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Portalocity Office | 13 Griffin Way | Thursday

By now, Sam had gotten pretty good at making all the local modifications and precautions that one needed to make for visitors' weekends when portal traffic to the Fandom area was expected to be high. Since a new crop of students and teachers was due to arrive on Saturday - though not, she expected, in anywhere near the numbers that the island saw during Homecoming, for example - and she didn't have any other major projects to work on, today Sam set to work programming a similar set of modifications for a wider radius that would include Baltimore as well. It was repetitive, relaxing work, and all the more relaxing because she knew that it would mean a far smaller likelihood of having to solve last-minute crises on Saturday. That was, in Sam's opinion, pretty wonderful.

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Éponine was incredibly relieved to have all the holiday nonsense over with; she liked talking to people as a general rule, but after some of the customers she'd had to deal with the last couple of weeks it had been much more appealing to just hide for a little while.

Which was why she was only just getting around to delivering her own presents.

"I've something for you," she remarked from the doorway. "Besides the mail, that is."

"Oh, hello," Sam said, looking up from her omni-tool for the first time in quite a while. She blinked rapidly to adjust her eyes. "Well, that's always a nice thing to hear. You didn't have to, of course!"

"Oh, I know," said Éponine in the overly breezy tone she adopted sometimes, "but I said to myself, why not? I've never gotten the chance to do it before."

She set a thin, somewhat clumsily-wrapped box down on the counter and the mail atop it.

"How much fun it turned out to be, finding things for people, besides."

"It's a bit addictive, isn't it?" Sam agreed, grinning. "A bit like a puzzle, figuring out what your friends would like that isn't too pricey or difficult to track down." And she loved puzzles. "Well, I've got something for you too, but I'll open this first, shall I?"

This was just what she'd needed today, too. One simply couldn't do calculations for an entire workday.

Sam opened the wrapping paper with care, and her face split into a massive smile as she saw what it was. "It's a game!" she exclaimed. Recognition dawned as she marveled over the pieces. "I think I've heard of this - it's quite old and a bit tricky, and it'll take me a good long while to get good at it, I should think. Éponine, thank you! It's wonderful."

Edited 2014-01-02 22:11 (UTC)

Éponine seemed quite pleased with that reaction, and she broke out into a relieved laugh. "So you like it then! That's good, I'm glad. That's the trouble with trying to find something unusual, you know, it's hard to think of something when you haven't heard of it yourself." Upside, she'd figured out how to do Google searches on her phone in the process.

She adjusted the strap of her mailbag, still smiling. "It looks tricky, but you're clever, and I thought something simpler might bore you."

Totally the right thing to say. Sam probably couldn't smile any harder if she tried.

"Well, we'll see, and hopefully I don't prove you wrong," she teased. "I'll certainly be needing a partner, if you're up for a challenge."

"It's not as if you can play it by yourself -- well, I s'pose you could, but how does one trick oneself, anyway?" wondered Éponine, but she looked as eager as she was curious; she could never resist a chance to prove she was more clever than she might seem. "But I'd be happy to help you learn, if you don't trounce me too thoroughly."

And here she'd always used to think chess was some uninteresting pastime to amuse old barons in the Luxembourg.

"You're giving me a lot more credit than I likely deserve," Sam laughed, although she quite appreciated the vote of confidence. She was preening a little. "In any case, you have the advantage - wherever you bought this must have given you some information about the strategy involved, whereas I've still got to figure it out."

"But," she segued, "I've also got something for you. I'm afraid it might not be as nice as this, though. Certainly not as personal."

She reached into an envelope in her desk and presented Éponine with an unnecessarily fancy-looking Portalocity travel voucher, good for any round trip, hotels included. "I thought I might add to the see-the-world fund," she said lamely. "Happy Christmas. Belatedly."

"For me!" Yes, that was something as unaccustomed as Éponine's surprised voice made it sound, so as far as she was concerned it was personal enough.

"But now I've got to think of a place to go," she said as she tucked the voucher into her pocket with meticulous care -- couldn't have it falling out accidentally, of course. "Someplace nice; it wouldn't do to waste this on a silly trip, would it?"

She'd forgotten to say thank you, but really, when did she ever look that delighted?

"As long as you don't use it to visit a city made out of candy, I'd say there's no such thing as a silly trip," Sam assured her, smiling - it was obvious Éponine liked the gift. "That's the company line. Give it some thought. But if you find yourself in need of ideas, I've got plenty of destination guidebooks and brochures and maps and such."

Edited 2014-01-03 04:04 (UTC)

"I'm likely to do that," Éponine warned half-playfully. "Somewhere quiet, I think, away from the city. I think I'm a bit tired of people for a little while."

"Well, our rural destinations are numerous and quite diverse," Sam replied, putting on the exaggeratedly polite voice that she used when talking to customers before she chuckled and dropped it. "Even warm ones, if you're looking to escape the snow. I should really just give you a book... You'd be looking for somewhere where they speak French or English, I'm assuming?"

Sam, don't overwhelm the poor girl.

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Portalocity Office | 13 Griffin Way | Thursday

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