Post by Raphael Caelan McLaggen on Nov 8, 2024 10:58:07 GMT -7
Early November 2029
“It’s…November, right?” Cheese had to ask out-loud, just to clarify that he hadn’t blinked and somehow missed the entire month of November. It was a fair question, in his opinion. Halloween had been a rather subdued day this year, considering the werewolf attack that’d taken place earlier that week. It was the only thing anybody was talking about, whether you passed by random shoppers on the street or riffed through the newspaper on your way to the comics section. The Wizengamot was outraged, HOWL was back to being in every headline of every paper, and the festival had gotten dismal attendance for the rest of the week. Cheese had spent his own Halloween recovering from some intense shifts at the Prophet trying to document everything, although it felt like he’d gone to bed, hibernated, and woken up in December.
Because even after a horrific attack, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Purifiers, life somehow continued to move on. And as the clock struck 12:01 on the day after Halloween, all the shops packed up their spooky decorations and moved like clockwork to prepare for the holidays. There were already signs of Christmas around Diagon and Horizont Alleys, and Cheese had walked around perplexed like he’d somehow time-traveled a month and a half into the future. Not that he hated it, because he could definitely get in the holiday season, but it felt like emotional whiplash after just finishing processing everything that had happened in the last week of October. His feet led him to the source of the smell he’d been following for several hundred meters until he wandered into a bakery and took in the holiday vibes. There were still some classics around the store, pies and cakes and whatnot, but it was like Santa had vomited all over the shop.
So yeah, he bent down to look at the cookies in the display case, decorated with candy canes that were dancing around the chocolate chips – and wondered if he’d accidentally skipped straight to Christmas. There were mince pies in the window displays, gingerbread men tipping their frosting hats at people as they passed, and his eyes followed the candy canes around the cookies like they were on a carousel. He couldn’t exactly complain – sweets were sweets – but it was confusing all the same. “If I bring these into work, people’ll think I’ve gone mad,” Cheese considered out-loud…although he wasn’t exactly sure. Londoners could get intense about Christmas. What with the markets, the lights, and the food – the whole city would be overtaken soon. It’d feel like Santa’s village at least until New Year’s.
cordelia regan smith
