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 Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 4:26 pm
He was stacking superheroes. Two perfect pyramids - young justice and teen titans, which as far as Finn could tell were almost the same series except one had some sort of odd nostalgia factor going for it and a bit more of a Japanime look. He recognized the irony, or what he perceived as irony, as well. "I want an action figure with my face on it," said Finn, stacking Superboy and Robin carefully beside each other.
"That's not narcissistic, is it?" he asked the air, balancing another box. That was almost the last of them - just three left to go and then he could go wander around waiting for some customer to need assistance. Finn grabbed the last of the action figures and climbed carefully up his ladder to place them at the top of the display.
"I think I'd make a pretty good action figure," he mused, setting them onto the top of the pyramid. "Give all the short, awkward kids someone to look up to."
He slid down the ladder and stacked all the cardboard crates onto the cart. It was someone else's problem now! He dusted off his orange company polo, straightened his name tag - HI MY NAME IS FINN HOW MAY I HELP YOU? - and glanced around the lobby of the toy store. Now... did anyone here look like they needed help?
The answer was, of course they did, there were less than thirty shopping days until Christmas, and that meant everyone needed help. (At least it was past Thanksgiving. That almost made the endless repetitions of Frosty the Snowman bearable.)
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Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 4:00 pm
Holding his sister's hand lasted about as long as it took Andrea to get to the toy store with Gabby. She had been invited to some party or another with one of her friends, and so had to buy a gift for it, which made a very clever excuse for a girl of eight to go wild in a toy store a month before Christmas.
Fortunately, this also gave Andrea the opportunity to do some stealth shopping. His sister was still of the age where she would be so overjoyed with all the TOYS everywhere that she was not necessarily going to notice if her brother picked one up and bought it for her.
"Okay," Andrea told her, moving to one side just in the doorway as he crouched before her and held her shoulders in both hand. "Gabby-- look at me, Gabby. Okay, one rule. Don't leave the store unless you're with me, understand? Do not cross this line," he pointed to the metal strip that separated the well-trodden carpet of the toy store from the linoleum of the man mall, "unless I am with you holding your hand, alright?"
The girl eagerly bobbed her head up and down, making eye contact long enough with her brother to convey her understanding. Andrea provided her with twenty dollars so she could make her own purchase, and then turned her loose on the wide world of toys.
Standing up again, Andrea winced slightly as Gabby squeezes her way past some stranger to make her way to the My Little Pony toys. He could let her go for a moment, since she had been good up to that point in the mall. Glancing beside him, he realized that there were huge stacks of action figures rather close to his elbow.
"Wow, how did I not notice that?" he murmured to himself with a small laugh. Andrea brushed his bleached fringe out of his eyes and studied the boxes, then stole a glance back over his shoulder, wondering if it would be permissible to pick one out for himself and give Gabby enough money to buy it for him for Christmas. She was still only eight, and therefore needed his help.
Admittedly, neither Young Justice nor Teen Titans were quite his thing, though. Catching sight of a clerk on the other side of both pyramids, Andrea made his way over to him and asked, "Excuse me, do you have any other series of action figures? Any of the movie ones, maybe?"
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Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 7:00 pm
Finn looked toward the customer and put on his best minimum wage smile, which he thought was a pretty good minimum wage smile if he did say so himself. It wasn't creepy and he had all of his teeth (no thanks to Valhalla), so what more could anyone ask for? "Actually, yeah," he said, reaching back into his mind for the store layout he'd memorized the hweek before. "There's Star Wars, Star Trek, and basically anything else space ever on aisle five, and I think we've got all of the Avengers stuff in four? Don't quote me on it, though."
He shrugged at the other young man. "Twilight's over on six, but you wouldn't want that, would you?" He cracked a genuine smile this time. "Although you never know, My Little Pony's a hot seller with the male eighteen to twenty-six demographic this year, so who am I to make judgements about whether or not you've got a thing for sparkly vampires?"
