Day 42, Afternoon: Lil' Tyke Toys
Sangamon had eaten, caffeinated, didn't need any girly crap, and he'd already ascertained that the bookstore was useless for anything beyond the usual purpose -- namely, providing bored housewives with a rotating selection of paperbacks and cookbooks.
Besides, most of the town was stocked with Institute staffers at a Sangamon Taylor to Opposition (STtO) ratio located somewhere between gridiron blitz and Blitzkreig. Good ratio for a petition-signing drive, bad for a fistfight. And another knot of them was coming up the sidewalk, slowly passing a mating pair of local teenagers. Who appeared not to have noticed the town's temporary population increase. S.T. stepped out of the pocket and into an available doorway.
It happened to belong to the toy store. It was quieter than the other stores he'd been in. Maybe just because there wasn't much trouble he could cause in a store catering to litigious yuppies and their ostensibly precocious offspring, who for all their intelligence had not yet mastered the art of containing an oral fixation to appropriate venues. Plastic made-in-China Patent Pending crap.
The primary-color monotony was broken by an outcropping of earth-tone pseudolandscaped papier-mâché. It was a train set and associated paraphenalia. Halfway decent, by the looks of it. O-gauge, attention to detail in the extruded plastic, perfectly to scale if you ignored the three-foot-tall (scale equivalent) smiley faces on the front of each car. Not like that was much of a change. He found the control box and started twisting the big friendly dial.
Flick.
Neutral. Transformers hummed with excess power, electrical potential looming like a thunderstorm cell.
Flick.
Reverse. The engine seemed to sigh. Then it restarted its rhythmic pilgrimage, course as fixed as its (increasingly ironic) grin.
[for Phoenix and his jailbait armada entourage]
Besides, most of the town was stocked with Institute staffers at a Sangamon Taylor to Opposition (STtO) ratio located somewhere between gridiron blitz and Blitzkreig. Good ratio for a petition-signing drive, bad for a fistfight. And another knot of them was coming up the sidewalk, slowly passing a mating pair of local teenagers. Who appeared not to have noticed the town's temporary population increase. S.T. stepped out of the pocket and into an available doorway.
It happened to belong to the toy store. It was quieter than the other stores he'd been in. Maybe just because there wasn't much trouble he could cause in a store catering to litigious yuppies and their ostensibly precocious offspring, who for all their intelligence had not yet mastered the art of containing an oral fixation to appropriate venues. Plastic made-in-China Patent Pending crap.
The primary-color monotony was broken by an outcropping of earth-tone pseudolandscaped papier-mâché. It was a train set and associated paraphenalia. Halfway decent, by the looks of it. O-gauge, attention to detail in the extruded plastic, perfectly to scale if you ignored the three-foot-tall (scale equivalent) smiley faces on the front of each car. Not like that was much of a change. He found the control box and started twisting the big friendly dial.
Flick.
Neutral. Transformers hummed with excess power, electrical potential looming like a thunderstorm cell.
Flick.
Reverse. The engine seemed to sigh. Then it restarted its rhythmic pilgrimage, course as fixed as its (increasingly ironic) grin.
[for Phoenix and his jailbait armada entourage]