Post un-nuked due to sufficient progress. Life happened, then life unhappened. Pardon the roleplay style in the intro. Felt that was more fitting at the time, but now that my feelings have changed, I'm too lazy to go back and rewrite it.

[hider=The Disappointing Child - Intro]

[color=8882be]“Here. Sniff this.”[/color]

[color=8882be]Arturo[/color] was holding out a shot glass with some sort of powdery green substance drifting along in a clear liquid. [color=708090]“What is it?,”[/color] Ashe asked. She’d been through this routine with him five or six times already, and it never went well.

[color=8882be]“Just sniff it. It’s not ether again, if that’s what you’re worried about.”[/color]
[color=708090]“No, no, no. THAT’S what I’m worried about. I have no idea what that shit is and I’m not going anywhere near it until you tell me what it is.”[/color]
[color=8882be]“Fine. It’s a new stim blend I’ve come up with. You won’t get anything out of it just by sniffing it.”[/color]
[color=708090]“Ugh, fine. If this is some kind of trick, you’re going to the hospital.”[/color]

Ashe reached out to take the shot glass, and Arturo pulled his hand back. [color=8882be]“No drinking, ya junkie. Just sniffing,”[/color] he taunted. So Ashe leaned in and took a whiff, and promptly fell flat on her face. Holy SHIT. Laughter sounded out about the room - four or five voices, perhaps, and Ashe tried to scramble to her feet. It didn’t work. She tried to scramble to her feet again and managed to scoot a couple feet across the floor, but still couldn’t stand.

[color=8882be]“See, guys? What’d I tell you? Weak. Stomach. Get up! It wasn’t THAT bad, was it?”[/color]

Ashe’s eye twitched in annoyance. She was feeling it already and she hadn’t even taken a deep breath, but in a few moments, the feelings of intense dizziness and nausea disappeared, and she pulled herself off the floor… and promptly threw a haymaker into Arturo’s stomach. More laughter.

[color=c4df9b]“See? What’d I tell ya? She don’t fuck around!”[/color]
[color=f7941d]“That’s what you get, dumbass.”[/color]
[color=92278f]“‘Ey Arturo, bring me that shit when you get up!”[/color]

[color=c4df9b]Thomas[/color], [color=f7941d]King Lowe[/color], and [color=92278f]Violet[/color] were laughing their asses off from the rattily upholstered red couch in the corner of the warehouse. Thick smoke wafted through the air, stemming from a very, *very* large hookah sitting upon a half-broken coffee table coated with duct tape patches. Thomas’s bulky form rolled forwards to pick up one of the hoses and took a long drag between his tusks, prompting a gurgling sound from the glass contraption. More fruit-flavored smoke billowed forth, further clouding the room. Violet, meanwhile, was halfway through a bottle of Old Mantle vodka, and was sprawled out across King Lowe’s lap. King Lowe towered over the hookah, even while sitting, and didn’t seem to notice the tiny figure drunkenly slobbering on his new pants.

Ashe reached down to pull Arturo off of the ground. Somehow he hadn’t spilled his concoction. For a tall, scrawny, balding guy, he sure knew how to take a hit. Out of respect for his health, he scooted away from Ashe as quickly as he could and passed the shot glass to Violet, the resident test subject. Everyone knew mixing uppers with alcohol was a really stupid idea - which was probably why everyone did it. Violet pulled herself upright, downed the green mixture, and promptly fell over again to chatter away like a coked up auctioneer to Thomas. King Lowe continued to ignore the drunk.

[color=708090]“So, uh… When’s the next batch coming in, Arturo?,” Ashe inquired. He’d mentioned earlier that he’d be able to get in a new package ‘soon’, whatever that meant. It usually wasn’t a good idea to ask him about his business, but time was important.[/color]

[color=8882be]“Some time in the next day or so. I’ll let you guys know - could use some muscle this time.”[/color]

And so the party continued.

