Fandom Island and Town

Alouette was chasing dust motes through patches of sunlight in the post office today, which as far as Éponine was concerned made it a more pleasant, even welcoming place, because what place couldn't be improved by the presence of a friendly, playful cat? If anyone suggested such places even existed, she might decide they could never be trusted.

It was not a terribly busy day, certainly not in comparison to how hectic the days leading up to Christmas had been -- and that was before factoring in all the increasingly absurd and dangerous events that had plagued the island, even. Éponine was content with that.

There was a NOW HIRING sign up in the window, seeing as it was a new school term and all, and she had a newly-made pot of hot coffee and a box of freshly baked cookies given to her by one of the little old ladies who came in regularly to check her mailbox. Éponine considered this a cautiously optimistic sign for how the rest of the day would go.

[OOC: Post/post office open! Same SP caveat as yesterday though. Whee.]

Sometimes it just felt like the sort of day where you had to bring your cat to work, and today was one of those days. But then, some days were the kinds of days where cats decided to demand all of your attention, instead of just being content to ignore you until mealtime, and it was not terribly convenient when those two sorts of days overlapped.

Éponine had been trying to get a couple of trays of mail sorted out, but it was extremely slow going when Alouette kept climbing into her lap and loudly demanding to be petted.

"Can't you wait just a little bit?" she asked, even though she knew perfectly well it was pointless to try. "I'll even get you some nice treats, maybe even a nice fresh fish, how's that?"

Alouette just yowled louder and started butting her head into the palm of Éponine's hand until she had to put the envelopes that she was holding down before they scattered everywhere.

"Right, have it your way then."

Which, evidently, suited the cat just fine.

[OOC: AKA me trying for the past half hour to get this posted. Open, though I'll be AFK for a chunk of the afternoon.]

Really, now, Éponine knew better than to be fooled by everything in the post office being quiet and uneventful when she got there and started getting everything set up to open. It was just a matter of how long it would be until she discovered the oddity of the day.

So she was not in the least bit surprised to discover that every time someone opened one of the mailboxes, whether it was her sorting people's mail into them or customers coming in to pick up the contents of their PO boxes, rock songs covered on bagpipes would start playing.

She couldn't say she minded, really.

So yes, the post office was open, if a bit ... all right, very loud today.

[OOC: Apparently it is International Bagpipe Day? In the process of finding something for this post I came across a dubstep cover of Star Wars music performed by an Indian woman with lightsabers strapped to her bagpipes and I am sharing it in part because I just typed that sentence and that sentence was magical.]

Was Éponine asking why there was a whole carrot cake sitting by the postal scale when she came in this morning? No, she was not.

Was it a good carrot cake?

Yes, in fact, it was, and she was carefully portioning out pieces for herself to nibble on during the day, while putting an equal sized piece away to take home with her later. After taking it into the break room, where it was out of sight of the customers, because did you think she had any intention whatsoever of sharing this cake?

[OOC: IDEK. Apparently it's National Carrot Cake Day or something. Open, but definitely going to be very slow until I get home in the evening.]

It was the middle of winter, so when Éponine came into the post office and found a bowl of hot, fresh clam chowder sitting there waiting for her at the register, she was hardly going to object.

"If I'd known to expect this," she said out loud to no one in particular, "I'd have seen to it that I didn't bother with breakfast this morning." But that was all right; she ate it all anyway, because it would be a damned shame to waste a nice hot bowl of soup, wouldn't it now? (And no matter how long she'd been here, she would probably never be inclined to waste food. Some habits got ingrained.)

She was sleepy now from being so full, but she could always stop off at the Perk while she was out making deliveries and pick herself up another coffee, now, couldn't she?

Hopefully another bowl would materialize at lunchtime, too.

[OOC: Post/post office open! Some SP may apply.]

As one might expect, it was absolute bedlam at the post office today, the day before Christmas. In between fielding phone calls from people asking if it was too late to send out packages so they arrived on time (which it was, mostly, except for a few select dimensions) and customers coming in to attempt to pick up their incoming packages, Éponine still had to explain the different postal rates to other people.

More than a few items -- some belonging to customers, some business property -- got jostled and broken, but luckily there were those tiny elves to help out with that.

Éponine couldn't get them to help her, much to her disappointment, but at least that one postal scale that was wildly inaccurate was fixed now!

