fandomtownies | Luke's Diner, February 8 (Monday)

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Luke's Diner, February 8 (Monday)

The collective sigh of relief from the staff today when Lacey didn't greet them in the aggressively perky tone of I-have-an-idea was so potent, that rustling noise could actually have been napkins fluttering in the resultant breeze. They weren't so relieved a few minutes later, when she set them to completely draining and cleaning out the deep fryer. In her (and the fryer's) defense, it needed it.

Lacey, meanwhile, would be soliciting Farmville neighbors to send her bricks and nails, and hoping the boys back in Dog River never got the idea to send those to her as actual gifts someday.

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Luke's is open, and thematic -- even if Lacey did it entirely by accident.

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Who gives people bricks and nails as gifts, anyway?

Unless you're into that sort of thing anyway . . .

Staring at paperwork all morning gave Angua a surprisingly big appetite. More appropriately, it gave her a surprisingly big desire to find something big and meaty, chase it down, rip it to shreads, and consume all the really good, juicy, fatty parts.

But she was going to be good. She was....going to at least get out of the station and...be good.

"You wouldn't happen to just have a...really...big salad, would you?"

Lacey looked up from her laptop at the new arrival and grinned, not purely because she was only one nail and three bricks short of building her Farmville stable already.

"Oh, hi! I can get the kitchen to whip you up a salad, no problem. What kind would you like? Caesar, Cobb, house, something else?"

"A lot of vegetables," Angua said with a nod. "And no meat."

A particularly pecerptable person might have noticed a slightly whimpering quality to that last part.

And then Angua remembered her manners. "Please."

Typically, perhaps, Lacey was more caught up on the pause before the 'please' than the whimpering quality; it was the sort of tone that crept into her own voice enough that she didn't make much of a note of it. Since the spinach salad today had bacon in it, that left either the house salad (boring) or the pear and Roquefort (http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Roquefort-Pear-Salad/Detail.aspx) she'd whipped up this morning.

"I'll have that up for you in a few minutes," Lacey promised, sending an order for the latter back to the kitchen. "Can I get you anything else in the meantime? Coffee, water?"

Angua had to take a moment to consider that question.

"That depends," said Angua, "on whether or not the coffee could likely have a second life filling potholes."

Pause.

"Or creating them."

Wait, wait. Would that be a good thing? Or a bad thing? Because Lacey was awfully proud of her coffee. (Shh, she had to have something.)

Cue the wibble-face! Or not quite, but wibble-face was waiting in the wings just in case, fluttering its metaphorical hands, trying to remember to breathe, and glancing spaztastically around for its possible cue.

". . . would that make you want it, or not?"

Typically, accepting anything around Ankh-Morpork was an activity done only in dire circumstances, but the potency of the anxiousness aroma now tingling in the air was enough to make Angua accept just to save face.

Or save wibbly-face, in this instance.

"I'll have a cup," she said, "thanks. Just a little cream."

Typically, according to the residents of Dog River, accepting anything unsolicited from Lacey was the same sort of activity. But then, Lacey would argue, that was because it was Dog River.

She might not even be wrong about that. Sometimes.

You know that napkin-fluttering sigh of relief the staff had let out earlier? Lacey managed one almost as big all on her own . . . or was that just how quickly she scurried to fill a cup of coffee? (Look, see? Vacuum carafes, even! New ones! And she'd made sure they were a little nicer -- in her opinion -- than the ones the Perk had. So there. Nice, fresh coffee that didn't overcook on the burners! What did it say that her self-esteem rode a little too heavily on that?

. . . don't answer that.)

"There you are," she said, looking much more cheerful now as she set the cup down on the counter along with a small cream pitcher still frosty from the cooler. "The salad'll be along in a minute. You know, I don't think I've seen you around before . . ."

