Eons. That is what it had felt like since she could let loose, let her hair down, and not have to concentrate on work all the God damn time. And it was long overdue. Thought this wasn't quite the party she had envisioned on her first day off in ages, it was a nice break from the bank robbings and petty thefts that made up her every moment of every day. The sidewalks in Detroit were cracked, weeds growing out of pavement in erratic patterns, the buildings falling into disrepair. When she found the building she needed she stopped, soaking in the detail of the small windows, the peeling paint on the front door- the entire charm and whimsy of the store where her great-great many times over grandmother had her beginnings.

With a happy sigh Katniss pushed open the door to the small dress shop. The place smelled of dust and age; everything looked untouched, abandoned. Materials of all types laid out in a haphazard manner, machines in mass quantities still sitting upon counter tops. She wondered if they even worked? Pushing her dark braid behind her ears she sighed heavily. This place was a wasteland. And yet it was hers. She had inherited it through the death of her Grandmother, who had it passed down to her through generations of the family before her.

Well, partially owned. Fifty percent. The other half of the shop had belonged to her great great's best friend since their college years. She would not have even known about the place if she had not received a letter from the landlord, demanding payment on the next year's rent or removal of all items within quarters. With only two weeks to make a decision, the young girl thought it was prudent to one, visit the shop to see what should be done and two, contact the great times a hundred granddaughter of the joint owner.

The phone call had been awkward, the two young women knowing each other by reputation only, and never having spoken in person. It had taken some coaxing, but Katniss finally had the woman agree to meet her and make a decision on the future of their grandmother's historic dreams. And, to make the situation less tense, she had also invited along her friend from Philadelphia, ZomBee, to make it a girl's weekend. The decision to invite her was only further confirmed when it turned out that ZomBee's great-great grandmother, too, had known the others. 'A meeting of the new generation,' the girl thought with a rush of nerves.

Neither of the other two had arrived, so Katniss walked into what she assumed was the old office. Pictures littered the walls, aging and falling apart, happy smiling faces of a group of women from every available surface. With a smile of her own, she reached toward a few and began to pull them off the wall toward her, examining them at a closer perspective.

CASHMONEYMILLIONAIRE pushed the door open with her elbow. She was carrying a stake of papers, things lawyers or someone important shoved into her hands earlier about the building her great great something or the other grandma had owned. Either way, CASH found herself in this old shop filled with old dusty things and the bell above the door didn't even ring. What was up with that. CASH stepped further into the seamstress store and looked around. None of this interested her as none of it would make her any money.

Hello.

She called out, almost a question.

Anyone here?

After getting a phone call from her friend Katniss, asking her to leave her small Philly apartment and accompany her on an adventure to the streets of Detroit, ZomBee couldn't help but to jump at the chance. She had been holed up in her apartment for what seemed like days and needed a good girls getaway. Katniss was meeting someone for the first time and didn't want to go alone. Afterall, the three women had intertwined relatives in the past, so if they all hit it off it could be the beginning of new adventures for all.

After settling into her hotel room and unpacking a few things she decided to head over to the old shop where the women would meet.

The door to the shop was already unlocked. ZomBee turned the handle and walked through the creaking door. She inhaled stale dusty air and as she exhaled had a coughing fit.

What the hell am I doing here? She thought to herself. This trip had better be worth it

Through a ray of dust filled sunlight she observed a young woman looking back at her. ZomBee could tell the woman was thinking the same thing she was. Who was she and how did we all agree to be here. Bee decided to speak first.

Hi, i'm ZomBee. You must be the woman Katniss told me about briefly. Have you seen Katniss anywhere?

Bee extended her hand out to the woman, in hopes this meeting would go over well

"Hello. Anyone here?"

The female voice was unfamiliar and frightened her a bit, and with a shake she dropped the stack of photos she was holding onto the old, decrepit desk. With a deep breath the girl quickly straightened out her clothing, moving toward the office door. 'This is it, this is her,' she thought to herself, squaring her shoulders and attempting to look more mature and business-like.

