fandomtownies | The Magpie Emporium, Thursday (8/4)

Was Steph in any better of a mood today than she had been yesterday, or for the past week and change now? Not really, but at least she was getting used to it, which was... a dubious plus? Sure. She'd go with that.

She was busy texting with Ethan and Alex as she showed up to open the store this morning, making tentative plans to run a quick one-shot for them later in the day -- being more than a little bit pushy about it, if she felt like being honest which she didn't, but she thought she was really going to need the distraction after her band workshop.

Except that it seemed like things were... a bit more disheveled than they had been when she locked up the night before, and the office door was cracked open, and had someone been in here at some point between then and now?

"Guys?" She eyed Saffron (who just kept getting crankier and crankier the last few days) and Little Bot (rolling around blithely as he went about his daily routine). "Have you... noticed anyone besides the gremlins getting in here?" Little Bot made a bright, nonchalant noise as if she shouldn't worry about it, and Saffron turned over with a loud grumbling noise in order to more blatantly ignore her.

"Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaay." Warily, Steph opened the office door to let herself in and found a cup of coffee sitting next to the slightly grease-stained paper bag on her desk, both of them looking like they'd been left fairly recently, and she wasn't at all surprised to find upon opening the bag that it contained her favorite breakfast sandwich and hash brown patty from J,GoB. It just figured that Vi would break in just to make sure she was still feeding herself, even if she didn't want to directly acknowledge Steph's existence.

"You absolute dumbass," she mumbled with a slightly watery smile that crumbled into a shaky laugh, and sat down at the desk to start eating.

The Magpie Emporium was open, and its proprietor was in the most indescribable mood.

[OOC: Open, if SP because work continues to be ridic this week. B&E food delivery modded at the suggestion of, and with permission from,

giveittoyoursister.]

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Steve had been doing a lot of wandering the island to try to get the lingering feeling of ick out of his system from the weekend and he'd never been into Steph's shop, so.

Here he was.

"Hey," he said with a little smile. "I haven't been in a shop like this since high school."

"Was that a million years ago?" asked Steph, like a little shit, giving him a wry half smile. "Hey, man. What's going on?"

Little Bot came rolling by with a couple of stray Warhammer minis and made a chirpy sort of noise in greeting.

"It was the mid-nineties, so basically," Steve admitted. "And not much, just going from air conditioned place to air conditioned place today. It's brutal out there."

Hawai'i would never dare to be a real feel of 107.

"Oh, wow, so before I was born then," Steph teased. (It was just a bit of an exaggeration, but she couldn't help it.

She grimaced. "Yeah, I feel you.
Hang out for the AC as long as you want, because this shit is gross and I've never lived anywhere with this kind of weather before."

Steve was definitely looking for a vent to stand in front of like the tropical flower he secretly was.

"I am going to ignore the 'before I was born' thing," he added, "so I don't collapse into dust."

Or dye the grays out of his hair in a vain attempt to turn back time.

Steph's collection of tiny Pride flags, standing in a ROLL FOR INITIATIVE mug on the counter, was conveniently fluttering in just such a way to point out the closest vent.

"Aw, it's okay, Little Bot would treat your dust nicely," she said, "but let's avoid that if we can."

"That is considerate and only a little creepy," Steve decided with a laugh. "So. How have you been? Haven't seen you at the Wednesday craziness for a bit."

"Not trying to be too creepy, just weird," Steph said, "but I may have overshot a little bit."

She sighed, though, and made a face. "Well, first I was a cat. Obviously I'm not any more, but I just haven't really been feeling up to it, I guess."

Because cat-related drama, but anyway.

"Well, you missed out on Sidon and me pushing Jo on a table that rode on top of a bunch of other people," Steve said, "so...there's absolutely not an incentive to come back."

Steph blinked slowly a few times, the slight furrow between her eyebrows getting more and more pronounced as she processed that description and then tried to visualize it.

Then, finally: "No, for real, what is wrong with him. Also what weird-ass shirt theme was there this week?"

She hadn't stuck around long enough, or gotten close enough for that matter, to find out.

"Crowd-surfing themed, which was kind of boring," Steve said. "I miss the aloha shirts."

He might be the only one who did.

"The shirts were boring? I'm officially freaked out," Steph decided, sparing him a very brief judgmental look for missing the terrible aloha shirts. "Oh, I get it. Crowd-surfing. That's diabolical."

Steve nodded. "But probably not prosecutable. The only one who got squished was that weird felt kid."

"Weirdly resilient felt kid," Steph had to add, because she still wasn't entirely sure how Beaker had survived the electric sledgehammer thing. "Oh man, you really can get away with a lot by claiming it's teambuilding, huh?"

Steve laughed. "You didn't know that already? Teammbuilding covers everything."

Steph snorted. "I'm a musician who sort of accidentally ended up running a record store before I came here, which was the closest to a desk job that I ever wanted to get in my life. I tried to avoid the hell out of anything that involved --" she put up some scathing air quotes with her fingers -- "teambuilding."

Meanwhile Steve's favorite word (other than "grenade") was probably team. He grinned. "Teams can be fun, though. They don't have to be about sports."

The Magpie Emporium, Thursday (8/4)

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