Virgile arrived not even two minutes after that, with a blatant smile.

“Sorry for being late” he smiled.  He was a little red, it was surely due to him hurrying up to meet us after his bus arrived late.

“Soon enough” I teased him

“Stop speaking like you weren’t late yourself” Ergil teased me  “Morning Virgile!” he waves hid hand

Virgile said a general “Hello” to everyone and then we quickly start walking to our destination while discussing between us

It didn’t take me long to understand a little thing. Leandre is irritated with me.

It doesn’t show. Especially to the others but I can decipher little signals indicating it. The way he is slightly frowning his eyebrows, biting the interior of his cheek and mainly how he is avoiding looking at me with ardour.

It’s not that I wasn’t expecting it, but I was expecting- more fluster and less annoyance. At least, he was pretty much his usual self with everyone else, I didn’t want to crash his trip- just help him with his “past” crush and maybe- tease him a bit. But it visibly didn’t work because he was acting very normal around him and was just upset with me.

I intend to make amends later. Even though, Lee wasn’t one to stay angry (in particular with family)

The way to the shopping street wasn’t far away from our meeting point, about a twenty minutes walk.

Once we arrived at the merchant street of Mershore we stop to decide how to search. There were eight shops in this little town called Mershore, I don’t know what the “shore” stands for because there isn’t any seashore around here, only mountains and a little forest, and I think maybe a tiny lake a bit further down.

Out of the eight shops, seven were open, the eighth one being closed for a while. Not that it mattered because it was a ceramics shop.  And we weren’t gonna buy Phaenna a set of plates.

“So where do we start?” Ergil asks

“Let’s follow the street, and enter the shops when someone is interested” I answer him

“You speak as if we didn’t know every single shop here,” Virgile says looking at me teasingly. It’s true that we all did know every single shop here but I didn’t want to debate hours where we should start looking. “Let’s decide where you want to enter first” he added.

“I wanted to buy her a plushy, the one from her videogame” Leandre said. Phaenna was playing that videogame with a penguin as a mascot, it was fairly popular.

“It’s her 17^th birthday you know, not her 5^th" Wayne commented mockingly

Leandre was about to argue back, but I spoke before he could “Don’t mind him, he himself has a teddy bear at home”

Wayne flushed and said “I got it when I was a kid!”

“Soon your 18^th birthday, you better be ready to get rid of it” Leandre smirked

“Let’s start with that then, so first’s with Melissa’s shop,” I said

We dragged everyone to Melissa’s shop to look for a plushy, this shop was a cute shop with everything from mugs, pens, notebooks, and fantasy pieces of jewellery to chairs and plants. Everything being aesthetics. The shop was really colourful. Melissa, the owner of the shop, as to be expected, wasn’t there. She was a middle age woman who gave her name to her shop when she was younger but didn’t work anymore except on rare occasions. She now gave literature, philosophy and piano private lessons and some other people were now employed to work there.

In the shop, we search for a plushy, but Leandre didn’t find anything and didn’t like any of our propositions so we quickly moved to the next shop.

Then we went to media store, where we could find video games, books, films and things of the sort. Wayne decide to buy a 70 cm long and 10 large pink pencils because he finds it funny and “she draws, doesn't she?”.  At the checkout to let Wayne buy his pen, Leandre notices a little keychain with the mascot he wanted as a plushy and decided to buy it.

We then went to the jewellery store, we find a pretty set of shiny massive hair slides. We then went back to media store because Ergil now wanted to buy as a gift a phone case with a matching box of air pods he had seen just before but was hesitating.

Everyone has a gift except Virgile, but he didn’t know her much and wasn’t going to her birthday so it doesn’t matter. We decide to go to the café before coming home because our shopping was fairly quick. We were only here for a little more than an hour and wanted to make the most of our little trip between friends. Not that there was much to do here.