Although he sort of sincerely doubted it. Finn didn't think he knew a single male who would admit to liking Twilight - in fact, most of the girls Finn knew didn't like Twilight. (But that accounted for basically Tate, Leah, and Griffin.)
"There's some new Spider-Man stuff on four, too, and Batman? Basically all of the superheroes besides this heathen monstrosity I just constructed." He gestured to the pyramids that towered over them. "You got a specific franchise in mind? I could probably help you look, I'm supposed to do that, help customers find each and every toy on their lists. And stock. But mostly know the location of every single variation of Tickle-Me-Elmo in this whole store."
Anyway. Finn shrugged at the boy, then gestured to his own messy bangs. "I like your hair," he admitted, feeling inclined towards liking the dyed blonde tips because Vin wore a similar style. "Reminds me of a friend of mine. You ever try wearing hats?"
Actually, that could have come off really badly. Finn rolled a saving throw. "Not because it looks bad, because it doesn't! But because I bet you could rock a hat." It took a special kind of man to wear a hat and not look either douchey or pretentious but simply awesome. "Anyways," he added, gesturing to his name badge. "My name is Finn, and it would be my pleasure to assist you in any way I can in your quest for plastic figurines that are definitely not dolls, and they do not pay me for that shpiel."
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Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2011 1:16 pm
Andrea winced at the mention of Twilight and quickly shook his head. "I wouldn't take Twilight stuff if you were giving it away." He definitely considered the others, though, looking over in the direction Finn had pointed. "Avengers stuff is cool, I guess," he replied when the store clerk stopped rattling off their whole stock long enough to take a breath. "I loved 'Thor' and 'Captain America'."
Oh, yeah, Lucas had really liked the superhero movies, too. He could get one for his brother here, too, and then tell Gabby which one to buy for him for Christmas. Great success!
His fingers strayed to his hair again, and he looked momentarily perplexed, and then laughed. "Oh, thanks," the dark-haired boy replied. It was that phenomenon of getting a compliment on your tee-shirt, and realizing that you had to check to recall which one you had put on that morning; sometimes he forgot his hair was dyed in the front because it had been like that for so long.
The comment regarding hats went off smoothly regardless, as Andrea laughed again. "My dad sometimes talks about hats because I don't think he likes me doing my hair like this, but I usually only really wear them when it's cold." A slight smile and a shrug. "So, too bad it's warm today, or else you might have seen me with my beanie on." He naturally thought of Sailor Vin's hat, as well, but heck if he was going to bring that up. Secret superhero identity or not, he was not exactly about to tell some stranger that yes, he actually did wear a pink chaperon on a fairly regular basis, too, regardless of the weather. Great way to get called something nasty.
"Alright then," he went on, and with a grin and the melodrama playing a family game of go-fish, declared, "Show me all of your Avengers." It was nice getting a clerk who did not seem like he wanted to die at work, especially with Christmas coming up. Since Andrea was growing up now, he seemed to notice more and more every year that a lot of the enthusiasm during the holidays was faked. This guy was chatty, but at least he seemed pretty genuine so far.
... Although working at a toy store seemed pretty awesome, at least. Andrea wondered how much of Finn's money made it out the door. Sort of like how he spent a good chunk of his cheque on food from Thaidays.
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Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2011 1:50 pm
Finn entertained the momentary fantasy that said beanie was in fact pink and had a badass ribbon on it, and a sly grin snuck across his face. He bit his tongue to keep from saying as much, though. It would probably just put this guy off - weird him out at best, scare him out of the store at worse and then Finn would lose the sale and get yelled at. Which would suck.
"Clearly your dad's got no concept of fashion," he laughed, although in his garish company polo one might say Finn had no concept of fashion, either. Not to mention the terrible hair - he kept meaning to get it properly cut, but then when push came to shove it was cheaper and faster to park himself in front of the bathroom mirror with a pair of kitchen scissors. So so much for fashionable hair - boys like the one in front of him put him to shame.
