wwiii | Room 222, Sunday Afternoon

Things were finally starting to settle down a bit. Sure, everything was maybe still a little raw for the people that he was close to, but at least Warren had managed to find himself something to occupy himself with after a visit to The Boards yesterday had gone better than he'd expected.

It was too cold out for flying, and Warren was quite happy to take it easy today, which apparently involved scribbling out things that he'd have to take into consideration while working out a reasonable budget for DOGS, this season. And then after that, he could look into what it would take to rent out the Zoo on the mainland, so that he could finally get back to Wesley about that.

There were way, way worse ways to spend a Sunday.

[Open! Warning for triggery topics in the thread with Bobby.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

glacial_queen

"Kiss kiss?" Karla called, poking her head through Warren's open door. "Up for visitors?"

Karla had stopped clinging to Warren like a lamprey after the memorial, but that didn't mean she wasn't taking every chance she could to visit and be near him. Being alone was still more difficult than she liked to admit.

From:

wwiii

"Has my answer ever been no?"

Well, okay, he might start rethinking this approach to his open-door policy if he kept getting punched in the face or horribly maimed whenever he spent time with somebody. But for the time being? Bring it.

"Come on in," he replied, smiling softly. "I'm just poking at numbers, anyhow."

From:

glacial_queen

"There's a first time for everything," Karla said, giving him a little smile, "but I'm glad it's not today."

Under different circumstances, she might have given him the kind of greeting that would have ended with the door getting closed and the book being ignored for the next few hours. Instead, however, she simply curled up next to him, brushing her lips across his cheek, and rested her head on his shoulder. "What kind of numbers?"

From:

wwiii

"For the Boards," Warren explained, content to curl an arm and a wing around her shoulder, to rest his cheek against her hair. "DOGS really isn't my kind of musical, but I still wanted to be involved somehow. So I offered to take care of advertising."

Which had turned into human relations. Which had turned into pretty much anything that had anything to do with finances. And a lot of dusting in an empty office that he was totally claiming for himself.

From:

glacial_queen

"I auditioned yesterday," Karla said. "After staring at Genesis for a few minutes after he told me to skip the monologue and jump right to singing."

She glanced down at what he was working on, tried to make heads or tails of it, and then shrugged. "One of these days, I'm going to have to ask you to sit me down and help me really learn that kind of stuff." She taken courses, but hadn't been able to muster enough enthusiasm to do more than just barely pass. "I mean, my Steward will be taking care of most of the budget and whatnot, but I should at least be able to understand what he's saying when he presents his work to me."

As opposed to staring blankly and nodding off, which was about where she was now.

"What kind of advertising?" she asked. "You mean like posters and stuff?"

From:

wwiii

"Posters and stuff," Warren agreed, smiling faintly. Any time she wanted to sit down and learn these things, he'd be happy to show her. "And maybe commercials on the radio. Those would probably be paid for in rum, so there's a blank spot on the page until I can find a half-decent rum to bribe Jack with. And if I'm not losing my mind, I'm pretty sure that there was a table for the school newspaper at the Club Fair this week, too."

From:

glacial_queen

"I'm pretty sure you don't have to hold out for half-decent rum to bribe Jack with," Karla said, with a very lady-like snort. "You could probably pour turpentine into an empty bottle and write rum in Sharpie and call it good."

Not that she was advocating for that! But the point needed to be made.

"Don't prove to be too good at this," she teased lightly. "Otherwise you'll end up with me looking to you in a panic, trying to figure out how to put my economy back together. Or worse yet, having to fight Genesis to get that opportunity."

From:

wwiii

"And I don't think he'd make it easy for you, if I ended up doing a good job," Warren replied, laughing softly. "You know, he hasn't been keeping all of his receipts? How do you make the books balance if you don't even know where you spent your money?"

Warren asked only the important questions in life, here. Truly.

From:

glacial_queen

"We're supposed to keep receipts?"

You have your work cut out for you, Worthington.

From:

wwiii

... God help him.

"Yes?" No, really. He was praying a little, right then and there, somewhere in the back of his head. "How else do you keep track of how much money you're probably going to end up spending on what, the year after?"

