Fandom Island and Town

Jenkins as a teenager had been absolutely insufferable, so it was probably better for everyone involved that the magic happening this week had passed him over. Seriously, he'd be all preachy and sanctimonious and trying to save all of your souls in the name of the Heavenly Father. There was kind of a reason why his dad -- and all his fellow knights -- hated him.

So Jenkins was his usual, average self today, brewing tea and reading up on youth and aging spells and pondering whether it was worth it to try to lure people in to experiment on interrogate find out more about the de-aging's implications and effects. From the sound of the radio, the present batch of teenagers were particularly obnoxious, after all.

Ah well. Perhaps he should simply try to enjoy his peace and quiet while it lasted. The personal diary of Ponce de León was highly entertaining.

[open!]

Jenkins still had one of the dogs from yesterday's class with him in the Magic Box today. The dog, a jack russell terrier which had made . . . let's say "good friends" with Jenkins' pant leg, was currently making the acquaintance of a chair leg.

"Aren't you getting tired?" Jenkins asked it as he put the finishing touches on his latest attempt at an antidote to the infernal pollen. "Surely you must at least be getting chafed." His beaker began to smoke faintly. Jenkins gave it a whiff, winced, then nodded and brought it over to the dog.

"Alright, what do you think of this, then?" he asked the dog. The dog paused long enough in its activity to give the beaker a good sniff. Its tail began to wag excitedly, and it turned away from the chair leg with a happy bark. "Excellent! I'd certainly call that progre -- and you're back on my leg. Well. I suppose we'll have to take a look at that drawing board again, won't we."

[open!]

Jenkins had a leather apron on over his usual suit today at the Magic Box, and a screwdriver in his hand that he carefully used to prod at the innards of a silver metal toaster. He had the counter top cleared off, and a bucket of sand on hand in case things got a little extra hairy. Though he had, of course, unplugged the thing, it was still giving off a disconcerting number of sparks.

He didn't much mind when it shocked him -- it was irritating, but, well, he'd live -- but the threat of the sparks reaching the drier and more flammable items in his inventory were of some pressing concern.

"Now now," he told it. "None of that. We don't want you doing to my shop what you nearly did to Yosemite." He sighed and straightened, setting the screwdriver aside again as he fiddled with the toast controls.

"The Toaster of Albuquerque," he said with a shake of his head. "My, how magic has changed in the last few thousand years."

[open!]

"Yes, of course, Santa," Jenkins said, leaning against the sales counter with his phone and only occasionally rolling his eyes at the ceiling. "I'd love to join you on your post-holiday vacation. I'm sure the Librarians will do just fine taking care of your sleigh." He was not sure of that at all, but if Santa got any more high strung, Gretchen was going to somehow find a way to hold Jenkins personally responsible. "You know, you should invite Colonel Baird and Mr. Flynn along as well." Hopefully as a buffer between Santa's terrible taste in dance music and Jenkins' poor ears. "They'll be honored."

He made a touch more small talk, told Santa to be sure to give Gretchen his love ("Not like that, that's been over for centuries") and finally hung up.

"Oh shiny balls that man can talk." He rolled his eyes one last time, then went back to work -- only to be set upon by a living snowman determined to give him a hug.

Sometimes he rather hated Christmas. . . .

[JENKINS HAS NEW CANON HAPPENING AND GOD HELP ME I'M GOING TO MAKE HIM DO SOME OF IT. Also, open!]

The level of ambient magic on the island had always been much higher than it tended to be on Jenkins' Earth, so he'd long since stopped being concerned by the occasional little spikes and eddies he picked up on his various magical sensing apparatuses. This morning's magic quake though, minor as it seemed to be, was rather more than a little spike or eddy, and as such couldn't help but draw Jenkins' attention.

"Oh dear."

He was honestly more than half expecting to see more giant bunnies -- after all, the sharks had been accompanied by wind and rain, not quaking -- but he was only moderately surprised to see a tremendous slug creep by his door instead.

"Oh dear, indeed."

It was time to hit the books. And invest in a staggering amount of salt.

[open!]

Jenkins had a large number of winter gourds at the shop today, set up on a table near the back where he could experiment on them with different substances while still keep an eye out for any potential test subjects paying customers.

Peridot's new pet had inspired a little extra "mad" in Jenkins' usual scientific curiosity. It wasn't that he desired to actually bring animate life to the no-longer-living, it was just that he wanted to know if he could.

"Well, that won't work at all," he said, looking over the previous literature he could find on the subject. "Not only are the skies nearly entirely clear, introducing that much electricity is far more likely to simply cook the things." He gave the butternut squash a measured look. ". . . Though that might solve the problem of what to have for lunch. . . ."

[open!]

