fandomtownies | The Magpie Emporium; Friday [01/05].

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The Magpie Emporium; Friday [01/05].

Graham had cheesecake, Graham had a squirrel that agreed to move this Jenga match from the radio station to the Emporium, and he was intensely focused on both, somehow, carefully moving a fork with a bite of cheesecake on it to his mouth while also hunched over the teetering tower as his finger of his other hand gentle poked and prodded at a piece to loosen it from its spot in the deteriorating structure.

The tower quivered. The tower shivered. Graham held his breath as the edge of the block slipped away and time seemed to stand still for a moment as he slowly, carefully, pulled both fork and block away and chewed...

He did it! It was still standing! It was...

Coming crashing down as a feline who was supposed to be referee came crashing into the tower and sent it all crumbling in a cascade of clattering wooden blocks.

"Saffron!" Graham complained. "If you were gonna call a foul move, you could have just said something! You didn't have to take down the whole tower!"

Oh, but Graham! She was a cat! What did you expect, honestly?

He looked over at Saffron, unremorseful as she sat down and started grooming her back leg, and shook his head, turning toward Leroy, already starting to gather the blocks, and asked, "Rematch?"

The Magpie Emporium is open!

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"Oh whoa," Arden said from the doorway of the store. "Jenga. I haven't played that in, like, a million years."

And then offered him a smile. "Hey, Graham, what's up?"

"A million years?" asked Graham, with a chuckle, grinning over at Arden unabashedly for what he was about to say next. "Zounds, I never realized you were that old!"

Yes, he was terribly proud of that one.

"And this tower," he added, gesturing, and also far too proudly, "is currently up, but who even knows for how long? You want in? Watch out for Saffron, though, she's out for blood."

"Black don't crack," Arden said cheerfully as she headed over to join the game. Sure, she'd play Jenga with Graham, a squirrel, and a cat. This was just a normal Friday on the island.

"Did you know, there's a roleplaying game that uses Jenga instead of all the weird dice you roll or whatever?"

Graham's eyebrows lifted at this revelation, and his eyes immediately bounced around to some of the shelves of the store with a thought that he clearly needed to be doing more shelf exploration.

Shelfploration?

"Is there?"

He returned his gaze to Arden, eyes narrow in a speculative fashion, thumb and forefinger stroking his chin with intrigue.

"Tell me more..."

Arden opened her mouth to explain the game Star-Crossed, only to remember at the last second that it was a two-player, romance game and her social anxiety kicked in immediately. What if that seemed...like she was trying to hit on him! That would be weird! She'd make it awkward! Also, she was eighteen! That might even be, like, illegal!

"Uh, hang on!" she said, pulling out her phone in a really smooth and normal way and totally not nearly dropping it or anything. "Uh, I, uh. Forgot. The name."

Frantically, she pulled up what she'd been reading about because, if she remembered right, it had been based on another, older game and--

"Dread!" she all-but-shouted in triumph. "The game's called Dread! It's a horror game!" Not a romance! "A horror game you can play with a bunch of people!" Not just two! Very important details!

She skimmed the details quickly. "Uh, I guess any time you make a move - not, like, make a move, it's what using a special ability is called - you take a block from the tower and if it falls, you. Uh. Die? I guess?"

Huh. Actually, this sounded kind of cool in its own right, not just as a convenient way to keep from being awkward, thank you game.

Would it be slightly less illegal if Graham had actually updated his profile after his last birthday, at least?

Graham's eyes went a little wide, hand paused mid-stroke, as he wondered if he'd said something wrong in all of those five words, and then his brows lifted as she looked it up, and then, naturally, he startled slightly once the title was shouted out, especially since he didn't realize until the clarification that Dread was the name of the game and not, just, Arden shouting out feelings or emotions or some kind of spell or something.

"Oh, no!" said Graham, with the proper amount of shock and...well, dread, one would expect from such news as being dead due to a fallen tower, except that he was chuckling a little with it, so maybe not exactly so concerned. "I mean, I guess it would make sense, for a horror game to be called Dread and result in you dying! But that sounds....really interesting! I wonder if we have it here. We have a lot of games, and I can look it up on the computer!"

