Celia made it in to work today! Already, things were better than last week, at least in that regard. And it was warm -- at least, there was the capability of making things warm, and it wasn't snowing!

Wins all around, really. Even if she was still a little distracted, she could feel it dissipating.

In any case, as soon as she made it in to the shop today, Celia set to work fiddling with the thermo-thingie (she still preferred a fire or a stove, thank you) and making sure it was as cozy as she could make it before settling down behind the counter with a book.

She'd be productive in a bit. Just now she was a little pleased with herself just for, you know, being here at all.

[open shop, though I run away at about 6 EST for weekend-SP-of-doom!]

The weekend was still weighing a bit on Celia, much as she was pretending it wasn't. Combined with the experience of her alternate-self earlier this spring, and she was once again wrestling with newfound memories of a mother she had never really remembered.

And while it was much easier to just shove all of that away and pretend she didn't care, anyway, sometimes temptation was too strong to resist. And while she had never put any stock in certain branches of magic -- or 'magic,' really -- it did seem like nearly anything was possible, here.

So that was why Tuesday found her curling up at work with a book on the occult. No, of course she knew seances weren't real, and one couldn't really speak with the dead. But the dead did seem to have answers she wanted and...well. Reading wouldn't hurt anything. Particularly if she hid the book if anyone came in.

[open shop is open and OCD free as usual!]

Gretel, as per usual, hadn't exactly slept well the first night in a new town. But she was up and patrolling all the same. Her crossbow hung at her side -- no reason to scare the fuck out of some innocent passer-by, after all. (Too many incidents like that, she'd learned, sometimes meant a significantly decreased reward, too.)

It wasn't like she was expecting to just find a witch, either, here in broad daylight. But you could never be too careful.

[and let us commence the celebration of leather pants. :D open for her brother or anyone else who might be wandering around town!]

Celia's weekend was still weighing heavily on her mind when she wandered into the Magic Box today. Yes, she got to stay, and yes, she had survived with minimal injury to her person, but she still didn't like how things had gone, especially.

So, she was setting her mind to training, and where better to start than the store where she was immersed in magic all day?

She took a seat behind the counter, and carefully floated half-a-dozen vials across the room, letting them linger in the air a few feet away. She broke them each in turn, then brought the glass back together in careful, precise movements.

She'd be at this for awhile, then she'd move on to enlarging and shrinking them. It was soothing, practicing like this -- and it felt good to do it her own way, like stretching a long-used muscle.

Celia was feeling quite a bit better today -- which, again, was probably aided by the fact that she'd slept most of the last two days, not to mention the fact that she was clutching two scones and a cup of coffee when she wandered in to work today.

She'd get back to her normal routine soon enough, but today found her embracing the clear and utter madness that had taken over the shop, recently. Not only were there pumpkins (still bearing her funny mustaches!), but now there were...skeletal flamingos.

And when one was greeted by skeletal, plastic flamingos, one had decisions to make. Such as how to better decorate them. Today's shipment solved that problem, given that it was filled with black crepe and cotton spiderwebs, which Celia draped gingerly around the shop.

The crepe was tied neatly around the necks of the flamingos, of course, because they were festive flamingos. She'd just decided.

It probably meant something that today was the first day Celia hadn't nearly tripped over felt spiders or orange and black streamers when she'd come in to work. Instead, there was a shipment of tiny little pumpkins waiting for her, all small enough to fit in the palm of her hand.

"You know, it's still summer for another month," she told the box, as though it might have some sort of defense. But Celia loved autumn, anyway, and it went with the bizarre Hallowe'en thing they'd been doing for weeks, anyway.

Perhaps if she got bored enough, she'd draw little faces on them, even. That would be adorable.

[open post is open!]

It was alarmingly difficult to find time to talk to one's dearest friends, sometimes, between work schedules and class schedules and social obligations and people turning into and back from animals. Celia had flagged Eleanor down in Doctoring this week, discreetly flinging notes back and forth during the course of the movie (which she wasn't following much, anyway), and that was how Saturday found them comfortably watching the clouds on the beach.

Celia, clearly, needed to talk about something, but she wasn't sure how to bring it up -- and at the moment, she was happy enough to watch the sky. They wouldn't have many more summer evenings to watch clouds fade into sunset, after all.

