bakerstreet | "This is why I'm broke" the Meme!

"This is why I'm broke" the Meme!

The YOU BOUGHT WHAT?! Meme

So for whatever reason, you just spent a ridiculous amount of money on a really stupid item. Maybe it's the Party Python (pictured above), a whopping 26 pounds of gummy snake, or maybe you just bought a life-sized whale made of swiss cheese. Whatever you did, your friend/roommate/comrade/the random stranger in your hotel lobby must now put up with the consequences of your buying decisions.

Maybe it's for a party, maybe it isn't--either way, if you show up with a six foot long gummy snake, they're pretty much bound to say: you bought what?!

So here's how it works (and it is incredibly simple with no RNG involved, really):

1. Character A comments with Name | Canon, and whether they're the Buyer OR Receiver, or either!
2. Character B replies with the opposite and either shows off or reacts to said ridiculous item for whatever reason! Be it a batman snuggie or a giant party python, your possibilities are only as limitless as the dumbest, most expensive thing you think your character might buy! Your character might be drunk or not, that choice is up to you.
3. Everyone questions their choices and profits! And by profits, I mean loses massive amounts of money!

Simple, no? Have at!

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either

[ It's that time of the month, again.

When you spend this much of your time wandering the world, collecting junk like the proverbial rolling stone does not collect moss (and how does that work? how do they keep accumulating so much stuff on the road?), Spring Cleaning has to come a little more often than just in Spring. Like, say, biweekly or twice monthly or just whenever everybody starts pissing and moaning about their packs being too heavy (not that that isn't usually an easy consensus to reach - easier than what to have for dinner or where to sleep, if there's more than one inn or not enough beds).

In any case, all of their purchase-based woes are well in the past - because it's a heap of potentially useful and potentially useless stuff that's staring them down, now, the only two left and responsible enough to go through it all.

Of course, given that more than a fair share is his, Cloud couldn't have argued the position (as per usual, really). He assumes Tifa has remained mostly out of pity.

Or maybe she's just as interested in where the other end of that 26-pound gummy snake terminates, amidst all of the obsolete armor and off-brand restorative items and questionable underthings (the ones he hasn't tucked discreetly back into the bottom of his own bag, at least). ]

...When did we buy that? [ Any of it. Tifa's free to take her pick, as he opts to sift aimlessly through the detritus of past shopping sprees, possibly all taken under the influence of temporary blindness or poison or who knows what all.

They clearly weren't in their right minds when they doled out the gil for those Mood Ring Bangles (no Defense bonus) or the Red Check Cape (doesn't prevent anything). ]

[Tifa had remained mostly out of pity.

And curiosity, and not even just about the gummy snake (how had anyone even fit that in their pack? It was half covered with lint and was that ... an eyeliner pencil embedded inside its head..? But - she could have sworn the gummy snake came from Barret's pack) but really about everything everyone had managed to, at some point in their journey, find so necessary they were willing to buy it and now so unnecessary that they couldn't wait to toss it. Also, maybe, there was the slight possibility that she'd snuck some of her own things into the pile and wanted to make sure Cloud didn't decide to either comment on them or keep them himself.]

I don't know. [It's an honest answer and, like his question, can pretty much apply to everything.

She does kind of like the Mood Ring Bangles though. One of those happens to sneak back into her nearby sack. The Red Check Cape can stay though. It still looks like a giant cloth checker board to her.]

I think the real question is why did we by that? [She leans forward from where she's sitting to lift out the pair of Chocobo Feet Slippers, which she's pretty sure is going in the Non-Resale pile thanks to the wear on the bottom of them, but it's really a question that can apply to all of what's in front of them. Except maybe the holographic sunglasses. She remembers why she bought those.

And the squeaky frog key chain. She still thinks that's funny.]

[ His only response to that is the noncommittal rise of one shoulder; he's given up on asking why - somewhere between the pink Choco Feather boa and the iridescent rainbow flip-flop Sprint Shoes, approximately. He can remember some instances, certain snippets of bad decisions in the making, but not a lot of the actual reasoning behind the least sensible of their junky, tacky, inexplicable purchases. Some of it, maybe, but not a lot.

Like falling into the tourist trap of overstocking on Softs and Cornucopias only to avoid all petrification and miniatureness, all remaining Remedies aside. Or buying that squeaky frog, because it'd made Tifa laugh. Flimsy justification like that is all that comes up, when he does spot something he can almost vaguely recollect. It might be a blessing in disguise that he remembers so little, though; he'd probably have to start burying gil in undisclosed locations for its own sake, if he knew exactly how much wasted money the two of them are sitting on.

