t say - he didn’t really have any way of checking the time right now - but it had to have been at least a couple hours. Getting rejected from that greeter job had not discouraged him one bit from his goal. It only reminded him that if he was going to spread positivity to people, he had to go where the people actually were. So he’d forgotten all about that empty mall and planted himself (figuratively) right in the busiest spot he could think of in the whole tri-state area, the intersection of State Street and Fourth Avenue. And he was not going to be deterred by the fact that not a single person had stopped to acknowledge him yet.
Sure, there were plenty of people out and about on a Friday afternoon like this - hurrying home from work, or hitting up the bars to get the weekend started. At first, he thought maybe people were passing by too quickly to even notice him. They were probably just assuming that he was an inanimate decoration that was put out on the street and not giving him a second thought.
So he started to speak up a little, to say “hello” and “Merry Christmas” to everybody that walked by, and to put a little more motion into his shimmering, decorated body to catch their attention. But just about everybody still ignored him - only now, it seemed more purposeful. Their eyes darted away, as if there was something incredibly interesting on the other side of Fourth Street, and their briskly-paced strides were never allowed to hesitate as they hurried on by. When he occasionally spotted someone who was obviously changed, he thought that maybe they would react differently, but no such luck. One man had just passed by with big horns sticking out of his head, and he was even more pointed in pretending to ignore Tim than the rest of them.
Okay, so maybe this wasn’t the right place for him to reach people, either. It certainly wasn’t the most pleasant environment for Tim to hang out in, given his current state. The urban grime, the clouds of car exhaust, the whiffs of vape smoke - these odors had never bothered him very much before, but now they were practically overpowering. He couldn’t just hold his nose to block the smell, for one thing, when he had no nose - and no, placing a bright red ornament right in between his eyes and mouth did not create a functioning sensory organ, although it sure did look festive enough for him. The tainted atmosphere seeped into his body through every pore, on every branch, and left him feeling tired and woozy.
But Mindy wouldn’t be able to pick him up for a few more hours, and until then, he wasn’t going to give up. He would brighten somebody’s day even if it took all night.
And that’s exactly what was on his mind up until the moment that a man in an official-looking reflective vest came up to him. Tim was fully prepared to be sternly warned that he was loitering, or disturbing the peace, or committing some other victimless crime and needed to leave the area immediately. What he was not expecting was for the man to grab him, lift him off the ground with minimal effort, and start to carry him away.
Tim nearly cried out to his abductor to tell him to stop. But before he could start to make a sound, he remembered how badly startled people could be when they suddenly found out he wasn’t just an inanimate tree. The image flashed through his mind of being roughly dropped onto the concrete, those carefully-placed ornaments all shattering once again. So, possibly against his better judgment, he kept his mouth shut and decided to play along for the moment. He was wondering what exactly this guy was doing, anyway, and if he waited, he would find out one way or another.
As he was being held sideways, the special ornaments that passed for his eyes dangling downward, he couldn’t see much of where he was being taken, but he could catch a flash of vision here and there. The man turned away from the sidewalk and headed into a narrow alleyway, where the wide-open door of a large freight elevator was waiting. Tim knew, of course, what building he was being taken into - it was the Cooper Tower, one of the most expensive office blocks in town! He thought for sure they would have had better security than this, though.
The man winched the door shut and pulled a lever with his free arm, and with a stomach-dropping clunk, the elevator started to slowly rise. Clutched underneath a sweaty armpit, with no noise surrounding him except a dull mechanical hum, Tim had to be really careful now not to let on that he was alive. But he had learned by now that this came easy to inanimate people like himself, who had no muscles to twitch, no lungs to make his chest rise and fall. Yes, he could still move his body by some magical means, but without any conscious effort to do so, he would stay perfectly still.
Even so, Tim had to make sure to contain his excitement as the elevator kept rising higher, and higher, and higher. If he had to be kidnapped, this was a pretty great place to be taken. He knew that each floor of the Cooper was more luxurious than the last. And as the minutes ticked by on this interminably slow ride, it started to dawn on him that he was being taken all the way to the top.
The elevator reached its destination not with a soft ding, but with a loud, harsh buzzer sound. Tim was startled, but if he squirmed at all in the man’s grip, it still went unnoticed. Passing through some narrow maintenance hallway, Tim was unceremoniously used to push open a swinging door a couple times, but he had come too far to lose his nerve now. Finally, one of those doors opened out into the room he was waiting for. It was only a few seconds after that before he was finally put down, upright, and he could start to really take in his surroundings.
First of all, he had just been left in a room as ornately decorated as it was large. This had to be the penthouse ballroom, a place Tim had heard about many times but never thought he would get a chance to visit. And along the longest wall, there was a Christmas tree every couple feet - he had just been placed in the last remaining gap in the row. When he was sure the coast was finally clear, he turned to the side and got an uncanny feeling. It was like looking in a mirror, something he had never really loved doing before Halloween and that he had only just started to be able to do again.
But it was the view behind him that Tim was more interested in turning to see. Through the plate glass windows - wow. He had never seen the city from this angle before. Or, further out on the horizon, the rolling hills that surrounded the city on all sides. On a clear blue winter day like this, you could see three different states from here - no, maybe even four!
But the novelty of all of this was wearing off pretty quickly now. He was not supposed to be here, and now he had to figure out how to escape without anyone noticing. Unless... maybe... would it be such a terrible thing if... he just stayed right where he was? They would have to dump him back out on the curb eventually - presumably right after Christmas. And he didn’t need to eat or sleep in the meantime.
He lingered at the window, ready to snap back into his proper place if he heard the slightest sound, and wondered if he really could go along with this for the next few weeks. And if he couldn’t... what could he go along with for the next few weeks?