Of everything weird that had happened since Nursey arrived in Vallo, this was a new level of what the actual fuck. He stood in the front doorway of the Nook, stunned at the sight in front of him. Sometimes the place was messy; this was just a fact. When he'd first gotten hired, he'd had to clean up some really gross books after all. But the weird ball of books and random objects that was currently rolling through the shop, getting bigger by the minute.
"Uhhh….not chill," he mumbled. It was early but their doors were technically open, so he looked around nervously for who might have caused this problem. Caleb was going to freak. Nursey did not want Caleb to freak. He liked his job. More than he thought he could like a job really. He stuck his head around behind a bookcase to the small storage space they sometimes had meetings in - i.e. where they practiced their musical when the shop was slow.
"Yo, Baz, you here yet?" he whispered loudly. "I need your effortless chill, bro."
“Yes, what is it?” Baz asked, in the middle of cleaning up the storage area. He’d dressed very casually for today; he just hadn’t been in the mood to really be extra, and so the purple silk shirt he had on would have to vibe with the green tailored pants, he supposed. At least he was autumnal. Nursery poked his head in, and Baz felt a little flip-flop of nerves when he saw the generally affable hockey player looking concerned. In Vallo, that was never good.
He finished tying his apron (unnecessary, honestly, for the book shoppe, but people did bring their children about and the children sometimes were moist, and Baz didn’t take many chances with his wardrobe). “What is it?” he asked, and then hearing something strange - a… thudding? - he composed himself and peeped around the corner, expecting… well. Who knows; it was Vallo. Maybe an oversize rat with a taste for human flesh.
But no, nope, absolutely not, he hadn’t considered the possibility of a… ball… collecting bits and pieces around the store. That was absolutely new. Baz considered their options and pulled back into the storage room to look at Nursey.
“You didn’t do that, did you?” he asked, the that referring to the sudden appearance of the… ball creature.
Nursey's eyebrows felt locked into his hairline. He didn't hide behind Baz, but he was tempted. "How could I do that?" he hissed back, ducking half of himself behind the bookcase as the ball whirled by and picked up a few more books. "I don't even know what that is."
He was really trying for cool. A calm and collected response to stress - that was Nursey's goal half the time he'd spent in Vallo. But the fact of the matter was he was an anxious creature from his hip sneakers to the carefully maintained curl of his hair. If he managed not to need a bag to breath into during this event, he'd consider himself chill enough to not be horrifically embarrassed.
"Do you think it's eating them?" Nursey poked his head back out to get another look. "Do you think it's already eaten people?"
Baz wasn’t pleased by this development, but he hadn’t leapt to panic quite yet. Honestly, given his history back home, it took quite a bit to rattle him these days. Still, he could admit that he’d never seen anything quite like this before: the ball just kept picking things up as it rolled about, growing larger every moment.
“It doesn’t smell like it’s eaten people,” he answered, distracted, and then hoped that that was something ordinary people would observe. Whoops. Move forward, Grimm-Pitch. “Did it attack you?”
It didn’t seem like it wanted to attack. It straight up ignored the two men staring at it concernedly from the doorway. Still, Baz didn’t like the fact that it was messing up the displays he’d spent yesterday straightening, and so he took out his wand and cast a loud: “As you were!”
The ball dissolved, books, papers, trinkets shooting back to their original place in the store, albeit messily. The ball continued to roll about, resuming its previous ambitions with nary a hesitation to indicate it was remotely bothered by the interruption.
“...huh,” Baz said intelligently.
“Oh well, it doesn’t smell like it’s eaten people. That makes it all better.” Nursey was aiming for cool but mostly sounded amused and stressed all in one. He was very impressed by Baz’s magic, though. Always would be. The only time he felt magic was during a particularly beautiful play on the ice, usually with Poindexter on the other end of a perfect pass or a surprise corner of a goal opening up just in time for a slapshot. Watching the ball break apart and then start right back up again, Nursey frowned.
