Apartment 6T
Around noon

Lala always thought she'd have a hard time living with someone else, but only days after Ellie had moved in she'd become sort of addicted to it. The apartment was like, almost clean, there was always food, she could rant to somebody at all times, the cats were being fed regularly... It was bloody awesome, is what it was! Unfortunately, Ellie actually worked. Like, outside the apartment, so Lala was getting quite bummed whenever she was left alone, nowadays. Fortunately, however, today she had a client meeting! Woo! And it was an old client, too, so that meant she could call him over and, thank Jeebus, wouldn't have to bother to actually dress up.

The really crappy part, tho, was that Madam Dorothea, the crazy, grouchy cat lady she called landlady couldn't be bothered to do something about the failing heating and there was no way in hell Lala would keep up a warming charm all friggin' day long. So, while inside the supposedly coziness of her own apartment, she was forced to wear a scarf and a bloody beanie, because, god dammit! It was cold like hell. To make it worse, she had absolutely no clean pairs of socks. Which is why when the knock on the door came, Lala faced an issue. To get up and face the cold, hard floor on her delicate, naked feet or stay where she was, with her feet snugly tucked under her bum on the computer chair? Hah. The answer was bloody obvious.

"IT'S OPEN!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, lowering the volume on the computer speakers. And just then came a loud bang in the pipes, identifiable as coming from above. "SHUT IT, LES! YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE IN SCHOOL!" Another bang came, this time softer. "I SWEAR TO GOD, I'M TELLING YOUR BRAH!" She waited for a few seconds and when no bang came she smiled pleased to herself. Rolling her chair to face the entrance door, she grinned at Rascal Rosier, today's client.

"I'd get up, but—" she extracted one of her feet from beneath her and wriggled her toes at him. "No clean socks and I never owned slippers" she said seriously, nodding as if the word slippers had personally offended her. "There's coffee on the counter in the kitchen" she gestured with her head over the half-wall that separated the kitchenette from the living-room. Extinguishing her cigarette, she leaned sideways, grunting as she forced the tips of her hands to reach the chair standing next to the desk. With a huff, she gave up and grasped her wand from the desk pointing it furiously at the chair. "Accio, you bloody bastard" she muttered at it, only to almost wake-up with a faceful of chair, her hand coming up just in time to stop it from dragon-kicking her in the throat.

She rolled her chair sideways a little, and settled the other chair next to her, patting at it invitingly while grinning at Rascal. "Holla" she finally greeted the man, as if greetings were something you just did in the middle of a conversation. "I'm sorry it's so cold, our landlady is actually Satan and relishes in our freezing to death because she cant be bothered to do something about the heating. The cow" she narrowed her eyes and muttered something unintelligible about. "There's a blanket on the couch, tho" she pointed to her right, where a a pile of clothes was sprawled chaotically around.

The door creaked open, swinging inwards slowly as Rascal nudged it forward with the tip of his trainers.

Good ol' Lyle. He grinned back at the witch and leaned against the door frame, arms folded as she made perfectly needless explanations. If answering the door in-person were important to him then the Rosier residence would be a most dreadful and dull place to live indeed. Better doors ajar, dark corridors, jarring laughter.

Or coffee, coffee was brilliant too.

"Don't mind if I do, little Lyle~" Rascal dropped a stack of flimsy notebooks on a table in the living space - one of them opened on to a story scribbled over with tentacles - and then made for the kitchen on light toes. By the time he returned with a mug of coffee, there was a seat for him.

One did not need a writer's imagination to suppose how she managed without touching the floor, especially as Layla Styles had a hearty set of lungs she frequently abused. He dropped into the seat like a puppet and managed not to spill a drop. A free hand went to his head first, removing his hat, and then adjusting his bow tie.

"Fear not- I'm warmer than jar a treacle, truly." Rascal was much like a lizard in that it took extreme temperatures to make him bundle up at all. "I brought copies of the stories for you to read again, with the unpublished one for the new edition." He nodded in the direction of the stack but didn't seem to attach much importance to it.

It hadn't been long since he signed with Trollhouse but they already wanted to issue their own edition of The Fantabulous Lifestyles, completely new illustrations and all that nonsense. Rascal detested having to deal with old work when he was always so busy having to inconvenience people with better work! But there was the one new story about the octopi, and that pacified him enough to pay Layla this visit.

"I think one of yours is already in the old one," he leaned back to stare at the ceiling, legs crossed and ankle dangling. "They'll want you to do another, flock of cacti that they are." Lyle had done odd bits of short stories and journal submission illustrations for him before but this was, probably, their first proper book project together.