Just think of all those swords he could've bought (even though the Buster is the only one he really ever carries around). ]

Did we even use any of this...? [ Not that he's sure of the practical applications of sticky toys made to look like materia - just that he can't quite get the useless, slightly melted glob off his hand, no matter how hard he shakes it and frowns. ]

[While he's distracted with the sticky ball, Tifa sneaks the frog key chain back into her pack. She has to hide a laugh though when she glances up to see him shaking his hand like a cat out in wet grass. Scooting over to him, she catches his wrist with one hand and uses one of Cid's abandoned ShinraWOW! towels to smother and remove the fake materia with the other. There are a lot of those towels. Cid seems to have the compulsive need to buy them and then never use them. She suspects it's the fact so many of the salesmen yell when selling them makes Cid feel at home.]

Sometimes? [Letting him have the now defiled towel, she reaches out to lift out the frayed feathers dangling from the end of a string. Yuffie. To tease Cait Sith. The Chia chocobo. Aerith. To tease Cloud. It strikes her that they spent a lot of money just to make fun of each other. ...which seems about right for their group. Lifting up the glow when it spins yo-yo (they had been very, very bored. She remembers that part) she adds:]

I never see Barret's sailor hat though.

Still in his bag. [ But he doesn't offer to elucidate on how he can say so with such pure certainty - just keeps looking at her like the act of plucking that gross, melting goo blob off his glove was some particularly neat sleight of hand. After a bit, though, he looks down at the ruined towel in his hands, instead, and there's nothing neat there. He throws it toward the trash pile, where it rolls lumpily to a halt at the foot of a moogle-shaped walkie-talkie (no use without its mate, even for hocking).

Back to the unsorted heap.

Avoiding another loop of gummy snake (does it have no end?), he snags the end of a bright red chamois collar, its bell jingling merrily as a few fake plastic Greens, one with a suspiciously insignificant piece of paper stuck to it, knock hollowly together in its wake. Another loop of gummy snake, with about fifteen different keycards stuck to it, surfaces as he knocks the Greens aside. ]

Hey, we still need any of these?

[Her eyebrows go up in surprise and she huffs an almost silent laugh, hand raised to hide it and no, no she doesn't find it at all odd that Cloud would know something like where Barret was hiding his sailor hat. She'd also never seen a blond wig or purple dress in the pile of discards. The wonder of her freeing him from his battle with the sticky materia is missed entirely on her part.]

Probably not. [Because when would they seriously ever need to use a scratch and sniff booklet of vegetables? Who couldn't name simple vegetables? She pushs it over into the hock pile and picks up the cheap plastic headband with the wire that dangled a red ball. She was never buying anything on a dare ever again. Ever. The headband goes in the trash pile.] But every now and then someone always tries to throw out something that's actually useful.

[...like the postcards of costa del sol. Sure they're tacky but... waiting until Cloud's distracted, Tifa slips those back into her pack as well. The suspiciously insignificant piece of paper goes with them. You never knew when it might show up on Cloud's pillow or awakwardly taped to a bathroom mirror first thing in the morning.]

Edited 2013-07-07 06:33 (UTC)

[ He's sorry to see the vegetable book go, but he hides it well enough. To be honest, that thing wasn't very useful to begin with. Vegetables didn't have have very distinctive smells. ]

They're just taking up space, then. [ And he proceeds to pick each one of the cards off the gelatinous snake's side and flick them individually into the pile of garbage (no resale value). Around the fourth or fifth one, he starts to make a game of it - attempting to utilize the residual stickiness to get each tacky-sided card to latch onto individual targets sticking out of the heap.

As far as real use goes, though, and not just passing amusement (their motivation for picking up a lot of this stuff, apparently), there isn't a huge amount of potential jumping out at him. Sandal with a broken strap? Trash. Unleveled Ice? Pack. Grenade? Resale - maybe for 50 gil, best offer.

Polka dot string bikini top? ]

Huh.

[ No, this requires further inspection. ]

[She looks over out of curiosity and then gets distracted watching him flick the key cards with surprising accuracy at various points in the trash pile. She catches herself after about the tenth card though and with a shake of her head goes back to sorting through what's left, a pile that's, thankfully, looking at least a little smaller to her, even if that is just optimism on her part. It never ceases to amaze her how the whole team can't seem to manage to sort their own items on their own. She's almost ready to swear it's a mini-game... but that doesn't make any sense.

Tossing the bag of what she assumes might once have been cotton candy but is now a very hard, solid pancake over her shoulder into the trash, she's wrist deep in sparkly bead necklaces she had a vague memory of Barret coming back to the hotel room shirtless and practically smothered in, she looks up with a vague kind of distraction at Cloud's noise of equally vague seeming interest.]

