Would you like to buy a flower? (Marko, Open~)

[xiaomei]

It was a normal, boring day in Mei's shop. Normal in that she'd had a few customers, had worked on a few arrangements... boring in that she had now resorted to cleaning because of the lull. She hated cleaning.

But at least, when she'd finished sweeping and running a dust rag around some shelves - the ones most people could see - the shop looked nice. Now to find something else to do... She could do a new window arrangement? Perhaps something with cheerful yellows and pinks, rather than the deep reds and purples she'd had in there for a few days.

Contemplating this course of action for another moment, she spun to examine all the other arrangements in the shop. She could move that one to make space for the red and purple... Yes. That would do. And it would occupy her time.

A few minutes later, she'd settled to a seat behind her work table, baskets of flowers taking up a good portion of the space and spilling onto the floor. The bowl she would put the arrangement in was low and broad, so that she could make the arrangement spread horizontally, rather than vertically as the last one had. She'd have to hang a fern in the window above it to take up some of the space, but that was fine... the fern could use the light anyway.

As she often did when she was working, she'd propped the door open to allow the breeze to circulate through her shop. She sat where she could see anyone who entered, after all. There was no need to stay shut up and shut in.

[Marko Iliev]

Flower shopping, considered incredibly unmasculine – and more than likely pointless – by the underground society, was at the top of Marko’s agenda today. It wasn’t something he did all too often, but something he did enough so that the north-facing window of his drawing room at least had something nice on the windowsill. His family’s house never had such décor; rather, his father and grandmother kept everything unnaturally bland and clean, and so he partly did it as not to be reminded of that place.

Unfortunately the place he’d served as a regular customer to had recently gone out of business; it had been going downhill for a while, and Marko had passed by it one morning to find the owner gone and the door and windows boarded up. Nothing out of the ordinary, for the Trade District, as small shops did tend to pop up and disappear regularly. Nothing that he couldn’t find a solution for, either.

His hands in his pockets, he stepped inside the open doorway of a shop he’d passed by once or twice before but had never gotten a good look at, much less purchased anything from. The fresh scent of flora in contrast to the cloying smell of dirty air outside hit him in an instant. Had he been thinking about it, he might have considered it incredible that flowers could even survive in the pollution surrounding Granor.