Open Case File [COMPLETED]

An Odd Encounter

Not going to lie I don't know why you want more of this bizarre author but okay here you go. Can't say I didn't warn you.

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Mason strode down the sidewalk, glancing at windows and occasionally stopping. With each step he grew more annoyed. He hated presents. He hated giving them and he hated receiving them.

He hated having to guess what a person would like. He hated the idea that value for someone's relationship should somehow be echoed with a price tag. He hated receiving gifts because no one ever knew what he wanted.

And what he wanted the majority of the time was simply to be left alone. Yet that hadn't been a gift he'd ever received. That's why he hated presents.

Getting to the point of irritation where if someone bumped into him he might overreact, he stepped into the next store he came upon.

It turned out to be a book store. The smell of coffee told him the store had a cafe and he cut towards it. With coffee and a muffin in hand, he found a free table at the cafe's railing and sat down. The cafe was raised and so Mason got a view of the store, specifically a crowd of people converged around a small platform with a stool and mic stand on it.

When a store worker stepped up to the mic, Mason thought about leaving, not wanting to hear someone he didn't know drone on about something he cared absolutely nothing about.

But when the worker introduced an author named Joy Jenkins and a girl in a baseball cap, t-shirt, jeans, and ripped shoes stepped up, Mason paused.

The girl looked like someone he could have gone to college with. Right as Joy took a seat on the stool, she tucked one leg under her and rested her other foot on the stool's bottom rung. Mason stared at her, trying to understand how someone who looked like she had dressed without thinking and sat like she didn't care could have made it successfully enough to draw such a big crowd of people.

Joy smiled out at the crowd. "Applause, but not a single hoot."

"Ca-caw!" someone in the crowd yelled.

Joy laughed. "Thank you. You know how the saying goes: a ca-caw is as good as a hoot."

There was no such saying. Mason would even go as far as to bet his entire trust fund that the only one to have said that saying, and only one to ever use that saying would be this girl. Which begged the question, who in the world was she?

"It's nice to see you all here," Joy said. "Though maybe only a few of you are here to see me and the rest came because of herd mentality. If so, welcome, we've all been there and done that."

Mason hadn't. He didn't care what other people thought interesting, mainly because what it was usually wasn't interesting at all.

"So," Joy said. "This is the time where I promote my book and you pretend that's why you're here but really you're buying time until you can hurl your questions at me and I do my best to metaphorically catch them."

Mason sat with his coffee mug half raised to his lips. That's how this author went about promoting her work. And she still had a career? Did she not understand confidence and charisma were the way to make it in the world?

"The book," Joy said. "Is A Royal's Tale. Which is told from four points of view. It's the final book in my Loria series. Before it are A Vagabond's Tale and A Pirate's Tale. I think this one is my favorite because it has the most violence and heartbreak."

Again, Mason found himself simply staring at this girl. This girl looked like someone holding up a butter knife might make her shrink away. And yet she smiled at the word violence and heartbreak. What a completely bizarre person.