It was silent in the Magic Box today. So, so blissfully silent. The robobaby from Ethics class had started wailing, and had started Elsa into knocking a couple of large gems onto a vial of some manner of fluid, and the domino effect along the shelf from there had been spectacular. There had been a smashing sound, and then a screeching sound from the droid-thing, a thud of a display book hitting the floor and then being doused with spilling tea, and then Canute had howled, and then there was a poof of violet smoke, and then... silence as the smoke cleared.

Absolute silence. No screaming fake baby. No howling dog. No desperate sound of Elsa's shoes against the floor as she rushed to get something to clean up the mess with.

Just... nothing. Outside there were birds singing and rickshaw runners cursing the cold. But down here, in this particular room? Quiet.

A couple of hours later, the barest murmurs of noise were starting to return to the room, little whispers of sound if you listened hard enough. But Elsa wasn't listening. Elsa was sitting at the counter and drinking her tea in blissful silence as Canute played with the baby somewhere behind her.

... So there might be a few teeth-marks in this particular droid baby when it was time to hand it back in next week. Maybe it was... good for them?

In any case, the Magic Box was open. And so, so gloriously quiet, at least until the effects of the smoke wore off.

[OOC: Open for suuuper work-related SP, OCD-free.]

It was a subdued sort of day at the Magic Box. It looked as though the place had already been cleaned recently, which left Elsa with not much to do to pass the time. A few orders were late, so there wasn't anything to really put on the shelf, and the place was already decorated for the holidays, which meant...

Well, she'd discovered the chocolate-behind-doors thing on her way to work, and so she was spending most of her shift sitting at the counter with a small pile of it in her Halloween candy dish, occasionally popping one into her mouth as she read a book about modern Christmas traditions that she'd brought from the library.

Subdued day. But at least there was chocolate.

[Open, OCD-free!]

Elsa was maybe the slightest bit distracted at work today. Oh, she was still getting the job done, putting out new stock on the herbs shelf, dusting around the crystals, that sort of thing. But occasionally she'd catch a glance of herself in a reflective surface, start just a little, and have to pause to stare.

She was wearing jeans again this week, for Lady Ghanima's class, and this week, in a fit of daring, she hadn't brought a change of clothes along for afterward.

She hadn't decided just what to make of what she was seeing, yet.

Hips. She was seeing quite a lot in the way of hips.

They were a little distracting.

[Open, OCD-free!]

When Elsa came into the Magic Box today, she was met, face-to-face, with a smiling pumpkin with a funny moustache. She still wasn't terribly certain if she liked them or not, especially since the way she had stacked them the other week had left her thinking of snowmen, and, in turn, brought her right back to how mortified she was that she had run out of class yesterday. But there was work to be done, and she was busying herself with unpacking another box of merchandise.

Her supplier sent entirely too much bloodstone polish this time around, and she frowned a little, looking at the selection. Considering there was only one person that she knew of on the island who spent any amount of time actually polishing bloodstones, that would almost certainly be enough to last Cecil until his graduation. And then possibly for a few years after the fact, assuming he cleared them out of stock before he left.

She put a few containers of it onto the shelf, and then opened the next box, which had her staring inside and blinking while she tried to puzzle out what she was looking at. What use could anybody possibly have for plastic, skeletal flamingos? Certainly no magical one that she could discern. Which meant that Elsa was shrugging her shoulders and pulling them out of their packaging to arrange around the shop.

The merchandise was still there and was still visible around all of the Hallow'een decor, so what would some plastic birds hurt, right?

[Open!]

Elsa was no longer certain if the shop was being decorated for Hallow'een or for some other manner of harvest-related festival, but she had to admit, the bundles of hay and the ears of corn that had shown up since her last shift were certainly pleasant to look at. And now for some reason one of the shipments had included a cornucopia, and, well...

There wasn't much to put into it besides some small pumpkins and dried herbs, a few braided bundles of sweetgrass and a couple of crystals, but Elsa did her best to decorate it up properly.

If her candy bowl of Skittles went into it as well... well... considering this was supposed to be a store that specialized in spiritual and magical supplies, she was making do.

[OOC: Open!]

Elsa was actually a little impressed as she stepped into the Magic Box today to see that not only was the place still decorated for Hallowe'en, but one of the skeletons had been dressed up for the occasion with a bright silk cloak and a little staff glued into his bony hand.

Elsa figured that if this was going to be a running theme around here, clearly the thing to do would be to weave a crown out of various herbs and grasses that they had in stock, to decorate one of the styrofoam jack o'lanterns near the back.

So she was occupying herself with that, humming softly with the flicker of her candles nearby.

At least the lights were on today.

[Open, OCD-free!]