“That’s bad right? That’s, hold on, let me test something.” Nursey picked up a water bottle tucked away in one of the storage shelves and lobbed over the reforming ball. It didn’t turn towards the bottle, just kept trudging along at the same speed and trajectory. “Okay, so, it’s not like a t-rex of weird magic trash pick up. There’s probably something about this on the network.” Scrambling for his phone, Nursey watched his klutzy fingers launch the device out of their hidey hole and directly in the path of the katamari. “Not chill. Not chill at all,” he pouted.
Baz winced as the phone was consumed by the katamari, and cast a second “As you were!”. The phone came flying back to Nursey’s fingers, no worse for the wear. “That’s useful to know,” Baz observed, peeping over the unblemished phone, “it doesn’t appear to be broken or dented. So this thing… whatever it is…. Isn’t causing harm. Yet.”
The ‘yet’ just had to be added in there. Baz had encountered too many weirdo things that seemed harmless that turned out to be kind of awful (the numpties came to mind).
The ball continued to roll, accumulating stuff as it did so, until it apparently had fulfilled its quota and headed without fanfare to the door. Baz didn’t reach the door in time, so the door joined the plethora of stuff stuck to the ball, which made quite a lot of noise and drama. Baz stared out after the ball before turning to Nursey with a sigh. “...Do you want to start cleaning this up and making it look not so bare, or do you want to let Caleb know the store was hit?”
"Oh my god, you're a saint." Nursey was actually a lapsed Muslim and couldn't really comment on sainthood but that wasn't going to stop him. He petted his phone, held close to his cheek, and then jammed it into his pocket for safekeeping. He wanted to text the Haus group chat with a lot of uncharacteristic exclamation points, but Baz was talking and the ball was crashing out through the door like a slow-moving Tasmanian devil.
"Uhhhh, what? Oh, right. Yeah. Definitely...tell him? And Jester?" He eyed all the empty shelves and grimaced a muppet frown. "Oof. I'm really glad we have our good looks and musical talent to fall back on. I almost rather spin signs on the sidewalk than go back to school at this point." He stepped backward out into the shop. "Think we should reverse engineer a missing book inventory? Or is that like way way worse?"
Baz frowned at the katamari-sized hole that used to be a doorway. Even the cheery little bell was gone. “We probably should figure out the missing stock…” he agreed reluctantly, even though that sounded bloody awful. “I wonder if there’s anything on the network about this nonsense. I refuse to believe it’s only hit us.” Although sometimes his luck did run that way…
With a sigh, he sent a reply on the network to Caleb, keeping it open so Jester could also see, frowning as he did so. How to describe this nonsense….? Somehow “a giant ball ate a bunch of inventory and the door” didn’t quite paint a vivid mental image, nor did it elevate the level of WTFery necessary to really convey what had happened. “Do you think it’d freak them out more if I started this out with ‘The first thing you need to know is that Nursey and I are okay’?” he called over his shoulder. “I kind of want them worried about us before I break the news of the… everything else.”
Nursey snapped and pointed at Baz. “Bro, you are a genius. Do it.” He was tempted to fake an injury but he couldn’t do that to Caleb. He moved for the door instead, inspecting the damage. Was it something wizard magic could fix up in a few seconds? “Maybe I can call Dex and ask him to bring uh…two by fours? A hammer? It shouldn’t take that much to build a new door, right?”
Derek Nurse was a poet and a hockey player, and now a stage performer with a few musicals under his belt; he was not a handyman. A piece of drywall clattered out of the “doorframe” and startled him back a step. “Or, we could leave that to a professional and I could just work on that inventory.” He wheeled away from the door with wide eyes. It didn't stop him from pulling his phone back out to check the network though. “Yell if it comes back! Or we’re fired!”
Baz, who knew nothing about construction of any kind that didn’t involve an appreciation of men wearing short, tight shirts, just called back “Godspeed, Nursery. Maybe we could get the set crew from Addams Family on it.”
With a sigh, he surveyed the mess-that-wasn’t-actually-a-mess-so-much-as-an-absence-of-stuff. “What the actual fuck, Vallo,” he murmured to himself, and dove into the problem at hand.