Covent Garden Flowers, Tuesday

[shiroi_tiger]

Nathan was squinting a little at a shipment of apology cards that had just come in. He was mostly certain that Peter had placed an order last week, after all of the odd apologies that people had been making in the wake of that weekend. But it looked as though the supplier had either mixed something up, or sent a few hundred bonus cards for them to use, as well.

He gave them a call just to be certain, and the answer he recieved was something along the lines of, "For your company's good business. Where else are we going to be able to sell some of those?"

Nathan had to admit that the customer service rep had a good point, and hung up the phone to resume looking, baffled, at the cards. They had room to store them, sure, but he was having difficulty coming up with a situation where they'd actually get to use very many "I'm sorry you spent a few days as a racecar" or "I'm sorry for the loss of your tentacles" cards.

[OOC: And open!]

Comments

[okteiviakom]

"Flowers, really?"

Yes, Nathan. You now had a person in unseasonably tough leathers in your store, giving her surroundings a judgey look. Or at least a mildly incredulous one. It was kind of Octavia's default setting these days.

Sorry.

[shiroi_tiger]

Well. Nathan had been given judgier looks for worse, really. He glanced up from what he was doing with the card shipment and raised a faintly amused eyebrow at the lady in the doorway.

"Flowers. Is there something the matter with that?"

[okteiviakom]

"Are they useful flowers?" Octavia asked, both her eyebrows raised, like a challenge.

Anne had tried to explain houseplants to her, but... Yeah, she wasn't that far along in settling in to present day culture to have really understood the point of that.

[shiroi_tiger]

"Some of them are," Nathan replied, easily enough. "The ones that haven't been cut and arranged can keep air temperatures down in a room, for example. And," he nodded toward some aloe plants sitting near the window, "others have medicinal uses. Those ones are good for treating burns, for example. But people mostly just keep them around because they enjoy how they look, and find them calming."

[okteiviakom]

Octavia seemed to simmer down some with her judgment by the time he got to the medicinal ones. Somewhat, at least.

Still frowning, though, as she stepped out of the doorway and actually into the store. "Mostly?" she asked. "People will pay to look at flowers? Why don't they just go outside?"

Nature here wasn't even post-apocalyptic!

[shiroi_tiger]

"There are some flowers we get in that don't naturally grow in this area," Nathan explained, "or they take particular care in order to grow into the state they are when they sell them here, and wild ones aren't quite the same."

He offered her a little smile.

"And," he nodded toward a few 'get well soon' bouquets, "there are some people who simply don't have 'just go outside' as an option. The sick, the injured, the elderly. Bringing flowers to people who can't just go look at them when they want to can take their mind off of those things for a while. It's a kind gesture."

[okteiviakom]

Kindness was one of those concepts Octavia was going to have re-learn. It had first died with her mother, then gotten left behind with Lincoln.

There wasn't a whole lot of kindness to go around where she was from.

Octavia gave that all a (surly) moment's thought. "I guess it makes sense," she hazarded. "Wanting them around, I mean. Not the asking for money for something that grows in nature, even if it is brought from somewhere further away."

[shiroi_tiger]

"Capitalism," Nathan replied, giving a little huff of a laugh. "It costs money to bring it in, and money to keep the building that they're being sold out of. Somewhere out there, it cost somebody money to grow them. The water and the fertilizer and the soil itself. Nature provides, and I'm not going to say that it doesn't provide perfection when given the chance, but everything costs money, these days. Even time."

There was a pause, and then he gestured to a bouquet of roses, a sort of rich blue-violet.

"And even then, some of these flowers don't grow in nature."

[okteiviakom]

This was the first time anyone had actually explained the process to her. So, Octavia listened attentively, even if her disapproval for the whole concept was pretty obvious all throughout.

The roses were pretty, but not enough to distract her from her initial kneejerk reaction. "But when you say it 'costs money' to have the building or to bring them over – was it just decided at some point in history that it should cost money? Because that's the only way I see money entering into the equation. A building doesn't need bits of paper to stand."

[shiroi_tiger]

"You're right, it doesn't," Nathan agreed. "I suspect in some way, the idea of land ownership and needing to pay in order to have the right to remain on that land was a way of establishing a hierarchy... of one person asserting power over others. God knows it's been used for that purpose over the centuries, at least. Money itself has in some form been around for thousands of years, so I can't exactly ask the people who came up with the idea."

A pause.

"Well. I suppose around here there's always a chance of it."

