fandomtownies | The Perk- Wednesday evening

Know what else was awkward on a day like today? Carrying around a pouch of money from home where the currency was all in coins. Luckily that wasn’t all of the money Beau had on her, but it still made for a very awkwardly bulging bag that dangled from her belt.

The pumpkins were kind of cute though.

She’d just stopped in for a snack, maybe a small drink, but spotted Rey and made her way over. “Hey, ‘sup, Rey. How about these fuckin’ pumpkins, right?”

"Why?" Rey asked. "What is the point of them?"

So... that was her answer.

“To be a pain in the ass,” Beau said without even skipping a beat. “Better than the fake-blood coffee at least? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s getting kind of cumbersome. They’re cute and all but you know how they say some things are better in moderation?”

Because she was such a poster child for that philosophy.

"I've said it before, I like the winter version of this better," Rey sighed. "At least the island isn't trying to scare me today."

She wasn't going to say how much jump scare day had or had not worked on her.

“Fuck, man,” Beau grumbled. “Right? I don’t think I’m getting my security deposit back now.”

That poor wall just beside her linen closet.

“Oh hey,” she added, “I have something for you.”

Reaching into a small satchel she had slung across her back, she pulled out a plush Galapagos tortoise — compact enough to be held in one hand, so not exactly giant — and tossed it across the table toward her.

Most people handed over the gifts they gave out, Beauregard, instead of just flinging them around. Though that satchel implied that she’d been carrying them around like some kind of cranky blue Santa Claus.

“Souvenirs are, like, supposed to be a thing, I guess?”

Rey blinked, picking up the tortoise like she was half expecting Beau thought she was someone else.

"You got me a turtle?"

She'd never gotten a souvenir before.

“Yeah?” Beau shifted her weight from one foot to the other, shrugging. “The real ones are huge, they’re dope, I wanted to sneak one home but it was kinda logistically tricky, so I just got a few little ones for people who didn’t get to go on the trip. Because that’s supposedly a thing people do.”

Aw, she was counting Rey in the friend column already.

"Thank you," she said, studying the turtle and smiling a little. She really was touched by this. "How was the trip?"

“It was awesome ,” said Beau, with an accompanying two handed fireworks sort of gesture for emphasis, and she sounded remarkably like a surfer dude for a girl who’d never seen the ocean until she got here. “I thought there was gonna be, like, more city tourist shit, but we actually got to see a lot of the wildlife from the area. And the ship was like . . . I can’t believe the school actually pays for so many people to go on these things.”

There was a catch there, she was pretty sure. She might have to look into this.

"And they do it twice a year," Rey agreed. "It's nice to be able to see more of the planet- across the world looks nothing like it does over here."

...she came from a world that was a whole desert.

It was weird how many other planets out there in other dimensions consisted of a single biome, huh? At least it made vacation packing easier.

"I'm pretty sure just getting from here to Quito was, like, a million times further than I've ever traveled in my own world," Beau admitted. Then again, even without portal travel, that would have been the case. Thanks, different levels of technological advancement! "It's fascinating, to tell the truth."

Which she did a lot of these days. Huh.

"Getting to see something new, or the fact that you can?" Rey checked.

". . . Yes," Beau decided, nodding. "I mean, the fact that I can is just kind of mind-blowing. Actually doing it? Even better. Back in the Empire, for me it was pretty much just my dumbass small town until I got a job in the city, and then I was kind of stuck there, you know?"

Or 'worked in the library of the monastery I got sent off to,' but same difference.

"Yeah, I know," Rey said. "It easy to be so used to how you live that when you see how someone completely different does it... it's interesting. And completely surprising. At least for me."

"Same," Beau replied. "Same. Not sure the surprise factor is going to wear off for a while yet, especially around this place. Where everybody I know came from some totally different set of circumstances than everyone else."

She idly twirled the end of the sash around her waist between her fingers for a moment.

"Kinda gives you a lot to think about."

Rey tilted her head. "Such as?"

Since it seemed like Beau was maybe leading to something.

Not really; she was just musing out loud, but if it made her sound all cool and philosophical she wasn't going to complain.

"~~So many AU/fusion fics.~~ Just how things might've turned out under different circumstances, I guess?" Beau said after a moment, with a light shrug. (Which was true. With the very different ways that she and Karolina with their completely different upbringings had handled some pretty comparable experiences, she did think about that sort of thing sometimes.) "Like how I would've handled life on your planet, which, by the way, I've pretty much concluded is 'not well at fucking all.' Or, like, what kind of job would you have ended up having if you came from a totally normal, mundane, no such thing as magic or whatever kind of world."

So yeah, basically AU fic.

"I can't even imagine it," Rey mused, and addrd, "Aside from Fandom being Fandom. I can say I would not be a barista turned wedding planner."

Aside from being good at latte art.

Hey, latte art was tricky. That actually took skill.

"And I am definitely not the reality show contestant type," Beau added. "I don't even know how my brain ends up coming up with these things."

Did Rey look a little amused? Tiny bit.

"A reality show contestant?"

"I don't know," Beau complained -- it was definitely at least 50% a whine -- and waved a hand like she was trying to brush off the idea. "One of those dumbass things where you have to, like, backstab everybody and be the last person on the island to win or whatever."