"I'd be worried if you had," said Angua. Really worried. But not at all surprised. She eyed the cup of coffee a little, drawing in a breath to take in the scent and realizing that everything really did check aroma-wise. A very good sign. She picked up the pitcher to pour in the cream. "I'm new in town, unless you count a visit about a year ago from a convention."

. . .

***
Flash-cut to what looks like a bizarre fantasy bastardization of a convention center, Fandom-sized, and Lacey standing in the middle of a crowd looking lost and confused as people walk by in all directions, dressed as characters from Ratman, King of the Bracelets, Space Battles, Galaxy Quest, Lightning Bug, Mister What, Bitterwoman, and so forth. Pan in on Lacey looking increasingly out of place, until finally as the camera pushes in close on her face, a giant costume alien tail comes sweeping into frame and knocks her over--
***

"Oh, I wouldn't have seen you then," she said apologetically. "I don't really do convention sorts of things. Anyway, welcome to Fandom!" This, too brightly and with a slightly nervous giggle. "I'm Lacey Burrows. What brings you to the island?"

[OOC: Argh, work ate me. D: And going to super-SP for the next several hours too, I'm afraid, but will definitely pick up tags ASAP . . .]

Dogs could smell fear; werewolves could smell everything. And right now, even with the coffee cup held up to her nose for an overly long sip, all Angua could smell was...well, she didn't know how to describe it. It was a sort of wavey yellow flailing type of colour.

The sip was extended a little longer as Angua tried to think of a good answer to that question.

"Needed to get away for a bit," she settled on as she settled down the cup finally. "Seemed like a nice place when I visited."

"It is a nice place," Lacey agreed readily; she'd gotten pretty attached to the island in the time she'd been here. "More than a little insane sometimes, but I assume someone's already warned you about that."

The cook hit the order bell, and she turned to retrieve the salad and set it on the counter. "If that's not what you had in mind, I'll be happy to swap it out for you."

"Several times," said Angua, "and thank you, this'll be..." There was the slightest pause of regret toward the utter lack of meat involved, "fine. And really, this place doesn't seem as much as Ankh-Morpork. Have you been here long? Maybe I'm still too green."

Lacey did not, luckily, pick up on the regret, or there would be flailing. Nobody wanted that, right?

"Almost two years," Lacey began, then had to double-take. "Oh my gosh. Already. Wow, the time flies, and around here that could be literal. You never know."

She turned to polish a nonexistent spot off the counter, offering, "A lot of days are fairly normal, but keep in mind my definition of normal's extended to include any day the sodas in my storage closet are at war with each other."

"One of my last big assignments," Angua offered ruefully in return, "involved tracking down a large petrified scone. Probably not as messy as warring sodas, I'll grant, but I had a feeling when the second day I was here, it rained vanilla, I wasn't in for that big of a change from...home."

How come everyone was better equipped for this place than she'd been? NOT THAT LACEY WAS WIBBLY ABOUT IT. She was mostly over that by now. "And the last place I lived," she replied by way of contrast, "had so much of nothing going on most of the time that half the police force could spend their time on a cold case."

Okay, she couldn't leave it at that. "Half the force of two. The cold case was who spray-painted Grad '68 on the town watertower."

Lacey vaguely wondered what would happen if it rained vanilla in Dog River, and decided Davis and Hank would get drunk on it, Karen would facepalm at Davis, Wanda would discourse for hours about rare varieties of vanilla while nobody listened to her, Emma would start planning a cake-baking day, and Oscar would probably run out into the main intersection and yell "Stupid weather! My taxes pay your salary!"

It was funny, then, how much a place like Dog River might resemble a place like Ankh-Morpork, if you shuffled around the right people.

"Sounds a little like the Watch before my own heyday," she said, grinning a little. "Our force was pretty pathetic before Vimes came in."

There appear to be Mardi Gras beads on the board today.

WHO DAT?

. . . and I don't even watch football 99% of the time.

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Luke's Diner, February 8 (Monday)

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