Elsa had taken a couple of days to herself to try to sort out just what the implications of this weekend were. She'd had a sister for a couple of days in Karla, and a lover for an evening in Eleanor, and in the wake of it all, everything was still muddled up in her head. She'd had a chance to speak to Karla, at least, who had assured her that Ange-- that Warren wasn't actually evil, and coming in this morning to see some of the books written in runes had put her worries about Celia's well-being to rest.

She still hadn't spoken with Eleanor.

But! That hardly mattered! It had just been one of those odd weekends, and everything was back to normal now, and Elsa was going to make herself very busy tidying and putting new stock on the shelves and making certain that there were orders placed for the proper incense and gemstones for Lughnasadh, which was in a few weeks. Aloes, rose, sandalwood, carnelian... Plenty of work to be done! No time for fretting!

... Elsa was absolutely fretting.

[OOC: Open, OCD-free!]

Given just how many crystals Elsa had dealt with during her Magic Box shift last week, it was no wonder she was bound and determined to work with anything but, this week. This week, she decided, she was going to stick to the bookshelves, which weren't terribly magical all on their own, but at least they were quite informative. There was a display on spirit guides that needed to be touched up, and if that led to her flipping through a book about totem animals before her shift was through, well, she'd had a productive day. She was allowed.

Maybe it could tell her why the island had turned her into a bear? Or maybe the island just thought it was funny. One never knew, with Fandom.

[Open!]

Elsa had come in to work today, half-expecting some sort of strangeness about. Last week it had been the eight balls. This week, it was so much worse.

Affixed to a good many boxes all piled up near the doorway and covered with a single white sheet, there was a note:

Sorry about the mix-up with the rabbits yesterday. Hopefully this will make up for it.

Elsa stared at the note long and hard. And then at the covered pile of boxes. She frowned a little, and then pulled the sheet off. And then smacked her forehead with her palm so hard that a raucous chorus of flapping wings in too-small cages occurred, followed by a cacophony of indignant cooing.

"What in the world are we going to do with two-dozen doves!?"

It was going to be one of those days.

[OOC: Open, OCD-free!]

Herbs. For reasons that Elsa couldn't quite put a finger on, the magic shop today had gotten in a shipment of herbs.

And not even herbs that seemed to be important for any actual magical rituals. Elsa was staring, perplexed, at parsley. Dill. Oregano. Cilantro. All fantastic if she had much of an ability to cook and an inclination to make pasta, perhaps, but who used dill while performing a good luck ritual?

What was she supposed to do with this?

She sighed, and then decided the best thing for it was to put out a display all the same. If nothing else, they smelled nice. The mint was especially pleasant.

[Open, ocd free!]

Elsa came in to the Magic Box today with an armload of books from the back room that she'd borrowed while the island had been busy imploding on itself. She hadn't found any answers in there, unfortunately, though she could probably point anybody to a magical home remedy for plantar warts that involved candles and chanting and an ungodly amount of castor oil.

She... didn't think that was going to be something that anyone was going to come in looking for, exactly.

She was humming today as she worked, thankful that everything was back to normal, at least. It was good to be her, even if she was far less outgoing than her other-reality counterpart and didn't actually have a suit of armor tucked away in her armoire.

[Open!]

It occurred to Elsa that she really didn't know quite how to get in touch with Rinoa if there were things she wanted to ask her about. Things, like, say, going into the back room and pulling out all of the potentially dangerous reading material that Rinoa had packed safely away when she'd first opened shop here. The books out front were all fine and well if you wanted to learn about spirit animals or international myths and superstitions, but there wasn't anything up here that seemed solid enough to really be useful, given what was going on around the island right now.

Given what Joker had told her about Eleanor.

So, if she was going to pull risky, powerful books out from the back room, she was going to have to be discreet about it. Only a few at a time, and she'd silently read them while holding them out of view, just below the counter. So far... so far there was nothing about rifts or swapping people out for other versions of themselves. She'd found a spell that could trade the minds of a person and a cat, and another one to create miniature vortexes to a Hell dimension in case you wanted to banish cockroaches away, but she was filing both of those under, "Wait, what? Why?"

[OOC: Open! OCD-free!]

Elsa still wasn't completely certain how she'd gotten herself talked into this. Rinoa, her manager, was apparently some force of nature unto herself, and after a single conversation, suddenly Elsa had found herself agreeing to take a job. In a magic shop, of all places.

Granted, so much of her job at the moment still involved cleaning and sorting. She was hardly an expert on anything but the math it took to count change on a purchase. But she had stumbled across a few books in the back, written in runes, that were holding her attention, now.

One of them had actually appeared to be some manner of spellbook, and she closed it quickly and set it aside to give to Rinoa later, with a warning about what was within it. Another one was little more than a misplaced cookbook most likely shipped here by accident, and while Elsa was no cook, she was going to keep that one for herself. No sense marketing something here as something it was not, unless soups and salads held magical properties that she'd previously been unaware of.

Well, that, and she really just missed reading things in runes.

[Open, OCD-free!]