| The Usual, Please | ||
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| Summary: A mid-day encounter at the Usual sees Deis meeting our resident maniac first-hand, as well as the return of another face from Twisted's past.    |
Another typical day in the Usual Restaurant. Behind the bar a girl with red hair and pigtails hums to herself as she wipes off the bartop. Once upon a time seeing her here would be surprising, but since no one remembers those days anymore seeing Ryoga's little sister is less than exciting. As the door opens and a shadow is thrown to the floor, Yoiko Hibiki turns and gives a polite smile to the customer. "Hello! Welcome to the Usual Restaurant!" The man in the doorway is of course Johnny C, who eyes her suspiciously waiting for some kind of comment about how long it's been since they crossed paths. In the absence of such he creeps his way over to the bar and sits down. "I'm hungry. Gimmie the usual." The woman blinks at the request. Instead of responding she looks at him, well past him really. There's that faint spark of something in her eyes and then... "Sure thing! I'll pass that along!" Oh, so she DOES remember him? To the kitchen door she goes, and pushing it open informs the skutters, "Get this man his usual!" Damn, well that test is a failure.
The door opens again, not too long after Johnny enters. The shadow on the floor isn't human. No, it's a serpent! Well, sort of. It's actually Deis, and here in Twisted she doesn't see the need to hide her form. There are giant sapient molluscs here; a snake-woman probably isn't all that weird. Besides, she's harmless. Mostly. Another clue, besides the serpentine shadow, is the swishing noise of her serpent half brushing against the ground. "Hi there~," she greets the red-haired girl. Then she asks, "Think somebody back there could whip up some good ol' shisu for me?" She will offer a pleasant wave to Johnny as she does. "Well, hello there," she offers in greeting. "I haven't seen you around here before."
Johnny sweatdrops at the woman as she makes her entrance. Doubly so when she tries to introduce herself. His gaze goes up towards the rafters as he ponders how to respond, but instead decides to not be a total dick. He bows slightly at the woman, smiling manically as he rises back up. "That's because -I- finally have a job I enjoy doing that's more than just drawing comics for the homeless insane." He side-glances at Yoiko waiting to see if she catches the reference. Instead she's off in the back relaying Deis's order and totally ignoring him. Again! There's no hiding the irritation there. "Fucking reboots."
"Always nice to have a job," Deis replies, with a smile. "I've not quite managed to secure one yet. Though I doubt I'm needed, really." She shifts, to 'lean' on a bottom coil. "My name's Deis~," she offers. "What's yours?" She only offers a name, but that's probably all she needs to offer. With Johnny's particular role in this place, he can probably see it. Or sense it, or feel it... or however he perceives it.
The maniac's eye twitches. He shouldn't have been sociable. Damn. Fine, maybe if he goes all official-like she'll leave him alone. He leaps off the barstool and stands straight, giving an elaborate full bow in the process. "Johnny C, Lord of Retributions and one-seventh of the Council of Hell. Pleased to meet you." He raises back up with that mischievous grin on this face again and offers a hand to shake. "I used to murder people, but now I condemn the dammed to eternal punishments. Friends call me NNY." Wow, he's going all out today. Meanwhile in the background Yoiko comes back with a plate with a burrito on it, and another plate with shisu decorated all fancy-like with little bowls for dipping if she should so choose. Sitting them down she glances at the two patrons and frowns slightly realizing she should have asked what they wanted to drink. Oh well. Without another thought she promptly switches the two plates around and walks off to clean some glasses while giggling softly to herself.
"Ooh, pleased to meet you," Deis replies, shaking the offered hand. She doesn't seem scared. Probably because... "I used to be an evil goddess." Huh. That's a thing to admit casually. She offers a smile to Yoiko as the food comes out. "Thanks~! Oh, can I get a hard lemonade too?" she asks. She gives a radiant smile. Not literally glowing or anything, no. Though there might be a sparkle or two floating around.
