Welcome to Gaia! ::

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"What? What." Pepper glowered down at the girl tugging on her shirt. She should have known better than to feed her.

Pepper stood there, her mouth twisted as she waited for the little one to explain herself. Disgruntled blue eyes stared down at the tail.The tow head was hiding behind a notebook now. Slowly Pepper's eyes shifted focus from the little mumper's face to what was written on the page. Some how, Pepper managed to stare harder.

"I seem to recall it being Mr. Baroni who gave you the hot dog." The blonde said as she crossed her arms, thrusting out a defiant hip.

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"I purchased a hot dog. Who's to say it was the one you ate." Pepper was arguing semantics, she knew, but the little scamp seemed set on following her all the way home, "Mayhaps I was just paying for lunch tomorrow and Baroni gave you a dog out of the kindness of his heart."

The notebook was interesting. The tow head, or Kathrine as she introduced herself, seemed to rely wholly on it for communicating. The girl claimed to be mute...but if she was, shouldn't she have learned sign language? Either way, how many half conversations did this girl have stored up? Pepper's fingers itched to get her hands on one, she sensed stories here. Unique books. Handwritten. More accurate than a diary, but less complete.

The blonde considered the mute girl, drawing out the growing silence between them. Although the tactic probably worked less well on the mute, most people couldn't stand lulls in conversation, not face to face at least.

Seeming to have come to a conclusion, Pepper shook her head, the loose curls of her hair bouncing gently. She didn't even bother to finish the conversation, just started walking back to the bookstore. Little miss mumper could take care of herself...probably.

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She. Still. Followed. Pepper was reasonably sure she didn't have "Mother of Strays" tattooed on her. She would have remembered. What was it with this tiny tag-a-long?! Didn't the mumper have something better to do than to follow an "I assure you I'm not very interesting" bookstore owner around?

Whatever.

It was a free sidewalk.

Pepper got to the door of Ever After and pulled out her key fob, flicking through the sticks of metal until she found the one for the store. She kept thinking she needed to cull the collection, but never seemed to get around to it. People were like to think Pepper was a janitor with the bulk of keys she carried around.

The store bells jangled as Pepper got the door open and flipped the sign. The orange tom thumped off his spot on the counter and padded over to her.

"Mwa!" He exclaimed, weaving between Pepper's legs.

"No, I didn't get anything for you, greedy puss." Pepper reached down and rubbed him behind his ears. The tom ducked away from her hand and went to investigate Kaylin, "I don't love you either, stupid cat."

The tom ignored Pepper as she stalked off to her counter, rubbing his orange hair all over Kaylin's nice black pants.

"Prrrt?" He chirped, standing on his hind legs and hooking a claw into Kaylin's thigh.

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The orange tom wriggled in Kaylin's grip. He liked affection and food, but drew the line at being picked up. He tried to claw his way up to the shoulder of her sweatshirt so he could jump down, the end of his tail snapping back and forth with his displeasure.

The sound of Kaylin's voice was a truck without a muffler in human form. No wonder she used the notebook to communicate.

"That cat is a spoiled jerk." Pepper's eyes flicked to the notebook on the counter before resuming glaring at Kaylin, her fingers itched to open it, "If he were my cat I would have fried him up with onions and garlic ages ago."

Despite the tom's efforts to escape, the tow head had buried her face in his fur. Was she shy now? The little mumper had followed Pepper for nearly seven city blocks and now she was going to play the shrinking violet card? What the hell did this girl want?

"Can I help you." Pepper's tone was flat. She crossed her arms and shifted her weight to one side while her free foot jutted out at an angle. Fingers tapped an impatient rhythm on her upper arm. Her face was relaxed, which on Pepper tended to look like she was on a slow-boil to anger. She was one of those unfortunate girls who, if they weren't concentrating on smiling, had the face of an evil queen. It was this kind of stellar customer service that kept Ever After the bustling bookstore it was.*

*Pepper actually considered it a point of pride that she hadn't lost a book to a customer for three months now.

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The cat, finally free of his torment of cuddles and affection, ran off among the stacks somewhere. He'd be back when he thought someone might feed him. That or he'd headbutt an unsuspecting customer from a shelf while they were browsing.

"Pick up a book you've never read before and start reading it." Pepper's advice, and particularly advice to potential customers, while on the whole correct and accurate, tended to be largely useless. Finding a book you'd never read before was the easiest thing in the world at Ever After, finding a book to read was a Herculean trial. Not even the gods would help you though if you wanted to find a book in particular without Pepper's help. Her sorting system seemed to have leaked through into this reality from the realms of chaos. Eris herself would have told Pepper to do some organizing. If the Grecian goddess of chaos and discord was ever looking for a second hand book.

