Snippet #1540482

Viktor Akunin strode down the hall of the local post office, yawning a bit as he did so. He'd drawn the short stick when he'd applied to work here, getting the 4:30 AM to 12:30 PM shift--needless to say, a pretty shitty gig. But it brought home the dough, and as long as Viktor had a 'home' at all to bring the dough to, he didn't care where he worked or what he did. Not to mention that his pay contributed to a portion of the earnings the 'runaways' lived on, so Viktor couldn't be picky about that anyway. They gave him a home, a place to stay, as long as he could also provide some measure of money to keep them going. It had taken a while, but at last an opening had come up in the local postage office, and Viktor had applied immediately for the job. Soon after, he got it. Jobs were in high demand in this city, and he'd been lucky he'd managed to get even that rather undesirable time shift before some other schmuck had gotten it.

The young man reached his destination after what seemed like hours--waking up so early in the morning did that to a guy. It was the check in-check out booth, and Viktor, having reached the end of his shift, was about to do the latter. He took the cheap paper card that read "Viktor Akunin--4:30AM-12:30PM" from the "Checked In" section, and then placed it in the stamping slot, withdrawing the card, which now had a circle cleanly stamped through it; he slid it onto one of the racks of the 'Checked Out' section, and turned, beginning to walk away, content to let the workers' whose shifts were beginning now to do their jobs.

Viktor stepped out of the office and into the cool afternoon air, glancing up at the sun overhead, shining just too brightly. As usual. Narrowing his eyes in an attempt to keep the bright rays at bay, he began to walk back on his way towards the place he and several other similar people called home--to retrieve a book he had borrowed from the library, and then possibly go down to the McDonald's Skylar worked at; Santana's shift at the library was over by now, and it could be assumed she and Kisa were currently with Skylar, and maybe Yoshi as well.

As he approached the abandoned church, hidden as it was by years of neglect and apathy, Viktor saw a figure sitting on the steps--a figure he did not recognise. An eyebrow raised, he paused, and then continued forth. No one came to this church by accident. It was off the beaten path, nowhere near where you could just happen to come across it. As he came nearer, further details came to Viktor's eye--the woman's clothes were clearly old and second-hand, not to mention the shirt looked baggy and maybe too big for her. Perhaps she had come here for a reason.

As he walked towards her and the church, he paused to think of what he was going to do. He couldn't just walk by and ignore her without addressing why she was here--and he couldn't do what Skylar did, which was walk right up to her and demand to know if she was homeless (he'd seen how often that strategy worked out). Instead, he merely approached her at a casual pace and, smiling slightly, said, "Excuse me miss, you wouldn't happen to be here for any particular reason, would you?"

((Yeah, it's a horribly shitty post...fortunately, I have a similarly horribly shitty excuse in that I had literally five minutes to type it up XD))