Fandom Island and Town

If Rosalind was rather smug today, well, who could blame her?

She'd made it through a weekend without any of the weirdness touching her one whit--mostly due to the fact that she'd been off island for half of it, then listening to the podcast had only given her the news that avoiding going outside was the best idea--and now, this morning, the shop appeared normal.

And she had coffee.

It bothered her a bit that these were the important things in her life these days, but until she could figure out a way to get home… this was what she was stuck with.

As was her wont, Rosalind came carefully down the stairs expecting to find the worst since the shop so often lived down to her expectations.

To her disquiet, the store was behaving itself. She peered down aisles, then walked down them, pulling books off the shelves at random to make sure they were what they were supposed to be before putting them back.

Eventually, Rosalind took a seat at the front counter, flipping the sign to open. Then she drank deeply of her coffee and proceeded to side-eye the entire shop.

She didn't trust it. It had behaved itself before, yes, but usually only when she was feeling under the weather. Today, she felt fine… and this made the spot between her shoulder blades itch.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that read:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

Rosalind's headache from last week wasn't really better, but she was a little livelier in taking care of the shop and putting things in order today. Wryly, she thought, she was getting used to the headache.

Which probably wasn't a good thing, everything considered.

Except that as long as she could do her job (and she could), and since she was learning to think around the headache, there didn't seem to be much point in worrying about it further. For all she knew, it was the island being cruel for some unfathomable reason.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that read:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

The shop had appeared normal today, right up until a customer opened a book and it started singing at them. After that customer had been assured that that was a bit of Fandom whimsy and not at all how the book usually reacted, Rosalind had waited until they'd paid for it, then checked the other books.

They all had songs in them.

Rosalind retreated to the counter and the quiet of her computer. There were worse things, she supposed, than some boy band's warblings. That didn't mean she had to make herself listen to more of it than necessary.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that read:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

As if to tease her after warning Alana of what might happen in terms of Fandom-strangeness hitting the book shop, Rosalind opened a suspiciously normal store that morning.

Well, suspicious to her anyway. No matter how she looked, she couldn't find anything out of place or out of the ordinary. Even the dust bunnies were behaving themselves.

Huh.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that read:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

When Rosalind had come downstairs that morning to discover all of her sunflowers had turned into strange red and white flowers with teeth, she had sipped her coffee, sighed, and got on with opening the shop.

The flowers liked to snap and lunge at people, but they didn't have much of a range. Rosalind judged it safe enough to let people in.

The flower on her main counter also kept trying to spit fireballs at her. This amused her, since a) it never hit her, and b) the fireballs bounced a few times and then disappeared.

Rosalind supposed a fireball spewing plant with teeth at checkout might be off-putting to customers, but left it where it was.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that read:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

Above that, there was another, new (and hopefully temporary sign) that read:

Watch out for the flowers. They bite.

Rosalind figured anyone who came in after reading that sign could cope with the random fireballs.

It was a pretty good day as far as Amelia was concerned.

She'd eaten well that morning, had new knee-highs that (though she hadn't told Sparkle) were quite cute indeed, and the jacket that Sparkle had given her last week was nice and warm which, coupled with the fact that it wasn't too cold out today, meant she was nice and toasty.

Amelia knew she was going to have to figure out how to gain more independence at some point, since she didn't want to have to rely on Sparkle all the time, but today wasn't the day for that. It had taken some poking around and a lot of listening to other peoples' private conversations before she'd grasped that when people talked about squirrels watching everything, they weren't using some slang term to mean people like the Turks.

No, they meant actual animals.

After weighing the odds for how dangerous it might be, Amelia had decided to go looking for them, just to see if they really were the small, fuzzy creatures other people thought they were. And if they were animals, starting at the park seemed like a good idea.

So Amelia was inspecting every tree that she could clamber up into (which was a great many of them) and under benches and behind rocks. And if she didn't find any squirrels, well, that didn't really bother her.

If asked she'd say it wasn't a game, but it definitely was, and she was enjoying it.

[Open!]

Ordinarily, Rosalind would have been more concerned about seeing things that, she believed, weren't supposed to be around.

Except that it was easy to blame such abnormal situations on the island and be correct for doing so. Which meant that, when she spotted, and then kept spotting, a vaguely familiar looking white kitten chasing after dust bunnies, on and off throughout the day, Rosalind simply sighed, and tried to keep an eye on it.