Beaming sheepishly, Finn shrugged in a 'follow me' sort of way. "Cinematic masterpieces, both of 'em," he agreed, walking backwards with the same self-assuredness that possessed many a college tour guide. "Chris Evans for Best Actor. Chris Evans for every award ever, he's amazing. I identified with that movie, on, like, a deep and personal level."
A pause.
"Because I'm short and goofy looking and get punched in the face on an alarmingly regular basis, clearly," explained Finn, as if it were the punch-line to some brilliant joke. He stopped and gestured down an aisle filled with action figures so aggressively masculine that they dripped testosterone. "Et voila, every single Avengers toy in the whole store. If there's anything specific you're looking for, I know where they hid the Limited Edition Tony Starks."
He winked and waited for questions.
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Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 2:03 pm
Andrea smiled and nodded but said nothing for the moment; it was not his place to judge what movies strangers identified with on a personal level. He felt a pang of sympathy at the mention of face punching, though, and looked back to the salesman, only to be greeted with a strangely up-beat smile on the subject.
A touch awkwardly, he smiled back, wondering how much face-punching one could be expected to take before punching back. But, well, if Finn was okay with it, again, not his place to judge. "There are a lot of jerks out there," he responded with a sigh after a second. "Everyone expects you to be just like them, and gets all weird when you're not."
But then action figures, and Andrea had better things to think about. He strode up to the nearest shelf of them and started to reach for a Thor, but stopped, his hand hovering in mid-air, at Finn's words.
"Limited edition?" he repeated, glancing sidelong back at the other boy. "What's that one like?"
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Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 7:09 pm
"There's a hidden button on the back that if you press it, he falls down drunk," deadpanned Finn, climbing the shelves with surprising nimbleness. Rock-climbing had to pay off sometime, didn't it? He grabbed a box from on high and dropped back down to the floor, leaving the rest of the shelves more or less undisturbed. "It's got a special magnet that attracts every Barbie in a mile radius and automatically poses them in compromising positions."
He flipped the box over and gave it a cursory glance. "No, um, actually... let's see. He's got snap-on armor and the reactor on his chest glows in the dark. And the armor has metallic bits. Oooh, shiny." He held the box out to the other boy for closer inspection.
"Though, I mean, if long-haired vikings are more your thing I won't stop you," he shrugged. To each their own. Finn happened to have squirreled a Captain America figurine away with his first paycheck, so it wasn't as if he was in any kind of position to pass judgement. Besides, these were definitely not something so frivolous as dolls. (Even if he was holding out an action figure whose clothes you could change.)
No, these were collector's items, sophisticated figurines for sophisticated adults that would nine times out of ten wind up in dirty poses on the wall of a cubicle.
"Or we've got X-Men stuff, too," he added, trying to be helpful. X-Men figurines wound up in dirty poses ten out of ten times. Especially Xavier and Magneto.
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Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2012 5:06 pm
Andrea had a good laugh at the idea of a Tony Stark action figure attracting Barbies. Then he held his hand out to ask for the box after Finn had read the list of actual features of the special edition. He wanted to see just how shiny the armor was.
He took no issue with Captain America, just found him a little camp. Something that always made Andrea feel just a bit bad - he did ballet, and thought a superhero was camp? But, well, he just liked Thor better. The Thor movie had ranked just below Cap's as far as the dark-haired boy was concerned, but, well, it was hard to really dislike a movie when he could always default to admiring Chris Hemsworth.
He returned the Tony Stark figure, then ventured, "Do you have any Thor specials, or would those have sold out over the summer?" Andrea shrugged a bit. "If not, that's cool, we can look at X-men, too. My brother likes Phoenix and Storm."
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2012 7:19 pm
"Nope, we've got those, too!" Finn exclaimed, pacing down the aisle. "It'll be in Avengers packaging - we haven't had anything with the Thor logo on it in stock since last Christmas, but there's a huge kick going on with the movie coming up. Just a second!" He leapt, grabbing hold of a high shelf and pulling his feet carefully up along the very edges, experience helping him to not knock any lower boxes over.
