among her own kind

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell finds Milliways once when she is eighteen. She has been there for two days now, setting up her sign ten minutes out of every waking hour, wiping down tables for her quarters in the staff area, eating buttery potatoes (she has been told that this is a complete nutrient package, for humans). Her wand is holding a bun of hair in place on the back of her head. Her shells are stashed safely in her room; she's budgeting carefully and she'll pay her tab when she leaves.

No one's talked to her due to the sign yet. They don't always. She sets it up anyway, like clockwork, so everyone gets the chance.

Comments

[sicaria]

"I have not," she says. "Do you think it is a good idea?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"Not everybody wants my advice. Most people want money, and some of them have magical trinkets they'll part with. And you've got your victor's village house, you can probably hide more stuff than I can."

[sicaria]

"True," she says.

"Why did you ask if I could convince you to trust me?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"Guess," says Bell.

[sicaria]

"You also desire to overthrow the Capitol. If we were to combine our efforts we could each access resources otherwise closed to us. For example, I believe I access Milliways more frequently than you do, although I have not been doing it for as long. I also have the means to visit the Capitol, which you do not. On the other hand, you have evidently learned to make much better use of Milliways than I. You have a room here, you trade seashells for sustenance. And you are wearing a magical weapon as a hair ornament."

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell sits back.

"How often do you come here?" she asks softly. "I barely - never more than once in six months. Once it stayed away for more than a year. I thought it was never coming back. That I'd grow up and think I'd imagined it. And how do you know about the shells and the stick?"

[sicaria]

"Your accent tells me your district. Your hands tell me your occupation. I have previously observed the use of shells as currency. I know you have been using this place to obtain better nourishment than your usual standard, periodically throughout your life. As for the stick, its design is not suitable for its current use; it is clearly meant to be held in the hand. Magic wands are a staple in some worlds, and the aesthetic matches. I was not sure it was a weapon, but it seemed likely. You wear it like one."

She pauses.

"I encounter the bar on my own roughly twice a month. Tony is capable of summoning the door in one try out of three, discounting repeats on failure, which never work."

[she_sells_seashells]

"He can summon it?" splutters Bell. "I - I'd half live here if I could and it went and left me alone the entire year I was ten, I have sacks of shells by every door in town so I can stay here for weeks rationing them when it shows up and everyone I know thinks I'm some form of touched in the head because I pitch a fit if they move the bags and when it finally starves me out I have six months minimum to get along without, the only reason I haven't been flogged yet for poaching abalones is because my dad used to be a Peacekeeper, and you get it twice a month and he can summon it a third of the time. Kraken."

(The last word in that tirade is, in District Four, a curse word.)

[sicaria]

"We only found the place after Tony's victory," she adds.

"Would it be a trust-establishing gesture if I put you on our tab?"

[she_sells_seashells]

Bella blinks.

On their tab. On a rich, victor's tab.

"It would help," she says, because she's needy but she's not reckless.

[sicaria]

"Then I will," she says. "Please do not bankrupt us."

[she_sells_seashells]

"What would do that?" Bell asks. "...I mean, I wouldn't actually put it past myself to live here for half a year. I love my parents but I don't miss them, not really. I just don't know if they'd have enough to eat if I weren't around."

[sicaria]

"That, then, would depend on how much time your half year spanned for us. If our timelines are closely linked, and you live on the Bar's idea of unexceptional meals, I don't anticipate a problem. If you live here at six months to my two weeks, or make frequent extravagant purchases, there may be trouble eventually."

[she_sells_seashells]

"I usually get potatoes. With butter on them they're nutritionally complete, and at least they aren't clams," says Shell Bell. "And they're cheap. But that's when I'm trying to stretch one bag of clamshells as long as I can. And rationing my others to buy nonperishables to bring home and 'find on the beach, it must have fallen off a cruise ship, Mom' at... key moments."

[sicaria]

"It is no longer necessary for you to live on buttered potatoes," says Sherlock.

[she_sells_seashells]

Bell looks nostalgic. "First time I came here I was six and didn't know shells could be money. I asked the bar for 'food I could afford'. I have dreams about what she gave me sometimes."

[sicaria]

"Evidence suggests that the bar enjoys providing people with food they will find both pleasant and nourishing."

[she_sells_seashells]

"She managed it." Bell sighs. "If your dad invented a third of the tech District Three has your family probably captured some of the proceeds, right? I never pay attention during the backstory spots during the Games, but. I suppose I sound like a hick."

[sicaria]

"He spent it all," says Sherlock. "Tony has begun to make some of it back."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Oh."

Pause.

"What on?"

[sicaria]

"Me."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Were you... sick?" guesses Shell Bell.

[sicaria]

"In a manner of speaking. I was born Tony's identical twin," she explains. "That did not suit me. The kind of relatively subtle modification necessary to correct the dissonance is an unremarkable thing to achieve, in the Capitol. Our father had a friend from the Capitol who arranged the appropriate access, for a fee, of course. An increasingly exorbitant one. When he was finished with us, I was as you see me and the family fortune was largely his. We no longer consider him a friend."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Oh," says Shell Bell. "Well. They did a very good job. I'm sorry your ex-friend is terrible."

[sicaria]

"They did indeed do a very good job," she agrees. "I am probably the only girl outside the Capitol who can truthfully say her breasts were designed by an artist."