Another voice, also female but much more familiar, began to speak from the front room as she made her way through the various tables. She approached the two, smiling warmly at ZomBee, and trying to smile equally as warm toward the other woman- blonde and slim, she couldn't help but notice jealously.

"Bee, glad you could make it," the gray-eyed girl said with a nod toward her friend.

Turning toward the other girl she extended her hand and smiled once more.

"Hello, I'm Katniss, you must be Cash?"

Nerves over took the girl and she immediately froze her facial features into a slight grimace.

"So I guess this is where our grandmothers spent most of their time, eh?" she asked hesitantly, pushing aside a thick layer off dust off of one of the nearby sewing machines.

Cash started laughing. Mad hater, lost her shit laughing. She clutched her stomach and bent over, manically laughing. Cash looked around the place, at the two women standing in front of her.

Really?

She laughed through the words and breathing was becoming difficult. Eventually she sobered up from the laughs. A giggle popped out here and there.

This place….

Cash turned her attention to Katniss and then Zombee.

Hi.

Bee's first instinct after seeing the reaction of Cash was to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. There was no way that she wanted to stick around and see just how crazy this woman really was. After a a quick moment of fight or flight, Bee decided to stick around if only to be there for Katniss. There had to be some truth to safety in numbers, right?

The three young women fell awkwardly silent for thirty long seconds before Bee broke the silence

Well, i'm so glad we could all make it. Though we all grew up in different areas of the country, i'm sure our great ancestors would be looking down at us with smiles that somehow we were all brought together today.

Bee hoped that Cash was just projecting nervous energy, but something told her there was something off with the woman than the other didn't know about, but might eventually learn.

This place....

Picking up where Cash left off

This place is something else for sure. Not much on the surface, but if I know Katniss, she has been here well before us and has been looking for clues as to what we are doing here exactly. There has to be some sort of mementos here to help us recreate what went on here all those years ago.

Katniss blinked several times. If, on the one hand as she wanted to do, she made eye contact with ZomBee, this other young woman- Cash- would most definitely pick up on the exchange of glances that would pass between them. More than ever all the young, dark haired girl wanted to do was make sure that her friend had just witnessed what she had seen with her own eyes. Lunacy? A woman overwhelmed with the dump of a shop they now had to sort through?

The girl went for the other hand- tactful ignoring of the situation. With a slight twitch in the corner of her mouth, all she could do was simply repeat what both Cash and ZomBee had said before her.

"Yep... this place."

Still glancing out the corner of her eye at Cash, Katniss nodded along enthusiastically as ZomBee spoke.

"You're right. Definitely right. I uh, I didn't get to do much looking around, just poked around here and there, but there has to be something redeeming about this place."

Turning to Cash she shrugged and smiled nervously.

"That is, if you find this place worthwhile to even invest in. I'm not sure myself, to be honest."

Turning away from the two other girls, Katniss narrowed her dark eyes and began further examining what she had merely looked over before. The machines were severely in disrepair. Fabric swatches, hanging off of walls and draped over tables, were much too old to do anything with. So perhaps it wouldn't be a sewing or clothing shop. But the building itself- that was in decent shape, wasn't it?

And as she thought it, she realized that the paint was peeling. There were cracks in the foundation, years upon years old, that no amount of patching would fix. Was there anything, anything at all, that would make this entire trip worthwhile?

With an apologetic smile over her shoulder at the other two Katniss shrugged.

"Maybe we're better off just getting dinner, signing some paper work and relieving ourselves of this burden."

She moved her hand toward the door, accidentally swinging her hand into a large stack of aging newspapers. Grace certainly wasn't her middle name, nor was it a word that could describe her even on her best day. The stack of newspapers toppled over, a large swell of 'plods' and 'thunks' and the occasional 'hiss' of a random page being thrown free from the rest. Shaking her head, the girl sunk to her knees and began to fix the mess she had made.