He gestured, excitedly, toward that marvel of technology. Maybe Arden had never seen one before! He sure hadn't, after all, until he got here! And he was still not that good at it, but he did know how to at least look up inventory!

You just pressed the TAB key!

At least a little, yes!

Arden, having managed to successfully avoid looking like she'd shown up trying to hit on Graham, even if she hadn't exactly managed to avoid embarrassing herself entirely, looked over at the computer in question. It definitely looked like, you know, a computer, but he was clearly very excited about it and what could she do but kind of nod and smile in response.

Being an awkward people pleaser was hard.

"That would be cool," she said, and that interest, at least, was genuine. "It really does seem neat. I think you just need the book, a Jenga set, and friends to play." She gave him a small smile. "Which means you just need the book."

Star-Crossed was also available in physical format, but that didn't matter as she had never heard of it, ever, in her whole life.

"That's exactly what I was going to say!" said Graham, pleased as punch to have those words about just needing the book taken right out of his mouth. He hoped that Arden was including herself in that category of friends, and not just Leroy and Saffron, because, even after all this time, it was still just delightful being able to count other people in that category and not just animals.

"Okay!" he said, with a determined nod now as his shifted his focus to the computer. "Let's just look it up, then, and..." His finger began to peck out on the keys, "D....R....E....A...."

Good thing the game had a very short title, huh?

"D!" He clicked the last key triumphantly, and then followed it up with the enter key, aaaaand....

"We do have it! Huzzah!"

He took a moment to jot down where it was said to be located and brandished the little piece of paper proudly. "To the shelves!" he announced, before giving his leg a small shake to set it on the right path and started to head that way with a swirl of his cloak.

If it were much longer, Arden might have had to hipcheck Graham out of the way and type it in herself. As for counting herself...well, she wasn't not counting, exactly. She knew Graham had said they were friends before, but it might take some reiteration before she'd feel confident in making the claim herself.

"Okay!" she said, following along, kind of pleased with herself for this whole thing. Not bad for a nearly colossal social faux pas! "This store has a helluva collection!" Was it a normal collection for a store this size? She had no idea! This was the first gaming store she'd ever been in.

"It's pretty great, isn't it?" asked Graham, taking a moment to beam over at Arden over his shoulder, before his attention turned back to the shelf with all the different game books on them, to look them over to discern if he was trying to locate it based on color or letter or whatever other system of organizing had seemed popular to the person who'd done it last. "There's always something interesting to find, about just about anything! Last week, I actually found this great game about capybaras! You know, because of Triumph! You play as a baby monkey, trying to organize all the capybaras into a line, and you get them in order by feeding them pumpkins! Oh, it was great! It was called...uhhh...um...hold on, let me think....it was really easy to remember, if I recall correctly..."

Then, he snapped his fingers.

"Capybara 'n' Capybara! That's it." He chuckled a little. "Of course, what else would it have been?"

"Capybara Conga," Arden said immediately, because alliteration was great and then it suggested a cool soundtrack to accompany the game. "And did the pun king triumph at feeding pumpkins to all the tiny Triumphs?"

"Ooooh, that's good," said Graham, approvingly, already hearing those capybara conga beats in his head, as his slightly shifting shoulders indicated, dancing with the rodents now parading through his head, before the pun king bit hit with a bit of a pleased, beaming blush, made all the more vibrant by the excellent word play at hand.

"And you could say I did a pretty..." That quick flash of a devilish grin was the only warning Arden would receive for what was about to hit her, "gourd job! I gotta say, it was pretty easy, squashing the objective. I was real capy with the results, ro-don't you know!"

"Sounds like you really carved up the competition," Arden said, because how else could she respond? "Orange you glad you found the game?"

She paused, thinking of something else, and snapped her fingers. "Calabaza Capybara would also be a dope title," she declared, conveniently moving them away from puns.

Oh, Arden. With Graham, you were never too far away from puns.

He chuckled approvingly at her contributions. "Maybe," he said, although he did go back to the task at hand, searching for the book, "that could be the squeak-quel."

But, thankfully, before anything else about maybe fur or tails or vines or, thank goodness, butternuts could come up, Graham let out a sound of discovery and reached up to pull the book from the shelf. He looked at it with a tilted her for a moment before turning it toward Arden. "This looks like it, right?"