Which wasn't the only reason to keep receipts, no, but it seemed like a good starting point.

From:

glacial_queen

Karla shrugged. "Huh. That's a good point, I guess. I should tell my Steward that, when I set up my Court."

Because Warren was the first person to ever think of that, obviously.

"I should probably start doing that with my bank accounts, too." As opposed to her current method of checking them every so often to make certain she wasn't in the red.

From:

wwiii

Oh, Karla. Karla, Karla, Karla. Warren was going to sit here and boggle at you for a moment.

"You mean... you don't, already?"

From:

glacial_queen

"I look at them before I spend a lot of money so I know I have enough?" Karla tried. "And every quarter or so, to make sure they're about where they should be?"

Not that she ever had any idea what that number was, other than 'not zero' and 'a positive number.'

Edited Date: 2011-01-24 01:13 am (UTC)

From:

wwiii

Warren was going to very strategically not ask about that. At least for the time being. It seemed like the saner option.

"You know, I'm pretty certain that I've got the bank account that never ends, and even I check more often than that?"

From:

glacial_queen

Karla had to laugh a little. "This is the first time I've ever had a bank account, really. Back home, my man of business used to send me quarterly statements about my investments, but my parents always handled that. Then they started going to Hobart and know who knows what state they're in? Until I came here, I'd never really even had money. I would buy on credit, the merchants would bill the estate, the Steward would pay out of the tithes, and that would be that."

From:

wwiii

"So, no receipts?" Warren just had to check. With a grin on his face, granted.

Look, aside from the momentarily busted nose that Bobby had given him, the woeful want of receipts from the Boards had kind of been the lowest point of the weekend, for him.

"It's a wonder the world didn't just go on ahead and end, then and there."

From:

glacial_queen

"They wrote it down in a book?" Karla tried. "And I always take the receipts I'm given when I deposit my checks from 'Dite's?"

And usually ended up throwing them away, or using them to hold used gum till she could throw it away, or served as scrap paper when she needed something to write on...

"I'm pretty sure the Steward would go and talk to the merchants if he thought a charge looked too high." She was trying to be comforting!

From:

wwiii

"And I'm sure he does it with a nervous twitch in one eyelid," Warren laughed, shaking his head. "I think before we worry about teaching you the finer points of filling out a ledger, we're going to have to have a long heart-to-heart about keeping track of where your money is going."

He couldn't say anything about spending it responsibly, because that would be way too pot-to-kettle, but at least he could tell you at the end of the month just how much he'd spend on things like frivolous Zoo rentals and the like.

From:

glacial_queen

Karla tried to look penitent, but the smile that kept twitching at the corners of her mouth probably didn't help much with that. "I work better with incentives," she mentioned. Helpfully. "I will probably be much better about keeping receipts if I knew I was going to get something for them."

Like, say, a kiss per receipt she managed to keep? That sounded fair to Karla.

From:

wwiii

Hey, Warren couldn't argue with that logic, really!

"What's the going rate for receipts nowadays, do you suppose?"

Aside from the cost of whatever it was you had bought in order to get one in the first place, of course.

From:

glacial_queen

"I think a one-to-one pineapple exchange rate is fair," Karla decided. "Perhaps with breakpoints every often to keep me motivated. Ten for room service, twenty-five for crepes, and so on?"

From:

wwiii

"That would get you stockpiling them pretty thoroughly, wouldn't it?" Warren laughed and shrugged, because how could he even compete with logic like that. "This doesn't mean that you're going to go out and just buy things in order to get your hands on more receipts, I hope?"

Because that would totally defeat the point.

From:

glacial_queen

"Nooo..." Karla said, immediately discarding a plan to go out and do just that. "That would be cheating and I wouldn't do that."

And also, Karla had a bridge to sell you!

From:

wwiii

"If you start handing me stacks of receipts for things like one cookie at a time from J,GoB, I'm totally going to be on to you," Warren noted, shaking his head. He couldn't wipe the silly little smile from his lips, so clearly, he didn't mind all that much.