Because Fandom.

"So the building can stand on its own for free, but in order to have the right to make use of it, somebody needs to pay. Either rent, if the manager of the business isn't the person who owns the building, or taxes to the town, for... whatever it is they use taxes for around here. Probably re-building efforts whenever something dangerous sweeps through, mostly."

[okteiviakom]

Octavia shook her head.

"Where I'm from, we did what was necessary," she said. "We made what was necessary." It would've been an oversimplification to say she thought people in this time must have had to easy if they had such elaborate structures of money-based power... But that was still kind of the gist of it. "But I'm not surprised power plays into it."

She knew humans, after all. Sky People, Trikru, and all.

[shiroi_tiger]

"Power plays into far too many things," Nathan decided. "Honestly, I'd be just as happy without money, myself. But since we're currently living in a capitalist society and I also happen to enjoy being able to eat and have a roof over my head, I'll play along."

He nodded toward the bouquets.

"By selling flowers."

He preferred it to selling guns. Though he'd done that on the island before, too.

Sort of.

[okteiviakom]

Selling guns, Octavia could fathom. But maybe that was just because it was what Bellamy did for a living, here.

"I sell music," she offered. It seemed the thing to share – and it encompassed her implicit agreement on how it seemed to be impossible to escape money around here.

[shiroi_tiger]

"Oh?" Nathan tilted his head at her curiously, and then offered her a little smile. "Now I'm curious, what does it feel like, to be selling patterns of sound?"

It seemed like an interesting profession for somebody who had difficulty wrapping her head around the idea of selling plants.

[okteiviakom]

Well, at least you couldn't pluck music right off the ground.

But still: "Weird," she admitted. "There wasn't much music, where I came from. And there's so much of it here, and from so long a time."

Relative to the span of human history, it wasn't that long a time, but, well. She came from somewhere post-apocalyptic.

[shiroi_tiger]

"It takes a bit to get used to, hm?" Nathan nodded a little bit. "I can imagine. My time and this place are only separated by around a century and a half, but people are capable of doing things in the here and now that we could barely fathom. There's a lot to adjust to."

[okteiviakom]

"So, that's a century and a half before this time?" Octavia asked, hazarding a guess. Honestly, could've been either way, when you considered where she came from.

Also, hey: look at her having adjusted to Fandom enough to actually ask that.

[shiroi_tiger]

"Before," Nathan confirmed with a nod. "Far enough along to have firearms, not quite far enough to be able to believe that there were once people walking on the moon."

[okteiviakom]

If you squinted, it almost looked like Octavia smiled for a second. But very wryly.

And very faintly.

"I'm from a hundred years into the opposite direction," she said. "I was born on a space station, so people on the moon don't faze me."

[shiroi_tiger]

Nathan gave his head a little shake at that.

"Very little in the world will astound me as much as the realization that the way humanity lives changes so quickly, you might miss something important if you blink."

[okteiviakom]

Octavia shrugged a little, turning to examine a plant near her. She didn't know what it was, and she wasn't sure it mattered.

"For what it's worth, space wasn't a permanent solution. We came back to the ground about a year ago."

[shiroi_tiger]

Well. 'Solution' was an ominous word to use there. It painted a far more detailed picture of the direction humanity had gone than even the mention of living on the space station.

"... Something happened, then?"

[okteiviakom]

"The station was failing, so it was time to see whether the ground was habitable again, a century after a nuclear apocalypse."

So, you know. Fun stuff. And she said that with a kind of detached idleness, because the more days passed here, the more surreal it felt how her life had changed so abruptly frm that to this.

And in keeping with that, she gestured at the plant she'd been looking at. "What is this? is it useful?"

[shiroi_tiger]

"That one?" Nathan looked over at the plant thoughtfully. "I believe that's a calendula. It's got anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties, but I'm fairly certain most people just keep it around because they enjoy looking at brightly-colored flowers."

So yes, more or less.

He was going to need a moment to process the rest of it. The phrase 'nuclear apocalypse' was another one of those things that weren't really a consideration back in his time.

[okteiviakom]

Yeah, nuclear apocalypse was a topic like that.

But Octavia was eyeing the plant with renewed interest. Or, to be more specific, genuine interest. She'd mostly been looking at it as a way of masking what she was thinking, before.

"I guess it's nice to look at," she said with a mild shrug. "But it sounds like people keep it around to be pretty and don't even take advantage of what else it has to offer."