[ hiatus ]

The man lets out bitter laugh before answering.

       ”It is, but what can I do? I like the place."

He seems unwilling to make any further comment about the store, at least not before a sip of tea after all his mouth looks oddly dry. He looks away and frowns and then offers a smile before turning around, he walks up to the counter and disappears through a door, leaving no time for her continue arguing against his offer.

Two minutes later he comes back with a glass jar, filled with iced tea, and two cups that boasts on the wooden counter, while mumbling a melody under his breath. He fills both glasses and pushes one toward the woman, he smiles sweetly and takes a sip from his tea.

       ”Luckily, a jar was left in the fridge— unfortunately without poison."

Narrowed eyes follow the man as he vanishes, and Karen is tempted to mirror the act, walking back out onto the street and pretending as though she was never here. She does not know why she stays - most likely it is a product of some subconscious whim - but by the time her reemerges with the tea, it is far too late to change her mind and embrace her cowardice.

She waits for the liquid to pass his lips before taking a sip herself. She did not normally have regard for manners and courtesy, but she felt compelled to at least partly follow them in this context. Something about the atmosphere of the shop was reminiscent of days gone by, and it was calming, it an odd way, despite the forced social interaction.

Small talk was beyond both her tolerance and ability, and she did not respond to the passing statement. It was made clear enough by her action that she doubted that it was actually poisoned, and thus his words warranted no further comment. 

"I know it’s fucking plant," John snaps, against his better judgement, giving her an increasingly annoyed look. He isn’t stupid. He knows what plants are and he knows that plants don’t do that. Or trap people with the intent of killing them. No, that belongs in bad scifi movies, not the real world. "Thank you, Captain Obvious."

He lets out a frustrated breath, free hand pinching the bridge of his nose. Where do they go from here? So long as she’s not trying to kill him, she’s not his problem and he’s sure she doesn’t want to hang around him any more than she has to, but they both know a little more than they should at this point.

The condescending sneer lingers for a while longer, spurred onwards by the childish quip and the immature language. In her adulthood, Karen had developed a pretentious proclivity towards not using such language herself, and she makes a habit of judging those who did not share her distasteful reserve. Any excuse to despise someone, not that pointing a gun at her was not enough to invoke her loathing.

"Mm, yeah," Piper knew that disappointed ‘thank you’ all too well. She knew that dissatisfaction. It was shit to be a witch sometimes, especially when someone found out. Witches had a terrible reputation, and ‘strange' was something she'd grown to prefer over other descriptions and reactions. “I know it sucks to be called strange. It sucks to not be normal, huh?”

         ”You’d be surprised."

And of course, she wouldn’t elaborate on that. Simple one-liners  and  quick  responses  were  all  that  was required for  a  conversation, especially with the other especially  with  the  other  it  seemed. Natasha  held appreciation for that fact.

        “Was that a pun?”

         "Perhaps."

She finds herself skeptical once again, but she does not pursue it further. People liked to think that they were complicated and important, but they so rarely were.

Karen sat behind her desk with her feet resting on top of it. The faint smell of whiskey clung to her, lending further to her air of unprofessionalism. It was a Friday afternoon; she wanted to be working even less than the students wanted to be in class. That was not a workable excuse for one-time behavior – she refused to work an entire day without a swig of something during class change regardless of the day of the week – but it served to justify the escalation somewhat. Not that she cared what other people thought of her and her actions, or, at least, she would never admit it.

Her eyes flicked to the clock set in the wall as the door creaks open, brow furrowing as she was forced by necessity to squint slightly. It was nowhere near time for her next class – as she had thought – but no one ever trespassed on her space outside of scheduled class time. She had always made certain of that, scaring people away whenever they tried.

“Weapons are weapons,” He repeats, a certain unconvinced tone to his voice. Under normal circumstances, he would be inclined to agree with her—-weapons were weapons and any weapon could be lethal in the right hands, regardless of what the enemy had. But this was hardly normal, by any definition of the word.

"Yeah, except most people can’t do that—-” He indicates the vines wrapping themselves around her fingers, careful to point with his free hand and not the gun, lest he set her off again. “What the fuck is that?”

"It's a plant," Karen says with the condescending, intolerant sneer of a colonist dealing with a barbarian for the first time. She does not like talking about her abilities, and these circumstances make it a thousand times worse. Lashing out had been an incredibly poor decision, but there was nothing she could do about that now.

"How peculiar."