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Back home there's everyday work (if dealing with possessed cinnamon buns and haunted highway overpasses- don't ask, but you really shouldn't take the BQE across the Gowanus for a while just to be on the safe side- can ever be called everyday), and an overenthusiastic ghost, and an angry sister. This is not very appealing to Ray right now. There's also his daughter, but she's a big girl. She can take care of herself for the handful of picoseconds between Ray heading for Milliways and Ray returning, Ray figures, much as he misses her while he's here. Right now he just doesn't want to deal with everything else back home. That'll happen soon enough.

So for the moment, he's reading a copy of the New York Daily News. There's a two-page spread on the city's proposed new disaster response plan. The police and firefighters' unions' response to the suggestion that special units be set aside specifically for the 'undefined phenomena' category of disaster is absolutely fascinating.

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"That doesn't sound too pleasant," He's mostly referring to the destruction of the city. "How'd you sort them out?"

"Pushing some extremely nasty extra-planar entities back through the portals from whence they came and blowing the dimensional doors shut behind them," Ray says. "That usually ends the 'grr, city go boom now' portion of the year's work."

"Well, at least it's not boring work," Atton grins lopsidedly. "I suppose, anyway?"

Ray smiles. "Yeah, it's the kind of thing that keeps you on your toes," he says. "And then there are days when you get jobs on a much, much smaller scale. We had an insane breakfast pastry last week, for example."

"... Insane breakfast pastry?" Atton blinks slightly. "What did it do, choke people or ... ?"

"Jumped off the plate, screamed 'let my people go', and started attacking the patrons of a coffee shop with plastic knives and forks," Ray says. "And then it started throwing the coffee pots around and trying to break down the walls and windows with bags of coffee beans."

To Atton's credit, he manages to school his features into a very solemn expression.
"Anybody hurt?"

"A couple of concussions, one very traumatized barista, and I still seem to have coffee grounds turning up in my shower drain despite my fiancee being very thorough indeed about getting me clean at the time."

"Well, I'm sure it could have been worse," Beat. "Could have started a revolution. Civil War." Very, very grimly.

"Considering how ideally poised the pastries and coffee shops are for taking out the law enforcement capacity of the city? We'd've been swarmed under by a tide of cinnamon-yeasty goodness in no time at all."

"They'd make the perfect fighting force - Small enough to get into tight spots, but forceful enough to knock out a fully grown Wookiee with indigestion. Destruction from within - First the city, then the world, then the galaxy."

"Except for the part where they're not intelligent enough to achieve interstellar travel on their own, so they'd only be able to get about as far as the Moon," Ray points out. "They'd need to force human slaves to develop star drive for them if they wanted the rest of the galaxy."

"I think that's being a bit unfair to the pastries. If they're intelligent enough to take over the world, they can develop a hyperspace engine."

"Possibly," Ray says, "but then again, they're a little limited in terms of resources. They don't make good miners, for example, and since we haven't got droids for them to use..."

"That's true, I suppose. But I'm sure they wouldn't have trouble subjugating a few humans for use."

Ray nods. "Probably true. Which is why it's for the best that we stopped the whole pastry revolution before it started. Although I do sort of wonder what they'd make of the screaming burrito."

"... Does it actually scream?"

"Well, it did," Ray says. "The shark wound up eating it, though."

"Everybody wins, I suppose. Except the burrito."

"Yeah," says Ray. "Although it was supposed to be my lunch, so I had to go out and buy another. Oh, well."

"Well, these things happen, I suppose," Sympathetically. "Occupational hazard, probably."

"I'd say I knew what I was getting into when I took the job, except that I didn't," Ray says. "Still, there's worse fates. I'll manage. HOw've you been, anyway?"

"Good. A bit cold, but that's probably my own fault. Or the weather's. Stupid weather."

"Yeah, I saw the snow," Ray says, indicating where Atton shed snow on his way in. "Were you out in that voluntarily or did you just get caught outdoors by mistake?"

"Voluntarily. But I didn't put on any extra layers, and then the mild snowstorm sorta became a blizzard."

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gone_byebye - 2006-11-30 21:54 (UTC) - Expand

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