[hr]

Ashe blinked. An alarm clock was going off, and she swung her arm out to the left, to hit absolutely nothing. [color=708090][i]Oh. Not my bed.[/i][/color] And worse, Violet was lying sideways on top of her, stripped down to her underwear. And something smelled particularly foul. With some effort, Ashe managed to roll the unconscious girl off of herself and gave herself a quick examination. Nope, nobody’d done anything to her this time around (not that she expected them to, but it didn’t hurt to double check). And she’d actually remembered the pajamas this time - which were basically just a pair of loosely fitting jeans and an old tee shirt, but they still did the job well enough. The alarm kept getting louder, and after looking around for a moment, Ashe found both the source of the noise and the smell. Violet had puked on the alarm clock. [color=708090][i]There's no way in HELL I’m touching that mess...[/i][/color]

Ashe pulled herself out of the bed, which smelled faintly of Violet’s bad habits, and slipped into her shoes before leaving Violet’s ‘room’. The Barbarians’ ‘rooms’ were all small plywood shacks sitting on the floor of the otherwise empty warehouse, save for Ashe’s, which was sitting on the very top of a shelf for privacy. Probably explained how she ended up in Violet’s bed -- nobody else could climb up there.

Thomas and King Lowe were already wide awake and cooking pancakes in a frying pan over a small campfire. [color=f7941d]“Sleeping beauty awakens! Go take a shower -- it’s open and you look like shit. We’ll have some breakfast ready for you in a few minutes,”[/color] King Lowe said, and Ashe groggily nodded. The alarm clock was still sounding off inside the tiny shed. Hopefully Violet would get out of bed and turn the damn thing off in a little while.

Twenty minutes passed in the hastily constructed “shower” (really just a wooden frame wrapped in a tarp with a propane water heater and a couple garden hoses), and Ashe stepped out, completely freshened up and perfectly clean. The group had a pancake breakfast with strawberries and coffee, and shortly after, everyone set off for work for the day. Nobody bothered turning off Violet's alarm.

[hr]

The clanking and thunderous rolling of about a dozen rusted shopping carts tied together with a bungee cord triggered confused and suspicious looks from the crowds walking down the city streets, and a clown was running his ass off, red nose, frills, and all. Two supermarket security guards were hot on her tail, but after a couple turns, they fell behind, wheezing and puffing in the summer heat. One police siren sounded off in the distance and the clown turned a sharp corner down an alley. A couple blocks down the road and about a minute later, a square jawed man in a navy blue business suit walked out with the shopping carts.

Over the course of a half hour, no fewer than ten different calls were made to the police regarding ten different suspicious individuals walking around with a bunch of carts. Of course, it was too late - the shopping carts had already been loaded into a pickup truck by a huge man with a lion’s mane. On the way back to the warehouse, Ashe dropped her disguise and scratched a note down in a small notepad. [color=708090]“27 minutes. New record. Let’s get these things repainted quickly so we can get them the hell out of my sight.”[/color] Lowe simply nodded.

By the late evening, eighty shopping carts, four charcoal grills, a very fancy mailbox, and three bicycles had been stolen, rebranded, repainted, and resold without serial numbers. The team worked fast and had pulled in a pretty hefty profit, even with only four people working at it. Violet was, of course, still completely unconscious, so JJ the Junkie had to fill in for her. That kid was pretty good at talking his way out of things, apparently.

After making that much money, there was no way in hell they weren’t going to throw a party that weekend.

[/hider]

[hider=The Disappointing Child, Part 1]

	Arturo didn’t come by in the ‘next day or so’. The whole squad occasionally chatted about it, tried to figure out where he might’ve gone, if something happened, whatever. People sometimes disappeared in their lines of work, though, and unless they got shot or arrested, they usually came back. The group agreed that the best option would be to just continue on like normal. Continued shopping trips. Continued shoplifting trips. Continued drug scores.

	“Dinner’s gonna be salmon again. That okay with you? If not, go fuck yourself.” King Lowe was frying a couple fillets of fish over the campfire again. Violet, in her infinite genius, had decided to blow most of the group’s food money on fish because ‘bulk purchases are a great deal’. King Lowe didn’t mind, though, and babied the food as caringly and lovingly as a proper chef. Ginger was sprinkled atop the sizzling slabs of fish, followed by a drizzle of lemon juice, and the sound of pure, concentrated culinary joy sprouted forth from the pan. The oceans and rivers were packed into every draft of warm air rising off of the pan, and King Lowe almost couldn’t stop himself from eating both fillets right then and there.

