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people: greta baker

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early May 2022

This is awful. Regan has been pulling Greta from rack to rack, trying to get her advice on different dresses — styles, color, lengths — and every one is wrong. It shouldn't be this big of a deal, but this is prom. She's never had a prom before, and she probably won't have one ever again. She wants her dress to be right.

And none of these are.

They've only been here for a half hour, maybe a little more, but Regan is starting to get panicked. What if she doesn't find anything? What if she ends up going to prom in just... some crappy dress out of, like... Objective, or something.

"Greta, I can't wear a dress from Objective to prom!" she insists, nearly dropping the two she has draped over one arm in her vehemence.

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Greta has long since resigned herself to the convenience of contemporary clothes shopping, though there are times — like this one — where attempting to buy off the rack seems... well, 'futile' is probably too strong a word. 'Fraught,' more like. Something made to order could be tailored to exactly what Regan is looking for, but the dresses in this smaller boutique shop are under no such obligations to suit anyone's particular tastes. It would be annoying even if the stakes weren't that high, but Greta's been given to understand that Prom is incredibly important. So perhaps she shouldn't be surprised that Regan is already nearing the end of her rope.

"We're not shopping at Objective," Greta replies, both a reassurance and a simple statement of fact. A sales clerk is watching them a bit nervously — Regan's visible frustration needs no translation — and Greta offers them a brief, tight smile before turning her focus back to Regan. She touches one of the dresses over the girl's arm, asking, "What's wrong with this one?"

The question is calm enough that Regan forces herself to settle before answering the first thing that comes to mind — which, in this case, is a knee-jerk but unhelpful It's ugly!. It's not an ugly dress, is the thing. It's just that the bodice is sequined in the wrong pattern, and the skirt is too long, but the color is perfect. She tries to relay that to Greta as clearly as she can, without looking like a total maniac in the process.

It's never escaped Regan's notice that Greta wears clothes for utility more than for fashion. And for a long time, so did Regan herself. It hasn't been until recently that she's even allowed herself to wear clothes with fabrics that she knows will make noise against each other, even if she can't hear them herself. Maybe bringing her mother-figure prom dress shopping is weird, but all of her school friends have had their dresses on reserve for months. Greta might not be the most fashionable person in Darrow, but she is still good at clothes, knowing how they fit and drape and work, and Regan wants that knowledge and help today.

"I can fix a skirt," she says first, because that's the most easy and obvious solution as far as that detail is concerned. "Especially if it's just too long." Too short might be harder — the hem will only give her so much extra material to work with — but she could take a skirt up a few inches in her sleep. It's likely a service the shop offers as well, but Greta's willing to bet that she works faster and just as skillfully for such simple adjustments.

Sequins are a little more out of her depth. She could probably teach herself how they're done, given a spare dress and a little time, but she has enough sense to avoid a project so fraught when she doesn't have that much time or focus to devote to it. The last thing either of them need is for Greta to volunteer a solution she isn't dead certain she can provide. And the last thing she needs is to arbitrarily put herself in full-time seamstress prison when there's other work to be done.

"Why don't we look for something else in this color — or close to it — and just worry about the bust, not the skirt length?" she suggests.

She's right. Of course she's right. Regan takes a breath and nods, and resists the urge to dump the armload she currently has. Neither of them are right, but she can at least look for a similar color and not be a dick and leave expensive dresses on the floor of the store. Instead, she brings them back to the rack and places them back on the bar they hang from, then takes another deep breath.

She can do this. If she can trek her way across half of New York, use her implant to weak one of the creatures, and then stab it in the face... Well, then she can buy a damn dress, right?

It's just prom. It's just the most important dance of her high school career. But she can do this.

Later, when this is all less public, Greta might allow herself a shred of amusement over how dramatic this is. It's not a laugh at Regan's expense, not really. Greta remembers being that age, and how everything felt loaded with more potential than it could hold. Some of it, she could chalk up to the world she came from: a place where your teen years weren't just for beginning apprenticeships or clumsily courting, but for avoiding the sort of magical predicaments that presented themselves to people who were less innocent than children but more foolhardy than adults. Some of it was universal, though, and while it's easy to say that the village dances she attended were never as important as they felt at the time, she hasn't forgotten how much she'd obsessed over them. In twenty years, Regan may look back on this and find her adolescent anxieties ridiculous. But Greta wouldn't be doing her any favors if she belittled them now.

Instead, while Regan resettles herself and puts a few of the dresses back, Greta returns to browsing the racks. She spies a dress that nearly matches the color Regan's looking for — the seasonality of colors used to strike her as arbitrary, but now she thinks it might work in their favor — and she plucks it off the rack, holding it up for Regan's inspection and lifting her eyebrows in inquiry.

