fandomtownies | Caritas; Wednesday (Daytime and After Dark); Wednesday [07/10].

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Caritas; Wednesday (Daytime and After Dark); Wednesday [07/10].

You know, it was usually Tino who was the one behind the bar at Caritas doing weird stuff to maket he other bartender on shift sort of quirk their eyebrow and wonder what the heck was wrong with him, but that was because Summer Smith hadn't worked there before. And now that she was, she was definitely getting a confused look and a quirked eyebrow from her coworker as she spent a good portion of the beginning of her shift looking in various cupboards and the fridge and the ice machine, checking out supply closets and the stage, and the lounge, until Tino finally broke and asked what she was looking for.

"Bears," she explained. "Possibly a panda, but perhaps not. We got one in the cheese cooler at the store yesterday, and even though Apu acted like he'd been there before, I've never even heard of it. I mean, I spent most of last week as a weird orange furry thing obsessed with taking off people's heads; there's a good chance that whever it is this week has influenced him, too, and he's not really my usual Apu but rather some Apu from whatever bear-filled universe we're in right now."

And Tino, confused, suggested that the thing with this week was....probably the whole eerie siren followed by disturbing monsters crawling out of the ash-filled darkness and everything, and Summer scoffed.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said, "creepy monsters that are clearly messed-up distortions of humans based on deeply seeded psychological fears coming out in the dark. Yawn. I mean, there's been monsters before this summer, right? The dressing's different, but it's still sort of the same thing. Now bears showing up in places of businesses to harrass customers about certain products....now that's something different. That's interesting. It's possible the whole monster thing is just a distraction for the inevitable bear take-over, Tino, you don't know! I'm just trying to be proactive here and nip this in the bud if I can, but, I mean, so far, no bears here, I think we might actually be good, but, if that weren't the case, wouldn't you be glad I bothered to take the time and actually check before it was too late?"

Tino just sort of looked at Summer; Summer just looked back.

Tino was just going to go over to the other side of the bar now.

"Okay," said Summer, "just don't come crying to me when a bear breaks your arm because you won't do a shot of tequila with him!"

Wednesday Jello Shot Special!
NONE.
Because you should be staying home tonight where it's safe from monsters and/or bears!
Although it is actually really safe here...
Possibly safer than home.
So I got Apple and Honey ones!
Whatever. Just be safe, k?

She'd sort of been hoping the honey would entice the bears out of wherever they might be lurking, ready to strike.

Caritas is open! And actually completely bear free.

[[ and, of course, like yesterday, please specify in the subject when you're coming in, since doors open before alarm! ]]

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Regina had spent all day at the diner -- her diner, and oh god, how much did she hate that? -- wishing for a drink. So she was here shortly after the alarm sounded, hoping she'd run into more people as informative as the ones she'd met yesterday.

Besides, she certainly wasn't about to miss out on an apple special.

"I swear, those things are getting creepier every night." She brushed ash from her blazer and hair before moving to the bar. "No less flammable, though."

Ooooooh, a customer who wasn't Seivarden and was new, to her, at the very least? Yes, please! Summer was more than willing to abandon her pursuit of potentially pushy bears in favor of actually doing some bartending with someone who wasn't just cranky and sad.

She hoped.

Off to a good start, though, as she met the flammable comment with a smirk. "I've found they're not too great against blaster bolts, either," she noted. "Hi! What can I get you? Beer? Cocktail? Jello shot? Usually, the first one's free for people who participate in the Wednesday activities, but I think that should apply to new people, too, I think I can hook you up if you're interested. I'm Summer, by the way."

Chatty and quite full of information, Regina decided. Though not necessarily useful information.

"Regina," she offered. "I'll have one of those apple and honey shots, please. It's . . . jello?"

She had never done a jello shot in her life. Having spent her young adulthood being groomed for royalty in a fairy tale world and all.

"And what on earth are 'Wednesday activities'?"

"It's jello," Summer confirmed, with a proud sort of nod, as she went and grabbed one of the apple slices with the jello part oh-so-carefully poured in, setting it in front of Regina on a napkin, "made with vodka, apple juice, and honey, mostly, put right in the apple so you can eat what its served in, too! Cute, delicious, and eco-friendly!"