	The other ones he’d already prepared were wrapped in foil on a small rack well above the fire itself, where they stayed nice, warm, and moist. Dry fish were the worst thing ever to the King, right alongside aggressive dogs, rodents, late mail, tire wall blowouts, broken transmissions, snitches, and not having milk in the refrigerator, among other things. A jab of the spatula flipped both fillets over, and he again sprinkled ginger and lemon juice across them. Being thorough was only polite, especially with other peoples’ food on the line.


	Meanwhile, the rest of the gang was huddled on and around the couch and various chairs they’d come to acquire over the past few years, all watching TV, quietly chatting, chain smoking, dumping full ashtrays into the garbage can, drinking their poison of choice, and the like. A pretty typical ‘family gathering’. Thomas, a slightly roly-poly boy of 17 in khakis and a green polo, eyeballs deep in a bottle of malt liquor, was staring at the screen from his place on the floor. “Teapot’s my spirit animal,” he said in his usual monotone, and the group quickly nodded in approval.

	They were watching some sort of reality TV show about life on a beach house in Vacuo, and Teapot was an autistic man who always tried to make sure his roommates stayed out of too much trouble. Teapot’s moral efforts usually failed, but the rest always tried to keep him safe anyway. Everybody loved Teapot. Thomas especially did though, because he identified with the awkward, prematurely balding man. Thomas was always somewhat ‘off’ - taking social cues the wrong way, not understanding body language, just little things like that, and they were pretty sure he was autistic on some level as well. He was happy enough though, so trying to get him to see a shrink felt like a waste of time.

	Violet, a [i]very[/i] short girl of around Ashe’s age, was sitting next to Thomas. They were almost always together, and most of the Barbarians were pretty much certain the two were ‘together’ together. It was a strange relationship, though. At least, by their standards. Violet had no standards normally, and she’d regularly bring in a new hookup every week or two, put a sock on her doorknob, and disappear with them for a few hours. Nobody had seen her make a move like that on Thomas, though. Ashe felt that Violet didn’t feel she was good enough for him, but she didn’t voice it, and Thomas seemed happy enough with how things were going. It was probably going to crash and burn some time, but the rest of the gang was there to pick up the pieces if that happened.

	J.J. wasn’t in the TV corner, though. Everyone knew he had issues and everyone had reached out to help, but with Arturo gone, he wasn’t able to get his fix and was undergoing harsh withdrawals. Opioids are a bitch. Instead, he was in the back corner of the warehouse, lying on a mattress and trying desperately to sleep it off. Everyone knew not to bother him beyond making sure he was hydrated and fed, and everyone knew that pushing him to go to rehab simply didn’t work. He didn’t trust modern medicine enough for it. It was a miracle that he even was accepted in the group, but he was useful in his own ways at times, and he was genuinely a nice person when he wasn’t trying to manipulate his friends into funding his habits.

	Some twenty minutes later, King Lowe approached the group huddled around the TV with a stack of paper plates and a pile of hot and beautifully cooked fish, and plopped down on Ashe’s lounge chair without a thought. The goatlike faunus had to scramble out of the way before she was crushed flat, and took up a perch on the back of the chair above his head. King Lowe don’t give a fuck. Dinner and TV was the name of the game most nights, after desperately scrambling to make some money, and some days were worse than others, but it was always peaceful at night. The gang continued their routine as such for some further days, clinging to livelihood as best as they could, and Thomas even managed to get a proper part-time job as a janitor at a local diner. Everyone was happy enough.




	Eventually, Arturo came back. The gang was huddled around their campfire, happily chattering about their activities and town gossip while they prepared breakfast, when a sharp knock came at the massive hangar door that led to the docks outside. Violet volunteered herself to open it, and a few moments later, while everybody was focused on their pancakes and their fruit and their coffee and orange juice and eggs, a scream echoed throughout the warehouse and was cut short.

	King Lowe blazed across the warehouse to the shack he’d set up inside a shipping container in a blur, and every single person immediately went for their weapons without even bothering to look at what was going on. They’d been hit by rival gangs before, and training for SHTF scenarios was burned into their brains heavily, but halfway through, they heard a voice call out from the garage doors.

	“Get on the ground, hands behind your heads! This is Officer Hiroshi of the MCPD!”, the voice shouted. Gruff, old, and intensely pissed off. Like running sandpaper across a bear with sunburn. One by one, those who hadn’t reached their shacks turned their heads towards the source, and sure enough, the police had arrived. And with them was their ‘friend’, Arturo, in handcuffs.