His eye twitches again. That was supposed to work, dammit! Cringing as she shakes his gloved hand (and pondering changing his gloves), Johnny reclaims the barstool he was sitting on moments before and stares at a plate of fish? "Th' fuck is this? This isn't a burrito!!" He glances over at Deis's meal and scowls. "...oh." Cue the sound of plates being slid back around. Acknowledging her request for a drink he promptly looks around for his lost, and apparently non-existant glass. "HEY! Where's my drink!?" As Yoiko sits a not-quite lemonade before Deis she turns returns Johnny mischievous smile from earlier. "You didn't ORDER a drink. ...sir." Oh, now she's just egging him on. Clapping her hands together the girl bows her head slightly. "Whatever can I do for you oh lord of the largepants? It is ever my pleasure to serve someone such as you." Johnny almost draws his dagger but instead taps his fingers against the bar. "Largepants? Really? A cherry coke. PLEASE." You can hear the venom dripping from the word. Of course he's still mainly annoyed that she hasn't admitted one way or the other about knowing him. As the girl turns away with that smile still on her face, he turns his attention to the snake woman beside him. "An ex-goddess, huh? That make you an ex-bitch too?" Not trying to win friends is he? He takes a bite off of his meal and shakes his head, "Don't get me wrong, but most goddesses aren't worth shit except for stepping on people. The fact you called yourself 'evil' doesn't help that assessment."
Deis just starts giggling. Johnny's antics regarding his meal are amusing, apparently. But she does understand the frustration, if this wasn't the 'usual' he was expecting. She'll start on her food in the meantime. Yoiko returning with the lemonade gets a smile too. "Thank you, dear~." She might be being extra nice to offset Johnny. But if he's supposed to be a 'lord of torment', it makes sense he'd be difficult. As for being 'ex-bitch'? "Nothing 'ex' about it," she replies, with a wink. "But seriously. I'm only a bitch when I have to be." As for the comment on most goddess's relative lack of worth? "Oh, I /know/," she says, in an exasperated tone. It's not at him, though; the heavenward glance and rolled eyes tells that. "My sister is /exactly like that/. Let everything go to her head in all the wrong ways. But for us it was different. Imagine this: you're minding your own business, and then people from another dimension /yoink/ you out of your own dimension with a ritual and you're suddenly a god." She raises her hands in a helpless shrug. "You didn't ask them to, didn't work your way up, just 'Yoink! Bam!'."
He watches suspiciously as Yoiko brings him a soda with a little paper umbrella. He'd comment but he's got a mouthful of food. As she passes he nods his head at the origin story. "No, no. I can relate to that. Sitting on an airplane and suddenly my CD player starts skipping tracks and switches from Ode to Joy to the A-Team theme. Suddenly everyone speaks English and cartoon characters are running around beating the hell out of each other." He angrily takes another bite, but this time he doesn't bother to chew it before talking again. "It's like the rest of the universe just does what they want with you, and bullies you into doing shit you don't want to do." He chokes down what's in his mouth and sips his soda after taking the umbrella out. "But what can you do? ...other than STAB the fuckers in the face when they show up to gloat?" He's speaking from experience, isn't it?
Deis listens attentively as Johnny relates his own experience. Thankfully Deis has been here long enough to know what a CD player is, and what cartoon characters are. But she does chuckle slightly at his words about said cartoon characters. As for what one could do? She smirks a bit around a bite of the shisu. "Or," she says, while chewing. "You could take it in stride." She pauses to swallow the bite, and take a drink of her not-quite-lemonade. Then she notes, "If it's doing stuff to screw with your head, it expects you to be upset. But anything that's making that much of an effort to screw with you is /trying/ to get a rise out of you. I just sort of... I think you'd say 'flip them the bird and smile'." Here she grins. "Always pisses off cosmic entities when you can find pleasure in the situation they plunk you down in to piss /you/ off."
