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Pick Your Poison, Thursday

Margo thought of herself as a practical girl. She’d been here for a few weeks. She’d tried the causeway, she’d tried calling Portalocity, she’d tried her own portal spells to get back to Brakebills, but no dice. That and what Irene had told her made it crystal clear they were stuck here for a while.

And she wasn’t blind. She could tell Eliot wasn’t that eager to get back to Fillory and all of its many problems.

So she slapped the ‘Open’ sign on Pick Your Poison in the morning, pulled up a chair, and looked up local real estate websites. It wouldn’t take much more than a spell or two to magic a mortgage into being for however long they were going to need it. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was finding something that looked acceptable enough to live in.

“Christ, miss me with your Europeanish tiny homes.”

They’d be a lot cuter in actual France.

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Buy stuff. Leave Margo alone.

Or don’t leave Margo alone. It’s your choice.

Irene had heard about Margo's little shop here on the radio, of course, though she'd never been in when it had been under the previous ownership.

However, when she saw the open sign, she couldn't resist the siren call of curiosity and ducked in. "Oh, it's really just bougie skincare in here?"

She had rather hoped it might be a store that sold a variety of real poisons. It was a real gap in her knowledge!

Though this would probably be all right, too.

“Mostly.” You know, Margo had seriously thought about ignoring her customers, but she recognized that voice. She lowered her phone and nodded towards the back door. “The last owner had some real weird shit going on upstairs.”

"Fun weird shit?" Irene asked, clearly hoping that was the case. She, generally speaking, loved weird shit! "Or the sort of weird shit that is best avoided?"

She had encountered quite a lot of both in her time here.

“The kinda weird shit you don’t want to put in your mouth,” Margo said. “I have an app that tells me half the plants in the apartment are poisonous.”

She shrugged.

“Guess someone was going full Thorn Queen for funsies.”

"You know, that actually seems sort of obvious," Irene noted, just this side of disappointed. "Though it's hardly the first time that someone's used one of these storefronts to produce something better behind the scenes. I used to know a fellow here awhile back who ran the tea shop and had magic elixirs in the back."

She didn't think Hatter would mind her sharing that secret, given how long he'd been gone by now.

“That’s just the price of doing magic these days, if you want to at least pretend to be on the up and up,” Margo said. She made an executive decision: the phone went back in her purse. “I know a herbalist who uses magic to make and sell designer drugs at parties.”

"Fun." Don't think Irene didn't notice, as something of a phone addict, the concession of putting one's device away. Margo got a smile for it and everything. "My old friend with the tea shop could alter your emotions, so similar deal. People around here do tend to at least pretend pretty well, as far as the up-and-up thing goes."

So discretion was the name of the game, if you were going to follow in that herbalist's tracks, Margo.

Edited 2021-09-09 17:47 (UTC)

Please. She could never match Josh’s talent with magical pharmaceuticals. Margo knew her place in the magical world: being glamorous and pretending to keep it together in a crisis long enough to fuck somebody up. “Emotion magic, huh?” she said. “That can go south fast. You ever indulge?”

The last time she’d had anything to do with emotion magic, they’d all bottled up their emotions to practice some spells, and before you knew it, she, El and Q had woken up in a naked jumble with Q’s girlfriend glaring at them from the foot of the bed.

"Once," Irene said with a quick smile. "He was quite secretive about it all."

Maybe understandably, given that it was apparently really, really illegal. But really, really illegal things were often Irene's favorite, so.

"Though the island sometimes fucks around with emotion magic, I guess," she noted. "You didn't happen to have one of those new drinks at Kitty's thing last week, did you?"

Irene, for what it was worth, was quite glad to no longer be married to someone who apparently never came home. Or cold all the time.

“Oh fuck, don’t get me started,” Margo said. She sagged back in that chair in her nice black dress in a way she knew wasn’t totally flattering for her tits. “That fucking bartender turned me into a woo girl.”

Edited 2021-09-09 18:09 (UTC)

"The drink did," Irene corrected, raising an eyebrow in mild amusement. "Sounds like Kitty herself suffered the consequences, too. If it makes you feel better, I was apparently married to some invisible woman named Phoebe and refused to use silverware, amongst other things."

It had been a messy week. There had been many casualties, though the chambray Armani she had on today was obviously not one.

“Well, I hope it teaches her an important lesson about not slinging magical testers she knows nothing about at unsuspecting bar patrons.” The indignity of being a woo girl had not done a lot to help Margo forgive and forget, but she had calmed down enough to abandon her plans to frogmarch Kitty down a short pier. Progress?

