Just to the be clear, are you entering the store now? I'm not exactly sure where you are, since if you are even outside the store you should be able to see Jack and Cian from the inside.
"Hey it's fine! What're friends for?", he responded. The shopkeep simply finished the transaction and handed Cian her new hair clips. Jack packed away his coat, he still had the bags of prizes from before. So he was pretty full up right now.
"Well... If it's just a trim I could...", you can guess what he was meaning to say, but he stopped himself.
"Uhh, nevermind...", as he said this, he heard the store's entrance bell and turned instinctively to see, and it was a familiar face. Luke.
"Hm?", Rui noticed someone walking towards him, by his speech, it was a sportsmanlike congratulations. It took him a moment, but soon he recognized who he was, the Akihiko player who scored third on the placements. Likewise, Rui accepted his handshake.
"Yeah, I'm surprised to see more Akihiko players, they were much rarer in Tokyo", he began.
"You have my respect for that", no lie, the character Rui chose was based on playstyle, and quite liked it. Neither of them were in uniform, but based on their approximate ages, this guy was likely a student too. He decided to introduce himself first.
"My name is Rui, I attend Warakuma High as a 2nd year".
The tournament started, and Rui was doing fine, managing to qualify for the higher spots. Rikimaru and Seighardt had a pretty difficult time once they began vying for 5th and upward spot and were beaten fairly often, while Masahide was managing to go par with the top three. Although, what stood out to all of them, was one opponent, whom Rui eventually fought in the semi-finals. She used Margaret against him though, and he was handily beaten, no contest... He went on to vy for 2nd place with the other finalist and barely managed that, but the skill displayed was insane. He looked at the other matches too, and it seems she switched between Margaret, Marie and Elizabeth. He just took a step outside for a breather as the tournament concluded.
"Woooo! That was good!", it was the tournament winner.
"You look like you had fun Shiki, now come on, you play these all the time when we were in Tokyo though...",
"I know, but there were a lot of strong people here! And it was a tournament! Of course I had to", the finalist was a little girl. Well, she was adorable, so it was hard getting a little miffed about it.
"Ah yes, it starts at 50 lien, and ones that channel dust go for up to 150 or so, if you want to go into battle, the ones at 150 lien hold dust and activate to guard against attacks. They're like a helmet really, a very stylish helmet", the old man was ruffling through a few other papers, likely other orders and organizing them.
"If you want to make a stronger one that can be used to attack too, that will have to be special order and approved", as in probably earn credits for those ones, but generally a stylish helmet sounded good.
"That sounds neat, I wish this bit of hair could do that", he commented, referring to the one bright and dagger-like strand of hair on his head.
"Hmmm let's see...", the old man listened to Cian while reading the note she handed him. This was all fairly simple. Her weapon was a ranged weapon, but it also sounded heavy, and then the hair clips. Compared to other requests, this was quite simple.
"Yes, I can do this, you can come here tomorrow afternoon and it should be ready, the hairclips I can even give to you today, we have some such things on display if you'll look closer to the cabinet on the left", he was right. Along the wall was a bunch of glass cabinets, it was accessories, some of these seemed to be able to react with Dust, while others seemed to merely be sturdy. In any case, they were all pretty stylish, coming in a fair number of colours and designs.
"Those are pretty popular with our female patrons, and not even just Hunters and soldiers either, so we've been making them stylish too because suddenly we're a semi-fashion store...", he gave out a small chuckle after saying this.
"Huh, I never noticed those",
"That's because you always come straight to the counter and not look around", he retorted.