Johnny finishes off his burrito and looks ready to lick the plate before Yoiko whisks it away, dropping it into a sink behind the bar. The maniac seems less interested this time around. "No. See. I tried that. Y'know where it got me?" He takes out his black-bladed dagger, twirls it once, and drops it onto the bar so it stands up on its own. "I got a neat toy. I got me some spooky demon powers, I got to control an army of lesser demons, and I end up in a fight to the death with my best friend who was possessed by another fucking goddess. So at this point I TRY to do the right thing, I yield, I help her take out the big asshole demon who's pulling the strings - and for my help I'm banished to some shitty speck in the middle of the multiverse for the next sixty five billion years or so." He leans back and lets out an exasperated sigh. "I didn't ask for this shit! I didn't want to live that fucking long!! I was content being myself and dragging assholes off the street and putting them down, I couldn't even do that then! There's always some fucking uber power pulling your strings and making you do some shit you didn't ask for!" He shakes his head and yanks the dagger back out, putting it quickly away. "Fuck. That."
Deis is a good listener, too. Comes from mysteries being in her purview. So she listens. And she looks at the dagger as he drops it onto the bar. She does think of patting him on the shoulder, but he seems not to like physical contact, so she decides against it. She nods, and when he says 'fuck that', she chimes in, adding earnestly, "In particular. I admit I didn't have things /that/ bad. My sister went kill-crazy for this race of dragon-people, who happened to be the only race she couldn't control. Well, of /course/ I tried to stop her. But see I was trying to be nice. Trying to talk to her and her warriors, get them to understand they didn't have to do that. Nope~! Sis had her warriors seal me up for five hundred years." She wrinkles her nose distastefully. "I was trying to be nice." Then she ventures, "And let me tell you, sleeping on your back on ancient stone bricks, NAKED, for five hundred years, is definitely NOT 'beauty sleep'."
The waitress blinks at his outburst, adjusting her headband a moment before responding, "And feed your delusions? No thanks, NNY." She's suddenly gone into the back before he can draw his dagger - which he does slowly as her words start to creep back into his skull. "...waaaait." There's a sound of giggling in the back, but the girl doesn't come back out. Not yet at least. She's not that stupid. Resheathing the blade he sinks back into his barstool. "See? Played again!" He leans towards the door and yells, "DEMON!!" He sits back and huffs with a cross of his arms. After a moment he turns his head and asks, "Shouldn't you be in Hell after all that? I mean, I had to kill a goddess to get in - but that's because of the whole Council thing."
"Oh I should have just kicked her off the throne myself, but I didn't want to take her place," Deis reasons. "She was handholding her worshippers and I wasn't about to do that." Suddenly Yoiko comes out again and... there's some interplay. Curious. Deis raises a brow. "I get the feeling you have some history?" she asks. Not one to assume, but it looks like that. But she can't help but giggle at the 'played again' comment. As for being in hell? "There wasn't a 'hell' in my world, so to speak," she replies. "One of the last survivors of that race of dragon-people actually broke me out. It's just too bad I couldn't get to the one Myria brainwashed."
Johnny listens to all of this, but says nothing about the comment about 'history' at least until she pauses again. "A lack of a Hell sounds like a good thing to me." He lets out a heavy sigh, "And as for the rest? When the universe reboots you tend to have to get to know everyone all over again. I've lived through enough that I'm tired of doing it over and over again." He stands and leaves the contents of his pockets on the bar as a 'tip'. "I gotta run, but if you're around tomorrow maybe we can chat some more." He pauses before the wrong idea gets left behind, "The abused-by-heavenly-and-dammed-forces gotta stick together." Johnny frowns briefly at the name, "Gotta work on that though. That'd look terrible on a business card."
"Oh, I see," Deis comments when he mentions a 'reboot'. "So people /did/ know you but not anymore. That makes sense. Also sucks to have people keep forgetting you." And she nods when Johnny mentions having to run. "Sure, sounds good," she offers, to the mention of talking with him more later. And as for that not looking good on a business card? Deis suggests tesingly, "We could go with 'Those Who Fate Has Kicked In the Ass'?" A giggle. "Take care~!"
With a laugh at the suggested name, Johnny gives a bow once again and dashes out the door. A few seconds later Yoiko comes back out of the kitchen and shakes her head at the random bits of whatever he's left on the bar. "He's insane, but he's fun. Don't call him 'wacky' though." The girl scoops up what she can and ditches it out of sight, and then cleans up the rest of the dishes. "If you happen to see a big fluffy white and black dog with a nametag that says 'Checkers' can you lead her back here?" The girl whines a little, "I'd really like to go home again." | |
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