Fandom Island and Town

Priestly was all set to move to New Gotham. He'd found himself an apartment, with two roommates who seemed like decent enough people and didn't look like his identical twins. One that even allowed exotic pets, so Stevesie wouldn't have to be abandoned to Dean's tender mercies. He had his class schedule for the fall semester, and a list of books and supplies to buy once he was settled in. He'd even managed to line up a couple interviews at local restaurants to work as a line cook and support himself through all of this crazy class-taking business. His financial aid paperwork was in order. His collection of novelty t-shirts was sorted and packed. His friends in Santa Cruz had all his new address information, and he'd confirmed that his cellphone would still work even when he was living in Dinah's dimension on a permanent basis.

He'd taken care of everything.

Except for one tiny detail.

"Fuck, who's going to run this place when I leave?"

( Thusly do I pass the Luke's management torch to another character )

Today's specials
Five alarm beef-and-bean chili
Fried okra
Whoopie pies

Luke's was open.

[this is Prieslty's last Luke's post before going onto alumni status. And it is OCD freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.]

So, angry Friday dude (yes, Priestly knew his actual name, he was a consumate professional diner manager, here) decided to do Ethiopian last week. Priestly couldn't have one of his employees showing him up in the fancy funky foreign food department.

There was just one problem:

"What do you mean we're all out of snails?" Priestly stared open mouthed at his cook. "They were frozen, man, they can't have just gotten up and slithered out of here!"

The cook showed him the little slime trails leading out of the freezer. "Some kind of malfunction," he said. "They're escargone."

"I hate you," said Priestly. "Never use that pun ever again."

Today's specials
Confit de canard
Ratatouille
Gâteau de ménage

Luke's was open. And probably not teeming with undead snails.

As was increasingly becoming usual for Priestly, he was spending his day at Luke's with a pile of papers spread out across one end of the counter rather than with a pile of ingredients in the kitchen.

Running a diner was not all it was cracked up to be. For that matter, neither was attempting to be a college student.

He had finals coming up at his classes at the community college, two papers to write for the same, and the largest pile of forms and paperwork he'd ever seen that he couldn't hand off to someone more qualified to fill them out (he missed Karla). There were housing forms and student aid forms and scholarship forms and federal funding forms and out-of-state legal jargon forms and out-of-dimension legal jargon forms, which he was pretty sure didn't even actually come from the school itself -- though with a place like New Gotham, he couldn't rule it out completely. There were class booklets and registration forms and some personality quiz that was supposed to match him up with either a roommate or an advisor, he wasn't 100% sure which.

And then there was the pamphlet about some pre-orientation weekend thing, which shouldn't have been so intimidating, except New Gotham was Dinah's city and they still hadn't completely worked out their weird shit with the whole Rook and Kestrel thing, yet. He considered getting himself a hotel room and just trying to stealth the whole thing -- it wasn't exactly a small city, they could totally avoid each other if they needed to, right? -- but then he'd looked up hotel costs in New Gotham and remembered that, oh yeah, nowhere was as cheap as Fandom.

Which reminded him that he'd need at least a part time job in New Gotham if he wanted to live and go to school there, too.

By the time Cookie came out to ask what the specials should be, Priestly was about ready to give up on the whole school thing and just start making avant garde hats out of the whole mess.

"I dunno, man, whatever the fuck you want to cook."

Today's specials
Dragon Dog
Saffron and black truffle fries
Bread pudding

Luke's was open.

Priestly was known to rock a kilt on a multitude of occasions, so he wasn't much worried about the fact that he'd woken up wearing one, this morning.

The trouble was, rather than his usual below the knee blue and green kilt, he'd woken up in a Great Kilt, or as Priestly was calling it, "Scotland's answer to the toga".

This thing could double as a blanket.

The kitchen staff were all in nice, understated modern black kilts made of canvas or leather. Well, save for the cook. He's somehow wound up in a mini kilt, ala a catholic school girl, a fact that didn't seem to bother him in the least.

"You do you, Cookie," Priestly told him before backing out of the kitchen. "You do you."

Today's specials
Haggis
Scotch eggs
Cranachan

Luke's was open and OCDless.

Some men just wanted to watch the world burn.

Or, at the very least, a local business or two.

After what had been a particularly delightful -- if overwhelming and occasionally confusing, uncontrolled touch telepathy plus kinky sex would do that to a person -- evening, Priestly had been a bit late to rise. That didn't stop him from remembering Dinah's promise of setting something on fire, though.

