a house of leaves moments before the wind

“Tour Guides”

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

A professional with a large stock of costumes (or several friend pooling their own collections) could stage a dress shop or secondhand clothes market scene.

Property sale scene where you take pictures in front of a cool looking building and the models are pointing and looking, and then shaking hands, and then exchanging a bag of coins for a key & property deed. Wouldn't even need to get inside the building for that! And it'd work just as well if the building was abandoned and falling apart, and the creatures dressed shabbily.

Shoe shining is quite an old job with a very simple setup that's portable and can be done pretty much anywhere, and newspaper seller is another good one. Think of what fun it'd be coming up with headlines for the prop newspapers! Maybe a wrinkly old wizard could buy one and then go read it on a park bench and feed the birds.