"That one looks like a bumblebee," she offered lazily, pointing.

[mostly here for one but open beach is open!]

There was nothing quite like finding out that you'd spent the weekend dead. Celia had to admit that it wasn't actually as traumatizing as she'd imagined -- she actually hadn't felt this well-rested in a good long while, and she seemed to have avoided most of the insanity afflicting her classmates, as well!

(She did have a vague dream of being naive, young chanteuse at a nightclub, but it was hazy enough that she could pretend that was all it was.)

Firmly not dead, Celia made her way into the Magic Box today with the runes Elsa had shown her in mind, and immediately went scouring the shelves for something simple that she could pick her way through, her cheat-sheet of Futhark always kept close by.

[open shop is open and not a nightclub/brothel, and we are as usual keeping it ocd-free around here.]

Celia had been dusting this afternoon (floating herself up high to the hard-to-reach places as usual) when she'd stumbled across an entire section of books that she'd never even touched, here: magical atlases.

These, unlike the runes that would require Elsa's help, she would be able to actually read herself. And that was how Celia spent the rest of her shift sprawled on the floor in a wash of skirts and pages, flipping through an enormous atlas and carefully looking over each page.

Apparently Scotland had quite the concentration of magic. Who knew.

[open shop is open, omg, though we are as always OCD-free!]

This ferrying business was rather annoying, really. Celia had been leaning over the rail to watch the water as she'd come over to the island for work today and had managed to get splashed rather thoroughly.

Her walk into work was spent magically drawing water out of her skirt and hair and depositing it in puddles along the way, and by the time she was actually at the shop, she was in the mood to curl up with a book behind the counter and spend the day quietly.

Which was exactly what she did.

[open shop, no OCD, SP while I'm at work!]

Celia had been in a good mood. She'd had an absolutely wonderful weekend, and while she hadn't been literally walking on air since Friday night, the thought had crossed her mind a time or two. And there had been polar bear cub playtime, to boot -- she really couldn't have asked for a better series of days.

And then this morning she'd picked up her mail, and found a letter postmarked from Paris waiting for her, bearing her father's untidy scrawl.

She'd waited until she was at work before she'd opened the letter. It was filled to the brim with Hector's usual lies about how fantastic things were -- she'd lived that life long enough to read between the lines, and correctly interpret his stories of champagne and furs as his spending more time than he probably ought to in Montmartre.

But it was his last paragraph that stopped her in her tracks, with more instantaneous terror than usual.

As always, I hope that you've kept up your studies. I don't need to remind you that your opponent could appear at any time, and you need to be ready to prove yourself. I will be in touch again once I'm back in the country -- perhaps the time has come for me to see for myself how well your tutelage has paid off at this school, and if I am dissatisfied with the results, you know what will happen.

The letter ended there, with no 'Papa' or 'Father' or even a 'Hector' in closing. Celia's eyes retraced the thinly-veiled threat a few more times. She felt her skin heat and her stomach churn, the hair at the back of her neck prickling as her frustration and fear and anger grew.

She heard the sound of glass shattering, and shut her eyes. A few more crashes, and Celia was under control again, though it looked as though she'd be spending her day piecing vials and vases back together. She threw the letter on the counter, forcibly pushing all thought of her father from her mind, and set to work mending what she had broken -- ironically enough, an exercise he'd probably have her engage in if he was still monitoring her training.

[open, OCD-free but angst-ridden, omg.]

Celia had a day off today, and was determined to use it well. She'd hauled into town the small stack of dusty books she'd taken home with her from work yesterday -- her first criteria, given that she hadn't much time to look them over thanks to the rabbit mayhem, had been that they were in a language she could read. That had been easy enough to manage.

Now, though, she was set up in the corner with a cup of cup of tea and a scone, and was poring over the first of her volumes and taking notes in a small journal off to the side. "Oh, no. This one uses herbs."

She was trying not to lose hope over how very many of these curse-removing sorts of spells seemed to deal with exactly the sort of magic she didn't do, but it was difficult.

"This one calls for eye of newt. Who in their right mind is going to de-eye a newt outside of Shakespeare?"

[open post is open!]