Plastic Ships
“Oh! What’s this!?” Romelle shouts delightedly. She holds up a can opener.
“I have no idea.” Acxa responds for the fourteenth time and counting. Make it fifteen as Romelle holds up an incense burner. Sixteen if her inquiry as to what kind of animal it depicted counted. Acxa knew the answer to that one. “It is called a dragon. James likes drawing them.”
“A dragon!” Romelle squeals. “Let’s buy seven.”
“Seven?” Acxa mutters. “We don’t even know what one does.”
“Okay, okay. Three. We’ll get three.” She puts four back and drops the other three into the cart and wheels on over to the next display. “Sun...glasses.” She mumbles. “Glasses that you put on the sun? How does that work?”
“Okay, now you’re just being thoughtless.” Acxa rolls her eyes. “We have these in the Galra Empire, I’m sure the Alteans had their version too.” She plucks the sunglasses out of Romelle’s hands and puts them back.
“Oh yeah. Prove it!”
Acxa rolls her eyes and points to her head. To drive the point home, she removes the sunglasses from her head and put them over her eyes.
“Ohhhh…” She replies, mumbling the Altaen equivalent of sunglasses. She dashes over to the next thing. “Oh! Acxa! Look at this! It looks like your new craft.”
Acxa inspects the plastic toy. She supposed that it did, in some way, look a little bit like her ship. Romelle tosses it into the cart. At this rate they’d be in this store forever. Before Romelle can make any more discoveries, Acxa pushes the cart into the food aisle. “Now, don’t touch anything.”
Romelle groans. “Okay.”
Acxa wanders down the aisle, searching for the things Veronica and the others have sent her pictures of. Not that she has the faintest idea as to which aisle any of these things would be in. This was going to take a while. She wanders slowly through the first three aisles. She hears Romelle groan again. “Are we almost done, I’m getting bored.”
“No, I haven’t even found the first thing.”
“Oh quiznak!”
Acxa doesn’t know what is worse the whining or the touching. She does her best to block it out, a task made easier by the satisfaction of finding Cheerios. She smiles to herself and puts it in the cart. “Hey! Where did these come from.” She picks up a box of Lucky Charms. It rests atop a box of oatmeal and a box of Captain Crunch, which Acxa also doesn’t recall putting into the cart.
“They looked so colorful!” Romelle notes.
“Romelle, do we even have enough Earth currency to cover all of this?”
Romelle blinks.
Acxa pulls out the wallet Kinkade gave her. Inside, she has exactly twenty dollars and five cents of her own and the stack of bills Veronica gave her, but those were for the items on Veronica’s list only. Acxa holds up the twenty, “This is all I have for extra stuff. I don’t think we have e--”
“We sure do!” Romelle cuts her off. “That says twenty right on it.”
“Yes.” Acxa agrees. “And that says ten.” She points at the incense burner. “You have three of them.”
Romelle blinks again as she drops another earth trinket into the cart.
“Put that back.”
“Aw, but Acxa…”
“We can’t pay for all of this.”
Romelle leans in close with a sly smirk. Wiggling her eyebrows and shielding her mouth with her hand she mutters, “we can just sneak it out when no one is looking.”
“We’re not stealing things.”
“It’s not stealing, it’s rewarding ourselves for helping the humans for helping protect their planet.”
Acxa rolls her eyes. “Well I suppose, when you put it like that...it’s still theft.”
Romelle folds her arms over her chest. “Come on, Acxa.”
“Pick your favorite thing and we’ll buy that.”
With a pout Romelle makes her way to the cart and rummages through it. “I’ll keep this one.” She plucks out the plastic spaceship.
“Why that one?”
Romelle plants a quick kiss on Acxa’s nose. “It reminds me of my favorite grumpy Galra.”