She eyed him curiously as he took his seat, holding her breath for the cup of coffee and hoping to God it wouldn't land on her floor. She let out the breath, with a little nervous chuckle as it seemed to have defied gravity and held in place. She snorted at his comparison and made grabby hands at the stack of notebooks, whining softly. She huffed and grabbed her joke-of-a-wand and pointed it at the stack with concentration etched into her features and the tip of her tongue between her lips.

Non-verbal magic was something Lala hadn't quite ever gotten the hang of. But a week of acute laryngitis had made her capable to at least summoning some stuff with... more concentration than she could usually muster. Finally, the stack lifted in the air, and so slowly, so bloody slowly started to move towards her. "Oh, come oooon" she groaned at the stack, raising her other hand in the air, forming a fist and shaking it at it. Just then, her red tabby British Shorthair, Cat, flew from bloody nowhere straight into the stack, scattering them all over the floor, only to land graciously and walk away absurdly pleased with himself.

"No... No! God dammit, Cat, why? Why do you always do that" she yelled after the feline, leaning a bit too far in her chair, grabbing the desk at the last moment before she face planted straight into the floor. She huffed and turned towards Rascal with a glare that wasn't really direct at him, but... in general. "That's okay" she almost grunted, straightening her back in preparation of getting up- "I like illustrating your stories, given they're, ye know, actually creative" -only for her back to crack dangerously the second she did. "Ow" she muttered, finally getting to her feet, grabbing a notebook here and there as she went in circles.

"What's the new one about?" she asked absentmindedly as she picked up the last notebook. She straightened her back and stopped with a musing expression on her face. "Is it a flock, tho? The cacti, pricks—meh..." she explained, in true Lala style. "I was never good with, ugh, animal, vegetal?—groups. Why does each species need a name of their own? Herd, flock, pack, school, pride, drove, colony—It's confusing is what it is..." she muttered, placing the notebooks on the scanner.

For the most part, Rascal appeared quite at peace with his coffee while the illustrator struggled with spells and cats and flailing notebooks. He sipped at his drink - black, two sugars.

"Creative is better than the adjectives they're hurling about at Trollhouse-" the author commented breezily as he watched Lyle pull herself up by some great exertion of effort that made him want to take her butterfly hunting. "- you would think they never had to deal with the safety etiquette of a pop-up cactus book."

One of his better ideas, which they instructed him to save for more accepting times even though it wasn't any more dangerous than a certain textbook gifted to children in their thirteenth year.

"The sinking of a pirate ship, told from the point of view of the kraken that took it." Rascal replied in an offhand manner, adding. "It doesn't fit with the other stories until the end but I won't spoil that for you~" he grinned smugly at her and then suddenly frowned. Collective names for plants were contested. "It's debatable, not confusing. A succulence of cacti? A spine of cacti? A cabinet!"

Maybe a Ministry of Cacti like their very own. Prickly, and some of them poisonous to their roots.

Rascal brought his lanky legs up on to his chair and crossed them together in an improbable pattern. "Muggle techniques, Lyle?" he curiously eyed the scanner that sat underneath the mess of notebooks now. "They have such beautiful tools."

"Trollhouse is just that—a house full of trogolodytes" she said nodding distractedly. "Still dunno why ye signed with them. They lack any sense of fun and creative ideas" she muttered under her breath. She'd done some work for authors signed with Trollhouse before. It was incredibly  frustrating when the author said yes to your work, but the publishing house went 'meh, this doesn't suit our image'. "Remind me to get some of those pop-up books off you, sometime. I can think of a few dozen people I'd like to gift them to" she smirked, quickly followed by a rather creepy cackle.

"I'm sure the kraken just wanted some love" she cooed, sitting back in her chair, legs tucked beneath her. "Ye're evil, is what you are" she pouted at his obvious unwillingness to give her some spoilers. Not that she really liked spoilers, but still... "I reaaaaaally wanna read it now. And draw it, because hell yeah tentacles" she grinned, fist-pumping in the air. "Don't get to draw much tentacles" she mused. "Well, not this sort" she added with a stony expression. Better leave that alone. Forever.

"A cabinet of cacti, really just makes me think of the Conservative Party" she muttered with distaste, scowling once and rolling her eyes, just as she turned her chair to face the desk. She leaned forward for her pack of Dunhill Fine Cut Black, struggling to get a fag out of it, using only one hand. She nodded at his question, patting her faithful scanner lovingly with her free hand. "Gorgeous, isn't he? It's a scanner, a most amazing Canon CanoScan LiDE110" she said appreciatively eyeing the machine, then quickly lighting the cigarette. "Does just what it says, it scans the paper, photograph, sketch—whatever and feeds the image into the computer, where I can use my epic skills to turn it into those" she waved her fingers around aimlessly at the various characters, scenes and creatures doing their thing on the walls of the apartment.