	“King Lowe, your crime spree is at an end. I’m taking you back to prison. Violet, Ashe, Thomas, your parents will be [i]very[/i] disappointed to hear what you’ve been up to. And J.J… Dear J.J. How many times is this? Seven? I thought you’d have learned by now.”

	The man was tall, at 6’3”, but not nearly as tall as King Lowe, and there was a dangerous edge to his appearance. He wasn’t like most police, and they only called him in to make arrests when the MCPD had a lead on potentially dangerous criminals -- mostly potential huntsmen and huntresses who for one reason or another had turned to crime to make their living. He was wearing the traditional Mistrali kendogi and hakama, purple, printed with red flowers, which sharply contrasted with his chiseled, scarred face. The state of his jaw suggested that he’d all but given up on shaving beyond keeping his beard too short to grip, and a simple katana was sheathed at his hip. Everything traditional, everything professional, everything exquisitely dangerous.

	“You’ve got ten seconds. On your knees, hands behind your heads. I won’t say it a third time,” the man coldly said. Arturo, at his side, was staring at the floor, covered in bruises. Something bad had happened, but he wasn’t about to talk. Violet was gagged and cuffed as well on the officer’s other side.

	Ashe’s eye twitched in rage. She would kill that motherfucker for his betrayal, but that could come later. Right now, she had to make a judgment call - comply, or resist, and she wasn’t sure which was the best decision. A few moments passed, and a golden blur flashed across the room, followed by a loud crash as the Officer’s sword flickered up to counter a claw strike. King Lowe had made the choice for the gang, and he and the officer’s clash threw the two apart. Arturo did the only ‘smart’ thing he could and ran as fast as he could towards the docks before throwing himself head-first into the water, as a series of Atlas-built police androids charged in through every opening to the warehouse. For petty criminals, the MCPD was going awfully hard on this. [i]What the fuck was Arturo up to?! We shouldn’t be getting this kind of treatment![/i]

	It was Lowe against Hiroshi. Ashe, Thomas, and JJ were left to handle the androids themselves, and that was enough. Lowe himself called to the group mid-combat, “Go, get the FUCK out of here. This is my problem,” as he threw himself back at the officer. The two were on a level far beyond anybody else and the blitz of sword and claw strikes between them was nearly impossible to follow. Lowe and Hiroshi were channeling their aura into every strike, redirecting blows beautifully. Hiroshi was meeting every claw swipe with the reverse edge of his blade, gently pushing the blow away from himself. Lowe was catching the blade with his bare hands and his claws, trying desperately to disarm his foe. But it wasn’t clear who was winning.

	Meanwhile, Thomas had disappeared. A brilliant flash of white across the room, accompanied by the crack of lightning, resulted in a pair of android legs crumpling to the ground, smoking and torsoless. Thomas had begun fighting as well, and gunfire erupted across the room as the androids desperately tried to take the surprisingly agile fat kid down. His weapon - The Boomer - was a custom-built handheld dust artillery piece, closer to an airship’s main gun than to anything else. And it was doing a number on every target. Its secondary function - a very, very ‘loud’ ECM device - was screaming on all radio frequencies.

	Ashe herself sprung into action, swiftly flipping the safety of her gloves off and adjusting the dials to a reasonable “5” as she charged the group that had entered through the back door. Railgun fire was erupting from the androids’ armaments, but there was a noticeable time lag, and their targeting was horrendous. Several bullets slammed into Ashe’s body out of many more fired, and she reached her first victim. One punch sent the android’s head flying, and a second open palm strike sent a lance of ice hurtling through the head of a second. More heads flew and more spurts of pure energy flashed through the warehouse, scorching some walls and putting holes clean through others. Cleanup was fast, and just as the last of the androids fell, Ashe felt something hard, thin, and heavy crash into the back of her head. Everything went dark.

	She awoke to the feeling of something hard, flat, and cold pressed against her face. Senses came back slowly, and with each shred of awareness that came along, she realized more and more where she was. Biting cold cut into her wrists, binding them together. She couldn’t move. And she was upright. Eventually, her eyes opened to the sight of an interrogation room. She wasn’t sure what had happened, but the old man must’ve gotten the best of them all. It’d looked like King Lowe was doing really well, though.

