Dominika and Nico Reynard visiting on a Fat Fox Friend Friday evening. Perhaps they're on their way to visit Dominic Mephitto to wish him happy birthday and hang out for a bit, they better stop by the convenience store and grab some snacks or swing by the pizza place first, though. Like I am in real life, I doubt many of my characters really care much about celebrating their birthdays in any serious capacity or expect any sort of gifts, but a visit from friends bearing snacks and/or pizza is appreciated any day of the year, regardless of occasion.
----- We're getting into territory where I'm using photos that are a year old as backgrounds--I don't have any photos from the places where I spent the first 20ish years of my life, so I'm using this random shot as a stand-in for the memories I have of walking with my own younger siblings in the evening sometimes when we wanted to get snacks from one of the convenience stores a few blocks from the house, an experience I'm sure is almost a nightly occurrence for Dominika and Nico.
Of course, this was the mid-2000s, which is sorta the time period I realized most of my storytelling probably takes place in, a strange mishmash of the years between 2004 and 2024 experiencing a strange sort of time compression. Visiting my old turf from the mid-2000s recently, I found out that the corner store I used to visit often, that I figure would be sorta the model for the Panda Market run by Hari and his wife Kamala, had closed down at some point, likely not surviving the pandemic. (Unlike how I portray the Panda Market, though, this store didn't have any sort of bakery attached to it--that aspect comes from a bakery nearby I remember visiting in the 1990s with my grandpa, that I believe had shut down in the late 1990s.) The place my grandparents used to take me to get my hair cut is still seemingly there, though, as is a local Italian restaurant that may have influenced some aspects of Bennetton's Pizza.
I doubt any of the locations I photograph have any 1:1 equivalent in my universe, but rather, I use the photos as stand-ins for locations that do exist in canon. Many of the locations in canon are created from happier memories of the past, it seems, like the Panda Market and Bennetton's Pizza, or based off things in my current area that I find oddly interesting, like the Industrial District and the End of the Road.
Nico loves Dominika with all his heart, but often finds her cheerful nature a tad annoying and sometimes jokes that Dominika is three minutes older than him because he just needed a couple minutes alone after sharing a womb with her for nine months.
