William really couldn't figure out what had brought a female werebadger onto the campus and to his office while he tried to have a quick lunch. From what he remembered, Yvette's defense attorney was male and he thought he could smell weredog on him, not female. Of course, when he entered a guilty plea at the trial, it is possible that Yvette dismissed him and turned to a court appointed attorney. That was possible, but as far as he knew, Yvette had apparently gone through sessions with Frances and was now apparently apologetic for her past misdeeds.
He couldn't explain that, but figured that for the moment, not having to deal with her a hundred years for her sentence would be for the best. If she returned to college after that, he could be more certain that she had truly repented. If she did need help, he was for it, so long as he and his family were not drug though the mud to do it. However, with the interruption gone, William returned to his sandwich and returned to preparing for his next class.
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Meanwhile, Martha enjoyed a quiet lunch of her own. It amounted to a sandwich made with wheat bread, slices of mackerel that she'd found at the local super market along with an American Cheese slice and some lettuce. It tasted fairly good and even surprisingly good.
"I suppose it's just the cat in me," Martha smiled to herself as she slipped on a pair of sneakers and stepped outside the house before giving a brief stretch, "Fish just smells so tasty now..."
It was a sign of her werecat instincts coming to the fore. It wasn't that she hated fish before or that Eric's scent as a weremerman made her hungry, but her tastes seemed to be more attuned to things like fish and even birds. She'd even had a couple of dreams in which she and William were both fully transformed and were taking turns tossing live mice into each other's open mouths. It was an odd dream, but made sense as cats and foxes were both known for preying on rats and mice.
She put that out of her mind and made her way out of the house, as thinking over what her were-instincts found as tasty not the main part of her day. Her main mission was to get some clothes that would be suitable for gym activities as well as being professional as a school employee, which included looking into the proper pants that wouldn't come off as personal exercise clothing or anything that would look like she was trying to seduce anyone, sports bras that could contain and support her in case she had to do some running or jogging, and cotton underwear wouldn't hurt either. She also figured to get some gym socks as well. She had a fair number of them, but most of her socks were actually better suited to the sort of clothing she'd worn as an elementary school teacher and given that both she and William had been growing more physically active as weres, Martha figured some gym socks weren't a bad idea.
That meant Martha had to go shopping which meant a bit of a hike out to the local K-Mart in Moon Lake. Contrary to what many might think, Moon Lake wasn't so totally isolated that all of its stores and goods were local institutions or were locally produced. For many food products that was possible, given some of the farms and ranches on the very edge of the town's city limits and the fact that predatory weres could always augment their own diet on wild game that she'd heard from Nate that Moon Lake active farmed to keep all the animal numbers balanced.
However, they couldn't have many of the manufacturing type jobs to make toys or many of the other goods that people bought or even the industries around making cloth. Moon Lake might have some tailors that could sew cloth into clothing that weres could wear, which made a shop like Awareness possible for smaller weres that didn't have fursonas that were so drastically larger than their human forms that were drastically bigger than their human forms, but that didn't mean Moon Lake was actually making the cloth used. Moon Lake was too small a town for that, and that meant it needed contact with the areas outside it in order to get many of the goods it needed. This opened things up to the opening of stores and restaurants that had headquarters outside of Moon Lake, as roads were built that brought people into Moon Lake for either college and/or work. This was were all the rules and forms required to keep Moon Lake's secret also came into play.
Martha remembered seeing the K-Mart when the Anderson family first moved into town. It was on the edge of one of the spokes that made up Moon Lake, and Martha was quick to walk in that direction. It might take a little while to get there, but Moon Lake had done a good job of putting in sidewalks to prevent there being dangers of accidents. Her walk was calm and quiet and Martha found herself enjoying the scent of all the trees that were either in people's lawns or in a park, or along some of the more public buildings that she passed. Some of the building had older designs than others, but Martha could help but marvel at how well preserved they were. Martha remembered seeing old buildings before, but many that were this well maintained and often this old were museum type places. She'd seen others that were theoretically younger but in much worse shape.
"This place needs to stay safe," Martha said to herself with some marvel in her voice, "not just for all us weres... but for the town that they built... The Society they let my family and I join."
She walked briskly and politely waved and nodded to a few people on the streets that she passed by and largely ignored the cars driving through Moon Lake on their way to Seattle or some other location further west. The scent car exhaust was a bit of a put off, but that was something that had to be put up with and in no time, Martha could see her destination coming up. K-Mart might not be the biggest of general purpose stores, as Walmart was forcing many stores to go under, but the one in Moon Lake was still running and doing fairly well. Martha gripped the straps of her purse and smiled as she knew she would be able to get what she needed for her days subbing at the Middle School for the girl's gym class.
"Thank goodness for were strength," Martha thought to herself as she walked across the parking lot and gave a slight chuckle, "until Will and I can get a second car... I'll need to carry everything back home."