And, y’know, nab a few bucks so she could pick up dinner along the way.
No matter how many times she pickpocketed people when she was out stealing energy, no one seemed to carry much cash on them these days. It was a crying shame, really -- Lovejoy knew better than to use folks’ credit cards because of the trail back they’d cause but finding only five or three bucks in a wallet was… well, it was insulting considering all the effort she had gone through to knock them out, steal their energy and then rummage through their pockets for said wallet.
UGH.
She’d managed a whole ten dollars from the nice looking gentleman who’d been walking home. Which was also insulting - he had a briefcase and everything. He was supposed to be loaded!!!
But at least ten bucks could get her a McNugget meal….
_______
Adelaide had only powered up because Celsus had given her a Long And Tiring lecture on how it was important to remember your friends in Order and also not to let things go and something about home planets and possibly something about cats, but that might just have been the fact that Celsus had had Wendell with him while he was talking to her and Adelaide had been distracted by this.
And now she was out on the street, hungry and bored. There hadn’t been anything exciting to keep her interest, not even a youma attack or anything. She would have liked even a tiny little attack, she mused thoughtfully, because that would have given her an excuse to kick things, and kicking things was always fun.
Adelaide rounded a corner and felt an abrupt flutter of a power signature steal towards her, making her slow her steps. Peering around, pale hair glimmering in the yellow glow of the street lamp, her eyes finally landed on a black and white figure a short distance away, shuffling down the sidewalk.
It took Adelaide another second to process who it was.
“Hey! Hey you!”
_______
Lovejoy had felt the blip of an aura come across the scene, which had been the reason behind her boots starting to quicken their pace. The ten dollar bill was stuffed down the front of her outfit while the wallet was discarded unceremoniously across the victim’s face.
He’d wake up later, maybe a little extra tired, but it wasn’t like he was dead or anything dramatic like that, gosh.
When the hey, hey you! called from behind, she felt herself wincing at the recognition of the voice. What was it about her and running into these dudes over and over again? Was it bad luck? Had she stepped on a crack inadvertently? Her mother’s back was fine… so maybe she’d walked under a ladder without realizing it. Or let a black cat cross her path. Did Guardian cats count as generic black cats? Because the snooty one had crossed her path a time or two.. Did this mean she was eternally unlucky from here on out????
Head turning around, she let out a sheepish smile and a quick wave. “HEY, HEY THERE!!” she called back, acting nonchalantly in the worst way. “NICE SEEING YOU TOO, BYE!!!”
_______
Adelaide may have had a bit of fuzziness to her last memories of having met this particular person, but her thoughts hadn’t been so muddled as to not recognizing her. She’d been the one in the frills and ruffles who had tried to get her to pretend that she wasn’t doing anything bad, all the while carrying a few orbs of energy. And then, to top it all off, she had left Adelaide to deal with the two people on the ground she’d taken that energy from. It had taken a stupid amount of shuffling and pulling and swearing for Adelaide to get them back onto the bench, and then she had spent another ten minutes trying to prop them up so they looked completely normal, sleeping against each other.
It had been a little fun. Kind of like drawing the mannequin card on an episode of Who’s Line is it Anyway.
And also very weird.
“HEY WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!” Adelaide shouted indignantly after her quarry. She darted down the street after her, boots thumping on the pavement. “THAT’S NOT HOW YOU GREET A NEW FRIEND, IS IT?”
She swung her arm back again, revolving in a baseball’s swing.
”PAINTBALL BLITZ!” Adelaide hollered, and threw, hoping at least one of them bonked off the back of the girl’s head.
_______
New friend? New friends didn’t chase each other with the sound of thunderous clomping growing faster and faster behind oneself. Lovejoy was all about gaining friends but this chick didn’t exactly fit the description, as far as she was concerned.
“NO, NO, THAT’S PERFECTLY OKA---Owww!!”
She was mid-sentence in reassuring the woman that she certainly did not want to greet this supposed new friend when one of the paintballs splattered against the back of her head, sending her stumbling forward. Hands flew up and caught her fall, preventing her face from kissing the pavement but not preventing the ten dollar bill from slipping out of her dress and fluttering down the street.
“Hey!!! You made me lose my money!!!”
Frowning, she rolled to her back and both hands rose, aimed in the senshi’s direction as she hollered back with equal passion, “Super Confusion!!!”
Then, lacking grace she never had to begin with, she turned back around and tried to claw her way forward and after the dancing bill, caught in the wind.
_______
Adelaide was under the impression that almost anyone could be friends if you tried hard enough, but sometimes there were people who just wouldn’t like you no matter what, and she was okay with that. If that meant that she couldn’t be friends with someone who didn’t like Harry Potter, then she’d just have to be content with not being friends with them, because that was how life was.
(And besides, she couldn’t be friends with anyone who wasn’t a fan, that was just weird.)
The second paintball had the desired effect. Adelaide watched it bounce off of the back of the girl’s head, sending her careening forward, and while she didn’t exactly faceplant onto the pavement, she did stumble and fall, which gave Adelaide enough time to skip closer, grinning.
“Was it really your money?” she asked, raising pale brows, and then -
Not again, Adelaide thought with a squawk of protest, but then the thought of what exactly was again slid from her mind. She was standing on the street, that was for sure, but she wasn’t sure why there was this girl on the ground, scrabbling like a rat for whatever it was she was looking for (maybe cheese?). She knew that she’d been running, because her chest was kinda tight, but that was about it.
Her gaze slid over to the girl again, Adelaide’s expression thoughtful.
“Do I know you?” she asked curiously.
_______
She managed to snatch the money, barely, before it tried fluttering off for the umpteenth time just as the girl hovered above her asking if she knew her.
Lovejoy might have laughed, she might have been annoyed, she might have been a lot of things but at the moment, all she cared about was avoiding more of those annoying paintball things and getting her some nuggets. Heck, she was probably gonna have to nurse the bump on her head for the rest of the night while eating her MickyD’s -- she wanted absolutely nothing else to do with this crazy chick.
“Nope, we just bumped into each other but it’s cool, no harm no foul.”
She scrambled up to her feet, taking only a second to brush off the debris and dust from her uniform before eyes started glancing around the area for the closest mirror. Seeing a pitiful looking one near a dumpster in an adjacent alleyway, she took her cue and offered the other girl a friendly wave, despite feeling anything but friendly towards her.
“See ya, then!!!”
Ten dollar bill clenched in hand, she dashed for the mirror, holding her breath until her body passed through the surface.
_______
Adelaide still wasn’t exactly sure what the girl was doing. She was scrounging around, but at the last second, she saw her fingers close around a dollar bill that she snatched up before straightening. Adelaide gave her a slightly bemused look, head tilted, trying to figure out what was going on, because she sure as heck had no idea, other than her mind felt a little foggy.
“Oh, we did? Sorry about that, love, I can be a little clumsy sometimes,” Adelaide answered cheerily, because, well, that explained that. She’d accidentally run into this other girl, knocked her down, and that was that. That was all that Adelaide needed to know, wasn’t it?
Her thoughts swirled lazily in her mind. She was probably overthinking things, brows drawing together, but it felt a little weird, a little off kilter still somehow. Even as Adelaide was standing there, trying to figure out what was wrong, there was a flurry of footsteps hurrying away from her, and the next second, the girl was gone.
Oh well. She probably had just wanted to get home. Adelaide should probably be heading home too.
Thirty seconds later, she stopped.
“Oh, for - “
[Fin]