She would be good at it, was the worrisome part.

"I really don't know how my brain ends up getting fixated on this shit."

Sometimes it was just being drunk, honestly.

"If it helps, I think you can blame the island rather than yourself for that, otherwise I don't want to think too hard about it."

Rey was a master of repression but some things were unfortunately public.

"True. That is the kind of thing it would do to fuck with us," Beau conceded. "Anyway, yeah. There's shit that never even occurred to me that's a totally obvious and legit conclusion for someone else to make pretty much immediately, because that's how things work where they're from. It's kind of a learning experience? I guess?"

"It is that. Though here I'm finding myself doing more of my own explaining than anything else," she admitted. "Maybe it's because I was here before and had some experience."

Edited 2019-10-24 12:15 (UTC)

"How'd that change things for you, when you went home?" Beau asked, her head tilting slightly to the right in curiosity. "Did it like, make some of the shit you always thought was pretty much normal seem kind of weird, or anything like that?"

"Maybe a little," Rey admitted, thinking of Duke's thing about personal customs. "I was on my own, so how I lived was how I'd set myself up, and I just went back to that."

Still did, actually- being on her own here meant she reverted to some old habits.

"But there were things I missed, and it was harder to be okay with living that way."

"Yeah." Beau nodded, frowning slightly. "To tell the truth I have no idea how I'd handle it if I ended up having to go back. If I was back to living where I was right before I came here, I'd probably . . ."

She had her arms crossed, and she didn't realize it, but the fingers of one hand were twitching against the elbow of the opposite arm, as if she'd suddenly just gotten really itchy. Just the idea of going back to the Cobalt Soul, where her entire life was rigorously scheduled out for her and her every move scrutinized, was fucking stifling.

"Claw my eyes out, I don't know. I don't think I could be okay with it at all any more."

"Then dont," Rey said, and meant it. "I kick myself for it now."

It'd worked out, sort of. But it'd also been a hard year.

"Then again," Beau added with a dry laugh, "that makes it sound like I was ever okay with it in the first place. Which would be a fucking lie."

She hadn't been okay with pretty much the entire first 21 years and change of her life, really. But that was enough about her.

"Not gonna do that again, huh?"

"Not to my home iWorks, probably. There doesn't seem to be much of a point." After the way she'd left, everything she had left behind was probably already picked over. "Wherever else in my Galaxy I'll have to go back to at some point, but that's very different."

"No particular attachment to the place you're from?" Beau asked; her tone was casual, but there was something in her eyes that might hint at a more focused interest in the answer.

"I'm pretty attached to the larger galaxy," Rey said, carefully. "It just needs help."

Yeah, Beau noticed that word choice. She didn’t say anything about it, but she noticed.

“There’s places in Exandria that aren’t so bad either,” she said by way of agreement. “Hell, some of them might even be on my continent. My hometown, though?”

The eyeroll said a lot.

"Clearly you think highly of it," Rey said wryly.

“Oh yeah,” Beau said, just as wryly, but with a snort of laughter. “Real snotty-ass small town where everyone’s up in everyone else’s business all the time and it’s somehow a million times worse than when the squirrels do it?”

Probably because the squirrels — and the people here, by and large — weren’t as inclined to use that information against you in a heartbeat.

"The squirrels are at least cute."

She liked the porgs, too.

“I guess.” Beau drew that word out with a long sigh. “I have to work with them so I can’t really talk shit.”

The porgs were cute though.

"I've found they respond well to rum even if you've yelled at them," Rey advised.

“Usually works pretty well,” agreed Beau, “but I’ve also met me, so there might be an upper limit there and I’m not sure I want to test it. I kind of do, but also not, soooooo.”

She dug into her pockets and found a couple more of the tiny pumpkins, then scowled.

“Hey, do you think these are gonna change — ha — back tomorrow or are we just out all our pocket change forever?”

"I hope they change back. I don't want to have tipped in pumpkins," Rey admitted. "I don't even know how much I left."

She was very concerned with people getting what they warned.

Understandably.

“Yeah.” Beau pulled her hand out of her pocket, opened it to look at the half dozen or so tiny pumpkins there, and shrugged. “It’s not like there’s any denomination system or anything, as far as I can tell.”

The mottling on the pumpkins seemed so random.

"Nope. I think it's interchangeable change," Rey frowned. "If it's normal I'll come back tomorrow and leave something extra. If it's still like this... I'm going to have to start using a card."

She liked to see what she had on hand.

“It feels weird, doing that,” Beau noted with a frown. Okay, more of one than usual. "I don't think I trust it, actually. The card thing."

Convenient and all, but unsettlingly intangible.

"It's more convenient," Rey shrugged. "But when all you do is swipe, how do you know what you actually have?"

"Except for what the machine tells me I have," Beau agreed, and she wasn't exactly scowling any less about this. "Hell of a lot easier than carrying around a bunch of pieces of silver and shit, but at least I can count those."

It wasn't really a huge problem until you leveled up enough to regularly loot good sums of gold, anyway.

The Perk- Wednesday evening

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