Ryan sighed as he dragged the large hamper down to the laundromat. The apartment's laundry area had been completely full and he really wanted to get this s**t done rather than wait several hours for the other residents to go get their stuff. Who knew how long it would take any of them? In his experience living here, people generally tended to come down, toss it in a machine, and then forget about it for the entire day, which really cheesed him off, like, come on, how hard WAS it to actually consider that you lived with dozens and dozens of other people who had their own laundry to tend to and couldn't wait around all day?

Sure, Ryan technically was one of those people who could wait around all day, because he worked from home, but that didn't make it any less aggravating when he had a certain play for how his day would play out and the order he'd get his chores done in and someone was just being irresponsible and throwing wrenches in that. Ugh, he hated that. But he was probably dwelling on it too much and having a quiet horrible facial expression, considering the way people were scurrying out of his way right now. It could've also been his absolutely massive hamper he was dragging along, but still, this was definitely less "large object" and more "large, angry object" sort of scurrying out of the way.

He breathed in deeply through his nose as he entered the laundromat, trying to force himself to cool down and chill out from his inner tantrum. He had his coins, he just needed to go sort out his clothes. Thank God for this place, really. It seemed pretty empty so he could fill three washers and only feel marginally guilty about it. Nice. He hummed, sitting down to watch a movie on his phone (with earbuds in, of course, because he wasn't a heathen like some people, he thought, glancing irritably at the person watching some stupid news segment on their phone with no headphones.

Jesus, he was in a really bad mood today. He scowled down at his phone for a moment before sighing to himself. Come on, Ryan. The world sucks today, so what, get over it, he told himself. The washers went off not long into his movie and he shifted everything to some available dryers right next to each other. There, see! Some positivity. Don't have to remember which random a** machines all this is going into. Geez, I really need to keep up on this stuff better before I'm doing three loads at once. He guessed, then, that part of his irritation for the day came from being mad at himself for leaving it all too long, but the rest was just compounding on that and making everything worse.

He sighed again, rubbing his face as he continued to watch Zootopia on his phone for the millionth time. It was one of his favorite movies, and honestly, he lowkey wished he could be a bunny like Judy and wind up dating a cute fox like Nick. Sure, they weren't actually a canon ship, but man, they would be sooo cute together.

Nose twitching, he looked up from his phone to glance around the shop, wondering if someone had been smoking outside and let in some of the smoke as they came in. No, nothing like that, as far as he could tell. He was just beginning to wonder what the burning smell actually was when one of the dryers burst into flames.

"Oh, ******** s**t!" he yelled in surprise, scrambling away from it and shoving his phone in his pocket. Okay, okay, fire, what to do, what to do? Water! Fire needed water to be put out—wait, no no no, not water, no, this was an electrical fire, he couldn't put water on that, that would just start a whole different problem. Electric types beat water types, after all. (You could say this was not the time for Pokémon parallels, but Ryan would argue that it was the perfect time; because, after all, it was helping him keep his head on straight about how to handle certain fires).

The other patron, the one who hadn't been wearing headphones, had already fled the store, and the poor worker seemed to be in shock, staring at the dryer on fire, transfixed.

"Fire extinguisher, where?" Ryan called out to them, watching them jolt and glance around frantically for a moment.

"Here!" they finally shouted, pulling it from a nearby wall. "I've, uh, never used one, how—?"

Ryan snatched the thing from their hands, pulling the pin, aiming, and firing (ha) at the fire. He stepped closer as the flames died down until they appeared to be completely extinguished, opening the dryer and spraying inside for good measure.

... Man, if any of his clothes survived that, he'd have to wash them again, damnit. Carefully, he started picking his clothes out of the dryer, making a face at the ones that were definitely burnt beyond repair, and the few that were potentially salvageable.

Not too much longer later, as he sat there sorting through his pile of clothes, the firefighters showed up to go over everything, and Ryan tiredly recounted the incident with the worker. Then the owners showed up and he had to do it all over again, and quite frankly, he really just wanted to go home with the clothes that made it while he had enough energy to get them put away. They tried to offer him some money to buy new clothes, but Ryan refused as vehemently as he could while remaining polite, but they insisted on the very least refunding him for his entire washing and drying cycles he'd paid for today, considering all he'd done and the clothes he'd lost. Reluctantly, he took it, knowing it would get him out of there faster, and he spread one of his clean towels to divide between the clean clothes and the burned ones as he carted it home. He'd just have to take care of it later.

He did, however, think to himself that he'd been quite right to be in a bad mood all day, since this whole mess had happened.