The spark of passion in those shy blue eyes must have softened* the blonde's cantankerous manner, because she shifted to lean on the counter and added:

"What kind of books do you like?"

*"Softened" in the sense that granite is softer than diamond. Which, while technically true, makes neither substance more cuddly.

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"All that in one book?" Pepper arched a skeptical brow. Obviously what Kaylin needed was an excellent cellphone plan with texting.

Pepper shifted position as she fought an internal war. Part of her felt every reader's enthusiasm to share the bounty of words they had discovered, the other part of her didn't want to let a single precious book out of her store. Seeming to have reached a decision, Pepper came from behind the counter, crooking her finger to indicate Kaylin should follow her.

She walked a winding path through the books, in truth it was the only path anyone could walk. Over the years the internal architecture of the store had been taken over by books, and perhaps in the oldest sections the architecture was books. Archways, stairs, tables and even shelves were made of books, with the occasional cracking leather chair peeking through in a desperate cry for help before it was drowned by literature.

Pepper led Kaylin up a flight of creaking stairs to the second floor, around a few more mountains of books and finally to another staircase that, for whatever reason the original builder had decided, was only half as wide as it should be (perhaps he knew the building was destined to be a second hand bookseller). A red velvet rope, fraying and faded went from one banister to the other. This Pepper unhooked and started up the narrow stair, the walls brushing her shoulders on either side. It was almost pitch black the whole way up. Ever After was an old New York building, and like many such buildings that had been established before the harnessing of electricity, none of the light switch placements made any damn sense.

At the top of the stair, Pepper pushed the old button set in a brass plate. There was an audible clack sound and the light for the stairs blazed to life. She hoped Kaylin wasn't claustrophobic. Ever After wasn't really the place for anyone with claustrophobia, nyctophobia or hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. It probably wasn't the place to go if you ever had nightmares of being crushed to death by the legacy work of dead authors either.

The third floor of the bookshop (or more precisely, this particular third floor) was curiously arranged. Every inch of wall space had been covered in paperbacks, each painstakingly arranged so that the covers faced outward. Beautiful printings of wizards, knights and dragons stared out from the covers of every single volume in the room, it was apparently the only thing these particular books had in common. Whoever said you couldn't judge a book by it's cover had never been to this room.

Pepper pulled three titles from a shelf, The Color of Magic, The Light Fantastic and The Wee Free Men found their way into Kaylin's arms.The first two featured a hapless, sinewy man wearing a red had that said "Wizzard" in golden letters accompanied by a rather dumpy looking man in a Hawaiian shirt and what looked like a camera except for the tiny red devil peaking out with a paint brush. The last book showed nothing more than perhaps the world's dumbest looking sheep covered in tiny blue men with wild red hair and beards clad only in ragged kilts.

"You could get all the things you requested with just The Light Fantastic and The Wee Free Men, but The Light Fantastic follows up on The Color of Magic. I assume you'd want to read that first." Pepper was already shifting books in the room to fill in the holes that the three she had handed Kaylin had left.

(Whoops. Might have gotten too lit. I have words. I wants to use them...TT~TT)

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'What to eat, something small before work or wait till the break?' Gypsy was musing over a meal in her mind as she walked. Glancing down a moment to make sure the pavement was even, she realized she hadn't put her name tag on. Fishing it quickly out of her purse, a brush on her shoulder nearly made her jump. Instantly her cheeks were red and she bowed her head in apology for not paying better attention. "S-sorry," was her quiet and probably missed response.

Stopped in her tracks to catch her breath, really she spooked too easy, Gypsy peeked up after him and her eyes went wide. 'Good grief that guy had some guns! Crap, did I say that out loud? No, it's cool no one heard that.' Her cheeks began to lose the pink to them as she realized she had only been thinking that, thankfully.

She had moved to the side a moment wondering how lost in thought she had been to miss him coming up. Placing a hand over her chest, she took a deep breath trying to calm herself and froze. There was nothing in her hand, so where had her name tag gone? 'Must have dropped it when I got spooked by that burly guy.' The color in her cheeks rose again as she quickly started scanning the area looking for the metallic gold colored name tag.

After a good few minutes of searching, she had to accept she was not going to find it right now. "Wonderful," she muttered under her breath and resumed her trek to work.

Upon arriving, she quickly arranged her hair to cover where the tag would be in case the manager happened to be about. Her purse was put in her locker in the back, exchanged for a small notepad and a pen. Heading back out into the cafe, the usually nervous lady had on a smile, ready to start her shift.

Meanwhile just past where Gypsy had searched, a name tag of a metallic gold color caught a bit of light and gleamed. Should it be spotted,
could be read off it.