It was more difficult than it should have been, since the kitten wasn't always there.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that said:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

She had two employees now, which meant that Rosalind took a long glance at her sign before shrugging slightly and leaving it up. Two employees were all well and good but she didn't want to discourage anyone who might want to come in for a job.

Besides, if she wanted to change her mind about the sign later… who was going to stop her?

The books, and the shop itself, were mercifully behaving themselves today so Rosalind could be found reading, when she wasn't helping customers.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that said:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

There were new students, and teachers, on the island but other than a vague wonder if it would bring in new customers, Rosalind hadn't really paid that much attention to all of them showing up, except to ascertain there was no one she knew who'd arrived.

Rosalind didn't know what she'd do if someone from her world, that she recognized, ever showed up but that was a different matter.

Today, while listening to podcasts of the radio, she worked on unpacking a new shipment of books and setting them out. The shop, possibly out of respect for the new books, was behaving itself today.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that said:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

There really hadn't been much point in opening the store last week, so Rosalind hadn't. She'd been more interested what had been happening around town to spend the day cooped up with a bunch of books.

This week, though, she was back behind the counter, checking inventory.

When the polar bear came in, Rosalind raised her eyebrows at it. It offered her a Coke.

"I see," she said dryly, taking the drink and then fending off a hug because there was no way that was happening. "Another one of those days? Well, try not to get in the way of the customers."

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that said:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

Rosalind would be surprised at Fandom's peculiar insistence on strange occurrences except for the fact that she'd gone through this before and was rather resigned instead.

It wasn't so bad today anyway, since the… marzipan… was falling outside. It could do that all it wanted. She was going to stay inside, nice and cozy, with coffee and books.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that said:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

And if anyone got marzipan inside her store, she was going to make them clean it up. Just try her.

Though she read more than she used to, due to her mother's insistence that she get a hobby, Rosalind was hardly the bibliophile that her employee was. Most of the books in her own store didn't pique her interest at all.

Today, though, as she unpacked the latest shipment of books, she found several that were interesting. They all seemed to be about some war that she didn't remember learning about when she'd gone to school on the island, once upon a time.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that said:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

Once everything was organized, Rosalind took a seat behind the counter with a book. And she had a few more to read after she worked her way through the current one. It wasn't happy reading but it was thought-provoking.

The island being stripped of students and teachers made it so much quieter. Rosalind didn't mind. The quietness might have made some people lonely, but not her. She found it peaceful.

And it gave her a chance to finish catching up on past radio broadcasts, which was good. Information was always good.

The shop was open and there was a sign outside that said:

Now hiring! Apply inside!

She doubted it would be a busy day and the odds of hiring someone weren't high given the scarcity of people on the island but, really, what was the point of having a sign if she didn't use it?

There were a lot of things that Rosalind was trying not to dwell on approximately a day and a half into her return to the island. How she'd gotten there was high up on that list. Higher still was the situation that she'd left behind. Between those two things was the nagging concern of how her coworkers were reacting and what was going on and the feeling that if she thought too much about it all, while stranded on the island, she would drive herself mad in short order.

That thought occasioned another glower at her phone, even as she picked it up to try and get a call through. She got nothing. Again. Portalocity was very sorry but very firm that there was no way for her to get a message back home.

Rosalind blamed the island. Heartily. And resolved to not think about it again. At least she'd gotten a chance to sleep some and clean herself up so that she was looking presentable.

She had plenty to think about in the meantime, since being back, and not as a student, meant she needed some way to keep herself from getting bored. (More honestly, she needed something to do to give her the busy work to take her mind off the inaccessibility of Gaia, but self-deception was a time honoured Turk tradition.) Money wasn't really a problem, since she could access that, which irked her when nothing else worked, but keeping busy was a necessity.

(Though she did wonder of Tseng would notice the activity in her account. And, if he did, what he would do about it.)

Running a shop probably wasn't what most people did to keep themselves distracted. Taking one over was probably not on any list of how to deal with things.

Nonetheless, armed with the largest coffee the Perk sold, a table all to herself, and all the paperwork required to get Book Haven back in running order, under her name, together worked out to an afternoon that was peaceful so long as she didn't think about those things that… she wasn't thinking about.

Well. It was a start.

[Open!]