fandomtownies | Luke's, Friday

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$luke's,
priestly

Luke's, Friday

Priestly was in a bit of a mood, this week. Enough of one that Stevesie the red panda was refusing to leave him alone, clinging to his shoulders and yelling whenever Priestly tried to pry him off.

Which would be why Priestly was wearing a fashionable -- and live -- fur collar in the diner, today.

He couldn't put his finger on what it was, but he was absolutely convinced something was about to go -- or already had gone -- horribly wrong. Even cooking wasn't helping. Well, that might also be due to the distracting way that Stevesie kept trying to groom his mohawk. (He hadn't even dyed the thing today. He didn't want to know what would happen to a red panda if it tried to eat treated hair.) So he sat himself down at the counter, idly feeding Stevesie blueberries while he surfed online.

"Don't get any ideas," he told the red panda after reading about the adventures of Rusty. "You are not going on your own private inner city adventure."

In the kitchen, the dishwasher started yelling something about a bear. Priestly didn't want to know.

Today's specials
Broiled chicken wings with spicy apricot sauce
Spicy orange wasabi fries
Cayenne-cinnamon apple pie
still hiring! red panda wrangling skills a bonus

Luke's was open.

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Ask for extra hot sauce.

Ask why everything he's got the kitchen serving up has a heat index.

*Dinah's ringtone of bounce*

Yeah, so... were we sure Priestly wasn't psychic?

Less psychic than subconsciously able to play the odds. Priestly answered on the first ring, snatching at the phone. "Dinah?"

One of these days, he worried, it wouldn't be Dinah on the other end. It'd be someone else, calling to tell him that something horrible had happened to her. And the longer she went fighting a war, the more convinced he was that that was what it was every time the phone rang.

"First off, I am okay. Momoko is okay. So's everyone else. Mostly." ~~unless the thread being played out later contradicts this!~~ "...and Karla won the election. So, yay on that." She paused. "Hi. Are you okay? Are you yourself? Is now an okay time to call?"

Priestly was living on Fandom Island, his life could be going even crazier than hers at any second. Dinah never forgot that.

Mostly?

She'd tell him if something was really wrong, right?

"I'm fine. It's only Friday, the weird stuff doesn't usually get started until Saturday, so everything's SOP here." It was nice of the island to keep patterns. Stevesie squawked and started climbing onto his head. "Well, other than getting my head molested by a red panda, anyway."

Which, honestly, wasn't that rare. Stevesie loved Priestly's hair.

Dinah snickered, and called, "HI STEVESIE! Don't you know that Priestly's hair isn't good for you?" Probably not. It was so pretty, how could it not be yummy?

Sooo, right. News. "Good. 'Cause I'm not going to turn into one of those friends who thinks their crises are more important than anyone else's."

Um. "Not that there's a crisis. Now."

Uh huh. "And what was the crisis that's apparently no longer in effect, then?"

Sorry Dinah, he saw through your clever obfuscation.

Yeah, her elite spying and concealment skills always broke down around him. It was like a superpower. Or she just sucked at that part.

"Wellll... after the election, and Karla winning-- remind me to tell you what the old bat who cast the deciding vote said-- we all went back to the hotel for dinner. We had the top three floors." Dinah took a breath. "We were still up playing cards when someone set the place on fire."

Priestly's first response to that would have been a long string of fairly colorful curses, but he bit them back. Dinah didn't need to hear that. "But everyone's okay?" he asked. "You guys got out?"

Jesus, at least they'd stayed up. If they'd been asleep. . . .

Didn't bear thinking about.

"Yeah, we did," Dinah said. "Some smoke inhalation, for a few people. We had to get the people on the floors below us out. We lost some stuff. The innkeeper's not thrilled with us, which is bullshit, but..." She sighed. "We knew Hobart wasn't going to be happy about it, but this was damn fast."

"Hobart's the bad guy, I take it." Priestly really didn't have a lot of details as to why his friends were off fighting a damned war. Hadn't gotten past the part where he was just freaked out and trying not to show it long enough to ask before they all headed over to Glacia. "Not big on due process when it doesn't come down on his side?"

"Really, really not." Dinah grimaced. "He's Karla's uncle. Well, half-uncle. And we're pretty sure he arranged the accident that killed her parents, and her cousin Morton's at the same time. He's a loud, overblown, incompetent, misogynistic manipulative troll." Okay, Dinah might've been holding onto that one for a little bit there.

"Sounds charming," Priestly said. "Just the type to bring home to mother." He smiled ruefully. "Don't suppose you can just take him out and watch whatever army he's got crumble, huh? All stealth-superpowered vigilante-like?"

"Oh, man, I wish," Dinah said fervently. "A couple people have suggested that off and on, but. Talk about making Karla look bad. Half the people in the country are getting kickbacks from him, if he dies, they'll just all declare a vendetta on Karla." She grumbled under her breath. "And all the little puppet Queens he set up would freak." She paused. "You know, I should have moral objections to the idea, shouldn't I?"

"Probably," Priestly said. "But he did set fire to an entire hotel. With other guests in it. He kind of loses a shit-ton of 'have to be nice even to the bad guys' points in my book."

To put it mildly. What the fuck.

"He's got most of the capital city scared of us. He's been spreading lies about Queens being unnatural, even told everyone that Karla was dead, which I know he would've made true if he could've gotten away with it." Dinah grumbled under her breath. "You know who I figured out who he reminded me of? Before the fire?"

"I thought Queens ran everything in Karla's world. And, like, had forever. Why would people buy into them being 'unnatural'?"

Honestly, Karla's world, what little he knew of it, made no sense to him, anyway.

"Who?"

"The mob bosses I've run into." Most definitely Al Hawke. Used to getting his own way, ruthless, crooked. Hawke was smarter and had more honor (and how much did she hate thinking that about the guy who killed her mom?). But they were the same type of guy. "Thugs with a plan. I hate when they have a plan." She grimaced. "And yeah, Queens have always ruled, and they did, so, guess how many safeguards they have in place for someone putting a naive incompetent in place, who's all about Hobart?... which just makes me gag."

"That's some fucked up shit, right there," Priestly said. "No one wants a mob boss as the leader of a country." That's what people frequently ended up with, because mob boss types were conniving and manipulative by nature, but still. "So what's your game plan, then? If cutting off the head doesn't work."

"Pretty much? Smoke 'em out." Dinah made a face, then lay down to put her feet up. "A lot of these people are just scared of big changes. Some of them have been lied to. The bad guys are no longer legally in charge. We've got an army bigger than we expected now. Soooo... Kind of work on reassuring everyone that Karla's the right for the job, and track down the guys who've been intimidating people." She started laughing. "We're The Untouchables! I'm trying to remember what Eliot Ness and his crew did."

"Can't help you there." He was never much of a crime drama kind of guy. "And that kinda sounds like it'll take forever." He didn't want her there forever! At some point, he wanted her to be somewhere he knew she was safe.

"It won't," Dinah promised. Although she was a little fuzzy on when they'd know the war was over. Or when they wouldn't need her in particular any more. "Remember, time's going twice as fast here. I figured on spending the whole summer in Glacia, and that's another six months here, which would still let me go back to school in September."

That actually wasn't that reassuring. It mostly meant he had to worry twice as much per Fandom day. "You're going to have the weirdest 'how I spent my summer vacation' essay ever."

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