Beau has stuck out the school year in Forks.  Even though a while after he moved, flights and everything else started getting a lot cheaper.

The magic mostly hasn't made its way to Forks directly, but it doesn't have to.  You still have to pay for groceries, but that's for the convenience of having more than one kind of thing and being able to get it in the middle of nowhere.  He went to Seattle and picked up Charlie a sandwich creator; it does three different kinds.  Beau still likes to cook, it's just kind of a lot less helpful than it used to be.

(While he was there, a seamster lady, older and intimidating, approached him.  He had - and has - no idea what about the way he was browsing the pockets and the translation artefacts struck her interest, but when she offered him a free tattoo he accepted.  It sort of seemed for a while that maybe this was a terrible idea and something horrible might happen to him, but nothing did.  It didn't even hurt.)

So.  It's summer, and Beau has a very cheap evening flight back home, and if he only packs his backpack then it's not that inconvenient to start the drive in the morning and hang around the city for most of the day.  There are new additions to the magic shop since the last time he was here, and it's more interesting since he can in theory use more of the products.  (Also, the intimidating lady's not here.  Which is nice.)  The ones he really wants are still too expensive for him.

There are some items that claim to prevent disease which are a little more affordable and he thinks he might be interested in, or maybe he wants this veil that apparently could give him full color vision?  He decides to think it over while grabbing some grub.  He can use cornucopias now!  Obviously he's going to try one of those.  He has his mind set on a fish dish he got while out for dinner on his eighth birthday; he was too young to ask what kind but apparently the memory should be enough and maybe he can figure it out now that he knows more things about food.  Or maybe it'll turn out to be decidedly underwhelming with an adult palate and months of living with Charlie, but at least he'll know.

Since he's at kind of an awkward hour between dinner and lunch, he manages to catch one without a huge line, even.  There's two people in front of him but no one immediately joins up behind him, and there's no one at the adjacent fabricator either, except - is that one of those mannequin people, walking away from it?  Woah.  He hasn't seen one of them in person before.

He shouldn't be caught staring, and it's his turn.  He - trips, correcting his angle too fast, and falls shoulder-first into - something -