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Turtle & Canary, Sunday

Apu was relieved. Rather than come in and start rambling about revolutions and unions, today, Dolf had quietly taken his seat behind the counter, piece of paper in hand, and started writing.

Of course, that was a relief to Apu for about as long as it took him to realise that meant that Dolf wasn't going to be cleaning the store in solidarity with the workers today. With a sigh, he picked up his broom and got to work.

Dolf didn't notice. He was busy trying to figure out how to establish parallels between Fandom and Middle Eastern dictatorships right now. Writing for the paper was turning out to be harder than he had anticipated, but he was planning to do it well. Dammit.

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He's not that hard to avoid today!

You might have to clear your throat to get his attention.

Okay, so after a good year and a half in Fandom Tara knew better than to take radio too seriously. But it rarely entirely made things up, was the thing. So she had to assume Raven was back somehow or other.

She'd get the details from Karla later, but right then, she wanted to talk to somebody else who was a little on the outside. Besides, it'd be nice if for once Dolf didn't hear about reserves drama after it was over.

"Hey," she said, leaning over the counter. "So -- this is weird, but did you listen to radio this morning?"

Hearing about reserves drama before it happened might go a long way towards making him feel less awkward at reserves meetings, yes. On the other hand, Dolf was starting to accept it as a fact of life - if it's Wednesday, a reserve leader has probably been traumatised again...

"No, I was trying to get to work," Dolf said. About thirty seconds after she'd spoken, after he'd had to lift his head up and away from the paper, after he'd blinked comically for another few seconds, and quite possibly after he'd dropped his pen.

Hey, Tara usually wasn't the source of the trauma.

Much.

Okay, that one time...

"We should ... probably call Karla," Tara said, biting her lip as she watched him get through the minor crisis her arrival seemed to have called. "'Cause, um. It thinks Raven is back. I was going to go to the library and talk to Jono before I came here but ..."

She hugged herself.

"I dunno. How do you even ask that?"

Ask a difficult question...

Dolf, now awakened from his world of the written word, still needed a few moments to parse that. "Radio says Raven's back?" he asked, with difficulty. "Maybe... the squirrels have been drinking and were being mean?"

"Maybe." Tara sounded doubtful. "Usually they do that about who's sleeping with who, though. Not ... big, huge real stuff."

He rubbed at the back of his head. It just sounded weird. People weren't supposed to come back from the dead - his home-taught skepticism had a hard time with the idea.

"Do you need someone to come with you if you ask?" Dolf said, finally. "I can come. We can figure something out together."

Tara looked grateful. She hadn't expected the offer, but if Dolf were along, maybe it wouldn't turn into the emo-fest she'd been dreading.

She was also rather firmly of the opinion that dead people should stay dead. ~~Unless they were vampire slayers, but that wouldnt' come up for another few years.~~

"If you want," she said, surprised but pleased. "Library? Or should we try to find Karla or Raven?"

Dolf blew out a breath as he tried to think of the least potentially traumatising experience. "Maybe look for Raven first, if she's here?" he said. "If she really is alive, it might be less weird than asking her boyfriend."

And of course he was going to offer to escort her when she looked that out of sorts about it. He was a boy.

"That's ... probably what we should do, yeah," Tara acknowledged. "It'll just be weird. L-last time I saw her she was, um, trying to kill all of us. And I was possessed. I don't want to bring up bad memories."

For either of them.

"If she is here, you'll have to see her sometime anyway," Dolf pointed out, "And this time I'll be there."

He sounded like he believed that it would help.

"And if bad memories come back, I'll just take you back, okay?"

That got a genuine smile out of Tara. "You're being all noble," she said, sounding as if she didn't see the trait much and liked it when she did. "I -- I guess I could start by calling her? Ask her to meet us tomorrow for coffee or something if she's around? And if she can't pick up the message" -- which sounded better than if she's still dead -- "it -- it won't hurt anything."

Tomorrow was good. Tomorrow gave her some time to adjust.

He gave that some thought, then nodded. Tomorrow would probably be good; it gave him a chance to deal with the little voice in the back of his head that was pointing out that blind faith in miracles like this was exactly what got people hurt.

Dolf didn't know Tara very well, but she wasn't the kind of person he liked to see hurt. "Tomorrow will be good," he decided, "And if she doesn't show, then we'll have coffee together. I can even pay for it now."

"Hang on," Tara said, in a way that wasn't a no. She pulled at her phone and dialed, then slowly put it back in her pocket.

"So ... we'll see," she said. "And I could pay for it too, but ... new job?"

It seemed a reasonable guess.

"Since a few weeks," Dolf said, sounding a little relieved and a little chirpy - potential miracles didn't exactly set him at ease. "I didn't have any money with me when I came here and it was getting kind of stupid, so I asked Shunsui and he gave me one."

Or rather, dubbed him an employee and then got out like a bat out of hell. Whatever!

"It's a good shop," Tara said, blinking a bit at the shift to chirpiness but going with it. "I got a job at the magic shop when I'd been here a few months. It's nice not to always have to make people pay for things."

It was very overcompensating chirpiness. Miracles were kind of 'here be horrible nuclear mines' territory where it came to Dolf.

"At least we're both doing something that helps?" he said. "I still don't get magic, but people here seem to be able to use it."

"We are. And you could probably do the kind I do," Tara told him. "I mean, most people don't, but it's just the right words and focus. Nothing about me."

Besides being from the right universe, of course...

"I find it hard to believe it still," Dolf admitted. "Even if I've seen it. It just feels like it doesn't belong in the world."

He looked fairly apologetic, for all that. ... and for a guy who had spent a chunk of the past year in the past courtesy of a time machine...

Wow, the Egyptian government is really starting to lose it (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/201113085252994161.html).

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Turtle & Canary, Sunday

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