She eyed Irene. “You hallucinated a whole-ass wife?”

It seemed beside the point to Irene that Kitty probably hadn't known it was magic -- and this was one of those things where the lines between magic and...other weird shit blurred, for her. Were the drinks magic, or just weird chemistry? Was it magic that Kitty wouldn't need to go around the bar to avoid Margo if she came charging, and could instead phase through walls to make a hasty retreat if needed?

Ugh, see, this was the kind of thinking that led Irene down that path of envy, when normally she was perfectly content with her fabulously mundane self.

"More just the concept of a wife," Irene told her with a little snort, leaning idly against the counter. "I never actually saw her. Also was freezing cold the whole while and made periodic elephant noises." And because she liked you, Margo, she even offered out a tiny, little trunk-miming motion to give an idea of the whole image this had been. "The height of dignity, I tell you."

The drinks seemed like a pretty clear-cut case of magical poisoning in Margo’s book, but hey, it wasn’t like she’d saved any to send to Josh, who’d probably know what it was.

But she was willing to let herself be distracted away from that argument by the kinda hilariously-adorable trunk thing Irene was doing. “Shit,” she said. “You’re actually making me feel some kinda sympathy right now, because that is fucked up.”

If she kept it up, maybe Margo would tell her the story of how she’d successfully masterminded a bank heist with magic one day. Or would that be tempting the whole envy thing?

You know, it would, but Irene also really enjoyed surrounding herself with morally-ambiguous people who could do things that she just plain couldn't, herself. So envy and admiration could coexist there.

"It was wildly --" look, she could pun "-- fucked up," Irene assured her, wiggling her fingers in a little flourish at the end of that charming and self-deprecating trunk movement. "Though honestly the woo girl thing sounds like a nightmare in a whole different way. Tell me I didn't miss you flashing for out-of-season Mardi Gras beads or the like?"

Because that would have been hilarious. (And probably compellingly hot enough that Irene would have tracked down some beads for her.)

“Nah, my best friend chose that exact moment to pop outta thin air, so once he caught me screaming ‘woo’ at his magical fireworks, he dragged me on home,” Margo said.

She should probably thank El for that. She wasn’t going to, but she should.

“I did go buck wild in the makeup aisle, but I’m not sharing those Instas.”

"The disaster friend turned up?" Irene asked, perking up a bit with a little smile. "Oh, no, but who's running the kingdom, then? Are the peasants in charge?"

Teasing, yes, but also genuine interest; information was Irene's very favorite thing. Better than sex, better than fashion, better than expensive booze.

Wasn’t like this was info she could do anything with, so Margo saw no harm in sharing. “Yeah, remember the herbalist I talked about?” she said. “He’s running the place now, as far as I can tell.”

She snorted loudly. Because King Josh Hoberman — sorry, Josh the Fresh Prince — was. . . probably going to get everyone high again, and not much else.

But that was the Fairy Queen’s problem.

She couldn't (and moreover, wouldn't even if she could) do a damn thing with it, but that didn't really matter; Irene still wanted to know everything about everyone, at all times. It made her feel more secure. Especially as someone who only had a wee little gun and her wits for protection, these days.

Plus, you know. She kind of just found Margo interesting, anyway.

"So are you very attached to this kingdom of yours?" Irene asked lightly, processing that. "Best case scenario I'm seeing here is that everyone's high as a kite when and if you finally get back there."

Worst case, things might be on fire? Maybe riots or something?

Margo was interesting, that was true. And Irene was pretty without being aggravating, so these conversations were a win-win.

“I am, unfortunately,” she said. “It’s a pain in the ass, because I’ve never been anywhere that actively wanted to fuck itself up the way Fillory does.”

And she knew Eliot.

"Well. First of all, Fandom's likely to compete for the title, because those drinks last week were but the barest splash of a drop in the bucket as far as this circus goes," Irene told her with a sympathetic little wince. "But why's it so important that Fillory stay un-fucked up? Presumably you're not their very first High Queen."

So, thus, it followed that Fillory probably had been fucked up before.

“You know, I don’t know,” Margo admitted. “I guess I feel some kinda fucked up responsibility for the place after keeping it from sliding into hell for the past. . . I don’t even know how many months?”

She shrugged. “You know, kinda like if you find a stray cat that won’t leave you alone, after a while you’re like. . . fuck, I’m attached to this thing, or whatever.” She looked at Irene. “You ever have anything like that?”

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