Who: Rey Smith & Delyth Davies What: Cleaning up the shop. When: Early December after this incident with the blowout and this Where: Davies Drawing & Design Warnings: None that I can think of.
The shop was already boarded up by the time Rey arrived for her afternoon shift. Rey let herself in and took a good look at the damage. It wasn't a pretty sight: the windows had splintered and the shards had nested in the branches of the tree along with the remnants of the glass ornaments. "Del?" she called. "It's Rey. And I might be able to do something about all the glass in the tree if we get some time to ourselves."
Del came out of the small back store room at the sound of the door and when she saw the young woman she offered her a warm smile. "Oh thank god," she laughed. "I gave it a bit of a whirl earlier, and well…" she glanced towards the front windows and shrugged. The shop was a little old fashioned, creaking wood floors, shelves filled with art supplies along the side, and several wooden tables that contained more of these types of supplies. Near the back there were some bottles of lotions and soaps. The front was the disaster area where there were two large glass windows on either side, and the front display area where the day before had been a lovely Christmas tree.
She had given it a bit of a try, but it seemed as if not having been able to do much wand magic during her married days in New York City had definitely been detrimental to her abilities, and this had been more of a mess than she'd ever imagined it could be.
"You can see the window just - shattered completely, and I went ahead and put up the plywood, but there's still bits from the window, and some of the ornaments, it's just a right mess, really."
"Yeah, it wasn't great at the B&B either." Rey frowned. "Just between us two, the thing that broke the windows wasn't all that happened there. It'll be in the news later, or tomorrow, but last night two of the older guests died. The deaths might not be related, and I was warned that people died there sometimes, but, still." She looked again at the wreck of the tree and the glass. "I think we'll lose the wrapper round the tree but we should be able to get the rest. Carefully."
Delyth tilted her head at this news. Growing up in Repose meant that you were no stranger to peculiar events. And in Repose world, this didn’t even seem that strange. Two older guests died at the B&B and windows exploded all over town. It was enough to make one wonder really. “I’d say that’s a surprise, but it’s less of one than it might be if I’d grown up in New York, and not Repose,” she said seriously.
“I’m not too worried about the wrapper,” she added looking at it. “What do you have in mind?”
"I have a--trick, I suppose--for that." Rey's tone only bobbled a little. Theodore, Rey remembered, had said he'd known Del, that they moved in the same circles. It was a guess, then, that Del had some familiarity with what Rey was going to try, or something along those lines, and wouldn't be shocked or bothered. "It'll just take me a moment to get myself together long enough to do it. We might want to lock the door for a few minutes, though, just so no one interrupts. Five minutes should do it."
Del raised an eyebrow slightly, but she walked towards the door even though she didn't really need to in order to lock it. She locked it Muggle style however, and then stepped back and looked at Rey. "Go ahead then, and if it works, I'm giving you a free hand lotion for thanks," she offered bemused.
"It's been a while since I've done anything this complicated," Rey confessed, though she didn't add that Del's presence was also a new factor. Usually when she'd worked through problems like this in the past, she had only had Luke, or maybe Ben--Ren--for company. Before she could let that get in the way of what she was doing, Rey thrust it aside, and began to concentrate.
Slowly, surely, Rey extended her hand, reaching out to feel everything in the room: organics, metal, glass, the plastic of the tree--it would have been easier if the tree had been living--and so on. The fragments of glass, and there were a lot of them, slowly began to rise out of the tree: not just the window shards, but also the remnants of the broken ornaments. It was complicated and painstaking, and more difficult than Rey expected. But Rey had found her groove, and the glass was moving, out of the tree.
"Can you get the wrapper under it?" Rey asked Del.
Whatever Del had been expecting, this wasn't quite it. She watched the glass move, looked at Rey curiously, but it was fairly clear to her that the girl was using some form of magic, just nothing that Del could do herself.
"I think so," she said quickly, reaching for her own wand. That at least, was easy to do, and it seemed that Rey had some powers of her own and wasn't going to be bothered by Delyth's abilities. She murmured the spell, and plastic slid under the base of the tree - ready to catch any of the glass that Rey was working with. "There," she nodded.
Rey gathered the glass so that it would fall on the wrapper, or if not on it, near enough that she and Del could get the rest of it with a broom and dustpan. Then she lowered it to about a foot off the ground and let it fall onto the plastic. Huffing out a long breath, she said to Del, "Well, that's done. It'll be safe now to move the trees to put new windows in."
Delyth slid her wand back into her pocket and gave Rey a smile. "Thank you," she told the younger girl. "I'd tried several spells, but I think I'm out of practice." A beat and she tilted her head towards the trees. "My ex-husband didn't much care for me using magic."
"Some people are like that. I was--I suspected you'd be open to the metaphysical." Rey looked at Del's wand, noting the wood, the length, any carvings on it. "Are you a Lindmarch alum? Or whatever the comparable institution is in the States? I didn't have that kind of schooling; I was trained in a different tradition."
"I assumed as much," Del offered a smile. "The lack of the wand was a giveaway. "I'm not a Lindmarch alum, I went to a school here in the states, but it's been a while since I've done much practicing outside of potions work. We should perhaps sit down and talk sometime," she offered wryly. "But right now I should probably get those trees out of the windows so that I can try to get my storefront displays back."
Rey nodded. "I'll help. With arms and a strong back this time."
Delyth grinned. "Then I think we'll get this done in no time at all."