Magic Box, Tuesday

[livingartifact]

Jenkins was taking his time exploring the island. He'd checked into the hotel without incident, and managed to get Ezekiel to send along his suits with only a little bit of argument and bribery, and he'd spent most of yesterday trying to find any record he could from his own universe of gossip reporting squirrels, to no avail. Today, he was resigned to his surveilled-by-rodents state and once again venturing out to get the lay of this land he'd decided to call his new home.

Really, why with the stairs? These knees were immortal, but that didn't mean they liked all this climbing about.

He peered through a few shop windows without finding much of particular interest -- which was unfortunate, having now purchased a present for Cassandra, he was going to have to find at least a little something for each of the others if he didn't want them accusing him of playing favorites -- then happened upon the magic shop. He peered in, expecting an array of sleight of hand tricks and plastic wands, or perhaps mass-produced fetishes and dayglo dream catchers, and was startled to notice that many of the shop's wares were, in fact, magical in nature.

The door opened easily enough, though he didn't notice the "closed" sign in the window until after he'd walked in. No one seemed to be manning the place at all.

"Really," he muttered. "This is highly irresponsible."

He tracked down a phone number for the current owner of the shop by poking around behind the counter, and after what turned out to be a perfectly lovely and fruitful conversation with a pleasant enough young man, and rather a lot of insistence that Fandom just kind of did things sometimes, he found himself the new manager in residence.

"The Library likes tricks like these, too," he told the air. "I suppose this is your way of making me feel welcome." He tipped his head in a small bow. "Thank you."

He flipped the sign in the window over to "open" and went to go look through the records and work out just what this place had gotten him into.

[change of management handwaved with permission. Open shop!]

Comments

[2_old_for_this]

Peter stopped by his own shop, read Shiemi's note, then sighed and headed off to the library. Though...huh.

He stopped at the Open sign and tried the door. "Hello?"

[livingartifact]

Jenkins looked up from the papers he was sorting through with an expression of faint irritation. "Ah. I should have predicted this."

Really now.

He straightened with a sigh and set his paperwork aside. "Yes? Can I help you?"

[2_old_for_this]

A bit bemused, Peter smiled. "Hi. I was headed to the library, but since you're open - how's your selection of books about possessing spirits?"

[livingartifact]

"I have absolutely no idea," Jenkins said. "Probably terrible."

He hadn't even gotten to the books.

He peered a little more closely at Peter. "Do you believe you're possessed?"

[2_old_for_this]

"No, not me," Peter said. "We had some flowers... Sorry," he realized, "I guess you're new if you don't know the books yet?"

He came further in and held out his hand. "Peter Octavian. I run the flower shop."

[livingartifact]

Jenkins looked at the hand, but didn't shake it. "How nice for you." He looked around the shop, then spotted a likely bookshelf and led the way over to take a look. "Jenkins. Newly established proprietor and -- yes. New resident. Flowers, you said? I've heard of flowers facilitating a possession, though, really, they're far more often associated with spells. Unless you meant an actual flowering plant had been possessed?"

[2_old_for_this]

Peter shrugged internally and put his hand down. "Weirder than that - cut flowers. I didn't even know they could be possessed. But a lot of things here don't seem to work the way I'm used to. I thought I'd better read up on other worlds' magic."

He eyed Jenkins. "Do you know about this place's weirdness yet?"

[livingartifact]

"Oh yes, pretty much anything can be possessed if you try hard enough," Jenkins said. "I remember once Moll Dyer attempted to use a possessed moppet to --" He cut himself off with a shake of his head. "But that's another story. What sort of flowers were they, exactly? Other than 'cut'." He pulled out a text -- in Latin -- and flipped through it a few times before putting it back. "And which 'weird' were you referring to? The multiple dimensions perhaps? Or the squirrels?"

[2_old_for_this]

"Dahlias," Peter answered. "And the multiple dimensions, mostly. If you grasp that and magic, you're about as prepared as anyone is here."

