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Getting free Hot Chocolate from that new food truck seemed like a great idea at the time, and the blue sprinkles on top was just the cutest touch!

A few hours later though, you just can’t seem to get warm. Nothing helps. Not a bath, not wrapping in ten blankets and not sitting in front of an open fire. Your skin begins to turn a pale blue starting at your fingertips, and if you were warm enough to remove your socks, you’d see your toes were doing the same thing. As the minutes wear on you begin to sneeze small bunches of snowflakes as the icy blue continues to take over your skin. Perhaps it is a good idea to just go to bed and pile on the blankets.

The cold lasts for about six hours, and the blueish tint fades after you again get warm. Maybe you should think twice the next time someone offers you something for free…


Reinerite had planned for tonight to be the last time that she would work on quota in 2018.

After all she, or rather, Ashley would be at the airport tomorrow in order to make the trip back to the UK and it would be 2019 once she returned to the US.

There had been little to do at her apartment since she was already all packed up and had gone through the checklist a few times in order to make sure that there wan't anything that she'd forgotten and so she'd figured that she may as well slip out on one final trip to work on her quota since there would be no opportunity for her to do so whilst in the UK.

As with the previous occasion however, it had seemed like little to nobody wanted to brave the cold December evening, as the streets had been relatively empty and even her preferred haunt of the bars had been quiet - and with an early morning flight on the morrow meant that she couldn't stay out as late as she normally did.

There had been a lack of auras too, both the cool auras of chaos and the overly sickly sweet auras that she associated with those of Order, leaving Reinerite to walk the empty sidewalks on her own, a part of her grateful for the warmth of the ear muffs, gloves and scarf that she had thought to bring along with her.

After a further fifteen or so more minutes however, Reinerite had figured that she may as well turn back, because there had been nothing to suggest that the evening was going to get any livelier–

In fact, if anything, it had seemed to get quieter and so she had teleported to an alleyway that was close to her apartment and had found somewhere secluded to power back down, a part of her mentally thinking about rummaging through the cupboard to see if there was any hot chocolate left as she - now that she was back to being Ashley - walked back towards her apartment.

The smell of hot chocolate had her pause, the smell rich and oh so tempting - after all if she could pick up some hot chocolate whilst out then there would be no need to rummage through the cupboards in search of hot chocolate that may or may not exist

It didn't take long to find the food truck either - more a case of following the scent of hot chocolate back to its source–

And whilst Ashley couldn't quite recall there being a food truck around here before, she wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

There had been a small queue, but the hot chocolate lure was one to tempting to resist - and really the queue had moved relatively fast - or at the very least it hadn't felt like she had had to wait too long in queue and the end result was well worth it - particularly when she had found out that the hot chocolate was being given away for free and found herself humming a song that she had heard on the radio to herself in between sips of the rich hot chocolate which had been decorated with little blue snowflake sprinkles...

Ashley wasn't feeling quite so cheerful a few hours later however as she turned the heating on to the 'all day' setting and huddled under every blanket that she could get her hands on. Instead she was feeling downright miserable - cold and miserable - and nothing seemed to be making her feel any warmer. Not the blankets or the heating or the multiple cups of tea that she had made–

Worse she had started to sneeze literal bunches snowflakes and when she'd glanced at her hands she was pretty sure that they had turned blue.

In the end, she had settled for miserably dragging the blankets with her to her room before calling her parents to advise that she seemed to have come down with the flu in between more snowflake-laden sneezes, before eventually agreeing with them that she wouldn't be on tomorrow's plane.

And whilst she had no idea where the sudden cold bout had come from - or why she had been sneezing literal snowflakes, Ashley knew that she was going to be avoiding hot chocolate for a long, longwhile.

-- 725 words --