And she was incredibly pleased and chipper about the whole thing, really.

"And Wednesday activities are this thing that the dean up at the school does during the summer. They're usually ridiculous, sometimes with really dumb prizes, but they can be fun, especially with the summer being as hard on everyone as it's been this time around. It's also pretty great when it manages to snag in the sort of people you wouldn't normally see doing it and some people," ROSA, "get stupid competitive over it. Today, we had to, like, pass around this ball and if it landed on you, you had to unravel it and answer a question, then pass it on. I had to clear away a layer of jello, myself, which just seems to be the island's weird sense of humor at work again, but I got a cute bouncy ball out of it, my cat's gonna love it."

...chatty and full of information, indeed. Look. Wednesdays at the bar were boring, and Regina wasn't Seiviarden. She was going to enjoy it if she could.

. . . Yeah, Regina didn't follow that explanation at all. She couldn't help but smile at Summer anyway, though. She sounded a bit like Henry would when he got all excited about something.

Her smile crumpled slightly at one edge. She really hoped he -- all the various versions of him -- was okay. And that, if nothing else, Emma was around to help him handle things, since Regina was stuck here.

"So." She lifted her shot, and after a moment of studying it to work out just how one drank these things, just took a bite out of the apple slice and sort of slurped the jello up before it could fall on the bar. It was undignified, but at least it was tasty. "There's a school here. I suppose I should be glad there aren't kids trying to troop out to the other towns every day for class."

"It's a high school," said Summer, who, having been one of those kids fairly recently herself, sort of took umbrage at really being called kids. "Boarding school, really, not a lot of, you know, kid kids around, but there's a few. It's the castle, up on the hill."

Her head tilted thoughtfully at the fact that she didn't think she'd ever had to explain that to anyone, really. Most people already just...knew.

"You really are pretty new, then, huh?" she asked. "When you'd get here? And, of course, the follow-up question's defintely going to be why, so I'll just throw that in there now, too."

"Monday," Regina said. "This is my third night on the island. I hear it's usually at least a little less fraught?" She shook her head. "As for why: magic. Curse gone wrong, near as I can tell. I'm supposed to be in Maine."

Edited 2019-07-10 17:41 (UTC)

"Yeah," Summer said with a wry, faint little smile, which followed a more sympathetic expression about the whole curse thing, "you missed it by a bit. But, hey, maybe if you'd have come at a different week, we would have been off of Maine. Maybe next week, we will be in Maine. Who knows?" She shrugged, a little over-exaggerated. "This place doesn't seem to know what it wants to be doing or where it wants to be this summer. And you popping up right in the middle of it."

She looked thoughtful for a moment.

"I'm going to assume with the way its been out there at night that you've at least managed to find a place to stay for the time being. And then you're probably going to focus on how to get un-cursed?"

"I've got an apartment over the diner." Regina sighed. "Which apparently I own. These sorts of curses tend to be . . . thorough." She was just glad she hadn't ended up with her memories wiped or rewritten again.

"Oh, the diner!" Summer instantly beamed again. "Luke's, right? My best friend works there, on Sundays! His name's Kanan, he's great, you'll love him, and if the kitchen staff gives you any trouble, believe me, they're very susceptible to yelling, I know from a lot of personal experience. Also, if you totally just got cursed into this place and landed yourself a diner, you're probably going to want more than just that one free jello shot, right? I know I would."

Regina had gotten around to taking a look at her payroll today, so the name "Kanan" wasn't totally unfamiliar. Her mental image of the guy was now of some sort of bubbly airhead not unlike Summer. Which was at least a small step up from what she'd assumed the rest of her staff was like, based on the idiots working in the kitchen.

"I'll keep that in mind," Regina said. "And -- yes. I would love another drink. Scotch, please. Top shelf."

And if Summer knew what Regina was thinking, she would do absolutely nothing to disillusion her, because that was hilarious.

"Neat?" she asked, bouncing maybe a little as she turned to fetch the best scotch. "Or on the rocks?"

And, no, she didn't think the novelty of saying that would ever really go away.

Especially since her customers were few and far between, save for one boring person who always just ordered beer no matter how hard she tried and the occasion visit from a dude who didn't even drink.

