![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's his own fault, really, but that doesn't stop him from being pissed off.
Joel knows the basement of Crossroads is prone to flooding. He's been meaning to get all the boxes down there raised off the floor and onto pallets for months, but he's never gotten around to it and he could give a thousand excuses for why he's never done it, but the truth is he's been putting it off only because pallets aren't cheap and he hasn't had the extra money lying around to buy any. For the past year and a half he's been desperately saving every cent he can in hopes he'll be able to outright buy the property from his landlord and he's so close.
But now he's paying for it.
For a long moment he only stares at the ruined boxes and when he finally picks one up, the cardboard just disintegrates and the damaged books go tumbling onto the floor, all of them wrinkled and swollen with water. What makes it worse is that these aren't stock for the store. These are his mother's books.
"No, no, no," he chants are he gathers them up into his arms, as if somehow that will undo all the water damage. They're probably beyond saving and it's only two boxes, but that's not acceptable to Joel. He can't just give up without trying and so he grabs the second box, hauling all the damaged books upstairs and out the front door of his store. There has to be something he can do.
The day is bright and warm and he begins to spread the books out on the sidewalk, realizing with every passing moment that there's really no hope of salvaging them. Not just by drying them in the sun and he's trying desperately to come up with some kind of solution when someone walks toward the store. They're probably just passing by, but he turns toward them anyway.
"Do you have a hair dryer?" he asks, realizing just how desperate and stupid he sounds. "N-not on you, I know you probably don't have one on you, I just... my books. I don't have one."
This is ridiculous. The books are likely a lost cause.
[Be the person Joel is trying to beg a hair dryer from or find him later, totally defeated and sitting on the bench outside his store with the books drying in the sun.]
Joel knows the basement of Crossroads is prone to flooding. He's been meaning to get all the boxes down there raised off the floor and onto pallets for months, but he's never gotten around to it and he could give a thousand excuses for why he's never done it, but the truth is he's been putting it off only because pallets aren't cheap and he hasn't had the extra money lying around to buy any. For the past year and a half he's been desperately saving every cent he can in hopes he'll be able to outright buy the property from his landlord and he's so close.
But now he's paying for it.
For a long moment he only stares at the ruined boxes and when he finally picks one up, the cardboard just disintegrates and the damaged books go tumbling onto the floor, all of them wrinkled and swollen with water. What makes it worse is that these aren't stock for the store. These are his mother's books.
"No, no, no," he chants are he gathers them up into his arms, as if somehow that will undo all the water damage. They're probably beyond saving and it's only two boxes, but that's not acceptable to Joel. He can't just give up without trying and so he grabs the second box, hauling all the damaged books upstairs and out the front door of his store. There has to be something he can do.
The day is bright and warm and he begins to spread the books out on the sidewalk, realizing with every passing moment that there's really no hope of salvaging them. Not just by drying them in the sun and he's trying desperately to come up with some kind of solution when someone walks toward the store. They're probably just passing by, but he turns toward them anyway.
"Do you have a hair dryer?" he asks, realizing just how desperate and stupid he sounds. "N-not on you, I know you probably don't have one on you, I just... my books. I don't have one."
This is ridiculous. The books are likely a lost cause.
[Be the person Joel is trying to beg a hair dryer from or find him later, totally defeated and sitting on the bench outside his store with the books drying in the sun.]
