Prompt
At long last, your Holiday shopping is complete! Every last person is checked off the list, and you have time to spare. Maybe you deserve something a little extra special, too? Or is there someone you suddenly remembered? Are you just imagining that you’re done? What if you actually haven’t gotten everything finished? This time of year is always so stressful—how are you handling shopping at all?


(WC: 630)


It was precisely three days until Christmas and Alrik Rey had barely touched his Christmas shopping list.

He'd told himself for weeks that it'd be easy street. He'd get it done eventually, find the time between his raiding, working, girlfriending and Negaverse duties to slide in a few minutes of quality shopping where he'd actually put in some half-assed time and effort into finding decent presents for those he deemed worthy enough to buy presents for.

And yet... he hadn't actually found any time to do such shopping and now he was at the tail end of the holiday season, about to cross the deadline and he still hadn't bothered with gifts. Crap.

With Mom it was easy... or so he'd thought. While his mother thought that gift cards were impersonal, she liked a lot of stuff that normal moms liked. She baked, she cooked, she... well. She did a lot of stuff around the house, right? So she was into cleaning, yeah - but cleaning supplies didn't sound exactly like exciting gifts to give someone for Christmas and finding a neat gadget like a Roomba was totally OUT of his budget for the year. So he found some utensils from one of the cooking stores in the mall, found a kitschy looking egg timer to add into the mix - maybe she'd make him some of her legendary stew with the spoons and timer? That'd be pimp.

Dad was kind of easy, he liked sports. Well, sports and movies. Alrik liked movies too but their common interests ended at the word movie because the genres the two appreciated were vastly different from one another. Getting him tickets to one of the local sports team's games seemed reasonable... until he discovered that a pair would cost him close to one hundred bucks and he'd probably be expected to attend said sporting event.

Nope. Not gonna work for him.

He ended up getting him a calendar for his office - dudes still liked calendars, right? One of the kiosks in the mall sold the kind that ripped every day off, had a fun fact about sports or crap on it... that would work, yeah, that sounded reasonably okay to give.

Penny, man, Penny was the easiest to shop for. She got some pens, the really girly ones - might of even been scented, he didn't really look at the box - and a couple spiral notebooks. One of them had a cute cat on the front, another had a sad looking puppy dog with some hopeful message scribbled across it in a fancy font. He stuck a cute little USB drive into her gift bag for good measure, making sure it was themed appropriately for her writer's passion. Maybe if she stuck everything on a USB, he'd be less likely to stumble across some gross stuff when he borrowed her computer?

Olga got the blanket for a half-birthday, half-christmas present. It was easy to find because thank you Amazon - probably the easiest purchase, already taken care of. Heck yeah.

Last but not least in the slightest, Cass got the crown jewel present of them all. It had taken a good deal of thought into what do you get your new girlfriend, but he eventually figured it out. A pretty bracelet that the girl at the jewelry store said would be fawned over. Girls liked jewelry, right? And when he bought a charm or two (holy crap, when did charms cost an arm and a leg????) he got the band for free so it was perfect. PERFECT.


..... which left him with a cool fifty bucks leftover, which also meant he had enough moola left to splurge on the new FPS game that had just come out, a week earlier.

Score.

Talk about a merry christmas for him!!!