Chapter 61 61. Fshion is Hard

Rippa took Buttons out to a few fancy clothing shops. The kid was soon going to attend some big events in her official capacity as Her Grace Lady Buttons, and Rippa wanted her little friend to dress accordingly. Not that Buttons had nothing to wear for the occasion, but Rippa wished to contribute in any way she could.

However, after the fourth store, she gave up. They found a bench and sat down to rest their legs.

Buttons, wedged between Rippa and Madam J.D., soon fell asleep from exhaustion.

The child was too small. Buttons was a good head shorter than kids around her age and, even with the prosthetic, weighed only about fifty pounds. She was so small Rippa could just pick her up with one hand and swing her around like a nunchuck, which the kid never found very amusing. There weren’t that many formal dresses made for a child that small.

Sure, there were some for special occasions, but they didn’t feel quite right in Rippa’s eyes. They were too… miniature adults. Cute, yes. Pretty, sure. Some even dared to try sexy. But all lacked that little baseline regal elegance of the dresses Buttons usually wore in the pocket dimension.

Alternatives had too many frills and laces and massively puffy shoulders and super-wide skirts. Rippa had to concede they were cute, but she couldn’t help but think they looked too… kindergarten birthday parties. Too Disney.

Stretching her legs, Rippa leaned back on the bench. Ignoring the wall of smartphones surrounding the bench, she browsed through Etsy on her phone. There were more candidates than on Amazon, but still, Rippa wasn’t satisfied. She showed some to Madam J.D., but the nanny didn’t find any of them up to her standard. After a few more minutes of scrolling, Rippa gave up. Nothing in the off-the-shelf category was good enough for Buttons’ special occasion.

‘So, it’s either tailor-made or Queen Elsa,’ Rippa concluded. She glanced at Madam J.D. The nanny really had done a fantastic job dressing Buttons in a perfect balance between cuteness and class. ‘Maybe that’s the difference between old money and new money,’ Rippa wondered. Or perhaps she was just too biased in favor of the pocket dimension staff’s taste in fashion.

After Buttons woke up, Rippa took the kid to a more casual store. There, she bought some lace socks and Pixar character underwear for Buttons, so in the end, the shopping trip wasn’t all for naught.

Coming out of the store, Rippa and Buttons were blinded for a moment when a teenage girl took a photo of the two with the camera flash on.

“Hey, no flash!” Others berated the girl. “Learn the rules!”

Rippa, while rubbing her eyes with her left hand, raised the other hand to signal, “Let’s not raise too much of a fuss about this.” To be honest, she was always annoyed that people treated Buttons like a spectacle. However, she also gave them credit for keeping a respectable distance and trying not to bother the kid too much. If Rippa had to choose, she would pick occasional camera flashes over a bunch of loudmouths screaming in Buttons’ face demanding that she reverse global warming and such.

Still, it was too embarrassing for the girl. Her face turned bright red. She fumbled with her phone to change the camera mode.

Rippa and Buttons took some seconds to recover before stepping into the portal that had opened before them.

Before stepping in, Madam J.D. turned around, looked at the crowd, and made a small bow.

People who had been following Buttons for the past few hours all cheered and clapped and said goodbye to the Jedi nanny.

“Bye, Buttons! Bye, Madam!”

“Come again!”

Madam J.D. straightened and stepped into the portal that soon closed behind her.

The crowd then began to disperse, but with an afterglow, chatting among themselves excitedly, as if leaving a zoo.

***

Back in the palace, Rippa first brought Buttons to the washbasin in the bedroom and made the kid wash her hands and face. She then helped Buttons get changed. Today, Rippa felt bold and put a pair of desert camo cargo shorts and a pink T-shirt on Buttons. Rippa’s Amazon algorithm had been offering great deals on kids’ apparel lately.

The new socks and underwear went into the newly installed wardrobe between the corner desk and the door. Goggles had spawned the furniture as Buttons wished to keep the clothing Rippa had gifted in her bedroom, not inside the magical storage in the ether. As she put the socks and underwear in their corresponding drawers, Rippa noticed she had bought quite many pairs of socks for the kid over time.

“You know, my socks always disappear,” said Rippa. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind if I lost the whole pair, but it’s always just one of the two.”

“Ha! That wouldn’t bother me too much,” Buttons gloated. It was true. The kid only put a sock on the prosthetic foot when she was about to go out in the world, so when she was in the pocket dimension, a complete pair wasn’t always necessary.

“Yeah, good for you.”

“I can ask Goggles to find your socks.”

Rippa had to pause and think about it. She shook her head and declined the offer. “No, I don’t want him handling my smelly socks.”

With that, Rippa walked out onto the balcony next to the writing desk. There, she leaned against the black wrought-iron railing and took a breath of fresh air. The breeze felt good. Had she been a smoker, she would have lit a cigarette.

The balcony looked out to the left of the palace, toward the lake in the distance. Rippa squinted her eyes and looked farther. Far beyond the lake, at a great distance, she was sure she saw something moving above the dark canopy of the woods. She kept watching, and yes, it was moving.

“Buttons, Bronto! Bronto!”

The kid hurried out onto the balcony and squatted down and pressed her face against the bars, for the horizontal rail was exactly at her eye level. The railing had been raised up to prevent someone taller than the kid, namely Rippa, from tipping over and falling down. But just high enough. Had the railing been taller, Goggles had argued, the balcony would feel like a human-sized birdcage.

“Which one?” asked Buttons, squinting her eyes.

“Can’t tell…” Rippa kept looking. Then she remembered. “Well, I can’t tell them apart anyway.” Which was true. She had only seen them from this distance.

“Ah, yeah…” The kid nodded.

“Aw, it sucks,” Rippa pouted. “You guys never take me to the Dino Safari.”

That was, unfortunately for Rippa, a hard boundary. Goggles had been adamant that Rippa was not to visit the Dino Safari until the paleontologists were finally and conclusively done with studying the physical appearance of dinosaurs. Just in case Rippa suddenly up and decided to enter a college and become a paleontologist.

“That’d be giving you an unfair advantage,” Goggles had said.

Rippa liked that side of Goggles. She, however, felt Goggles was being overly cautious. For one, according to Goggles himself, the dinos weren’t real. They were constructs modeled by Goggles. He, nevertheless, had said his dinos were ‘close enough’ to have a significant impact on academia. Hence, the Dino Safari was a no-go zone for Rippa, although she had no intention of walking all the way out there to begin with. Two, Rippa couldn’t picture herself going to college to become a paleontologist. She couldn’t even finish high school. Yes, she liked dinosaurs, but studying them as a job? Fuck, no.

Besides, whenever Buttons came back from riding dinosaurs in the Safari, for some inexplicable reason, the kid was always covered in dung and sticky ooze, and smelled absolutely terrible, which begged the question of why Goggles would allow that to happen to Buttons. That, nevertheless, was enough of a discouragement to make Rippa rethink wanting to visit the Dino Safari for a few weeks, until the next time she spotted something in the distance again.

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