The butcher shop was so desiccated by this point, it barely took more than a match. That didn't make it any less satisfying to watch the blaze.

And, you know, smash the occasional zombie piranha into it. For funsies.

[ooc: primarily for the literal partner in crime, but also open to any other lunatic out and about pre-finale. AUed butcher shop arsoned with permission.]

Sheba wasn't sure why the kitchen staff thought "all day brunch" was such a strange concept. Surely her male counterpart had been as into breakfast foods as she was? It was the most important meal of the day! Even if you happened to be eating it for dinner! Sunday brunch was just the world's way of crying out for more opportunities to eat scrambled egg and 15 different varieties of carbohydrates.

Plus, you know, mimosas. Mimosas were an important part of any balanced breakfast.

Today's specials
Omelette bar
Breakfast burrito bar
Mimosa bar

Luke's was open. And rather full of delicious fats and sugars.

Unlike his doppelganger, Priestly was entirely aware of the holiday, yesterday. He'd even gotten up early this morning to hit up a farmer's market on the mainland and pick up some supplies for the probable influx of hungry kids.

Some of them with actual superpowered appetites.

He wondered if he'd get Jane or Lena visiting this time. He wondered what would happen if they both showed up at the same time.

Was it incest if you were half-siblings across whole dimensions? Probably. It really probably was.

[ooc: expecting one, but also open.]

So it was really freaking cold out. Mind you, Priestly was the kind of guy who thought it was really freaking cold out most of the year in this climate, but he was reasonably certain that the temperature outside today objectively qualified as really freaking cold.

Oddly enough, the kitchen staff raised no objections when he decided they should build a bonfire under the vent hood.

This was totally going to end well. Totally.

Today's specials
Cedarplank smoked salmon
Roasted root vegetables
S'mores

Luke's was open. And somehow not on fire!

"Look, I told you guys, I didn't abandon the diner. I have a tendency to get shot when weapons start showing up, so I decided to skip past all the weird stuff and go visit Dinah for awhile. And then, you know, the holidays and all that happened and I just got busy, okay?"

The kitchen staff did not look impressed by this explanation. Priestly sighed, rubbing his forehead. "I've been back for, like, two weeks, guys, can we get over this, already?"

The kitchen staff exchanged looks, then huddled together to mutter amongst themselves. Priestly was 99.6% sure they were just saying "peas and carrots" over and over to make it look like they had to hash this out.

"Okay," Cookie said finally. "But you owe us an ice cream party."

"It's, like, freezing outside."

The cook raised an eyebrow.

Today's special
Build your own ice cream sundae

Luke's was open.

When Priestly woke up this morning and found that, yep, there was still an excessive amount of horny in the air (that cushion and Stevesie were practically married by now), he reassured himself that at least he didn't have any guests coming in for the weekend that he had to worry about being inappropriate at.

Then he went downstairs to open up the diner, and Tish walked in.

"Man, how is everyone on this island so attractive?" she asked, immediately heading for the lunch counter as if she owned the place. "Honey, shut your mouth. You look like one of those cartoon characters that's starving and hallucinating their friend is a hotdog."

"Tish," Priestly finally managed. "You could have told me you were coming. Uh, coming. Uh -- fuck -- visiting?"

Tish snorted. "What the hell is wrong with you? I like the hair, by the way. It's a really good look for you. You wanna go make out in the kitchen?" She blinked. Even she wasn't usually quite that forward.

"Yes," Priestly said.

The kitchen staff would be cheering them on, if they weren't a little, uh, busy on their own.

Today's specials
Salad bar

Luke's was open.

It wasn't actually anywhere near cool enough out for all the roasting the cook wanted to do.

"No," Priestly said, every time the cook pulled out another pot. "Chicken or beef. Unless we get specific orders for both, you have to pick one."

The cook opened his mouth to protest. Priestly cut him off with a wave of his hand towards the dishwasher and the busboy, who were both sacked out in the corner shirtless talking about sweating out toxins and going on vision quests. The cook glared bloody murder at them, and Priestly, satisfied, turned to head back out into the dining room.

"Roasting is a dry heat!" the cook could be heard shouting. "Dry heat!"

Today's specials
Roast beef with root vegetables
Baby cactus salad
Apple strudel

Luke's was open.