Sorry to interrupt but how many guys are watching this thread and reading their post? Lol

Raises hand

Did anyone else hear that?

CASHMONEYMILLIONAIRE shifted her eyes from that woman to the other one to the papers that were slowly falling from the sky. Everything was in slower motion than normal and CASH sighed, her shoulders slumped and she pulled one of the papers out from the air. The voices, they had started again. But wait! This was excellent, CASH thought to herself as she looked over the piece of paper she had in her hand. She wasn't reading it, don't get the wrong impression here, she was just looking at it as her mind tripped on the most obvious idea. "Sorry to interrupt…" they said to her. Of course, the voices would tell her why the crap she was here with this one and that one.

To the basement!

CASH exclaimed while she simultaneously raised the hand that held the paper into the air. This was meant to spark both excitement and fear into the other woman into the room. Neither of them looked excited, fear though, fear was there. CASH winked.

Okay, I need a shovel.

CASH watched Katniss the clumsy and Zombee the positive exchange glances. CASH rolled her eyes at them. Wasn't it obvious what the shovel was for. Man, she'd have to teach these girls some tricks.

…For the bodies buried under the floorboards.

She stated miffed at the other girls in the room.

Chop Chop! There are things to discover down under.

CASH made her way to the closets door, which she opened and stepped into a tiny, dark closet. She stepped right back out and moved to the next door which opened up to stairs, going down. She laughed manically and skipped down the stairs into the darkness. Once at the bottom she flicked open her lighter and a small amount of light showed her the lost secrets in this basement. Her eyes grew in astonishment, her heart skipped a giddy beat at what sat in front of her and her mind raced with many destructive and horrifying ideas…until Katniss and Zombee joined her with a lantern and CASH could properly see what was in front of her.

What? What is this thing? THIS IS NOT A HUMAN TORTURING DEVICE. What the heck is a paper printing machine doing in the basement of a old maid's clothing shop.

CASH sighed again.

Where's my shovel? There better be some bodies down here for me to loot.

So much commotion going on all around her, ZomBee Was unsure where to place her focus. CASH seemed to be hearing voices, while Katniss had just knocked over a stack of old dusty newspapers. CASH had fled to the basement with a shovel in hand, Katniss followed shortly after with a lantern, while ZomBee fell behind to inspect the papers a little closer.

First Don of Detroit
Let's Get Some Shoes

The title of the article reads. ZomBee is instantly intrigued and runs downstairs quickly after the other two. Plus, there was an old, stale, and marginally creepy vibe when she found herself all alone in the front of the store.

Hey girls, look what I just found. It has our great-great-grandmothers' names written side by side on the front page...and look at the heading of this article. Surely, this has to be the reason we're all here today?

The young woman said with a renewed enthusiasm as she pushed the paper toward the other two.

As the girls gathered around in the basement, ZomBee noticed the old looking machine behind Katniss and realized this is the exact area where all the hard work and countless hours were put in to produce the rest of the old, dusty papers upstairs. She couldn't help but to daydream what it must've been like all those years ago for the three women on the front of the paper.

Katniss' eyes could barely adjust to the dim light as she followed CASH downstairs into the basement. Thankfully, a lantern was on standby and she grabbed it on the way down the rickety old steps, turning a knob and thankfully seeing that there was still life left in the old device.

Her mind was racing, putting together pieces of a puzzle that seemed to be falling into place. The old shop; the reconnecting with the great-grandaughters of her relatives; the basement with what was, yes, most definitely a printing press; and the newspapers... stacks upon stacks littered around the shop.

The thought occurred to her that perhaps the sewing shop hadn't been much of a sewing shop at all.

"It was a front," Katniss said with a slight grin as she took the paper from ZomBee, examining the names and dates, crinkling the aging paper between her fingertips and narrowing in on the words themselves. "This whole shop had to be a front for what they actually did here. They produced a newspaper. No, a tabloid?"

