The Pawn Shoppe [In Progress]

The Pawn Shoppe

The two-story brick building on the corner of Collier and Fifth is generously brick: a grocery once (the old sign in fading paint visible on the second-story bricks), and then a series of Something Else's. This strange cascade of metal signs of uncertain provenance descending a worked-iron scroll precisely in the middle of the two front-doors. CLARA KNAPP - Real Estate - Licensed Broker, so says the topmost sign. Beneath it: FARRIER& SMITH&tc. and beneath that: PAWN. Beneath that: a smaller: consignment, antiques.

Hard to see in through the dusty windows, which are themselves again littered with dusty signs. An old movie poster for the Towering Inferno. An RR Xing sign, yellow-and-black crosshairs. Another that says: TAKE SOME THING THAT ISNT YOURS AND WIN A FREE RIDE IN A POLICE CAR. Another, small, handwritten: help wanted. Flexible hours.

Pen

Now that Elaine Hyde (Penelope [Pen]) is in Denver what she needs to do is get her house in order, and some of getting her house in order means building a sanctum, honing her experience into a better tool, into a better sense of her shadow and how to throw it; Elaine Hyde is not a woman people associate with shadows, but then she has one.

It is difficult for a devoted Order of Hermes mage to find gainful employment in the world at large outside of academia, and academia is not an option for Elaine (nor is it one she would take - tactics. The professors of the interesting courses are often Awakened, on one side or the other of the field, or so Penelope has come to believe. Graduate student programs are fertile grounds for little apprentices).

Elaine makes a habit of estate sale visiting, consignment shop hunting, pawn shop scoping - visits anywhere which buys gold, especially on the shadier side of the tracks, and anywhere odds and ends might be salvaged for a ritual: well;

it has brought her here. PAWN. Today Elaine is elegantly arrayed in something just a little bit out of the ordinary, something with flare, and over that a sleek blue-gray lake-colored coat with a large black faux-fur collar, beside which her hair smoulders. The collar is almost Elizabethan in scope but not quite. Tall boots, and who knows what else. Her hands in gloves.

She opens the door and goes inside to investigate.

The Pawn Shoppe

The interior feels - closer and more narrow than the exterior suggests it will be. Something about manner in which the walls and shelving has been arranged suggests false-fronts and secret passageways, although perhaps it is simply that what looks like one large open storefront from the front of the building is actually more like a warren, the sort half-sightless animals dig through the compacted earth, somewhere above the bedrock. To-wit: this one long row lined with dusty bric-a-brac, cheap plastic jewelry, dusty faux furs, 1970s mod dresses framing locked wooden cabinets where finer (all relative) things are displayed, all herd one back toward a wooden cage that looks to have been secured from a frontier bank. One teller bay, framed with iron bars, but bullet proof glass.

Behind the bars: a rather round African-American man old enough that both his hair and his (rather luxuriant) whiskers have gone almost entirely gray.

His head rests on his left fist. He appears to be sleeping.