Arden was definitely not emotionally prepared for butternuts. She just wasn't.

"That's it!" she said, recognizing the cover. And, you know, the word Dread emblazoned across the front. "I guess making characters is really easy? It's just answering some questions? Which is good, cause I've never done anything like that, so..." She chuckled, a little nervous. "I can probably answer questions, though, right?"

No one was emotionally prepared for butternuts.

"I don't know," said Graham, grinning broadly at Arden, because, well, there had been puns, and when there's pun, you were bound to get a very particular kind of Graham who thought he was very funny, "can you?"

Instead of laughing, though, he got a suddenly much more (obviously) nervous Arden. "Um. I mean. Yes? Maybe?"

Wait, but what if she couldn't? Were roleplaying questions really hard? Were they like essay questions or something? Was she going to have to come up with a philosophy or something? Were they philosophical essay questions?

"I mean, like, maybe if they're not too hard..."

Perhaps Belle had a resolution to socialize more. Perhaps she missed game nights. Perhaps she just wanted company. Perhaps it was all of those things combined that brought her into the Magpie Emporium that day.

"Hello, sir knight!"

What? Maybe knights played Jenga with animals all the time where Graham was from and this was part of his training.

Graham did play games with animals all the time back home, but, alas, there was no Animal Friendship part of being a knight school.

(That tended to be reserved for princess finishing school, really).

"Ah!" Graham corrected, with a little lean forward and a lift of a finger. "Sir Not-Knight-Yet! But, you know, the Tournament is coming up, so perhaps we can get away with Sir Soon-To-Be-Knight!"

And, with that little bit of semantics now out of the way, Graham grinned at Belle and ducked his head a little in a bow and lifted his cap, as was only proper when addressing someone with a benevolent, "My lady."

Then he straightened, fitted his cap back on.

"How are you today, Belle?"

"But you will be a knight and the others hardly roll off the tongue so well," Belle countered even as she offered a curtsy in exchange for the little bow.

"I'm quite well, Graham. And yourself?"

"Pretty good!" Graham was obviously pleased to report. "I had cheesecake for breakfast and then Leroy and I have been playing Jenga. Have you ever played it before? It's actually a lot of fun, but you have to be careful, because Saffron gets a little confused on the rules sometimes."

Which was a very charitable way of framing what had clearly been very intentional sabotage, but Graham was a diehard optimist.

"Cheesecake for breakfast? How indulgent!" Belle said approvingly. "What flavor? And no, I haven't played. Should I try it?"

Would Leroy cheat if she played him for mysterious reasons involving a grudge that made no sense?

Leroy seemed to have a lot of those, huh?

"Boysenberry!" Graham was proud to announce, because, really, when it came to berries, that generally did have the best name. "And you should try it! Here!"

He started to gather up all the blocks to neatly put them together.

"It's really easy," he explained, as he set up the game. "You just take turns trying to remove the blocks from the tower without letting it tumble down! If it falls, then you lose! And when you remove a block, you have to put it on top, so that the longer the game goes on, the more treacherous and suspenseful it gets! So you have to stay focused and delicate and careful, and not be too haphazard in your stacking, either!"

Leroy had a very rich inner life!

"Will you play with me?" Belle asked as she reached a hand towards the block tower. "Or should I begin with Leroy?"

Graham blinked a little, looking a little nonplussed at the question, since he had sort of figured he and Belle would be playing together. And then he realized he probably shouldn't have just assumed and he gave a worried look toward Leroy before looking back at Belle, his eyes unintentionally a little wide and worried.

"Would...would you rather play with Leroy?"

And then, a second later, as if realizing how that might sound, he quickly added, hand waving desperately, "It's okay if you do! He's very good at it, it's neat sometimes to see how he uses his tail to move the blocks! So if you..." His protesting was losing a bit of steam to make way for even more embarrassment, "...wanted to...I mean....with Leroy...." He cleared his throat, brought a hand up to the back of his neck, "...instead..."

"I would much rather play with you than Leroy." Belle said quickly. "I'm sure he's quite talented with his tail but I did come here with the idea of seeing you, after all!"

She smiled brightly at Graham. "And I'm sure you're much better at explaining the rules."

Sorry, Leroy.

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The Magpie Emporium; Friday [01/05].

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