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Andi Kestrel has been doing great in her first week or two in Spaghetti Town. She's saving lots of money (still has nearly eight hundred bucks left from her original stash!) by sleeping, eating, and training at the WWA Dojo. She's made a new friend in Lillith (she was a different kind, Lillith, but such a sweetie at heart!), and she's learned to endure or work around Lillith's cooking when she eats there. If she doesn't eat Lillith's food two nights in a row, the nausea is usually managable. Moreover, she's been training hard, getting ready for her WWA debut, and she's in fantastic shape. And yet, something is missing.
Tonight, Andi's at her favorite gas station, going through her semi-regular routine of wolfing down her just-purchased dinner while leaning over the trash can indoors. Tonight, it's a gas station burrito that she hasn't bothered to heat in the proffered microwave, a package of pork rinds, a small bottle of milk, and one of those rare gas station apples that had defied aging because it had a cursed portrait done of itself in an attic somewhere that took on the ravages of time in its stead. She's aware of the store clerk watching her, but doesn't think anything of it until the middle-aged woman behind the counter speaks, in accented English, when she's nearly done.
>"You come here all the time. ..... Do you have a family?"
Andi replies with a simple, "Heheh, yeah," around her last mouthful of food, but she chews awkwardly as she takes in the full depths of the pity and confusion in the clerk's eyes. She swallows. Stops. Stands still. Her face is hot.
She goes to the ATM in the gas station and foolishly takes out one hundred dollars. Tonight's gonna be a little different.
All work and no play makes Andi Kestrel a dull, dull girl.
