Well, that wasn't so bad. I hummed cheerfully as I skipped down the road. Helping Gramps had been pretty fun! And with my handy Customer Service Rules, selling watermelons was a breeze. Even Gramps had acknowledged my selling powers with a rough nod, his curly hair bouncing around. Heh. 

With a couple bruised apples (Gramps sold them on the side, and he gave me the ones that were too bruised to sell) in a pack and a bounce in my step, I let myself enjoy the now noisy street back home. A couple people called out to me in recognition, and I waved back, swinging my brown paper pack of apples as I did so.

Then the pack burst open. And apples rolled out. 

"Ahaha," I said, to nobody in particular. Ah well, life be like that sometimes.

Someone burst out from the alley next to me, holding an apple. "Who threw this!" growled a man.

My hand shot up in the air. "Me! It's for you!"

He frowned. "For me?"

"Yup! Free apple!"

"Oh." He considered this. "Okay," he said, then went back in.

As I skipped past the alley, I heard him say, "Guys, I got a free apple," and my grin widened. Yup, it be like that sometimes.

I picked up the rest of the apples and stood back up, putting the brown paper bag and the apples into my bag now. When I looked back up, I saw someone lurking in the corner, with short black hair and ripped clothes, holding a dirty cap in his hand. Hey, it was the government official that came by almost every night to the bar! That always wore dirty and ripped clothes and ordered nonalcoholic cocktails! I raised my hand up high. "Hey there, sir!" I called.

He jerked back when he saw me, crammed his head into a cap, and backed away.

"Aw c'mon, what kind of greeting is that, between old friends," I joked, still skipping. 

"You know me?" he asked, suspiciously.

"Sure! You come to the bar almost every night, don't you?"

He nodded, once, still holding his cap in his hand and giving me a wide berth.

I smiled and patted him on the shoulder. "Don't worry, I'm a friendly bartender. Hey, you want an apple?" I produced an apple from my bag, and he stared at it suspiciously. I laughed. "What are you, Snow White?"

He looked up sharply. "You know Snow White?" he asked, even more suspicious than before.

"Who doesn't?" I asked, raising an eyebrow at him. "So are you up for the apple?"

When he didn't respond, I nudged the apple his way. He shied back.

"Okay, I'll take that as a no." I shrugged, putting it back in. "Don't complain now if you get hungry in a couple hours and wish you had an apple to munch on." 

With that, I skipped away, whistling horribly, because I didn't know how to whistle but somehow felt like this was the perfect time to do so.

Ah, what a good day, when you get to earn money the whole day long! Why, I'll just take out an apple and bite into it!

Crunch!

---

I lied. This was horrible. Not a good day. Abort. Abort.

The lady in front of me gave me a strange look. She leaned over to the man next to her and whispered, very loudly, "Are you sure she isn't drunk herself?"

I snapped awake, my eyes rolling open with difficulty. I strained a smile. "Of course I am. I mean, of course I'm not. Hahaha."

"Her laughter sounds very fake," the lady confided to the man, who was very much drunk himself. "She looks a little too young to be drinking, don't you think?"

"Don't hate on my laughter," I said hotly, then felt myself going cross-eyed from the effort of keeping myself awake. "I sound like that sometimes, okay? No judging."

"She's slurring her words!" she said, her eyes growing in horror. I focused just long enough to glare at her.

"Girl," rasped good ol' uncle's voice. I swung my head over to look at him, only to see him recoil with a horrified expression.

"What?" I slurred, my head drooping down a bit. "I'm."

When I was jerked back awake, I'd poured some beer into a cup and was curving myself into it. I straightened up immediately. Ugh, my head hurt.

"Wine," someone said at my right.

I turned to the right. "You need some wine?" I said brightly, though one eye was half-closed. The government official guy stared back at me, dumbfounded. "Wine, you said, right?"

"I didn't say anything," he replied slowly.

I blinked. "Oh. Sorry." I turned back to the beer and continued pouring, nodding off as I did so. I forced my eyelids open after a few seconds, set down the beer pitcher, and took out a spoon. "Special technique coming soon!" I said, looking around.

I frowned. Why were they looking at me with such amazement? I looked down at my hand. "Oh," I said, as I stared at the apple in my hand. "That's not a spoon."

"How do you hold an apple and think it's a spoon," someone muttered, voice laced with disbelief. "Don't they feel different?"

I shrugged. "Time for a new special technique, then," I said, then took out a knife from the bottom shelf.

"Someone get that away from her!" someone else said in alarm. 

"Relax," I said, shaking my head to clear the drowsiness. I pretended to wink at that person, though it was really just an excuse to close my eye for a second longer. "I'm just cutting the apple." And I did, even if it took me five minutes to do it.

"Will we be okay?"

"Shh, don't make her mad."

"So she is drunk!"

"Shhh!" I said, waving my hand at them. A couple people yelped, and I belatedly saw the knife in my hand that I was waving. "Oh, sorry, that wasn't. Be nice, hand," I said, then blinked. What had I just said?