[OOC: Post/post office open! Work SP more likely than not, tbh, but that's kind of a given, right?]

Was Éponine at work today? Yes.

Was she frequently sneaking into the bathroom with a mug in her hand, and shortly thereafter drinking from it as she emerged, looking pleased? Also yes.

This was one of her favorite parts of the holiday season, after all.

[OOC: I am so tired, and this post may be wishful thinking. Open, though if today is as much of a trash fire as yesterday, who even knows how epic the SP is going to be.]

If anything, Éponine would maintain that the tiny turkey wearing one of those tall black hats with the buckle that was trotting around the post office without a care in the world today was far less absurd than if it had been, say, a porg in a turkey costume.

(Although she wanted a porg in a turkey costume now.)

It was friendly enough, anyway, and kept coming up to greet customers who came in with a tiny but enthusiastic gobble.

Honestly, this was a fairly mundane day for the post office, all things considered.

[OOC: IDK man, IDK. Open!]

"Absolutely not," Éponine said to the two gremlins who'd scurried out of the storage room holding a string of Christmas lights and some tinsel. "I don't care what anybody else does, it's too damned early for that nonsense, and isn't there some business with turkeys coming up first? It isn't fair to skip right over that, it's not."

(She had an agreement with the gremlins who frequented the post office: she kept them supplied with some little treats and things they wanted from the mainland, and they left her ankles alone.)

"You put those back, right now," she said, eyeing them sternly, and the two gremlins sagged a bit in disappointment but trudged back to the storage room, and emerged again shortly with a large, cartoonish turkey made of posterboard. "That's better, there you go."

If doing the decorating around here kept them happy, that suited her just fine.

[OOC: IDEK, but really, when do I ever? Post office/post open!]

Éponine's dreams were bad enough, some nights, and that was when they only involved flashes of her actual memories. 'round about the middle of summer, for instance, she'd often find herself wandering through some dream version of the Rue de la Chanvrerie. That was difficult as it was without adding a ghoulish aftermath to the entire affair, all the dead of the barricades rising up to try and drag her back down with them as she stumbled away in the quiet that was even more ghastly than she remembered it being. Or other memories: Montparnasse and her father's accomplices, transformed to look as monstrous as they really were.

So it was a good thing the coffee was just fine today; she looked exhausted, and -- to tell the truth -- not entirely there, staring, unfocused, off into the distance more often and for longer than usual. Not even the occasional very tiny bat that flew out of the mailboxes did much to divert her attention.

It was going to be a very, very long day. At least, from her stop at the Perk, she knew she wasn't the only one in this situation.

[OOC: Post office/post open!]

The post office was doubling down on its fall-themed decor this week, it seemed. Small drifts of autumnal leaves were now piled up in all of the corners of the lobby, there was a scarecrow stationed behind the counter, and it looked like there was an actual miniature pumpkin patch growing beside the packaging supplies.

At least the cornucopia front and center on the counter had actual fresh fruit and vegetables -- that it was, apparently, actually producing -- spilling out of it, so that was Éponine's snacks and possibly lunch solved for the day.

Really, she could forgive quite a few of this place's more inconvenient quirks, so long as it kept feeding her.

[OOC: Post/post office open!]

Someone, first thing this morning, came in with an entire flat's worth of manila envelopes, all addressed to the same place and all seeming to be stuffed fairly full -- but much lighter than they looked. Upon handling them, Éponine realized that they all appeared to contain a number of more or less uniformly sized strips of thin cardboard, which earned the woman who'd come in to mail them all a curious look.

"I'm sending away to win a real rocket to the moon," the woman told her cheerfully. "I finally have enough cereal box tops now!"

Éponine didn't ask; she only nodded, humoring the woman, and went behind the counter to start metering the envelopes. It was going to be a good amount in postage sales, in any case.

[OOC: . . . yeah, I don't know, I'm just sitting here staring across the table at a cereal box right now. Post office and post are open, though fair warning, work burned me out so hard yesterday that I can't guarantee I'll be able to do more than stare blankly at the open comment box and maybe cry a little. Help.]

The gremlin-driven tiny dog sleds were gone this week, replaced by . . . gremlins on tiny Segways with pouches of letters strapped to their backs, apparently. And that was perfectly all right with Éponine, who had been mildly unsettled by the dog sleds by the end of last week (how were they getting around so easily without any snow?) anyhow, and concerned about the tiny dogs.

