Well, this is a surprise. (Sean)

[Gwen Peyton]

Saturday had been a usual day for Gwen, kicking into her usual weekend routine as the morning rolled in: she got up at 8, went back to sleep at 8:01, woke up for the second time at 11, hit the shower at 11:15, and was out of the door by noon.

Stopping by the nearby deli for a quick bite, where the servers knew her by name and gave her "the usual" as she paid the exact amount, getting into the rhythm of things like meticulously choreographed number, moving without much thought about the order of her activities. They were arbitrary, just like how she normally went about deciding on things. Take her bike, for example, which she used to get around most of Pilot Ridge. When asked by others why she chose to ride a bike instead of getting a car of her own, she answered, "Just because". That, and that she didn't actually have the money to afford even a beat-up, secondhand car; Gwen could not be bothered to call her parents for help even if they wired her enough money to get her through every month.

Today, she was on her way to the local bookstore, which she normally did when no other significant errand occupied her time, which was few and far between. Gwen had a healthy love for books, and The Book Nook was the perfect place for her to peruse through books without actually buying them; she was careful to put back those on display after she was done, without the slightest wrinkle on any of the pages. She had already finished quite a number of titles with this practice, from Chuck Palahnuik to Stephen King, to those New Age/Occult books located at a rather more obscure section of the store.

Despite the number of bestsellers sold in the store that were definitely worth her buck, Gwen was not too interested in purchasing any of them, and instead preferred on saving her money for the books that she felt were more... deserving of her purchases.

Pilot Ridge didn't have its own comic book store, yet Gwen was lucky enough that The Book Nook had a decent selection of graphic novels and comic books. Unlike the other books, most of these were sealed, most of them being printed in paperback, which wasn't a problem for her. She had only discovered comics recently, and she found out that not only was it impractical as hell to collect every single issue, but she would have been at least thirty years behind to catch up on the more established stories.

Gwen eyed the vibrant-looking shelf, running her finger on the Walking Dead series before it landed on Volume 18 and picked it up, scanning the front and back covers. Usually, Gwen was alone at this part of the bookstore, with about a handful of people just popping in and out, none of whom she really knew or recognized.

Usually.

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean was a voracious reader. He had been since childhood, and much like his interest in other people, that had not changed as he’d aged. He even retained similar tastes to what he had enjoyed as a young man. He read a great amount of nonfiction, particularly science and current events and biographies. In literature, he retained his interest in Kurt Vonnegut and in certain genres of classics.

He had never been particularly interested in comic books. They hadn’t been as intricate when he was a boy, compared to the massive industry that existed now. His parents had dissuaded him from reading comic books once his telepathy manifested. Stories about super-powered mutants trying to take over the world did little to curb discomfort about meta-humans, and Sean had never delved back into the genre. Even when other students read comic books, he typically found something else to occupy his attention. M*A*S*H or training or one of his many favorite books.

Sean’s nephew, however, loved comic books. Ryan loved what authors and artists could do with that visual and narrative medium across all genres. Primarily, he liked superheroes. Ryan Finnerty had Opinions about superheroes as allegories for society and as characters within a self-contained universe and as an ideal for which to strive.

Most of what Sean knew about superheroes, he had learned from Ryan. Most everything else came from telepathy, working at a school, or simply decades of exposure to American popular culture.

His nephew planned to visit for a weekend, and Sean had wanted to get the young man a present. He kept a list of characters that Ryan particularly liked, and it was with that list in his pocket that he set out to the bookstore to shop. Pilot Ridge didn’t have a dedicated comic book store, which had its ups and downs for such errands. The lack of dedicated fans made shopping more accessible to people like Sean, who couldn’t go toe-to-toe with a super fan and didn’t want to jump through hoops to buy a product. On the other hand, that also meant that the employees might not have expertise in a given subject and thus couldn’t answer a question.

That was rendered moot, since, as the tall telepath made his way through the graphic novel section, there were no employees within his line of sight. That left him to roam until he found someone to help, or, if he was lucky, a book might jump out at him.

Surely, there had to be lots of X-Men books...