Shopping

5th Day of Stellvard (approx)

Potatoes: Can use in curry, soup, stew, boiled. Boiled potatoes are better with salt. Not sweet, or bitter. Reminds me of llama. Peasant food? Don't eat if green.

Tomato: Good without cooking. Sweet, juicy. Giorno says you can cook pasta sauce. What is pasta?

Carrots: Sweet. Curry, soup. Can eat raw. Don't buy them if they're floppy. Good snack.

Bean sprouts: Cheap. Can add to soup. Good fried, or with mayonnaise. Do not add to curry! "No nutritional value"?

Mushrooms: Many types. Shitake is bitter, but good grilled. Too expensive. Enoki is cheaper. Good in soup, fried, curry. Have not tried all types yet. Do not eat raw. (Yuuji says not to eat ones I find outside, only the ones I buy).

Cabbage: soup, fried. Sweet, sometimes. Sometimes no taste at all. Mysterious ingredient.

Eggplant: Rub in salt before cooking, then wash again. Too much trouble. Sweet. Good in curry, fried.

Green peppers: What are these good for?

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The skin on the back of Aiko's neck started to prickle not long after she entered the supermarket.

She had been waiting until there weren't so many people inside. When the supermarket was busy, the food swam in front of her eyes, and Aiko wasn't able to remember the things Nomura had told her. The constant movement of mothers dragging their children along behind them, and old people bumbling from one aisle to the next, called her attention from one place to another and left her exhausted.

It was easier later on, when the only people going in or out were tired men in gray suits who wouldn't look at her either way. She was able to take her time looking at each of the stalls. Besides, she didn't have much money to spend on groceries, so she had to be careful with what she bought. Juggling the prices in her head was difficult enough when it was quiet.

And so it was quite late by the time she finally started shopping. The supermarket was never really empty, but at this hour there were more clerks than shoppers.

Aiko first noticed that there was a demon close by while she was looking at white daikon radish, and wondering if it would be suitable for a soup. She perked up her ears and stood on her toes to see a little further over the vegetables, but there didn't seem to be anybody around that shouldn't have been there. Were they hiding?

As she was looking over the vegetables, focusing on finding whatever it was that had gotten her attention in the first place, somebody bumped into her from the side.

"Oh! Sorry!"

When Aiko looked up, she saw a man with gray streaked hair looking back at her, shaking his head, one hand raised in apology.

"Wasn't looking where I was going, I'm sorry," he said again, and started to shuffle off.

Before he turned, a small silver flash caught Aiko's eye. The bright white light of the supermarket reflected off a small pin clipped to the man's breast pocket. A circle, with a single line running down the center. She'd seen that before, at the rooftop before the flying demons had appeared.

"Hold on," Aiko started, but as the words were coming out of her mouth there was a tremendous crash, and then the muted sound of cursing from behind her. Still on edge about the demon, Aiko spun back to see what was wrong, but it turned out to be entirely pedestrian. One of the night workers had knocked over a box of canned tomatoes, and was now picking them back up, muttering to himself while another staff member rushed over to help. She turned back to where the man with the silver emblem was, but he had vanished.

Aiko stood on tiptoes again and craned her neck but it was no good. He was gone.

"Suspicious," Aiko muttered, but there wasn't anything to be done about it now. In any case, she could no longer feel any sort of demonic presence. If there had been something nearby, it was gone.

Still, it was concerning that she should have picked up on anything like that at all. She hadn't quite been willing to say it out loud, but Aiko had been half hoping that after her encounter with the blue-eyed man, the stray demon attacks would somehow sort themselves out. That had certainly been far too optimistic on her part.

Aiko did her best to continue with her shopping, but the half-encounter kept her on her toes and wouldn't let her concentrate on what she was doing. In the end she decided to play it safe and put a few potatoes and some bean sprouts into her basket. After some deliberation she added a tomato.

When she got to the checkout, there was hardly anybody left in the supermarket, and she was standing in front of a cashier in no time at all.

"Oh! Miss Steamed Bun!"

Aiko blinked, and looked up with her eyebrows knotted together at the cashier who had greeted her. It was a young girl with a plain-looking expression and half-closed eyes, who looked somehow familiar without standing out in any particular way.

"Steamed Bun?" Aiko's eyes darted about.

"Ah! I mean, sorry! I mean, good evening, would you like a bag with that?" the cashier laughed.

Aiko shook her head. She had one of the plastic bags that Nomura had given her. It wasn't worth paying the fee for a new plastic bag each time when she had already received so many of them as gifts.

"Sure thing!" the girl carried on. "You, uh, don't remember me? I work at the convenience store. You're always in there. One steamed bun!"

Aiko stared at the other girl for a while, until finally she made the connection. It was those dead-fish eyes of hers. She was wearing a different uniform, but it was unmistakably her.

Aiko pointed at the girl.

"Dead fish eyes."

"Ah hahaha, still with that, huh," the girl laughed. "OK, Miss Steamed Bun, that'll be two hundred and fourteen yen. You're paying cash, right?"

"Cash," Aiko carefully counted her money out and put it on the counter.

"Right you are! That's exact, so no change. Let me get your receipt. Oh, I'm glad to see you looking better, yeah?" the girl babbled incessantly.

"Noisy," Aiko frowned.

"Ah hahaha! I get that a lot! OK then, have a nice night! See you soon!" the girl laughed and waved as Aiko took her basket of things and headed to the small counter row near the exit to bag her groceries.

Why was everybody in this world so overly friendly? And why did everybody have so many jobs?

Aiko carefully shook out her shopping bag, and loaded her things inside. When she was certain that nothing would accidentally squash anything else, she returned her plastic basket and headed outside.

Aiko paused, with her back to the large glass automatic door that led back into the supermarket. Had she just forgotten something?

And then, without warning, a giant black shadow leaped off the roof of the building across the street. The wraith bounded towards Aiko, clumsily tackled her, and the two of them tumbled backward through the glass door and straight back into the supermarket.