Yanking a pair of boxes off the top shelf, Finn dropped back to the floor and landed heavily. He held them out for Andrea to check out. "We've got a translucent, glow-in-the-dark hammer and glow-in-the-dark accents on this one, and the other one's got the metallic bits." Grinning and eager to make some kind of sale for all this time (or get a phone number, or both), Finn asked, "See anything you like?"
With the answer optimally being yes.
"I'm not sure if we've got Phoenix and Storm in the First Class stuff since they weren't in the movie, but we might have some of the throwback figures in the 80s or 90s costumes," he added, helpful desire and near-encyclopedic knowledge of the store kicking in. "Would he be cool with that?"
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Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 1:08 pm
Andrea leaned a little to watch Finn as he climbed the shelves, then stepped away when the other boy hopped down. Accepting the two boxes of Thor, he scrutinized them both before declaring, "These are both pretty freaking cool." He would have to decide which one to make his sister buy him. Or maybe let her pick.
Holding onto both of the Thor figures, he moved on to the X-men, and scrunched up his face a little as he tried to remember which version of the characters Lucas preferred. "You know," he replied after a minute, "I'm really not sure."
Gabby made her reappearance at that moment with an armload of My Little Ponies. "Andrea!" she called out as she ran up. She stopped and flashed a quick grin at the salesman, then asked her brother with excited urgency, "Which one should I get?"
"Oh, good," Andrea breathed with a laugh. "We can take care of tie-breakers now that there's three of us here." He started to reach for the collection of ponies, then stopped and glanced up at Finn.
"Are you into these at all?" he inquired, looking a bit furtive. He knew there were plenty of guys who watched the newest My Little Pony, and quite unashamedly, too. Andrea caught the occasional episode online, but only when no one else was home. He studied the other boy's face for signs of judgement.
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Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 5:48 pm
"I know, right?" Finn asked, quirking an eyebrow up towards his hairline. "They're both pretty awesome models." He personally had a preference towards the glow in the dark one, but with the arrival of the boy's younger sister, he was distracted from the matter. She'd gathered up just about every member of the Friendship is Magic cast - that was shaping up to be a difficult task.
Finn would never admit just how much he knew about that show, but he could at least attribute some of his knowledge to working in a toy store. He had to have a conversational knowledge of virtually every toy line they carried, be that Hot Wheels or Ben Ten or even My Little Pony. It had started as just a casual interest, but then he'd kept watching. He hadn't even been high!
"I know a bit about them," he confessed, smiling genially. "I mean, I work in a toy store." Which excused a lot of things. Bronies were mysterious creatures. Finn had watched a lot of the series, but he still hadn't admitted as much to anyone else. "Why?" he asked, smirking. "You got an interest, Andrea?"
At least, he thought that was the name his sister had called him.
"I'd go with Rainbow Dash," he said to the girl. "She's at least twenty percent cooler." It was a meme.
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Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 6:34 pm
"Sometimes I see parts of it when Gabby is watching," Andrea replied, sounding perhaps a touch defensive. If he noticed that Finn had called him by his name, he did not seem to be bothered by that, at least.
"The rainbow one looks good," he then agreed, leaning a bit to try to get a look at the others his sister was clutching.
"Rainbow Dash is like twenty times cooler," Gabby insisted, hugging the bunch of boxes to her chest as she tried not to drop any of them. She was still a bit too young to be allowed on her own on the internet, and Andrea was thankful that it prevented his sister from being one of the insane fans he had seen in his own adventures on the intertubes.
She took notice of her brother's dilemma, then, and gaped at the two Iron Man boxes. "Glow in the dark is awesome!"
"You think so?" Andrea asked her with a grin. He wanted them both so badly, but, after one last look at the two Thor figures, handed the non-glowing one back to Finn. "Thanks," he told him. Then turned his attention back to the X-men.
