ooc: feel free to join! Sterling Tomes is staffed today by the Sterling brothers, including Lionel, 22yo grad Gaheris, and 5th&6th years Mark and Kay. their acquaintances, adults looking for information on an uncommon subject, or bored or explorative students are welcome. disturbances are highly encouraged welcome. shorter responses also totally fine. I somehow wrote a lot.
Hogsmeade in February was not temperate by any stretch of the imagination, but if he had to be outside Lionel rather preferred to be here than at home, where the wind whipped itself into gales in the winter and dashed the water of the ocean everywhere on the island. Orkney's winters were vile. In other ways, Hogsmeade weekends might as well have been like being at home. Rather than the freedom of most students at boarding schools, his family shop's close proximity to Hogwarts meant that Lionel was forced to see his family once a month at the least. It wasn't as if Sterling Tomes got particularly crowded then--the store was really never particularly crowded, seeing as its appeal was rather limited--but there did tend to be a slightly higher concentration of customers what with all the students roaming about, and the rest of the work was work that was neglected and backlogged when the three youngest Sterling children were not around to keep everything up to date.
Lionel had always liked the bookshop in his own way. His family carried many very interesting obscure books that he always liked thumbing through, and you could find just about anything here. But now that he had access to the Hogwarts library (although, to be sure, some of these books belonged in the Restricted Section), coming here had lost its charm somewhat. Especially when he was forced to work during what could have been time spent with people. Lionel wasn't a social boy by any stretch of an overactive imagination, but even he couldn't disregard the charm of a day outside of the castle where they spent so much of their time, and sometimes even he pined (silently and unadmittingly) for a little bit of variety to add to regular life, which certain of his yearmates tended to provide in scores, especially now before the novelty of Hogsmeade had worn off as he observed it had for some of the upperclassmen who had been coming here for years. While he could have visitors on these days, he often didn't, simply because there were more interesting things to do in the village.
The Slytherin boy was, as usual, in the back room this afternoon, cleaning up messes his mother, who had tired of this business long ago and filled a more robotic role than anything, had left, hating to see anything not meticulously organized. He had almost finished with a pile of new and fragile scrolls about something called Sigilmancy, which he was scanning in the meantime, as he'd never heard of the discipline before, when he heard Kay's voice from the middle of the shop; around the one-year-ago acquisitions, Lionel guessed. Kay was the younger of the twins (Lionel would never stop calling them that, no matter how factually inaccurate of a moniker it was for his ten-month-apart brothers; it was one of the rare times in which facts did not take precedence for him), in fifth year, and he was rather the harsher one, unlike Mark who always chose charm before force. They asserted to strangers that it was something that differentiated them, but Lionel knew better; his brothers found it much more useful to appeal to different people by working together and having one use a different strategy than another, but they were always working together.
At the moment, Kay was taunting someone. Lionel was aware that it was Gaheris running the shop today, which meant that his oldest brother wouldn't bother to step in against the twins, not finding it worth his while. He was likely studying something. "...pipsqueak...what could...find interesting...not old enough...watch out...run over..." Lionel put down the scroll he was looking at. Someone more expressive might have sighed. He didn't particularly care for whoever it was, although it might be someone in his year for the word pipsqueak to appear, but he had noted at least two other students and one adult on his way in, and he'd rather Sterling Tomes not lose its reputation for being somewhere people could come for quiet. Lionel moved silently to the left aisle of the place, noting he'd been correct about the location, where Kay was addressing a small girl, his back to his brother. Upon getting closer, a moment's recognition crossed the third year's face. Aideen O'Bannon. Second year Slytherin, and frequenter of the library. Certainly the mental maturity to be in here--but how had she gotten past Filch to make it to Hogsmeade today, and why?
"Kay," he said evenly, not addressing the girl's age, as he was quite sure Kay didn't know her, "Please don't create a disturbance. I believe the gentleman in the far right aisle may not find his sources in any other place nearby." His brother looked at him and laughed. "Since when do you get involved with what I'm doing, Sir Lionel?" Kay had always found their siblings' Arthurian names amusing. "Since you started wasting time," he said with a bit of an edge to his voice. Lionel's sheer will had always had to serve as his force, as he was the youngest. Kay, who did after all respect his weird little brother and looked out for him more than he let on, scoffed, shoved him in the head and went back to whatever he was supposed to be doing; Lionel interfered rarely enough that it wasn't worth it. Lionel refused to rub the area, even to fix his appearance, out of principle, and turned back to Aideen. "He's right about your age, though he doesn't know it. What brings you here?" Lionel himself didn't care too much about breaking rules and so didn't address it; he understood very well that authority was all well and good, but if it suited him to disobey it and the consequences were worth it, he didn't care for it. Sterling Tomes was hardly something worth running a risk for though, was it?
The door creaked open ahead to let in a few more students. It really was uncommonly crowded today. He hoped it would stay quiet.