It was giving her ideas, though, about how she ought to look into some sort of transportation for herself if she wanted to be able to make a viable side business out of doing food deliveries from off-island. Maybe a motorbike of some kind?

That was certainly something to think about as she went out on her delivery route, anyhow. Perhaps she was going to be thinking about it a little too much, because her initial idea had been some sort of electric bicycle, and now it was getting overly ambitious . . .

[OOC: IDEK. Post office/post open!]

Half the packages these days were just decorated Lego bricks or carved bits of balsa wood or even just blocks of styrofoam covered in wrapping paper, but that didn't matter. The post office had to keep operating.

Éponine -- who would be rather put out next week by her current resemblance to the doll from the shop window in Montfermeil that she'd wanted so badly and had ended up in Cosette's possession -- had to keep an eye on what came in and went out, after all. You could get a rather decent sense of who might bear a little more close observation from their mailing habits, and she'd turned in a fair number of toys based on her own observations.

It was profitable for her, really, so why shouldn't she?

If she was spending more time sorting mail than she did most weeks, well . . . it was only partly because her little porcelain hands were a bit clumsy and inflexible.

[OOC: Post/post office open! Éponine is on Team Bad Guy all week, just as a heads up.]

Éponine had stepped out of her front door this morning and immediately fallen into what looked like home, which was to say Paris nearly 200 years ago, except that everybody seemed to be singing. Then she'd ducked into an alley, sufficiently perplexed by all this, and found herself here, in the employee break room.

The post office seemed normal enough, except that the computers had been replaced by pretty, if less sophisticated, manual cash registers and scales and rubber stamps, and there was an odd pervasive smell around the place. A bit of poking around revealed a tank of whale oil set into a socket in the wall that appeared to be powering the entire establishment, and a spare tank kept nearby.

Well, she'd just have to deal with the smell, she supposed. Unless she fell through another rift and ended up somewhere else. In the meantime, she'd just be poking at the registers and scales, trying to figure out how they worked.

[OOC: No OCD, post office is open! If a little Dishonored style today.]

Right then. Éponine was even less fond of this week than she had been of the one before, or the one two weeks before that, or -- well, suffice to say this was her least favorite week of the summer so far.

It was a good thing, really, that she'd taken that airhorn last night as a cue to get home.

But now she'd come in trailing ashes behind her, having had to trudge through quite a few drifts of them getting to the post office from home, and after twenty minutes or so of trying to sweep it all out the door she gave up on that as a lost cause. No point, really, when she'd only be doing it all over again every time she came back in from making deliveries.

She didn't like this. She didn't like any of it, and it all had her feeling a bit more lost and beleaguered than she had been since -- good lord, since shortly after arriving here several years ago. So while she was going about her usual routine of sorting mail, making deliveries, restocking the mailing supplies, and working the front counter, she was doing it all with a slightly more unfocused and distracted air than usual. And perhaps humming to herself a little louder than she typically did.

Every now and then one of the mailboxes would open of its own accord, but rather than a small swarm of butterflies or anything else silly and whimsical, a small cloud of ashes would come puffing out before the mailbox door shut itself again.

Perhaps it might be a good idea to get away for a few days -- but then again, it didn't look any more promising on the other side of the causeway, now, did it?

[OOC: Post/post office are open! Usual SP disclaimer applies.]

Éponine knew the streets and alleys of this island like the back of her hand by now, even better than she'd ever known every shortcut and hidden passageway of Paris. She was fairly certain she could navigate Fandom in her sleep.

And yet she had gotten lost no less than three times on her way in this morning. It had her on edge, even more so than the odd noises coming from the bushes and the disembodied laughter and the general creeping sensation of being watched. So it was a relief, really, that there didn't seem to be much in the way of mail today -- although she suspected that it had just never arrived.

That was likely a bad thing, but on the other hand, it was less likely that she'd get lost while out on her route, wasn't it?

Even the butterflies that occasionally came from the mailboxes seemed disoriented today, and fluttered around in aimless circles just trying to accomplish the ordinarily straightforward task of making it out the window.

[OOC: Open post/office! Usual SP disclaimer applies.]

