![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The people who have read so far have liked it a lot and not given me much to work with for rewriting. *g* Any volunteers will also be welcome to help me get this story a real name!
I think I might finish a book pretty quick here. I also started a new short story in the world of "Kansai Hop" (more generally useful: like a slightly less boys-book Artemis Fowl universe) which I will cut but still put most of the opening here. Despite the fact that it's not Teaser Tuesday or anything.
Larry ambled down to the marquee, bland expression fine tuned so he could internally sneer at the knocked-in neighboring sign for the ugly wonder of a Funeral Home. ...
He had repudiated elvish snobbery enough to not hold his kiosk to bizarre standards, but a half-way-to-nothing horror like that was just too awful. In the little gas station there was at least a wholeness of impression now only added to by the damage from last week's ice storm nightmare.
Flying branches occasionally had a sense of humor. The wind had taken out letters on one side of the marquee so it read “B w iser, 2.99”. The hole knocked in the other sign was just like a pock on a face. A pock on overly severe, and self-serious face.
A car drove in, and as it pulled by, slowed down. The window rolled down and a mixed-race woman with full lips and the cheekbones of a Cherokee grinned at him.
“Pointy,” she called, “you're glamour's showing.”
Whoa...mixed race in more ways that one. She pulled up to the front before he could think of any graceful retort, and unfolded from the Escort with a definite litheness of bearing you could tell anywhere. He seethed a bit, as he retrieved the extant marquee letters, because of all of the elfin traits that got to him...
His cell-phone rang as he was going through the door, so he didn't have to try and greet the gal musing over the drinks case. Too good to be true—it was his brother, the self-styled “Doc” of the Magical Moderation outfit.
“We just traced a Queen's agent to your doorstep, Lahridan. She still there?”
“Yup.”
“You'll hold her for us, then? We're setting it up a bit better, getting another operative over there.”
“I have a paycheck to earn, here.”
She came up, still smirking, and threw a few packs of Trident and one of the huge bottles of Arizona Green Tea on the counter.
“Just a few extra seconds, okay?” Doc pleaded.
“Fine.” He flipped the phone shut and put it in his pocket. “How are you doin' today?”
She dropped her eyes from his as she got out her wallet, as if unnerved by his blank smile.
“Sorry, I'm sure you could have been as rude to me about what I am,” she said. “The Fair outside their normal venues just get to me, y'know?”
“I have no idea what you are,” he said, after checking to make sure Tom was still in the back. “No worries.”
She looked up. “Oh. You...”
“I've disinherited the elfin from my brain-space. That'll be five-fifty,” he repeated, now he had her full attention.
While he got her change from a twenty, she looked him over.
“That's...brave.”
“Think so?” Their eyes met now—hers were a startling dark blue with white slivers. She was actually kind of gorgeous, if she weren't so clearly caught up in elfin politics... “Have a nice day.”
She turned to the door just as a glamoured dwarf, projecting himself as full-sized (though fooling neither of them), plastered himself against it and made it neatly one with the frame. Larry sighed. His customer just as calmly opened her tea and began chugging it. He leaned on the counter, resolved to be bored with it rather than infuriated—he was so fired. There was a lot he was good at when it came to magic (and therefore, was bored with) but deconstructing dwarvish spells was not one of them.
This is placed in a specific time in bordertown Claremore, BTW. ^_^
