fandomtownies | Stark Industries, Tuesday, Sept. 11

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Stark Industries, Tuesday, Sept. 11

Victor came to work carrying a baggie full of the results of his baking experiment with Sparkle. Maybe it was messed-up android taste buds, but he thought the peanut butter-pickle-sugar cookie combination was surprisingly good. Like, the kind of good that made him wonder if he could sell the recipe in stores.

To ... the kind of people who were not automatically repelled by the notion of cookies with peanut butter and pickles in them, yes. There had to be a couple of them out there.

He kept taking cookie breaks through the day as he worked to get a couple small appliances working again. Jarvis -- quite possibly repulsed by his taste in snacks -- was mercifully silent.

[OOC: Open repair shop, no OCD, want a cookie?]

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Olive didn't have any classes on Tuesday! Yay! Unfortunately, that meant she was bored, and thus she went out in search of things to entertain her.

Lucky Victor. Though she had, thoughtfully, stopped at the Perk, and when she wandered through the door, she was holding two cups. "Did you hijack my cookies?" she asked curiously, spying them. "They look...different."

And hi to you too, Olive.

Edited 2012-09-11 14:16 (UTC)

"Hi," Victor said, setting aside the toaster he'd been playing with to come closer to the counter. "And nah, those are the ones I was making with Sparkle? Peanut-butter-pickle. Try one, they're good."

Even if they'd kind of started as a dare.

Olive gave him a look that verged on incredulous. "You put pickles in cookies? Are you a pregnant stereotype from a sitcom?"

Somehow she had missed this last night. Never let it be said that Olive was famous for her observational skills.

Edited 2012-09-11 14:43 (UTC)

"No," Victor said, rolling his eyes a little. "I think that would require I use the cookies to make ice cream sandwiches."

Which didn't sound half-bad, actually. Maybe with chocolate ice cream.

"I dunno, Sparkle asked why I never made him cookies, and it ... kind of went from there. But they came out good."

Olive gingerly did take one, because she was polite and had likely eaten worse, and broke off a little bit. "That's for you, by the way," she added, gesturing to one of the coffees she'd set down. "It doesn't have pickles it in but I'm sure we could figure something out."

"Thanks," Victor said, and took a sip. "Black is fine. I don't do anything weird to coffee. That'd be, like, unholy."

He watched Olive carefully, curious what her reaction to the cookies would be.

Olive, thank goodness, had a pretty good poker face. Because yeah, no, it wasn't exactly her...usually flavor combination of choice. It wasn't like, horrible, but yeah. The things she did for the people she liked.

"This is really interesting," she said, which was at least sort of honest.

"Aren't they?," Victor said, totally missing that 'interesting' was a code word. "Have as many as you want. The dough made more than we expected."

Edited 2012-09-11 15:31 (UTC)

"Oh, I couldn't take too many," Olive assured him. "They're yours. And I'm...watching my figure."

Her mostly straight up-and-down figure, yes.

"What were you working on, before I so rudely interrupted?" she asked, hoping to distract from the cookies so she could get away with that, maybe. It was harder to think up lies on her feet with people she actually liked, and it probably was showing, a little.

"Your loss," Victor decided, with a little shrug. "And, um, a toaster? The ticket says it's burning bread, so I'm trying to get the internal thermometer to run a little cooler."

He realized that sounded pretty dorky, smiled apologetically. "I promise it's not as dull as it sounds."

It was kind of dorky, yes. But Olive was smiling like she didn't think it was, or care if it was. "Do you have a fast-paced and intriguing manual to go off of? Or are you winging it?"

She was so never going to stop teasing him about reading those for fun, no.

"I think I'm winging it on this one," Victor said lightly, also with a smile. "But you never know. I might get bored later this afternoon and see if the manual gives me ideas on how to make it a smarter, faster toaster."

"I mean, it's entirely possible there's some very key detail you're missing that would shave microseconds of time off the lengthy waiting period for slightly-browned bread," Olive pointed out. "Think of the cumulative minutes we have all wasted, waiting for toast. Obviously you should read that manual. Plus, you know, sounds like fun."

Victor could tell she was joking, but the thing was -- "Sometimes I think about that?" he said. "I mean, in theory there should be a way to get toast just about instantaneously without it turning into a piece of coal. Maybe not with this toaster, but if you made one good enough..."

It would cost a fortune, and the manual still probably wouldn't be that interesting?

"But isn't that like, the principle behind toasting things?" Olive wondered. "You can't get an instant tan, either. I mean, even broiling stuff takes a couple minutes and that's like, five hundred degrees or something. You'd need like...lasers to make instant toast, wouldn't you?"

Well, now she was thinking about it. Look what you've done, Victor.

"Lasers, but they'd have to be kind of special lasers so they penetrated all the way through the bread," Victor said seriously. "Otherwise you'd get brown bread, but the inside part would still be mushy. Plus, it'd have to be really carefully designed to be safe in kitchens."

Clearly this was one of the core problems of western civilization.

"Yeah, my mom's kind of a flake and would definitely set her hair on fire with a laser toaster, at the very least," Olive mused. "Let alone if someone's letting their kid use it or something. But how would you make it so it goes all the way through the bread without burning the outside? You'd have to use radiation or something like with a microwave, but...more precise, I guess."

This was obviously a productive use of their time. Obviously.

"Right," Victor agreed. "And then you have basically a tiny nuclear reactor sitting in your kitchen, and ... probably it's better to just wait the two minutes and make toast the regular way."

Though someday he would solve the problem! Someday!

He smiled a lopsided smile, perhaps realizing toast was not the most interesting topic to discuss. "What's up with you today, anyhow?"

"Absolutely nothing. I don't have classes on Tuesdays so I figured I might come annoy you," Olive said cheerfully. "It was either this or you know, doing something productive like teaching myself some sort of useful skill, but that sounds like work. And this way I get to learn about nuclear toasters and visit you, and that's way better than pretending that I can definitely teach myself to use a crossbow or something using Youtube videos."

"Yeah, see, I know we talked about Karolina being the nicest person on the planet?" Victor said. "But that might not last if you accidentally shot a crossbow into her stuff trying to teach yourself."

It just might, though. Karolina was almost that sweet.

"And it's good you came in before I convinced myself to actually build a nuclear toaster."

"That does sound like something I'd do," Olive mused. "I shouldn't risk roomie wrath. I could practice my nonexistent crossbowing outside, but considering I nearly put Marsie's eye out with a paper plane the one time I was throwing them off the roof, that's probably not a great plan either."

That was a slight exaggeration.

"I think I'm doomed to hide if anything bad happens. People keep telling me that violent shit does, occasionally, go down here."

"Maybe go into the woods to practice?" Victor offered. "And, like, make a lot of noise so the deer know to stay away."

He believed in her abilities so hard, yes.

"And yeah, once in a while," he said reluctantly, tilting his head at her. "Has anybody said the name Umbridge to you yet?"

Olive shook her head. "I don't think so. Is that like, a hesitant-speaking crossway over water or a canyon?"

A pause.

"See what I did there?"

Yes, Olive. It wasn't especially clever.

"I saw," Victor said, and that was such a terrible joke he couldn't manage more than a smile at it. "I wish she were a talking bridge. That's be kind of cool. But actually she's this ... psycho witch who apparently ran the school in an alternate reality? And somehow her world came here for a week back in July."

See, now Olive wasn't all that interested in making desperately stupid jokes. "Okay, wait. So she came here and ran the school? How'd she get it away from the current administration?"

Alternate realities were confusing.

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