"Man," I mumbled, "if only Rosa was here. She'd squeeze out the juice from this apple with her bare hands." She totally would. Too bad she wasn't here; then we'd have a mega special technique.

But that gave me an idea in the drowsiness of it all, so I raised the apple in my hand and said, "Who can squeeze the most juice out of these apples? I'll give you a free cup of beer for it!"

And though the rest of it passed by in a whir, all I remember is that someone managed to squeeze half a cup out, I added all that juice into Uncle's beer, and he liked it so much he promised me not to hop on the table if I kept making it like that for him from now on.

Oh, and Cook scolded me for acting out and promising a free cup of beer without asking him first, though he admitted adding the apple juice to the beer was a good idea.

It be like that sometimes.

---

Meanwhile, at the Academy...

---

Rosa Chesterfield sprinted into the bushes so quickly that the knight-brigade-in-training only felt a weak breeze of air pass through their area.

"Pretty windy today," one commented.

His comrade shivered. "Winter's coming," he replied, to which the first guy frowned at, because it was still pretty hot. Just windy.

The girl in the bushes didn't hear them, nor did she care about them, with her light brown hair and golden eyes that the narrator must always mention because she is the Heroine and Must Not Be Taken Lightly. She checked the area carefully, in search of a certain tall thin playboy knight by the name of Drew Glitch-- ahem, by the name of Zimmerman. She checked for dirty blonde hair and red eyes, saw none, and double-checked just in case.

Then she checked the area for another person, a teacher with green hair and black eyes by the name of Elias Richards. She shuddered, for apparently even the thought of seeing him made her disgusted. If only he was as nice as he was pretty, she thought. Instead, he's oily and sadistic.

Once the coast was deemed clear, she scurried under the shadow of the surrounding trees, always keeping a careful eye out in case anyone she needed to avoid saw her. She made it to the rose garden successfully, where the scent of roses--

"I can't smell anything," she muttered.

--was not overwhelming to the Heroine but was still there--

"Maybe because of the wind?" she wondered.

--or actually, flying into other places. Yes. Exactly as it should be.

Anyway. 

Rosa Chesterfield, her silky light brown hair flying behind her, her golden eyes sparkling in utter delight, sneaked into the romantic, white gazebo in the middle of the garden, where a certain silver-haired, blue-eyed, beautifully formed Crown Prince awaited her.

Crown Prince Alexander was taking a nap. Nobody came to the rose garden gazebo because it was far away and not that pretty, actually, since the Academy gardener hated roses and didn't bother coming into the very middle of the garden, where the gazebo was. He was entirely unaware of the ordeal to come.

Rosa counted to three. She repeated the dialogue in her head. She readied herself. She counted to three again, then took a deep breath. And with half the power of her Rosa Bomb shout, so named by her sisters, she yelled, "Surprise! I got you!"

A mile away, a flock of birds fluttered up in alarm. It was- it was totally coincidental.

Prince Alexander fell out of his seat, hit his elbow on the bench, slammed his hip bone against the ground, and pricked his ankle on a stray thorn. "Gwafargh!" he shouted, in absolute panic.

"Oh yes," Rosa laughed, though it sounded more like a cackle than a laugh. She was quite good at cackling, in fact, that the disoriented Prince felt absolute fear flood into his heart. "I've got you now."

If that wasn't the most sinister thing the Prince had heard, he wasn't sure what it would be. He scrambled back immediately. "R-Rosa Chesterfield?" he croaked, then cleared his throat. Nobody heard that, right? With a more regal tone, he managed to ask, "What are you doing here?" for of course, Crown Princes must maintain dignity at all times.

Rosa paused here. She ran through the dialogue again. What had it been? Oh, yes. "Um, the scent of roses. Lured me in," she decided. She nodded. Her mouth stretched into a smile, though her eyes stayed dead. "Fancy meeting you here."

"I--" The Prince stood up, readjusting his clothes and avoiding eye contact with the dead-eyed Rosa of golden pupils. "I must be going."

Rosa frowned. That wasn't the dialogue. "You're wrong," she stated, hands on her hips. "You're supposed to say I'm Rosa."

Anything to get away from you, the Prince almost said. "Um. You're Rosa."

"No," she sighed. "I'm Rosa, like the roses."

"You're Rosa, like the roses," Prince Alexander parroted obediently. He inched away from her. Dignity? What was that?

Rosa smiled in satisfaction. "Good, good." She paused, then suddenly thrust herself upon the gazebo. The Prince jumped away so fast he climbed the bench of the gazebo and held a pillar in his arms in the time it would take to say "gazebo." "Ohoho, your joke!" shrilled the girl, triumphant in completing yet another event. Things were going quite smoothly, indeed!

"My joke," repeated the Prince. "I must go now." He climbed over the wall of the gazebo into the middle of the rose garden and fled, leaving Rosa patting herself on the back for a job well done. For surely, yes, it was a job well done. It was. Right...?

("See? This is why I ran away!" sobbed a narrator in a nonexistent room with a nonexistent voice, cradling his nonexistent heart and curled up in a nonexistent corner. "I couldn't take it no more!") 

There, there, previous narrator. You did your best.

As shall I.