"I give no shits about the fluttering around, but the cranky old lady was awesome. She's pretty much my end goal in life. Running around yelling at people and thumping them with my cane? Yes please."
"It's funny to read about, too. All the dancing and prancing and prissy British nobility stuff." She adopts a faked British accent. (A truly horrible one, as it happens.) "Isn't it just a charming day, good sir?"
Mark makes an overdramatized face. "I'm not sure I've ever heard the dialect you're trying to imitate and I can still tell you're faking it atrociously."
To no one's surprise: glitter ensues.
Is anyone paying attention to the potion?
They will probably remember it when it explodes in a puff of dust, however. Both of them are now coated in clumps of green fluff.
"Awww, shit," Alli grumps, but she's laughing as she says it. "Shit, shit, shit." She brushes semi-effectively at her outfit, then eyes him and bursts into helpless cackling. "And you, c'mere." This turns into fiddly multi-tasking trying to brush both of them off at the same time. It's not terribly coordinated or effective, but she makes some progress.
He helps de-fluff them both, somewhat less haphazardly.
"Meh. Only an issue if you catch on fire." She decides she's as defluffed as she's likely to get, and gives up. He gets one last brush off the back of his shoulder, and then a considering look. "You don't freeze up when I do that any more."
"Huh. Can't decide between yay, that's probably good and well drat, it was kinda hot. Is that weird? Probably a little. I'm bad at normal."
Alli blinks at his face and re-evaluates what she just said. "Ohhhkay that probably came out wrong, didn't it. Very sorry, I will remove my foot from my mouth, etc. I- ugh. Phrasing is hard. How do people get good at this shit? Hmm. You being upset is bad but hot guy reacts when I hug him is the fun bit?"
"...sorry. I'm good at the foot in mouth thing."
Rather than focus on how twisty her insides currently feel- why did she say that, terrible, terrible plan, ugh- she picks up the cauldron. The fluff is, blessedly, not terrible difficult to remove from metal. "Soooo. Potion round two?" she asks.
Alli scrapes the fluff into a pile at the bottom of the cauldron and dumps it into the trash can, then offers it back to him. "Second time's the charm?"
He remembers all the steps of the potion recipe perfectly.
When he's done reassembling the potion, she almost leans forward over him to check on the potion. Then she reconsiders and scoots around him to perch on the desk instead. "Yep, looks good," she confirms, and starts up the burner. "Maybe this time an alarm? I mean. In case glitter's distracting."
Alli sets an alarm on her Razr for twenty minutes. "There. Here's to no more fluff." She grins at the garbage can full of potion debris. "Wonder what the librarians make of that?"
"Man, now I wanna see their faces. Except for how that would tip them off that I'm the one responsible for all this shit."