fandomtownies | Magic Box, Monday

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Magic Box, Monday

Considering that hiding out from a power-hungry older witch and her minions was the entire reason Surreal was in Fandom in the first place, she was actually taking the event of last week rather well.

...if you definition of 'rather well' was getting into the voodoo dolls and stabbing them repeatedly or trying to light them on fire.

The Magic Box is open ~~if ocd free~~, but 'ware the witch!

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It seemed to Tara as though everything were back to normal -- for certain values of "normal," anyhow -- on the island, but she would still feel better once she saw for a fact the shop had not been turned into some new age hodgepodge of Zodiac calendars and bead curtains.

She breathed in as she entered, smelled the usual mix of herbs, incense and old books. "Hi, I just ... wanted to make sure the shop was okay?" she asked Surreal, frowning at the voodoo doll activity. "Actually, are you okay?"

"Fine," Surreal said, in her usual bored voice as she tried sticking a pin in the doll's eye. "Just testing out your voodoo magics to see if they really work."

"... do they?" Tara was half-horrified, half-intrigued. "I've never tried that."

"I don't know. But if Sadi shows up swearing at me for mysterious ailments, we'll know!" Surreal, poking at the eyes of a doll representing your absentee parental-figure probably wasn't nice.

"Why are you trying to make him sick?" Tara wondered.

She would have understood making the loyalists sick even if she didn't like it, but she didn't see where Sadi came in -- other than by being, in Tara's limited experience, completely terrifying.

"He made me come here. Therefore? His fault," Surreal replied. Most things were pretty simple to the witch, despite the fact she lived and breathed the shades of grey between the black-and-white view of the world. "Also, an interesting test-victim to see if voodoo does cross-Realm service."

"Besides, his jewel is darker than mine. He'd be fine, just cranky."

See, the problem was Tara was curious about the experiment now and was pretty sure she shouldn't be.

"Let me know what happens," she said, and felt only a little bit bad about it. "So ... everything that should be in the shop, is in the shop?"

"As far as I can tell it is," she confirmed. "I even checked some of the top shelves, and it matches what we have written down."

Tara flashed a smile. "Good," she said. "I think I might put together an emergency kit and ... I don't know, bury it somewhere. Just in case that woman comes back."

"Surreal?" Cara was not checking up on Surreal, because that would imply that was actually some kind of need to check up on her. Which clearly there wasn't. This was just a normal, regular visit.

Of course, any attempt at normality was completely ruined by the thin strands of glittery plastic lodged in her hair. Damn squirrels. Maybe she just wouldn't notice?

Surreal really shouldn't be surprised that Cara was here, since she dropped by every Monday, but this was not a conversation that she knew how to have!

She'd never kissed anyone she actually knew before, and repeat customers did not count as people she knew.

"I'm here," she called from behind the counter. "Contemplating the methodical removal of anything pink from everywhere on the island."

Oh, like Cara was actually capable of using her words?

"I can get behind that idea," she managed, with one last, ineffectual swipe at her hair before wandering over to the counter. "Can we get rid of the glitter too?"

Surreal frowned. "How did you get glittered?" she asked, leaning over the counter to try and get some out of Cara's hair. "Or, rather, why?"

"The squirrels decided to celebrate being back on full rum rations," Cara replied, keeping her head still for Surreal and doing what she felt was a masterful job of keeping her eyes on her face.

It wasn't. But not more than usual.

Surreal was rather immune to people staring at her chest, although she tended to slug any males who stared too long or talked directly to it. Females, eh, it wasn't as if they hadn't seen breasts before.

"I don't think I can blame them for celebrating," Surreal replied dryly. "The one time I went to Caritas last week, they restricted me to one ale."

Well, it was a very nice chest, though Cara was glancing rather than starting. Glancing a lot.

"I don't know how you survived." Cara said with slightly less sarcasm than she'd used on the squirrels. "Does that mean you're going throw glitter at me too?"

