The Nettle Tea Chronicles

Marissa

Marissa couldn't help but sigh as she worked the dough, lamenting both her overpowering work ethic and her lack of nearby family. It was Christmas Day, and there she was, still elbow deep in flour and dough at 4 in the morning, preparing for what was sure to be a slow day. Probably.

Sarah and Julie were both off for the holiday, but Marissa had no real reason to not work. On a day like this when things were bound to be either slow or basically dead, she was perfectly comfortable running the store entirely herself for the day. She had even brought down a handheld game console, because while she was busy now, she was pretty sure most of her day would be spent sitting alone behind the counter.

She had no family nearby, as everyone else - her parents and younger brother - remained near home. Trips across the country were expensive at the best of times, and travel around the holidays was not the best of times. Not to mention, she didn't want to force her workers to pick up extra shifts around the holiday, so it was easiest for her to stay here, work, and visit family on an off time of year.

And with most of her friends busy on Christmas Day itself, she didn't even really have friends to hang out online with, either. At least not until much later in the day when their own family gatherings had finished.

Altogether, to her, that meant she may as well work and make some money. Hopefully. She still needed people to show up and buy her food.

She sighed to herself while kneading the dough. If she had stopped to think about it, she really didn't need to wake up at 3a.m. like usual to get started on the prep work. There was no way that she'd need to make a normal day's worth of pastries and things for Christmas Day.

Still, she went about her work mostly as normal. Knowing that she would be alone all morning and really was in no rush, she connected her phone to the speaker system in the bakery that normally played music. She had long since gotten tired of the incessant holiday songs that had been on repeat for over a month now, and was more than happy to listen to an audiobook while she worked.

There was something almost therapeutic about it. Or meditative. She had spent years at this point doing the baking here, so every recipe and movement involved was seared into her body. She could bake anything they sold with little actual focus on it. She'd guess that as she went about her morning routine, she was probably splitting her concentration roughly 60-20, mostly focused on listening to the book while her hands went about the baking. And the remaining 20% was just her mind wandering about on its own.

It was rare that she got to do an entire day's work on her own while it remained low stress. Especially after the previous stretch of solo days that were basically destructive to her body. That had been like stepping into hell. But baking a little less than half of what was normal, knowing that was still probably too much, was relaxing. She did make a mental note to make sure she took the slower day to bake the treats for the Nettle Tea bake exchange. She may as well get them done on a slow day like that one.

Her holiday went about as perfectly as it could have, she supposed. She got the lion's share of the baking done before she opened the bakery, and even once she flipped the signs she barely had anything to do. Outside of the three hours around lunch time and the initial rush of people getting coffee on their way to other jobs that didn't close for the holiday, Marissa decided she had made the right call in bringing down a game system. She spent a good portion of her day sitting behind the bakery's counter planning out her farm in a game.

She made liberal use of her phone for that, too, because the game was not nearly as simple as it first appeared. As deep into it as she was now, she was constantly checking information guides about which crops and animals had the best yields to maximize her farming. And yet even with all of the constant reference sheet checking, she still found the game to be enjoyable and relaxing.

By the time she was ready to close the bakery for the day, she had made a decent amount of sales. While the typical pastries and other common purchases hadn't been as popular, she had sold enough full pies that she had to bake more - and that made her enough money to make working worth it for the day. It wasn't quite as good as a normal day, but she also didn't need to pay anyone for the work, so she was satisfied.

And, thanks to the relative lack of hustle and bustle, she was feeling pretty good after the 13 hour shift of "work". Cleaning up had even been easy, because she had been keeping things somewhat tidy as she went, so once she closed the front of the store down, she was able to put her book back on the speakers and clean up in that same lovely meditative state that she had baked in.

When she retreated upstairs to her apartment, Marissa popped her dinner into the oven to reheat, then showered off the day's work. Refreshed, she left the bathroom to the lovely smell of chicken permeating her apartment. Once she threw on a tee shirt and a pair of loose pajama bottoms, she moved back into the kitchen to snap a couple quick pictures.

The Nettle Tea Clan chat had been quiet all day, as she was sure everyone was busy with family. But now that it was almost 5p.m. for her, she figured some of the others would be wrapping up their own family celebrations. With a grin, she dropped the first picture into the chat.

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She had spread out all the baked treats she had made for everyone on her table, ready to pack them up. Before snapping the photo, she had even arranged them neatly, the same way she would have to post on the bakery's social media. The spread looked so good, she decided that she would actually post the picture to The Flour Basket's page later as a holiday greeting post.

{Bisky} : [Attached Image]

{Bisky} : Fresh out of the bakery, and coming from Cali with love. <3

She snickered at the post, proud of how good all the treats looked. She'd get them in the mail the following day so they'd still be as fresh as possible when everyone got theirs.