Hm?

[Which quickly turns into -]

Cloud!

[Because that further inspection should take all of a second to figure out whose cup size that bathing suit belongs to and she was sure she'd thrown it away back in Costa del Sol. There's a quick grab for it that's a bit unbalanced thanks to one arm still being tangled in cheap beads. It's not as if she ever actually wore it!]

What?

[ His brow furrows in what appears to be honest confusion - but he's already leaning out of her reach when she makes a grab for either him or the suit (can't be certain). With that mass of beads weighing down her other side, he still stands a chance, but likely only thanks to that anchor of plastic jewelry. The pile they've been going through has migrated up over his boots and pantlegs as they work, more than likely to prove equally as difficult to extract himself from smoothly.

He's not done trying to figure out where all the ties go on this thing, though. So he's not giving it back. ]

[What?! A... build like hers needs - extra support. Of course there are more ties. Now if he'd just hand it over -

She makes another grab - and she swears he's a frustrating combination of little boy and problem teen at the moment - but just misses again thanks to those beads. Turning back to them she gives a rough, distracted attempt to free herself before forgoing it. Yes, she knows he's seen a bathing suit before but this isn't about the bathing suit. It's about something that seems awfully close to a bra, that reveals just how big she really is and might lead to Questions. Which with Cloud might range anywhere from wondering why she'd never actually worn it to how she managed to carry around two - items that size without falling over. Or anything in between because with Cloud you really never knew what was going to occur to him.

With something close to a throaty grump, she went with the only thing that occurred to her as she started to scoot her body sideways closer, working around the beads that were less anchor and more clinging vine.

That's mine.

[ He'll have to sneak those beads back into Barret's pack, once this is all over. It's abundantly evident, now, that they're all on his side.

But even Cloud in a rare good mood can't help giving in when she genuinely starts to grouse. He doesn't mean to be cruel, after all, and his curiosity is more satisfied in her reaction than any amount of fumbling with the foreign article of clothing could possibly account for.

After another (probably too long) pause, Cloud holds the top out to her where she's still struggling in the grip of so many gaudy plastic necklaces. ]

You should keep it.

[It freezes her in mid-grouse - and mid-shift to swing her legs over to either trap him or kick him and she goes absolutely still the way she does when she has no idea what's happening, eyes going a bit wider (and younger) as they finally look up at his face. She and Cloud don't actually fight very often. Without really realizing it with the front of her conscious, Tifa has always found it most often feels like an almost teenage style awkward jostling, something Tifa understands instinctively isn't meant to hurt or upset either of them, so much as just to... test. In a way, it's almost comforting, even when she's annoyed because - because it feels normal.

Gone from embarrassed huffing to mollified and even a little shyly pleased in the space of a single sentence, she reaches out with the smallest self-conscious smile at the edge of her lips and takes the top from him.]

But I never wear it.

Edited 2013-07-24 05:13 (UTC)

Never know when we might end up somewhere you'll need it.

[ Not that swimsuits are basic necessities or anything, but she might, and it's not like it's in bad shape or anything. From fashion he definitely wouldn't know, but that isn't something many of them seem to worry much about, on a day-to-day basis. (More important to be comfortable and functional in a fight, and alive at the end of the day.)

Less self-conscious outwardly than he is on the inside, all of a sudden, Cloud returns to rifling through their teammates' collective junk runoff.

He'll probably deserve to find something embarrassing or indicative of unreasonably awkward memories taped to the bathroom mirror one morning soon, but at least now he's made sure of earning it. ]

[She's never worn the top - and never intends to wear it - because it shows the scar she's got across her chest and she's ashamed of that ugly mar... yet she still turns to carefully tuck the top back into her pack, pressing it down toward the bottom near a stuffed mog that's a little worse for the wear. It's not to wear... it's to treasure because -

he will no doubt deserve that awkward reminder stuck to a mirror one day... but, not yet. He's bought himself a little more time - and a little more of her already mostly gone messed up heart - today. On impulse, she leans over quickly, much easier to do suddenly between her already scooted closer thanks to earlier position and his not leaning away anymore either, and presses a quick kiss to his cheek.]

Okay.

[It's a quick whisper and then her hair's in the way, hiding her face, as she turns back to much more calmly unwinding the beads from around her wrist, stupid hidden sappy smile on her face.

Sorting through the team's floatsam doesn't seem so bad after all.]

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"This is why I'm broke" the Meme!

Tifa Lockheart/Final Fantasy VII

how about both

I love it!

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