There was a sharp *bang!* from the Magic Box sometime Friday afternoon, and a cloud of green smoke blew out through the door into the street. It smelled like coconut.

"Well," Jenkins said, holding a green-smoking beaker at arm's length and waving the smoke away from his face. "That did not do what I thought it was going to." He set the beaker down on the counter and pulled a small notebook from his inside jacket pocket. "Addition of young coconut water makes solution volatile," he muttered as he wrote. "Note to self: check shop regularly over the break for suspicious growths."

[open!]

The shop was full of gourds. Jenkins tried to work out which of the items for sale was causing it, but with his entire stock emitting a faintly cinnamon and allspice smell, it was difficult to tell. Even the smudge sticks were giving off a nigh-overwhelming aroma of ginger and cloves.

"The scent of the sage is nearly the entire point," Jenkins grumbled as he sniffed one of the sticks. "I suppose it's attacked the lavender and incense too." He gathered the stock up to put away until the effect had passed, but the moment he opened the door to the supply closet, he was caught in an avalanche of cucurbitas and lagenarias.

"It's going to be an exceedingly long day."

[Open!]

Jenkins was in a terrific mood today, humming to himself as he dusted the shelves and checked over the inventory. His first class had gone well, and he hadn't gotten any crazed phone calls from the Library all week.

Come to think of it, that last bit was almost suspicious. Perhaps he should call them?

. . . No. If they were learning independence, Baird would be furious if he disrupted that. She would let him know if they needed him.

Though . . . if she couldn't let him know. . . .

Jenkins was having a rather remarkable mood swings today. Really, at his age. He should be ashamed of himself.

[open!]

You couldn't watch a chaotic storm through plywood, so Jenkins was standing just outside his shop's door instead, under the dubious cover of the decorative awning. It was an almost absurdly foolish thing to do, all things considered, but one of the joys of magical immortality was getting to do almost absurdly foolish things with minimal consequences, and Jenkins felt like getting the most out of his magical immortality today.

Plus, there were sharks being blown around. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity, even for someone with such a long lifetime.

He did at least take a small step back when one of those sharks was flung abruptly down into the street in front of him. It had a bit of tarp or some other long cloth tangled about its neck like a cape, and a thick, broken staff in its jaws. It gave Jenkins a pointed look. Jenkins blinked, and frowned back at it.

"Hell is empty," Jenkins mused. "And all the devils are here. . . ."

"It was a torment," said the shark (or so Jenkins thought it said, its mouth was full, after all), "To lay upon the damned.”

And then the wind caught in its cloak, and it sailed off to gnash and gnaw at some other poor fool braving the tempest.

[shut up, I HAVE SEVERAL REASONS. Open, should there be any other intrepid fools about!]

It was, according to Jenkins' facebook (a magical artifact that manifested tiny articles, mostly made up of lists, that only ever had to do with things Jenkins happened to care about in a particularly detached sort of way), National Donut Day.

Far be it for Jenkins to neglect to celebrate such an important national holiday.

By ordering one of each variety of donut JGOB had.

"Do crullers count as donuts?" he pondered aloud. "Well, best add one in to be sure. And the danish as well. It almost certainly doesn't count, but who can resist a danish? Ah, no. Adding in the muffins would just be absurd."

Then he carried the resulting enormous box of donuts to one of the outdoor tables on the patio to enjoy the sunshine and an amount of fried pastry that would put a lesser man — say, one who was not immortal — into hyperglycemic shock.

[open!]

Jenkins was hard at work today, carefully charting out what he remembered from Monday's adventure into the underreaches of the island, and comparing them to his diagrams of the Library's most recent layout.

"Ah, Mr. Carson. Glad I caught you." He clamped the phone's receiver between his cheek and his shoulder as he held the two diagrams up next to each other. "My weekend was perfectly fine, sir, yours? . . . Well yes, that does happen sometimes when you're in the Himalayas. I presume Ms. Cillian managed to keep all her toes? . . . Excellent. That's not why I've called. What would you think of the Library acquiring a Hall of Disco? . . . Disco. No, like the music style. . . . Mirrored ball, light up floor? . . . No, purely to liven things — you know, I had no idea Netflix had such a show. I only ever watch that lovely baking thing — right, of course. No, nothing else. Merely checking. . . . And you as well, sir! Thank you." He hung up. "Philistine."

Ray probably would have loved a disco ball in the Hall of Doors.

[Open!]