Still in a good mood, she sat down at her table with the day old rotisserie chicken that she had reheated. Evie's plan to eat a bucket of fried chicken had sounded really enticing, but Marissa had never made it anywhere other than the grocery store, so she only ended up with the rotisserie chicken instead of fried. It didn't matter too much, though - she loved a good rotisserie.

She had set up her phone on the kitchen table to watch a video while she ate, but got a response in the chat much sooner than she had expected. She stuffed another big bite of chicken in her mouth, and wiped off the grease on her fingers before handling her phone. She ended up getting up to wash her hands instead, deciding the paper towel hadn't quite done enough.

She returned to see a message and picture on the server from Evie. The picture immediately made Marissa laugh. She wasn't sure exactly how the other woman had gotten the angle right, but she was sitting in her computer chair with her whole rig behind her. She was leaning back quite far in the chair, with one leg and one arm held up high while her other arm cradled a bucket of fast-food fried chicken in her lap. The pose reminded Marissa immediately of the movie Flashdance, but she had never actually seen it.

Being that the image was also the first time she had seen what Evie actually looked like, she tried to imagine the face and voice together. She figured they matched. She had imagined the slightly deeper voice belonging to a stockier woman, but Marissa could tell that while Evie may not be stocky, she was still very tall. Probably imposing, too.

{Evie} : Looking forward to the treats! They look so good.

{Evie} : [Attached Image]

{Evie} : Gotta love a night that I can do nothing, gorge on fried chicken, and not feel bad about it!

{Bisky} : Lookin' good, girl!

Marissa grinned to herself, then glanced at her own chicken dinner. It wouldn't be quite the same vibe, but she decided to just have a little fun herself.

She tried to set up her own phone to take a similar picture of herself from her table. Her kitchen table only had wooden chairs, so she couldn't recline in them quite the same way, but she was able to get close enough, cradling the black plastic bottom of the container that her chicken came in on her lap. She was eating out of it, so the clear image of a rotisserie chicken breast was still easy to see peaking out above the plastic.

It took a couple tries to get the picture right, but once she was satisfied she went back to the chat and sent her own picture.

{Bisky} : [Attached Image]

{Evie} : lmao

{Evie} : Hell yeah! More chicken!

Marissa went back to her dinner, this time opting to eat with a fork so she had a clean hand to use her phone, and swapped periodically between the video she was watching and the chat with her friends. The other group members popped in with photos and greetings of their own. She saw full family photos from Kieran, Evan, Nyx, and Jasmine with Ashton's family. Firo also sent a group shot from wherever he was with a bunch of friends. It looked like it may have been a college dorm, or maybe a rented house.

Either way, it was really nice to see everyone's faces to close out her day. Despite not having family nearby and spending the day alone, Marissa wouldn't have necessarily said she was lonely. She liked her time alone, and wasn't sure she actually would have preferred all of the trappings that come with a big family holiday. Honestly, she didn't miss those big family get togethers for holidays all that much.

Instead, Marissa was perfectly happy with just her online family. Admittedly, Evie, Nyx, and Firo were still "new", but Kieran, Jazz, and Ashton were as much family for her at this point as her own family was. Evan too, but to a lesser extent. Hell, she definitely talked to her friends more often than she did her family. Even with it being Christmas, she only had an hour on the phone with them in a video call. There just wasn't much to be said or done after the catching up was done, and Marissa wasn't the chatty type.

But her friends? They could sit in a call for a full day as long as they were doing something together. She literally had done that more than once with both Jazz and Kieran. Or, at least, something closer to chatting for 20 hours in a 24 hour period. Even when there was a new game they wanted to play, they still had some adult responsibilities, after all. And they all wanted breaks for food and showers and things these days.

Actual no-life sessions were probably a thing of the past for them.

Once she finished her dinner, Marissa sat on her couch to relax with some TV. Clearly no one was around to actually play anything, but she was more than content to watch TV and mess around in the text chat - which turned out to be pretty lively in the end. Celebrations for Jazz, Ash, Evan, and Nyx were all winding down, and Evie was already just hanging out on her own, so they were getting quick in their replies, talking about their days.

Between sending her own messages, Marissa retrieved a cold beer from her fridge and laid out sprawled across her couch long-ways, eyes half split between the TV and the ceiling.

All things considered, while it wasn't going to be the most memorable Christmas - she spent most of her day working in the end - it wasn't a bad one. She smiled to herself, took another sip of her beer, and snapped a picture of herself holding it with a thumbs up.

{Bisky} : [Attached Image]

{Bisky} : Merry Christmas, weirdos.