Éponine was entertained by the current lack of color, to tell the truth; it meant she could make up her own color schemes for everything in her head, and entertain herself in the slower moments of the day by treating her surroundings like some kind of life-size interactive coloring book, visualizing how everything would look if she could go at it with paints or markers.

Some of the color schemes in her head were utterly ridiculous, and those were her favorites.

Not that it was terribly out of the ordinary for her to just start laughing every now and then for no apparent reason, but today, at least, she could justify them! Even if they were for her own private amusement.

[OOC: Post office/post open, no OCD, SP likely, blah blah etc.]

Éponine, were she herself, would be annoyed to realize that for all she'd gotten healthier in the years since she'd arrived on the island, she was right back to looking like her old, sickly, emaciated self. The Wasteland would do that to you.

The point was, Éponine wasn't the usual version of herself, and the ramshackle little metal-walled structure that was ordinarily the post office (and occasionally had a pack brahmin wandering through it, loaded down with bags and the occasional battered lawn chair and also not always necessarily touching the ground) didn't do much in the way of mailing these days. That was difficult when most of your shipping options involved relying on bloatflies or mutant hounds or the occasional radscorpion to make sure your package arrived.

The mail service still existed, sure, but mostly Éponine supplemented what meager caps she got from from the post by going out to scavenge in the Wasteland; you could probably tell from the tire iron and rusty machete dangling from the belt of her beat-up road leathers that she was pretty good at it. So in addition to whatever (very old) postage supplies were on the shelves, you could find salvaged cans of Cram, Sugar Bombs, the occasional Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, and of course various junk: rolls of duct tape (look, those were very important if you wanted to mod your weapons), old broken light bulbs, mugs, toy cars, maybe a bedraggled stuffed animal.

But if you still wanted to come in and chance it on a package going out, she wouldn't turn down your caps.

[OOC: But please assume that any essential mail miraculously makes it through, also! The sort of post office is open, and Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii might have spent way too much time playing FO4 (because I don't have FO3 on console and I'm lazy) the last couple of days. Will I ever be done poking fun at the FO4/76 crafting mechanics? Not really, no.]

The post office was intent on feeding her today, Éponine decided; every so often, as she was sorting mail out for various recipients, she'd open a mailbox and find a roast leg of lamb inside.

This, she suspected, would be just fine until she ran out of room in the break room refrigerator, so hopefully any customers who came in today would be interested in some free food.

[OOC: Post office and post are open! Some SP in the middle of my day while I go get a camera jammed down my throat and then have to recover from the anesthetic, though . . .]

The post office was not immune to the general sense of quieter-than-usual around the island this week, of course; even the mailboxes were calmer than they typically were, and only a few butterflies at a time might appear to go flitting about the lobby, rather than entire swarms.

Éponine wouldn't argue with the chance for a little time to herself while being on the clock, either. She'd picked up some new phone game that required her to break bricks by bouncing a string of balls shaped like cats off walls, often with some fancy ricocheting involved.

It was going to take up every single second of her spare time today and then some.

[OOC: Open! The game is myownface's fault. Also I have a headache. Please rescue me.]

Right then. It was that time of year again.

Éponine had been here long enough, she knew what the island got up to right around the end of the spring term and she'd long since resigned herself to dealing with it.

She'd decided to be a bit entrepreneurial about it this year, too: today saw her making phone calls to most of the restaurants in town in between customers and delivery runs.

"Yes, I know you're likely to see lots of delivery orders coming in --" a pause and a snicker -- "over the next few days, and all I'm saying is, I'm sure your delivery folks wouldn't mind a bit extra time to . . . see to their own affairs, 'f you know what I mean. I'd be happy to help you out with it for a bit."

She suspected she might be less likely to be traumatized than some of the hapless delivery folks employed at the restaurants in town, given some of what she'd seen over the years.

[OOC: Post is, of course, open!]

Several of the mailboxes had taken it upon themselves to turn into planters of some sort today, each with one or two spinach plants in full growth sticking sideways out of their open doors.

"This is entirely the wrong establishment for that, you know," Éponine told the plants in a completely deadpan voice; it wasn't as if she harbored any illusions about the post office or the island in general actually listening to what she had to say, much less taking it to heart. She did, however, think that she'd regret it if she didn't bother to comment on the situation at all; call it a superstition of sorts by now.

She did pick quite a bit of the spinach, though; if nothing else, she'd have herself a nice salad later.

[OOC: Post office and post are open!]