"Hai, Rupert" she said to the jawless zombie, near the window, just a couple of feet away, that lazily attempted to drink a cup of 2D coffee, only managing to pool it into a puddle at his feet. Because... no jaw, also zombie, also holes—like, in his body. Rupert grunted and waved with his usual unimpressed, stony expression. "His place is really in my room" she said conversationally to Rascal, leaning closer to him. "There's a fantastic zombie apocalypse scene just on the wall across from my bed. He's nice, sometimes I even think about giving him a functional jaw and... speech" she furrowed her eyebrows at the walking-dead.

"So how many illustrations per story?" she asked, attention back to her screen. Just as she moved the mouse, the screen came back from stand-by right to her SAI window, which currently showed a work in progress, which, because this was Layla Styles and she had no luck whatsoever, just happened to be a glorious, highly explicit, piece of Destiel fanart. Shut up. It was a commission. "Oh, my shit" she spluttered, quickly scrambling to minimize the window, managing to only make it worse, by zooming in and spilling her cup of coffee (thankfully, on the edge of the desk and towards the exterior), until finally hitting ctrl+s with the force of a woman on a mission, and closing the program.

She turned towards Rascal, and laughed awkwardly and almost mechanically, pointing her wand at the spillage on the carpet without even looking and vanishing it. "He he he—commission" she offered, pointing at the screen where the image was currently fluttering because of her wand, swallowing tightly around a knot in her throat.

There was nothing untrue about how dearest Lyle described the thorny greenery of Trollhouse.

"You would be hard-pressed to find a publishing house of different character..." Rascal trailed off with a dramatic sigh as he dropped his head back to consider the ceiling again, an empty canvas. "But you will be the very first to receive such a stack of cacti books my dear."

Well, first other than his poor uncle and editor. They would find theirs open to the spikiest of pages and laying quite deviously on a parlour or office chair. The author smiled to himself and then smirked at Layla's sly allusion to those other tentacles she had the privilege of rendering as an illustrator.

He lifted his head only briefly to consider Rupert interestedly but then leaned back again. "I would extol the cautionary tale of Pygmalion[1] but I do not think that you are very much in love with him~" Rascal commented and his fingers met across his gut. "Nothing that will last."

Layla swore and he made the effort to see why- barely catching a glimpse of her 'commission'. By a muggle client? Creative lot. Rascal grinned mischievously. He adjusted his seating position to one more conducive to conversation, legs dropping back to the floor.

"Two illustrations each, whichever scenes you would like - except that saucy one in the fifth story, better left to imaginations - and three for the Kraken." A glance flew to her computer and then back to the witch. "Such great comfort to me that your skills extend to all genres. It's a shame I haven't thought of expanding."

1.	Not really a cautionary tale, he's just being madcap.

She supposed he was right... Publishing houses weren't at every corner and she was sure it could've been much, much worse. Still. Trolls. "Why thank you" she said with a little snort, beaming at him. "I promise they will be placed in good homes. They will be with others of a prickly nature to keep the company" she grinned, toothily.

When Rascal mentioned Pygmalion, Lala quickly made an itinerary of the illustrations she'd once made for some cultural periodical about Greek mythological characters. When she finally got it, she scowled and made a disgruntled sort of noise. "Errr, yeaaaaah. No. Nuh-uh. Thanks, but no thanks" she quickly moved her hands in a sure no. "Venus can chill and just not gimme anything akin to the—ugh... undead likeness of my decomposing character" she said grimacing and shaking her head fervently. "Sorry Rupert, no offense and shit" she said, still creeped out, glancing at the zombie.

Seeing, well, hoping Rascal had not seen her screen, or not in detail anyway, she took another sip of her coffee and calmed down and decided the best way of moving past that particular clusterfuck, was by denying anything had ever happened. "W—wait. Saucy?" she suddenly froze, flailing to get to the notebooks, and practically diving into them to find that fifth story. Had she been drunk? Amnesiac? How could she have possibly missed that?! "Where are you, you little shit" she muttered at the mess of notebooks, completely encompassed by the search for it.

"And that's fine" she waved one of her hands at him. "The number of illustrations I mean" she mumbled, still cursing under her breath as she leafed through the notebooks. She froze in place at his next words tho, and slowly, ever so slowly, turned her head to him, with a demented look and sort of a demonic smirk. "It's never too late, Rascal" she drawled, wagging her eyebrows, eyes popping as she did.