Day 42, Afternoon: Lil' Tyke Toys

[toxicspiderman]

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

Comments

[mind_the_sukima]

[Time-warping from here]

"The kids with candy came from here!" said Yukari excitedly, striding into the candy shop with her jacket pulled tight around her. After the chill ice cream and the even chillier weather outside, the toy store was nice and toasty with the warmth of indoor heating and little bodies milling about.

"Toys and candy; two birds with one stone," she commented as she looked about. And what all sorts of fun stuff there was here! Nothing at all like the electronic and plastic wastelands of the city and of course nowhere near the rustic handcrafts of the Gensokyo. She crouched down to ostensibly examine a set of colorful dolls, but was actually eying the candy counter and wonder how to best obtain its riches.

[jokers_wildcard]

Harley eagerly followed Yukari into the store like a little kid going into, well, a toy store. Candy and toys in one place! It couldn't have been more perfect even if they tried! And there was so much stuff here! She could already see stuffed animals and dolls and toy cars.

Harley let out a happy squeal as she whirled around in a spin to take everything in. "Wheeee~ Look at all the goodies!"

She hardly knew where to even start! There was so much to look at! So much potential! If there was one thing she had learned, it was how one could always find alternate uses for toys when they were creative enough. It added that little element of fun to the whole thing, you know?

"Where should we look first? Huh? Huh?" Because lord knows she couldn't decide on her own. Ohhh, how was she supposed to choose only small things to snag when there was just so much stuff here?!

[mind_the_sukima]

Yukari giggled the girl's overly excited response. Just a real ball of energy, wasn't she? The fact that her companion was a felon only made the scene that much more amusing; juxtaposition was one of Yukari's favorite pastimes.

The candy counter was a problem though. All of the candy was, quite reasonably, on the other side of the counter, so it was quite impossible to help oneself to a five-fingered discount without - yes, she just checked; they were certainly not working now - one's interdimensional powers. This was not a boundary she could cross by force, so if sugary sweets were to be obtained, it would be by guile and careful planning

[jokers_wildcard]

Harley was busy staring at a stuffed bear with a very tempting "Squeeze Me" written on its stomach when Yukari pulled her away in another direction. She followed along to the weird display of girlie knick knacks, staring at it in confusion at first. Just about anything in the store would have been better than that stuff. You couldn't even use it for anything. She got it when Yukari whispered her question and immediately played along with the 'ooo pretty' facade

[pleading_ngri]

Some stores seemed more appealing than others, for the purposes of snooping around. In the end, it had come down to a toss-up between the bookstore, the electronics store, and the toy store. Phoenix decided to go with what was closest, since his odds of finding anything useful anywhere in Doyleton probably washed out somewhere around equal.

He hadn't anticipated just how creepy walking through the aisles would be. There wasn't anything major that was wrong with the place, but the absence of household-name franchises, their replacement with ones that he'd never heard of, kept strumming at the same mis-tuned chord way down in his gut. Investigating in the bottom of the retail uncanny valley, he thought flatly, inspecting a package of building blocks. Copyright, plausible date- as far as his admittedly pathetic knowledge of children's toys went, it checked out. He put it back, continuing his circle around the store. If his attention hadn't been caught by the humming of the electric engine, he might not have even looked away from the

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. had located both power boosters purely by ecolocation. One was approximately two-thirds of the way down the tunnel, and the other was at the summit of the lone sculpted hill. Which made a certain sense from a marketing perspective, as it covered any deficiency in locomotive power. But it was unappealing from a philosophical/aesthetic viewpoint

[pleading_ngri]

"That's what you said. Well- wrote." S.T. had been vague on the bulletin, but Phoenix preferred it that way. He didn't know for sure the upper limit on how many people in the institute were actively gunning for him, and that didn't take into account opportunistic psychopaths who might've seen personal information and picked at it for their own reasons.

"You have test results, though?" This was just flat-out awkward. Phoenix had asked for forensic results plenty of times, but not in the first person. He was tempted to pick at the synthetic landscape while they spoke - he'd always had this problem with keeping his hands to himself - but in the end decided he didn't want to look any more uncertain than he already was. All the same, he let himself set straight a couple of toppled plastic people by the sideboard, just as likely abandoned there by the last child to play at the table.

[toxicspiderman]

To bend the metaphor well past the point of elastic motion and into the range where it was going to snap and fly off and hit someone in the eye, the train had gone right past awkward and into the territory of serious conversation, no bullshit, prevarication, or propaganda allowed. Even when not talking to walking polygraphs. S.T. could feel a headache gathering in his sinuses, and this time it was only indirectly the fault of the damn needles.

How the fuck did Dr. J do this? Oh, right. He had an underpaid gum-popping nurse drop the bombshells, amid the avalanche of insurance forms and illegible prescriptions.

"Yeah." He'd taken a stack of readings and proved absolutely nothing he hadn't already guessed. He had enough ego left to not assume confirmation bias as Occam's razor. "Custom-targeted neurotoxin for you, triptych of retroviruses for me. All completely plausible and completely fucking impossible at the same time." Either due to time frame or due to the fact that psychic powers lurking in underused portion of the