"I settled for the fizzy drinks once I'd had my ale. She offered non-alcoholic ale, but what's the point?" Seriously. Non-alcoholic ale.

"So, no, no glitter. I don't even know where they get that stuff."

"Non-alcoholic...why would you even make something like that?" Watered-down ale was not considered a good thing in any of the taverns she'd ever been in.

"No idea where they get theirs, but you can have some of mine if you want." Because she was generous like that, and not at all because Surreal touching her hair had been the least bit nice or anything.

"Mmmm..." Surreal rummaged under the counter for a moment before coming up with a glass jar to deposit the glitter in. "Here. You can throw it at the next person who annoys you and get them glittered."

"The next person? I'm not going to have it very long then," she said dryly, before a calculating look appeared in her eye.

No, Cara, that was a Bad Idea.

Surreal inched away slightly, reading a shield spell. "Why do I not trust you when you look like that?" she asked dryly.

Cara, you were never going to look innocent, why did you even try? "Like what?" she asked, palming a handful of glitter.

Edited 2012-08-01 15:22 (UTC)

"Like you're about to do something that will get one or both of us in trouble." Cara wasn't the only one palming some glitter, no.

"Would I ever do anything like that?" Given that Cara then lunged across the counter and was trying to pull Surreal close enough to rub glitter in her hair, that was probably a rhetorical question.

That was fine, Surreal was busy dumping her glitter down the front of Cara's leathers and laughing.

Great, now, Cara was going to be finding glitter there for days. Not that revenge wasn't going to be swift and decisive, it was it turned out that a glittery, laughing Surreal was...distracting.

Maybe she hadn't thought this through quite enough.

"Don't tangle with a witch, sugar," Surreal said smugly, already trying to pick the glitter out of her hair. "We fight dirty." Like glitter in leathers.

"I noticed," Cara said absently.

That would be when, with an embarrassing amount of hesitance and her gut twisting in a tight knot, she leant across to kiss Surreal.

Oh.

Cara would forgive her if Surreal quickly pinched herself to make sure the timestream hadn't suddenly gone back to the way it had been previously been last week, or she'd hit her head or something.

So she did the only sensible thing; kiss back. It wasn't like she got to do this often. Or, well, ever.

Not faced with immediate rejection, Cara quickly lost that hesitance, the kiss turning not so much aggressive as intent. As if she needed to kiss her as thoroughly as possible before Surreal changed her mind about this whole kissing back thing.

Surreal wasn't going to change her mind about the kissing back thing, but when the kiss finally ended, she just stood there for a moment, blinking, the tips of her fingers touching her lips.

"Oh."

To her (small) credit, Cara's response wasn't just echoing that 'oh?'. Though that might have been more effective.

"I..." she started before trailing off helplessly, eyes on Surreal. '...like you' was only two words, Cara, short ones at that.

Well, it was rather well-established on the record that neither of them were great with words or feelings or anything like that.

Surreal held up her hand to stop Cara from trying to blunder around with vocabulary.

"I'm the bastard daughter of a whore, with multiple people wanting to kill me, and I'm here to complete 'education' before a male who has appointed himself my 'guardian' and is better known as the Sadist enrolls me in one of the best Red Moon Houses for courtesan training. On the side, I kill people for money, or just because I don't like they way they treat people. I fully plan to kill my sire at some point," she said bluntly. "People don't just kiss people like me. If that was just to cozy me into doing something for you, just damn well ask."

"If you meant it..." Well, Surreal didn't exactly know what that meant. "Just...shut up and kiss me again before I make a Darkness-damned idiot out of myself."

If she'd possessed the ability to articulate them, Cara had her own list of reasons why it was a bad idea for people to want, well, anything to do with her.

It was much easier, better, to do exactly what Surreal had told her to and reach over to pull her in to kiss her again.

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Magic Box, Monday

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