There's only one "scene" left in this bit, so I'll start commenting on this part for real. I restrained myself because I didn't want to spoil it (spoil what?) for you.

I debated a while before I committed to doing it this way. In part because I didn't want a complex angisty backstory to turn Lucy into a Mary Sue-ish character who is not responsable for her actions because of her oh-so-horrible past. I knew SOMETHING bad had to have happened to Lucy to make her go from Sweet Kid to...well...Lucy. I just wasn't entirely sure what it was. I went through several, some that I look at now with a glare that should be reserved for moldy socks, some that could and would have withstood the test of time, so to speak. The one I settled on is not neat, and it's probably the most offensive of the story options I had, but it's the only one that worked.

I'm not happy with it from the viewpoint of an artist, who wants everything to be elegant and etherial, but from the viewpoint of the word-mechanic...it works. Let's leave it alone.

And speaking of work...

...sigh.

Somebody asked me why I say working in this store has ruined my faith in humanity...because really, it's a very cushy job, isn't it? Standing in one place doing math all day? ...well, yeah, but then you add the people in there and things kind of fall apart. There is this thing called "People" that develops once you have to deal with more than ten individuals with less than two minutes to dedicate to each person. Personalities blend together, the same behaviors appear over and over again, and all sense of individuals vanishes into this great rolling mass of greedy, voracious skin with lots of screaming babies. We see it with the afore-mentioned Bags. We also see it in the way that people pay for things. Skinny white females almost ALWAYS pay with a credit card. As in, they ring up a two fifty purchice and put it on the plastic. Larger women will give me exact change or a mutation thereof so that they don't end up with any pennies. People do not READ the damn SIGNS.

Let me harp on that for a moment. There is a fifty percent off sign on a wall-to-wall display of fall STUFF. The sign states, in letters that can be read from the registers a hundred feet away, that it is on the CEREMIC FIGURES (which are ugly as sin, BTW). Now, this store is like a flagship for the chain or something, because everything has to look PRETTY. The CEO OF THE DAMN COMPANY is supposed to come here. This store is so dolled up you can't turn around without knocking over a vase full of carefully arrainged flowers. In this fit of fluffing frenzy (Fluffing=technical term for some form of simulated plant material placed near or around useless objects sold to decorate houses) someone placed flowers all around the fall stuff. Under the fifty percent off sign that STILL states very clearly that unless the thing is breakable with a stiff glaze, it's not on sale.

People kept bringing me the damn flowers. For a sold week I would have this conversation no less than five freaking times a day:

Customer: "Now I KNOW all of these are half-off."

Me: (after customary once-over to identify what is and is not on sale) "The ceremics and (nearly every other item) are...but the flowers...are...not. No, ma'am, sorry, the flowers are not on sale."

Cust. "Yes they are."

Me: "No. They're not."

Cust. "Yes. They. ARE. I saw the sign."

Me: "The sign over there?"

Cust. "Yes"

Me "On the wall?"

"Yes"

"Ma'am, the sign is for the ceremic pumpkins. See how it says in nice big letters, the word "Ceremics?" You can see it from here. My BACK is to it and even I can see it from here. The flowers are there for decoration, but they're not on sale this week."

"...so the flowers aren't on sale?"

"no."

"you're sure?"

"YES."

"...well, the sign is misleading. It should have what's on sale On the sign."

I have a large black and blue spot on my forehead from banging it into the glass top of the check out counter.

So after dealing with people like that OVER and OVER and OVER again, it's refreshing to deal with the nice customers. The ones who DON'T look at you like you're stupid because you used a calculator to check to make sure that you didn't get something wrong on the reciept (clue: You cannot redo these receipts if you screw up. Screw up, and you have to do the whole thing all over again. My manager saw me redo a reciept three times to get it right and told me that if I ever doubted my totals again, I was to use a calculator and check the figures twice). The ones who DON'T expect to be pampered and primped when the truck comes in and the manager has just paged your name for the THIRD TIME to come and get another load of boxes. There's a few people that I've seen more than once that I'm starting to like because they're nice. One of them is a lady I came to call the Clock Lady, after the time she brought in two hundred dollars worth of clocks to return because she didn't want them. She was really, really friendly, and grandmotherly.

...so yesterday I'm doing the register, which, for those of you who think its easy, consists of trying to do complex math, entertain a total stranger for two minutes, answer the phone if it rings, pay attention to the manager if they want you, the random "Can-you Help Me" customer if THEY want you, and trying not to forget that this week, only one brand of beads is on sale, no matter WHAT this particular Skinny White Female says. Anyway, Mean Manager (We have two, Mean manager and Nice Manager) comes up holding the return form from Clock Lady. MM asks me if I would know this woman by sight if I saw her again. I said yes. Turns out that MM got a memo from the reagonal office about Clock Lady, who had defrauded ours and other stores for the last week or so.

Translation? Nicest person I'd met in three weeks turns out to be a con-man. Or rather, sweet little old con-woman.

Next person who tells me this is a cushy job is going to get to wear the cash register as a hat. - Chelsea Gaither