	“Awake at last, huh? I’ll get Hiroshi,” said the loudspeaker in the corner of the room. A pane of one-way glass acted as a mirror for her, and when she looked up to the loudspeaker, she caught a glimpse of herself. She looked like utter shit - covered in scorch marks, spilt oil, bruises, you name it. Dark circles under her eyes suggested that she’d slept like shit. No mistakes there, of course. Getting knocked out the day after a long night didn’t do much good for a body. The question of what would happen next floated across her exhausted and half-asleep brain, but no answers came forth. Thinking was hard, especially in the brightly lit room with air conditioning blazing forth to chill arrestees to the bone.

	After some time, two knocks came at the door, followed by the old man stepping in. He was still in the same outfit, but he wasn’t wearing his weapon this time around. He laid a file on the table in front of Ashe and sat in the stainless steel chair across from her, then placed a scrap of paper on top of it. Slowly, with one finger, he spun the scrap of paper around and pushed it towards her. It was an invoice. “Shouldn’t have resisted. Wouldn’t have had to bill your folks for the androids you smashed,” he said. He wasn’t quite as abrasive this time. More… Disappointed. He seemed to be playing the ‘good cop’ role.

	“Speaking of, they’re on their way now. I think they’re tired of this little runaway experiment of yours. Hope you’re tired of it too, because it’s ending here and now.”

	Ashe lifted her head. The thought of seeing her family again was rather uncomfortable, after years of being gone. She’d run off in a huff after a long argument over whether the White Fang were good or not. Something about her future had been mentioned, but she was too upset at the time to think, and she impulsively stowed away on the first boat out of town. It wouldn’t be a fun talk. So she simply blinked at the officer, slowly and deliberately.

	“Don’t look so disappointed. Look, you’ve got a court date coming up. We’ve got video evidence of your activities, and the pictures are all in the file here. Your little semblance doesn’t seem to work on video cameras. I’m willing to cut a deal with you, though. I’ll recommend deportation over imprisonment, since you’re a minor and I’d rather not see kids rotting in a cell when they should be going to college. And I’ve made up my mind on this. You’re going home, where you can’t cause us more problems.”

	He flipped open the folder, displaying every single time she’d been caught on camera stealing or reselling property in public. It was pretty comprehensive, but Ashe found herself staring at the invoice instead. It had cost her family thousands of Lien, which she was sure she would have to pay off. And they weren’t exactly well-off, either. But a question came up, and she shot her eyes back up at the officer. “The others. Are they okay?”

	“Yeah, yeah. They’re a little banged up, but they’re fine. Your big pal is on his way back to prison, though. Not sure if you know what he’s done in the past, but I’ll let you squeeze that out of him by mail. Not my place to talk about it.”

	She nodded once. “Alright, then. If you’ve got anything else to add, now’s the time to say it. Your buddy had a lot to say about your involvement with a big deal when we picked him up, but it’s his ass on the line, not yours,” said the officer. Ashe shook her head, and Officer Hiroshi retrieved the folder and the bill, then left the room. Arturo could rot for all she cared.

	A jail cell is a lonely place by design, even when surrounded with petty thugs and drunks who’d been picked up over the course of the week and were waiting for their court dates. Ashe was privileged enough to have been given her own, on account of being a minor. Days passed, but without the sunlight to tell her how many, Ashe lost count. One day, though, came a rattling as one of the guards dragged his baton across the bars of her cell. “Wake up, Ashe. You’ve got company.”

	When she looked up, standing next to the guard were two Faunus. A huge, dark-skinned and bearded man in his early fifties, with long horns curling from the top of his head almost all the way back to his hips, and a woman in her late thirties, small, slender, and almost completely human in appearance save for the swishing tail of a Fennec fox waving around behind her. Her parents had arrived.

The trip back to Menagerie was long and quiet, and Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood knew their daughter well enough to not prod her for information. She wasn’t exactly in the mood to talk about how life had been going, and they’d gotten all the details from the police anyway. So they stayed in two separate cabins on the ship, and when they arrived at port, the conversation could be summed up as: “Should I carry that for you?” “I’m good.” “Okay, then.”