It's better than the others Regan had found, at least. The skirt isn't as full as she would like, and the sleeves are a little long, but maybe, if she thinks a little outside the box, she could imagine a sort of petticoat to fluff up the skirt. Her immediate reaction isn't disdain or frustration, at least, and that feels like a win.

"The color is good," she says, a little uncertainly. She frowns and tugs it closer, holding it against herself and looking in one of the mirrors. No, the color isn't just good. It's really good. It's almost perfect, actually. The bodice is nice, too.

Regan closes her eyes like she's praying for a second, then tips the back of the bodice open to look at the size. It's too big. No, no, no. It can't be too big. She hooks the hanger over the back of her neck so she can tug the side seams against her body, trying to see where they'll fall if she were to put it on right now.

Regan's anxiety could be contagious if Greta isn't careful, and she makes a point not to fidget as Regan takes the dress in hand and examines it. There are elements to it that Greta knows won't work — Regan has already made her opinions about skirt fullness clear — but it's nothing she couldn't fix. And when Regan holds it up to herself, trying to get a sense of the fit and looking faintly desperate about it, Greta lifts a hand to draw her eye.

"Do you want to try it on?" she suggests. Venturing a wry smile, she adds, "We can assess the damage." She doesn't expect anything off the rack to fit the girl perfectly, but once Regan's wearing it, they can get a better idea of what needs to be done.

She absolutely does, and absolutely doesn't. If she tries it on, she'll know exactly how wrong the fit is, and Greta can work wonders with a sewing machine, but Regan isn't sure she can handle putting it on only to find out that it's too wide here, not wide enough there, and utterly the wrong shape somewhere else.

But she doesn't want to pass this up if it's the only dress that's even close to what she wants.

She takes a breath, and nods.

"Okay." Greta says, giving Regan a bolstering nod and then walking her over to the changing rooms. She, at least, is tentatively optimistic. Once they get a better sense of how the dress fits (or doesn't), they can figure out a plan of attack — all of which sounds better and more productive than continuing to paw through the racks in mounting despair. But Regan might not be so confident.

She pauses outside the door to one of the changing rooms, and adds, "Just knock on the door when you're ready for me, okay?" The changing rooms are large enough to accommodate two people, and she thinks it might be better for everyone involved if they have any conversation about alterations in said room, where none of the shopkeepers can see them. It may not be against any laws to buy a dress you intend to modify, but it still feels a bit rude to be blatant about it.

Regan nods and ducks into the room to change. She toes off her sneakers and strips down to her underwear, then tugs the dress on before tightening the zip. She looks at herself in the mirror, first, pulling on the bodice and trying to floof up the skirt. Wearing it now, it's easier to see what she wants it to really look like, what her final vision for it is, but she doesn't know if Greta can do it all.

Taking a bracing, hopeful breath, Regan steps closer to the door and knocks on it.

Greta slips inside the dressing room, shutting the door behind her. She gives the dress a brief, assessing look. The fit doesn't seem to be that bad, actually, certainly not to the point where it would be a real undertaking to fix it. The bodice is a little loose, and the skirt doesn't have as much volume as she thinks Regan was hoping for, but neither of those issues are insurmountable.

She lifts her gaze to Regan's face, which looks, she thinks, a little less despairing than it had a few minutes ago. "The fit's not bad," she says. "Better than I was expecting, actually. What do you think?"

She nods, trying not to look too nervous when she smiles.

"I wanted tighter, longer sleeves," she admits, "and the bottom isn't full, like I want." She plucks at the skirts and sort of holds them where she wants the fullness to stop. Then she releases to add, "But... that'd just be an underskirt, right? Petticoat?" Is that what it's called? God, she doesn't know dress things as much as she should right now.

"Petticoat," Greta confirms, smiling a bit easier. "And we already have plenty of those. They might not be the exact length you want, but that's a quick fix." Most of the ones in her collection are a bit long for the job, but she could double them back on themselves a bit and fix it with a running stitch that would be easy to just cut back out once Prom is over. If it only has to last one night, they can get away with cutting a few corners.

"How much longer were you thinking for the sleeves?" she asks before reaching out to examine them, letting the fabric slide between her fingers. Tightening will be easy enough — she's not worried about any adjustments that involve taking fabric away. Lengthening might be trickier, as you can't add what you don't have. She could probably let out the hem a little, but if Regan's looking for several inches, they might need to get creative.

Regan holds one arm out and tugs the sleeve. It falls just an inch and a half, maybe two, above her elbow.

"I guess... maybe this could work? I wanted it down to my elbows, but." She's trying to compromise, because she knows she only has so much time before prom, and she only has so much leeway with what Greta can feasibly do. She makes a little, playfully distressed face. "This looks okay at this length, right? If they're a little tighter?"

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