fandomtownies | Luke's, Wednesday

And ask for ice cream with your pie. Mmm.

Who is contemplating making another pie, like maybe strawberry rhubarb, or Key Lime with chocolate. Suggestions welcome.

"No duck this week?"

Hi to you too, Éponine.

Hey, Éponine.

"Nope. You want it every week?" Kenzi asked, looking intrigued, then pointed to the board. "There's French pie!"

"No, I think it was a bit much, actually," Éponine said as she wandered over to a booth and sat down. "But I'd much rather have a stomachache from eating too much, and it was good so I couldn't help doing that, could I?"

She turned to stare at the board, reading the words (or trying, in some cases) to herself sotto voce.

"Look here, though, I think I'm more curious about that Russian meat pie than anything else -- and some of that chocolate bourbon one for afterward, yes sir."

"Oh God, that one is so good I had to tell cookie to hide it from me after I had one piece," Kenzi admitted. "You want ice cream on that?" Here, have your Coke! "How's tricks in the Post Office?"

As if she was ever going to turn down a chance to indulge? She had years to make up for here! "May as well ask if I want to eat at all, if that's a question," Éponine exclaimed. "And a plate of fries, too, if you don't mind."

She leaned over to inspect her reflection in the side of the napkin dispenser, humming a bit of something by One Direction ~~because for some reason I think this is hilarious~~ as she rearranged her hair.

"I'll tell you, as I've learned one new thing this week, I'm never going to complain about all the steps I have to climb to get the mail delivered around here again. At least I don't nearly get eaten by God only knows what kind of creature, the way some unlucky people in other places do."

"You got that?" Kenzi asked the busboy who was hovering. "Shoo!"

She hummed along with Éponine to figure out what she was singing, then groaned and head-napkin-dispenser'd. "One Direction? Seriously?... say what? Who almost got eaten?" she asked, perking up.

And again, a bit of a dubious side-eye for the busboy.

"Oh, I've no idea who it actually was," Éponine told her. "But the post came back with great big bite marks in it because it wasn't actually delivered, you see? Never got there. I can hardly blame whoever it was for not trying harder. I know I wouldn't have."

"Yiiiiikes," Kenzi said with relish. "Kind of makes the hazards of hostile dogs seem pretty tame, jeez. How big were the teeth marks?" She tilted her head. "So is it return to sender, or do you guys get to keep stuff?"

What? It would be cool!

"There isn't much of it left to keep," Éponine said with a sigh, because that was a shame. (Clearly, she thought it would be fun to keep things too.) "I suppose we'll have to find out if the sender wants it back at this point, though."

"Now I'm wondering if it was an attack dinosaur or something." Kenzi poured herself a Diet Coke, then went on, "Of course, I'd be tempted to get a velociraptor if I could feed it junk mail or the bills I couldn't pay." Éponine seemed like she was in a better mood from last week.

She was, but mostly by chance. Still, it counted, right?

"A velociraptor?" she repeated quizzically. "What's that, some great big insect that eats paper?"

Her education had not exactly gotten into any science related fields.

Half of Kenzi's science stuff was thanks to movies. Or overhearing Topher bibble and looking stuff up on the internet. "Hmm, it's a kind of big dinosaur-- I'm not sure if it's imaginary or not. Human-sized, two legs, fast. Cretaceous Garden had a million of the little suckers taking down tourists. They're my number one vote for stuff *not* to show up here, 'cause we'd be lunch." Which lead to the thought... "Island, if you're listening, that was not a suggestion."

Fandom probably knew that. Ingvar, though....

Éponine had gotten into half the theaters on the Boulevard du Temple at some point, but she wasn't going to get any kind of useful science lessons from the kind of plays Gavroche's friends did either.

"There's another thing I'll have to learn about," she said thoughtfully, kicking her heels against the booth bench.

"Mmm? What's that?" Kenzi asked, as the busboy returned with Éponine's fries and Russian meat pie. She pointed at the pie. "Mushrooms, onions, meat, garlic, I swear the smell is enough to make me order it alone."

"Dinosaurs," answered Éponine, already leaning over the meat pie and inhaling the scent with a half-blissful expression on her face. "Animals I don't know about, like half the ones in those pictures you showed me. There's the ones in the menagerie at the Luxembourg, you know, with little plaques by the cages so you can learn about them, and I used to go there every now and then, but I didn't ever really stay very long."