Narrowing her eyes and tilting her head, she began to read a sentence here, a sentence there. A larger smile playing on her face, the dark haired girl turned her focus onto the printing press. Handing the paper back to ZomBee, she walked over, running her hands over the smooth metal workings and looking for signs of wear and tear. It seemed to have held up with time and thankfully so, as Katniss was beginning to see potential where there was none before.

"I don't know how to use these things... wait, wait," she mumbled to herself as she found a large switch in the back of the machine. With a click she flipped it, and after a small shudder start the machine began to whirl and clank to life, printing phantom papers from decades before.

Katniss wrinkled her nose in excitement, scrunching her eyes up in delight at the machine, then upon CASH and ZomBee in turn.

"I think you're right, Bee. I think maybe there was a reason we were brought here today. I don't know about you, CASH, but maybe selling this place would be a damn shame after all. We may have just stumbled into some sort of jackpot."

What did you just say?

CASH abruptly stopped trying to dig up the floor of the basement and looked over at Katniss. She brushed her blond hair from her face and stood up from being hunched over the shovel.

Did you just say my favorite word ever?

Her eyes lit up with excitement.

CASH MONEY!

CASH smiled brilliantly and tossed the shovel toward a wall they weren't near. She walked over to the printing thing and looked at it like it had just fallen from the sky.

Okay, what do you need me to do?

ZomBee was focusing on CASH's reaction to the possibility of making money, she almost forgot where she was. She sometimes let her thoughts get the best of her. She snapped out of it quickly enough to hear Katniss speaking.

I definitely think, we should look into this further before making a decision on what to do with the shop. I mean, we could possibly have the chance to do something big here. Something that we were destined to do even before we knew it.

Bee always tried to look at the brighter side of things, while trying to push out the negatives. Even when she knew that there was a lot on the line and the possibility of failing was present, she refused to let it show.

How hard to you think it would be to try to put this to some real use? Do we even know what we are doing?

She asked, letting her excitement spill out into her voice.

Katniss shrugged her shoulders at the other two young women, but a contagious smile broke out over her face despite her hesitancy at where to start.

"No, we don't know what we're doing, but I mean, it's in our blood, right? Look at this-" she said, gently tugging the paper back from ZomBee once more and pointing at the names at the top. "Those are our great-grandmother's names. If they could do it back then, with little resources or little rights, then why can't we do it?"

She glanced back at the printing press for a moment, before turning to look at CASH and ZomBee once more.

"I mean, we could do this. We could take what they did and make it into something profitable. We basically have this space for free, and what are the options, really? Sell it, or use it. It's definitely not in shape to be a sewing or dress shop, but with the right cover operation upstairs we could keep this place running down here."

With an excitement burning in her chest and making it's way throughout her body, Katniss tossed the paper into the air and did a very uncharacteristic squeal.

"We could do this... I can write decently. I've been to school and was commended on a lot of what I did there. I hope I'm not crazy, am I crazy?" Katniss asked, looking at CASH before realizing she probably wasn't the best judge of character.

"What do you think?"

Uhm....

CASH ignored answering the question by walking over to the printing press to tinker with it.

You know, this won't be that hard to figure out.

She leaned over and looked into the contraption.

I'm in. Lets do this.

Hearing Katniss asking aloud if she was crazy, Zombee quickly turned her head to CASH and then back to Katniss and shook her head in a silent 'No'.

Katniss, we all may be a little crazy. This may not pan out in the long run, but it's damn well worth a shot. If our great-greats could pull it off, i'm sure we can too.

We have everything we need here, well, almost everything.

Zombee holds her hands out palms up and motions them around the room.

We definitely need to get this place in shape again, but I say, let's do this.

Bee picks up the old paper, and it reads across the top

Tea Time!

I propose we call this:

Tea Time! Gen-X

The three young women nod in agreement and start getting to work on their new project.