a new year a new day
After a month away being back in the shop felt like coming home. The floors were still the same gleaming dark wood they had been when she left, the shelves filled with all sorts of rare oddities and curiosities. The pleasant scent of agarwood incense drifted through the air projecting an aura of expense and exoticism something her family traded on. Few knew just how expensive the scent they inhaled when they came in through the doors was. It was a litmus test, when you had a customer able to identify it you knew they were a special one, one who would have you scour the ends of the earth for the rarest objects possible. It was those clients she lived for, fellow appreciators of the rare and odd.
The noon sun filtered through the curtained windows of Diagon Alley. The shop had been there for over three hundred years and carried the prestige of that in it's aged bones. Her family took pride in the shop unlike the owners of Borgin and Burkes, the deplorable antiquities shop around the corner in Knockturn Alley. The shop was nothing like that dusty and crowded store that wished it had the caveat of her families business. It never would as long as they kept selling overpriced nasty dark artifacts to those willing to spend more than was necessary on some of the darkest objects out there. Personally she felt more than half of the items in that shop should be burned for how ugly they were.
Normally on a day like today she'd be in the back room, cataloging and photography the new items she'd brought home. Today though was Oliver's granddaughter's first birthday. There was no way anyone could make the lovable shopkeeper work today, he was practically apart of the family with how long he'd work for the family. That was the reason why Nicolette was currently sitting a on stool behind the counter reading the newest Witch Weekly as the bell over the door rang signaling someone stepping inside.