She paused then in favor of taking a large bite of the meat pie and making a muffled, wordless exclamation that was clearly favorable. "Oh, lordy, that's good," she declared, reaching for a fry. "I feel like the smell alone could fill me up for a few hours."

"Seriously," Kenzi said, filching the bit of crust that had fallen on the counter. "Russia does food that makes sure you'll last through the next blizzard or famine. Oh, and dinosaurs are extinct. Reptiles and big lizards and sharks and things. Uh, they all died out like, millions and gabillions of years ago. All those huge bones people find sometimes? Dinosaurs." She swallowed and added, "Which, our luck, probably means there's a planet of them out there somewhere, and one of 'em will be a student next term."

". . . I'm fairly certain I only understood half of what you just said," admitted Éponine, who'd been trying her best, but just couldn't quite wrap her mind around these concepts. (If she ever got a chance to meet Old Lace, it might clear things up nicely.) "There were some great big lizards at the menagerie -- alligators, that's a funny name, with their sharp teeth, so something like that, do you mean, but bigger? Fancy, something like that could have eaten that unlucky person's mail."

[OOC: OMGWTF "Luxembourg?" Pretend I originally said Jardin des Plantes there. I CAN'T BELIEVE I MESSED THAT UP. *mortified*]

"Muuuuch bigger," Kenzi agreed. She grinned. "Some of them with wings. Alligators are from south of here, I think. Or maybe that's the crocodiles?" She could never keep those straight. "We should hit D.C. Take you to a museum there instead. Most of them are free." Her eyes widened. "We could see the Hope Diamond!"

Where 'see' meant 'case the joint.'

[ooc: HEE. Beligum? I have never heard of this Luxembourg! *pats* ]

Oh, Kenzi, did you have to?

"What do I care about a diamond in a museum?" asked Éponine with a laugh -- but an interested expression. She had the general idea that it was something she shouldn't do, but it couldn't hurt to at least think about it, right?

She really, really did.

"Dude, it used to be part of the French Crown Jewels!" Kenzi was gesturing expansively, and took a second to slurp on her Diet Coke. "It got stolen during your Revolution, right? And cut into smaller pieces, and this one is a blue diamond, as big as -- oh, your thumb, maybe? It's famous, and the Smithsonian just has it in this display (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Hopediamondnewset.jpg) with all these other rocks."

Rocks. Rocks. That shit was criminal. Why wasn't someone wearing this sucker?!

Edited 2013-06-13 05:26 (UTC)

"Doing absolutely no good to anyone at all, of course," Éponine said, snorting. "What's the point of it being there?"

"So we can all look at it but not have it," Kenzi said, only partly serious. "That's always the way with museums and stuff. Man, if I could've figured out how to take something from the British National Gallery..."

Sigh. Damnit. She just hadn't had a good enough plan to get it from 1815 London to 2011 Maryland, had been the problem. Ah well. She'd gotten better in two years.

"Reminds me of field trips for school. Always the best bit." Kenzi finally broke down and yelled back, "Another slice of bourbon pecan for me!" toward the kitchen. "So did you get to the menagerie very often?"

"Not as often as I'd like; open for the public it might be, but seeing as they'd rather not scare off people visiting on holiday, I wasn't terribly welcome." Unlike her brother, who would just laugh and come back later to steal bits of netting from the aviary or whatever else he thought might be useful, she'd taken it a bit more personally.

Éponine, it had to be admitted, looked rather envious of getting to go on trips for school, or . . . well, school in general. "Of course that's what it's there for," she muttered. "Looking pretty and being absolutely useless, useless and silly and of no good to anyone at all -- it's stupid is what it is."

"Yup," Kenzi concurred. Then paused as her slice of pie was slid down the counter, and picked it up to take a bite. Rolling her eyes in happiness, she chewed for a moment, then said, "You can keep a secret, right?"

"Of course I can!" She had practice at that, since sometimes it benefited her to do so. "No one will get a word out of me if I don't choose to cough it up."

"I wanna steal that thing so bad once I figure out how to get past all the security," Kenzi confessed, chomping on another bite. "We had a teacher here, Mr. Caffrey? Who was great at teaching about how to run cons and swipe stuff. I mean, he'd gotten caught, he was on a work-release program so he wouldn't go to prison. But still, I learned a lot from him. And I really really really want to own that rock for even a week."

"Only for a week?" Éponine frowned and took another bite of her meat pie. "What would you do with it for only that time?"