[livingartifact]

"Dahlias. Interesting." Jenkins snapped a second book -- Greek -- shut and placed it back on the shelf. "Then we certainly won't find anything in this section. They weren't introduced in Europe until the 18th century. You'll most likely want Aztec mythology, which is. . . ." He turned to look, finger poised to point, and then dropped it with a despairing shrug. "Lord only knows where. I would recommend against using the hollow stems as straws -- Montezuma is not kind to people drinking his water without permission -- but other than that, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to help you."

[2_old_for_this]

"Straws?" Peter blinked. Then he shook his head. Since Jenkins seemed to know a bit... "The girl who works for me was able to exorcise them, so I don't think the spirits were endemic to the flowers, more that they came from somewhere else and the flowers were convenient. But they seemed to think they were the flowers, which rules out the sorts of spirits and demonic influences I know of."

He shrugged. "My wards alerted to them but didn't actually keep them out, so they weren't harmful by nature. Just...grumpy."

[livingartifact]

Jenkins looked at Peter with a raised eyebrow. "If you believe them to be harmless -- and they are already gone -- what on earth are you bothering me about them for?"

[2_old_for_this]

Peter gave him a nonplussed look. "I'm not. I'm looking for books about similar things, since my knowledge of other forms of magic is obviously lacking. I believe in being prepared."

[arboreal_priestess]

The Magic Box, huh? Verity didn't expect to find much more than crystals and trinkets and patchouli. But sometimes you could find useful things in there, things roadwitches could use for power.

"Hello?" she called.

[livingartifact]

"This is a thing in this town, isn't it," Jenkins said, not looking up from where he was examining a display case full of what appeared to be miscellaneous powders for gris-gris bags. "Customers saying 'hello' as though they actually want to talk to people. I thought the new media was meant to make everyone anti-social and self-serving."

[arboreal_priestess]

"That's us millennials," Verity said cheerfully. "We're always screwing up expectations, even the ones based on our technology."

[livingartifact]

What was that? Someone snarking back instead of pouting like a wounded puppy? This one showed promise.

"I thought the latest set was meant to be called 'Generation Y'. Not that the name makes the slightest difference. It's simply an excuse for aggressive ageism, blamed on the social sciences. Which is terribly rude." Jenkins finished with the powder display, jotted something in a notebook, straightened, and finally looked up at his visitor. "Jenkins," he said with a nod. "How can I help you?"

[arboreal_priestess]

The Prices didn't much hold for pouting. That took precious time away from killing the ugly before it ate you.

"At some point, reporters probably realized that they could sell more papers by linking us to the Y2K scare in the minds of baby-boomers afraid of technology, so we got a rebrand," Verity said with a shrug and a half-smile. "Now they can clutch their pearls about us at the same time they call Thomas Edison a witch."

Which he wasn't. That was an insult to several self-respecting witches she knew.

[livingartifact]

"Don't be silly. That man wouldn't know a hex from a hole in the ground." Jenkins rolled his eyes. He and Edison had never gotten along. "Tesla -- now there was an electrician with a good appreciation of the otherworldly. Which, of course, only got him into even more trouble, poor fellow." Him and all the residents of Collins Falls, may their archivist rest in peace.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Hey now," Verity said, a little sharper than she'd intended. "I think Edison was a money-grubbing asshole whole stole damn near everything he could get his hands on if he thought he could make a quick buck."

Edison and cryptozoologists had a history.

[livingartifact]

"And he murdered puppies to sabotage his financial rivals," Jenkins agreed dispassionately. "He is, however, the reason I can listen to Thelonious Monk any time I please. And also -- he's dead. So we win."

[arboreal_priestess]

"It wasn't puppies," Verity muttered under her breath.

Fucking Edison.

[livingartifact]

Jenkins held up a finger. "It wasn't just puppies," he clarified. "Puppies were most certainly murdered. He sold tickets. Now, while trashing Edison is certainly entertaining, I suspect it's probably not why you came into a magic shop today."

[arboreal_priestess]

Verity was happy to drop the subject before she got all worked up about baby chupacabras--a sapient species.

"Not really, though I didn't have much in mind, either," she said, looking at various items in the store. "I figured I'd pop in, see if there was anything that jumped out at me to send home to friends or whatever."

[livingartifact]

"Are your friends magic users?" Jenkins asked. "Or are you planning a particularly nasty prank?"