"Do you mind?" Jenkins made a third attempt to get the front door to the Magic Box open, shoving it against the rump of a truly massive rabbit that had taken up residence on the sidewalk. "Look, I'm certain it's a perfectly nice spot to have a nap, but you're blocking my customers and I have truly had quite enough of being blocked today." His back door back to the Library, for instance, was cut off. It simply opened to the shop's broom closet, as it had before he'd taken over. And he couldn't reach Colonel Baird or Flynn or even — god help him — Ezekiel Jones on any of his various phones. "So —" He leaned his shoulder into the door and heaved. "— excuse —" The rabbit shifted its weight to its other hind leg, giving him no more than a handspan of extra space. "— ME!"

The rabbit hopped forward, clearing the door, and Jenkins went stumbling out into the street. He straightened, spent a precious moment adjusting his tie, and turned to face the rabbit with a faint, sarcastic bow. "Thank you."

The rabbit barreled into him, knocking him flat. When he sat back up, cracking his vertebrae back into place, it sat a few feet away, twitching its nose at him.

"Right," he said. "That's how it's going to be, is it?"

The rabbit charged him again. He sidestepped it like a matador, whipping his short sword from his jacket and neatly slicing through its carotid artery and nearly managing to get out of the spray fast enough not to ruin one of his favorite suits.

When it stopped twitching, he wiped his sword clean on its enormous fluffy tail and tucked it away again.

"I wonder if anyone on this island has a taste for a truly tremendous amount of rabbit stew. . . ."

[ooc: Open!]

So the thing that Jenkins had forgotten about when it came to running a business (having not done it since at least the industrial revolution) was that it required rather a lot of paperwork if you didn't want it to entirely fail. He'd never had much patience for paperwork, himself, and he was moderately tempted to simply skip it and let the shop part of the shop languish as a front for his laboratory (perhaps even going so far as to actively discourage any actual shoppers from coming in and purchasing things, as many of the great used book stores of old preferred to do) were it not for Charlene.

Charlene would never have forgiven him for neglecting his accounting. And though Charlene was no longer with him, she would continue on forever in his heart (as well as that magic mirror in the Library), and even after all these centuries pining for her from afar, he couldn't quite bring himself to let her down.

So he was doing the books.

"How in the name of cheese and cake is there still fifteen cents unaccounted for?!"

It wasn't going well.

[open!]

"You know, the king cake actually finds its origins in ancient Bohemia," Jenkins said, as he accepted a slice of brightly died purple and green cake from the clerk (the bakery was not about to be outdone by the dorm common rooms). "Of course at the time it had nothing to do with the Epiphany or Lent, but was rather a prototypical Feast of Fools. Celebrations centered around role reversal can be found in dozens of cultures all over the world -- our modern Halloween, for instance, is an excellent example of just such a celebration --"

The flamingo which had been following him around town since Friday started choking on the plastic baby. Jenkins sighed.

"I did tell you not to feed it."

The flamingo coughed up the baby, sending it ricocheting all over the shop. The clerk balanced a small plastic crown on its head as reward. It went very well with the flamingo's assortment of plastic beads.

Jenkins went to find himself a table, wearing his own assortment of plastic beads in lieu of a shirt under his suit jacket with a certain long suffering dignity. He'd done his sarcastic congratulations to the island for such incredible originality back in his lab this morning.

At least the enforced frivolity came with cake.

[it's Jenkins' first random event! \o/ Open!]

Jenkins was just about done setting the store to rights, and all set to begin his experiments again. This week especially seemed like a good time for it, with the general lack of people on the island -- something about a school trip, he honestly wasn't paying that much attention.

So naturally this was the week the Guardian would find herself a problem she couldn't solve alone.

"-- It's not the Genie's Lamp, Eve, I've told you -- because it's never the Genie's Lamp. . . . Yes, well, that was an aberration. The exception that proves the rule if you will -- Oh. No, no, I suppose that could . . . yes, yes. With wild magic back out in the world someone probably could end up with a false -- Eve -- Eve. Colonel Baird. . . . Well then I'm not going to be able to help you anyway, am I? Mr. Jones will just have to be patient. I know it's not his strong suit but -- I am sure it's perfectly comfortable inside that lamp. . . . Try the stormy night room. . . . No, that's the monsoon room. Ask Mr. Stone, he's spent a great deal of time -- yes. Excellent. And you'll call back should you need anythi -- yes. That doesn't mean I don't care. . . . Of course not. I'll have one of the doors in this place set up just as soon as I finish calculating the precise magical spin of the interdimensional -- oh cosine and tangent! I had no idea she could do that cross-dimensionally. . . . No, I imagine she didn't either. I'll be sure to get right on that. Have fun and tell the Librarians to come back alive for me. Alright. Goodbye, Eve."

So. He'd begin his experiments just as soon as he finished setting up the semi-permanent door to the Library in his back room. Which he'd get on just as soon as the headache from having interdimensional quantum geometry shoved into his brain faded a bit more.

For now . . . tea.

[open!]