	Striding across the bustling streets of Kuo Kuana at sunset with a suitcase in each hand reminded her of the first time she had gone to and come back from a summer camp. It was, strangely, in Atlas - a place not usually thought of when summer was brought up. The camp was for kids who wanted to learn about modern technological wonders, and she distinctly remembered learning about the failures of the space program. Dust stopped working at some point high above the ground, so Atlas was looking into alternate ways of getting off of Remnant without any success. The thought of using chemical propellants was so utterly alien to the people of Remnant that even with their advanced Dust technology, rocket fuel and engine-based electrical power were centuries out of reach, and most scientists didn’t even stop to think for an instant about how stone-age technology could’ve branched off in a different direction.

	But that was beside the point. In her ruminations, Ashe eventually came across a familiar-looking door and moved to stand in front of it. A hand on her shoulder tugged her away, though, and her father’s silky baritone voice explained, “We moved. Had to sell the old house. New place is this way.”

	So the old family home was gone. A shame, really - she’d spent fourteen years in that place off and on, and the idea of living anywhere but there or the Barbarians’ warehouse felt out-of-place. A short walk further brought them to what she remembered as her father’s store, the West Kuo Kuana Dust Outlet. He was a third-party distributor for the Schnee Dust Company, and regularly had to purchase and resell shipments directly from Atlas. Competition in Menagerie was fairly tight, though, so profit margins were so low that her mother had to work as a waitress on the side. One thing was different about the store, though. It was a bit taller than she remembered, and it looked like a second story was tacked on top. Her father spoke up again. “Did a bit of remodeling ourselves. Bit small, but it’s home now. Come on, your room’s waiting. Tried to make it like it was before you left, but I probably messed it up somehow.”

	She nodded and entered. Thoughts of her friends were still laying heavily across her mind, and she had a little bit of trouble talking to her parents. But they knew her nature through and through and didn’t say any more than they had to. They were obviously worried, happy to have her back, and greatly disappointed, all at once, and Ashe wondered how they were able to hold it together so well. Truth be told, though, her parents were panicking entirely. What they didn’t tell their daughter was that they had sold the house to cover bail and the android damage costs, and that they hadn’t added the second floor to live in but rather to store excess stock. Between their mess of a child and the financial hole they were stuck in now, they weren’t too sure how to make it. But they weren’t about to give up, and they didn’t want to break their family a second time.

	Through the back room, up the stairs, and at the first door on the left, Ashe was given a gentle push into the room. It was arranged very similarly to how it had been when she was still a younger kid, complete with band posters, fluffy bedding, a cheap radio/alarm clock next to a cute plushie polar bear that’d been turned into a nightstand lamp, and a very pink color scheme in general. She’d never really outgrown the pink, but the posters had to go at some point. Unpacking was quick enough, given that she only had some twenty-odd copies of the same outfit in different colors, and some gear that she and Thomas had built together, including her Magicians’ Hands.

	And so when the unpacking was finished, her parents were gone - unpacking their travel gear and discussing their problem of a kid downstairs no doubt. Ashe flopped onto the old bed, to be surprised by the comfortable floof of a new foam mattress. That was new, and was probably what her father had been talking about when he said he’d messed something up. In a few moments, she fell asleep, and when she finally came to, it was already morning.

	Loud noises downstairs indicated that breakfast was already made and eaten, and her father could be heard arguing on the finer points of pricing between raw and purified crystals with a rather snooty customer. As poor as Kuo Kuana was on average, they sometimes had vacationers who thought they knew better about economics than the locals. That was a new sound to her, and she wasn’t entirely sure she liked it, but she had to get up and get going. When she stepped into the hallway, she bumped into her mother, who was on the way to go to her own job. “Ooh, sorry~! Gotta run, late again! Bathroom’s right there, food’s in the fridge, help your father, bye!”, the older woman spewed as she leapt down the stairs and broke off into a sprint around the corner. Ashe blinked. Had her mother always been that… Whatever-that-was?

	But that didn’t matter. A long shower and proper cleaning, complete with [i]intense[/i] scrubbing later, she emerged from the bathroom next to her room sparkling clean and draped in a towel before getting sharply dressed once more in her usual outfit, though her shoes were scratched to high heaven from the brawl with the police. She would have to help her father that day, and help she did. They continued not talking about what had happened years back and where she’d gone and what she’d been up to, because that’s just how they were. It was as if nothing had happened at all and she was in the right place again. Breakfast was eaten. Crates of dust were moved about. Lunch was eaten. Belligerent customers were chased out of the store. And eventually closing time came around late that night, when Mrs. Blackwood returned, and the family ate dinner together for the first time in four years.
[/hider]