Bad Luck: A Morning Pick Me Up (open)

[Talia Spencer]

Talia had never been a morning person. 

She had resigned herself to the fate that having a day job meant waking in the morning. Worse yet, it meant waking early in the morning. But she had even learned to adjust to that lifestyle. It didn't come naturally by any means, but with the help of a particularly obnoxious alarm clock, she had been fairly successful. 

However, today was just not her day. 

The short story is that her alarm never went off. 

The longer story is that when she finally awoke, her clock was blinking 4:35 while her phone insisted it was actually 9:12 am. It seemed there had been a power outage during the night which reset her clock and rendered her alarm utterly useless. 

Which is how she had managed to oversleep so terribly. 

So of course, that meant that she was late for work. Really late for work. So her day had begun with a scramble, rushing to throw on the first outfit she could find, grabbing her phone which was only half charged - of course - and then trying to make her hair look like it wasn't some sort of animal nest. She settled for a quick ponytail and then rushed to the kitchen to fix a quick cup of coffee. 

Only to discover that she was out. 

No coffee? On a day like today where she was already a groggy frazzled mess? Not possible. 

She had called the office in the car, apologizing profusely, explaining the situation, and promising she would be there as soon as possible. She could have said she was on the way, but she planned to make a pit stop. She just couldn't handle the day without a coffee. It just might kill her - or at least her last nerve. Her entire job hinged on her being sociable, and right now that was not in the cards unless she got some caffeine into her system. 

Talia passed the Velvet Tone Coffeehouse on her way every morning, so it's not like she was really going out of her way or anything... Besides, she was already late - what difference would 5 minutes really make at this point?

Of course, she hadn't counted on having to park almost a block away or for there to be a line nearly to the door. It seemed she wasn't the only one in Pilot Ridge in need of an energy boost this morning. She absently wondered how many of them were victims of the very same power outage that had thrown off her entire morning. Talia tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for the line to move, disappointed to find that her sense of urgency did nothing to speed up the actual process of serving everyone in front of her their own orders. 

Today was going to be a long day it seemed. 

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean had always been a morning person.

From his childhood, when he often had woken before his parents and had never grown out of that time where children woke so early, to his teenage years where he had managed to be the only student at Hammel (absent those with power-based sleep problems) to awake with plenty of time before classes, to his college and medical school years, when he had deliberately chosen morning classes for his schedule. Through adulthood. Even with the insomnia which could impact his ability to function (as it deprived him of well-restedness and the benefits of a good night’s sleep), he still considered himself a morning person.

In the mornings, he went through his whole routine, and he had it down pat, had a rhythm for it.

The time right before Hammel winter recess always threw his schedule off-kilter a bit. Never in a bad way, but he always had to shift around sessions with students, due to their exam period, as well as to make sure that everyone who needed a prescription script left campus with one before returning home for a month.

This tended to provide him with a bit of wiggle room with his schedule.

When he had wiggle-room, he liked to leave campus to take a breath of fresh air.

The telepath had been at Hammel since before first bell, to meet with a couple of students. Then he had left, as he had a gap in his schedule, and decided that he would prefer real coffee to something brewed, and possibly burned, in the faculty lounge.

That brought him to the line at the coffee shop, one that was far too long, although he lucked out in that he was somewhere in the middle. Better to be in the middle than being at the end.