"Hey, Gabby, which Phoenix do you think Lucas would like best? Or would he like Storm better?" He glanced back up at Finn, as well. "Who do you like better Storm or Phoenix? I think I like Storm better, myself, just because Phoenix seems kind of overpowered. I mean, she's a cool idea but ... I dunno." Talking superheroes was a much safer conversation topic with boys his own age, in general.
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Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 7:08 pm
"Glad you're decided!" Finn told Gabby, giving her his best kid-friendly grin. He gestured to the other boxes she was nearly dropping. "How about you give me the rest of those to hold onto and I'll go re-shelve them later?" It was kind of what he paid for, and he'd hate for her to drop any of them and bang up the boxes. No kid wanted to unwrap a scuffed up box on Christmas morning.
"I was thinking the same thing," he added, gesturing to the glow-in-the-dark box. "Your sister's got good taste," he nodded at Andrea. "And I totally hear you on Phoenix. I guess she's fun in theory, but when you really boil down to it, all it did was wreck Jean Grey."
The X-Men character who had no codename and had always confused the hell out of Finn. The boy shrugged. "That and her costume's a hot mess. Neon green? Gold trim? Go-go boots? It's like a disco club exploded on her."
Leaning down, he picked up a couple of different morphs of Storm - movieverse, Evolution, classic 80s. "Storm's an all-around better character," he decided. "Glad we're all on the same page. How old's your brother?" He was guessing somewhere in the middle of the two siblings he saw here, but assuming was always sort of dicey.
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Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 7:35 pm
"Umm...." the girl intoned, fumbling with the other action figures. Then she knelt down on the carpet and let them all fall the shorter distance to the floor, then started handing the other ones she did not want up to the salesman one by one.
Then, coming down to Rainbow Dash and Applejack, Gabby grinned impishly and handed the latter to her brother. "Don't forget Christmastime," she reminded him, then laughed.
Andrea laughed and took the pony for his sister. "I'll let Santa know," he told her, and handed Gabby the Thor figure he had selected. "If you tell Santa about this one, too." He winked at his sister.
He quirked a brow at Finn then, too. "Oh come on, the corny costumes are the best ones. I mean, badass is always cool, but you have to love the old-school silly ones." Then he ribbed the salesman, "You are a fan of Captain America." All this coming from a superhero who went out to battle evil in hose and a wine-pink ribbon.
Nice that they could agree on Storm, at least. "Lucas is thirteen and thinks... ahh, what's her name? The lady who plays Jean Grey, he thinks she's hot. Meanwhile, the rest of the girls in his class probably still have cooties." Andrea shrugged and consulted his sister again: "Does he still like Storm, too, or is he all about Phoenix now?"
"I dunno, Marvel verse' Capcom is too fast," Gabby said with a pout. "and he doesn't like me watching him playing anyway." She got up off the floor again to look at the figures that Finn now held, then asked with another devious smile, "Is there a hot mess Storm?"
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Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 7:57 pm
"I wish I got along with my sister half as well as you two get along," said Finn wistfully as he picked up the boxes. Gabby had at least tried to let them down easy, and they didn't look like they'd taken any damage. "My sister and I fight like cats and dogs." Which didn't mean he loved her any less, but it did mean Leah probably wasn't getting any kind of present this year. No, after spending a year hurling rude names at him, Leah was just lucky her brother was willing to save her a**.
"Yeah, but Captain America at least pulls it off well," argued Finn. He could tolerate corny costumes so long as the person wearing them was likeable. "Phoenix's fashion disaster is just there to show off that some boneheaded artist decided b-o-o-bs the size of cantaloupes was a good design choice. I don't see the appeal, but someone's got to like it because it sells comic books. Your brother, maybe?"
He shrugged. "That is not trivia I would know," he admitted. "That movie was ages ago, wasn't it? Don't think less of me, but I don't devote brain space to that kind of trivia. Also, are you implying that girls don't have cooties? Because no one ever told me that."
He stuck the not-glowing Thor back on the shelf just sort of anywhere. Let some lucky kid score a limited edition instead of a neck-beard collector.
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