Welcome to the Gift Shop

The Gift Shop sat on the southwest side of the plaza, its windows facing the Now-dry fountain. That wouldn’t have given it much of a view anyway, but the murals that obscured the glass made sure of that.

Selfen had claimed this building early on. It was a treasure trove of material back then, and somehow, years later, she still found things that she swore weren’t there before: stuffed creatures of all sizes, T-shirts with a myriad of strange drawings and phrases on them, hats Selfen never would’ve thought to make, a labyrinth of shelves that could be dismantled and rebuilt into just about anything. It was as if the place was made for Selfen.

Around seven people lived there, more or less. Selfen and Carmine always did, but others came and went. It was that sort of freedom that attracted people to the cult, Selfen figured.

Carmine usually claimed the Gift Shop was more of a community art center, but Selfen insisted that it was a cult the two of them were running. She admittedly had only a vague idea of what a cult was Before. It just sounded fun. And in Sel’s experience, it was. She threw parties whenever she wanted to, and tens of people cared about what she had to say.

Selfen adored the idea so much that “cult leader” was typically how he introduced himself. All the cult leaders he had heard about from the Before had some connection to the divine. Sel had never met a god he believed in, but he was entangled with the Maelstrom, which had gotten him called crazy too many times and in too many ways to count. That was close enough.

They deserved this—Selfen, Carmine, and all the other Sensitives who visited the Gift Shop. They deserved to have a place where nonsense wasn’t taboo. They deserved to relax on a floor scattered with pillows and blankets and to chat about hauntings and unexplainable visions as if they were only the weather. And they were, quite literally, the weather. Most people simply refused to see them as such. Or, at least, most people preferred to close their curtains during a thunderstorm.