So, Priestly was now enrolled in real, actual, academic-type classes for the first time since, well, something like his sophomore year of high school. (Culinary school didn't count, okay? Though he would argue that pastry class should count as a chemistry credit, at least.) This meant he had real, actual, academic-type homework for the first time since early high school. And back then he'd been very good at coasting by without doing any of that homework. So things like worksheets and large amounts of reading were really pretty damn foreign to him.

Which would be why he's at the counter of Luke's right now, staring down at his "Accounting 101" textbook and trying to make it not just a swarm of incomprehensible numbers and letters.

Maybe he should have gone with "Air conditioning repair". It couldn't possibly be less complicated than this.

Today's specials
Grilled peanut-butter* and jelly** sandwich
Tatertots
Grasshopper brownies***
* or assorted house-made nut butter of your choice
** Variety of flavors available
*** By which we mean mint, not actual grasshoppers

Luke's was open.

So. Priestly still didn't have any hair dye, and all his attempts at making his own had resulted in whatever he was using vanishing before it could touch his hair. Either the gremlins had decided they would look really good in blue, or the island was trying to tell him something.

Either way, it seemed he was rocking a whole new style, these days.

The kitchen staff was deeply disappointed. "Where are we going to put the orders and receipts?" the cook asked.

"You know those were't actually supposed to go in my hair, right?"

The expression on the cook's face stated in no uncertain terms that he totally felt they were.

Today's specials
Jalapeno-lime chicken
Brie quesadilla with granny smith apples
Flan

Luke's was open.

[ooc: and OCD free, with the note that I'm still on vacation and at some point today will disappear for three hours while I drive home.]

Priestly honestly didn't notice anything was going on when he got to the diner, today. Sure, the kitchen staff was going through a full blown, choreographed song about the various ingredients they were using to make chicken tenders today, but that actually happened on a semi-regular basis (the choreography was markedly improved, at least). And sure, he was humming under his breath while he got the place set up to open, but he had a song stuck in his head. Like that never happened to you.

And so it was a blissfully oblivious Priestly who finished setting the diner up, wrote up the specials, and settled in to give Dinah a call to catch up before they hit up El Paso over the weekend.

Well. At least she wouldn't make fun of him too hard for it.

Today's specials
Chicken tenders
Curly fries
Rootbeer floats

Luke's was open.

It was the summer solstice, and it was absolutely gorgeous outside. Priestly spent the first part of the morning, when it was usually just the NPC regulars who didn't want pastries hitting up the diner for some nice eggy breakfasts, at a table set up right out front on the sidewalk, feet kicked up, soaking up the sun, and waiting for it to be a reasonable hour to call Zo on the west coast (earlier today than any other day, since he knew for a fact she'd be up before dawn just like he was, to catch sunrise). By 9:30 he was in the kitchen, setting the grill up to flame up nice and high (he was pretty sure even Fandom would frown on an actual bonfire in the kitchen, alas) and gathering together every fresh seasonal vegetable and fruit he could find.

The cook stayed out of his way. Less because he was respecting Priestly's little solstice celebration and more because he was convinced Priestly was going to burn his eyebrows off and wanted a good angle to record the action on his phone.

Today's specials
Asparagus stuffed chicken
Watermelon cucumber salad
Fried faery honeycakes*
* no faeries were harmed in the making of this product

Luke's was open.

It wasn't actually the first time Priestly had worked the diner in weeks despite the lack of posting by his mun, but due to a complicated dispute with one of his distributors -- Vincent had apparently set up a contract with a hyperintelligent shade of blue that was rather put out by the fact that Priestly didn't have any advanced degrees or extra letters after his name -- it was the first time he'd managed to work the front in awhile.

It was nice to know that none of his employees had managed to trash the place yet, though his anti-authority streak wondered if that meant they weren't trying hard enough.

It was also the reason why he was sitting crosslegged on the counter, a straw sticking out of his mouth, a food magazine open in his lap, his laptop on one side of him showing a list of Baltimore-area colleges, and his phone, awaiting texts from Dinah, on the other.

He was multitasking, okay?

Today's specials
Duck Soup
Fried Green Tomatoes
Ratatouille
still hiring! "normal" people need not apply

Luke's was open.

So. There were flying, fire breathing jalapenos invading the island, today. You know what that means?

Today's specials
Enchiladas verdes
Ancho chile flan
Bottomless chips and salsa
now hiring! most shifts available!

Theme day.

Luke's was open.