"Find somebody to buy it from me. There's collectors, and crazy people with more money than sense-- If I had it over to them for like fifty mill, that's set for aaaaages." Okay, maybe she was being optimistic there. "Or ten mill. I'm not that greedy."

Éponine allowed a brief sardonic smirk. "What would you do with that money, if you had it?"

"Shoes!" Be a little more gleeful, why don't you, Kenzi. "And my own private island that no one could ever kick me out of. And a really cool car that I wouldn't let anyone steal." She grinned. "What would you buy?"

"Fancy, me with that much money!" Éponine exclaimed. "I don't know what I'd do with all of that, but I imagine I'd get myself a nice place to live, perhaps beside the water, and all the books I could possibly find. And not so much as a sou for my father," she added fiercely.

"You need electricity?" Kenzi was frowning a bit there. "We should find somebody to hook you up on that... You're big into books?" Then she held out a hand for Éponine to slap. "Word. Our dads can get by without us. Ha."

"Oh, that's taken care of," Éponine said, and she was allowed to feel smugly accomplished about that particular feat, wasn't she? "I needed light to read by, didn't I? And candles are such a hassle, it's stupid to bother with the mess and the danger of fire when I don't need to. I like stories," she added with a shrug.

And a quizzical look at the hand Kenzi was holding up.

Kenzi rolled her eyes, and picked up Éponine's free hand to slap her own. "High five. Kinda dated." She made a fist, and bumped it against Éponine's again. "Fist-bump. Also a little dated. But if you're gonna worry about that, you'll never do anything."

"So what'd you do, if you decided to skip the candles?" Kenzi was curious, and a little amused. "Hey, have you visited the library here yet?"

"Oh, sometimes all one has to do is know exactly the right people to talk to in order to get things done," allowed Éponine with a knowing look. "And it's useful, you know, getting all about town like I do. The things I see and hear, good lord, and it's funny how many secrets people try to keep, isn't it?"

But never mind that, she'd heard something more interesting, and less perplexing than this fist-bumping thing.

"The library up at the school? No. I keep thinking I ought to go, and haven't gotten round to it yet."

Old habits died hard, and she kept expecting them to try and run her off if she did.

Kenzi snickered and then poked at her. "I might be recruiting you for help when Bo and I find a new place. Depending on how hooked-up it is." Or if they were paying rent.

"Yeah, you should. The librarian there's kinda funny. British. Not all ... scholarly."

Look, you try to explain John Constantine.

"Plus half the time it's just kids at the front counter, library aides. If you like books that much, you should do go. It's a public library too."

Could anyone explain John Constantine?

"I can be useful that way," Éponine agreed, brightening at the prospect. "If that's what you need, just let me know and I'll look around, see what I can do."

She paused. "I pass by the bookshop all the time, you know, and I always stop to look in. I don't know if I'd ever seen that many books in one place before! There was an old man, a friend of Monsieur Marius, I remember. He sold all his books to have money for food, one by one, as if he was cutting off pieces of himself to do it. I watered his garden once; he seemed so sad. I suppose that's why he went to the barricade, in the end."

"Jeeez, dude." Sometimes, Kenzi was sharply reminded that she was lucky just to live in the 21st century. In ways she didn't expect. "The barricade? They wouldn't let him have books? Harsh."

"I don't recall exactly," Éponine said, her voice taking on a distant quality to match her now-unfocused gaze. "He sold books, once, I think, only no one was interested any more. He was at the barricade. The flag was shot down by the Guard. When they asked if someone would dare to raise it again, no one volunteered but him."

Kenzi poured some more Diet Coke into her glass, then some Coke into Éponine's and raised it in a toast. "When we get rich, we find somebody like that guy, and give him a book shop."

"And come in every week to buy books ourselves?" asked Éponine, raising her own glass.

Hey, there were always comic books-- whoops, graphic novels.

"Sure, why not! Gotta spend the rest of the money." Kenzi clinked her glass against Éponine's with a grin. "The future."

Éponine hesitated for a long moment; the future was something she'd fallen out of the habit of even considering. Useless speculation, really, and what was the point in finding another way to torment herself with what she couldn't have?

Maybe it wasn't so useless, though, not now that she was free of her father and the rest of Patron-Minette and didn't have to wonder how long it would be before she got her next meal. Maybe it wouldn't be such a foolish risk to take.

"The future," she echoed with a faint smile.

Need. Foooood.

Luke's, Wednesday

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OOC