Sometime while the floor had been filling up with bags of dubiously useful and dentally catastrophic goods, Ayem had slipped out, thinking that she'd have to make a bathroom excuse only to find that Mary was really good at making her own distractions. There was another bag when she came back a few minutes later, thicker and softer than the rest of their whimsical groceries.

[color=fff79a]"It's not all that cool,"[/color] said Ayem later, sipping a cup of hot chocolate she'd bought from a nervous crack in the concrete outside. It had accepted her change with a dark-gloved hand before closing up for eternity. [color=fff79a]"I'm a security guard. Like the ones on train stations? Except, I do it in the air."[/color] Another sip. [color=fff79a]"You can come along when we head to the spaceliner. It's called that because it's in space and it goes in lines,"[/color] she added, hoping to purge 'floaty-boat' from Mary's vocabulary at some point in the next hour. 

She might be working with children, but she was still a military professional, she thought as she fiddled with the wrapping of a lollipop and surveyed her ranks of irresponsible purchases. Sergeant Outrider Ayem 'I just adopted a tiny knife maniac' Moestadja.

[color=fff79a]"We'll get there with the Kelawar. It's another kind of ship called a fighter. It's called that because it fights."[/color] That made sense, right? [color=fff79a]"But you can only fly in it if you're clean,"[/color] she pressed again. [color=fff79a]"Because it... Was made by bunnies. And they like clean things."[/color]

A bulbbot pulled over outside and Ayem started packing their supplies into one of its cloves. It whizzed off to join the rest of its bulb on the main roads, leaving them only the necessities: Sugar straws and the newly-purchased bag of clothes.

It disappeared between streetlights bright, blown and replaced, passing a service station on the way. Almost nothing still ran on chemical fuel, but heavy-duty power supplies had far more applications, and wherever there were vehicles there was a need to clean and patch them.