"Rocks," Regina said. "If you wanted to use a bit of apple as a garnish, too, I wouldn't say no."

What? Apples were her Thing. And she didn't have a tree here, yet.

"You've been around here awhile then?" she asked. "Seems like you have the lay of the land."

Yeah, Summer was not going to need convincing to add a garnish, apple or otherwise, to a drink if given half the chance. She had spent so much time looking up fancy bar tricks on her phone that she did not have nearly enough opportunities to use, and so you were getting weeks worth of pent-up bartending skills poured into that drink right along with that scotch, Regina.

Which would then be presented very proudly as she set it down in front of her on the bar. With a coaster.

"You could say that," she said with a grin. "Went to school here myself, actually. Class of 2018, what whuuuut!" She laughed a little, shaking her head. "So it'll be two years this fall, though there was a brief hiatus last summer went I went back home to take some business classes. Which came in handy when I bought the general store here. So, if you need anything, like...literally anything, you should stop by. Turtle & Canary. Kind of a funny name, but I guess it's named after two people who used to own it, and it's practically a brand around here now. This place has got a lot of really interesting little shops and restaurants, though, definitely worth checking out if you're bored."

Regina started a little at the mention of the year. A small amount of time travel in this curse then, too. Not too terribly unusual, but she was annoyed she hadn't spotted it earlier.

She picked up her drink and saluted Summer with it before taking a sip. She knew those bartender moves -- had several of her own under her belt, thanks to her time as Roni -- so she knew how to be an appreciative audience.

"Sounds a bit like something you'd find in my last small town," she observed. "Storybrooke was just full of odd little shops named after their original owners."

She couldn't help but wonder if the original "Turtle" and "Canary" hadn't hailed from a fairy tale realm themselves.

Very distinctly not, especially that Canary, though the Turtle did used to fancy herself quite the witch...

"And where was that at?" asked Summer, beaming maybe that little bit more, because it was so nice to be appreciated, even if only a little bit for something as simple as a drink, really.

"Maine," Regina said, resisting the urge to nurse the drink, and instead setting it on the coaster. "The curse was supposed to send me back."

"Ah," said Summer, in the tone of someone who knew plenty about curses and how they could go all wrong and really fuck up your shit, even though, really, curses actually were something out of her wheelhouse, which was...pretty rare, really. But just because she hadn't personally experienced any in any sort of legit fashion didn't mean she couldn't at least get how much of a pain in the ass they might be.

She considered Regina again for a moment, then, and the fact that she was probably pretty settled now that she had a drink and there were creepy-ass monsters outside anyway, so she might as well get the question in now while she was still sort of fresh and probably wasn't sick of people asking her every time she brought it up, although, really, if you're going to be flinging something like curses around, you're gonna have to expect people to ask about them.

"So," she said, "what's the story with the curse? Who'd you piss off enough to want to send you off to some small town in Maine called Storybrooke," which, in her mind, could go one of two ways: boring as shit or Stephen King terrible, "or, alternately, who'd you piss off enough to want to have you think you were off to Storybrooke, Maine, and instead plopped you down in Fandom Island, Maryland, right when the island decided to have some sort of major identity crisis?"

Regina raised an eyebrow and picked up her drink again. "That is much too long a story for a drink this size."

Seriously. She wasn't even sure she could keep track of all the convolutions and curses and villains over the years, and she was responsible for several of them. She took a large sip. She was going to miss living in a place where people already knew all of that.

"Suffice to say," she said finally. "I have pissed off a large number of people in my day, but Storybrooke is home. I was trying to fight fire with fire." Her expression went sad and a little distant as she stared down into her scotch. "I have no idea how it went wrong."

"Well," said Summer, quirking her head back to the bottles behind her, "there is more where that came from. Which you'll probably need, trying to figure out where things went wrong. It's probably something, like, a fly flew into things at just the right time. Maybe the wind was blowing just slightly too southwesterly. Maybe an unfortunately placed smudge made one number look like a different number..."

"You don't have a lot of experience with curses, do you," Regina said. "But yes, trying to figure it out without my resources is going to potentially require many drink breaks."

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Caritas; Wednesday (Daytime and After Dark); Wednesday [07/10].

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