milliways_bar | (no subject)

Of course Merlinians don't brood.

They think.

He's thinking to himself, over a glass of whiskey.

Right.

And Sunshine isn't trying to distract him from whatever thoughts he's not brooding about by placing a cinnamon roll on a plate in front of him.

He blinks, roused from his not!brooding thoughts, and offers her a brief smile before starting on the offered cinnamon roll. No call letting it get cold.

None of that explains the deep melancholy in his eyes.

Maybe it's a trick of the dim light. It makes everything seem more miserable.

Rae is horrible when it comes to talking about feeeeeelings. She rarely does it herself unless pressed, and hates being pressed. She also tries to never press for others to talk about them, unless it's absolutely necessary.

She watches him for a little while, seeing how the shadows flicker and dance on his face, returning his slight smile for the briefest of moments before taking the booth seat opposite him.

No matter what he might be thinking or feeling, he's doing justice to that cinnamon roll. Cinnamon rolls defy troublesome problems in life.

At least, that's the theory he's going with.

"Surrendered the oven to someone else for a while?"

"I only bake every other day, you know," she replies. "Besides, the rats needed them for the chickens they were roasting, so I left."

She would rather not be around the kitchens when they're cooking meat.

He lives in New York City. There are rats large enough to serve as a meal for four.

Thus, he frowns, wrinkling his nose.

"There's something distinctly off about that statement." Dinner cooking dinner? Not appetizing.

"How?" she asks, not seeing what it might be. Though the mutant rats that are found in Old Town are large, they're also nearly too fat to run or do anything threatening because of the large quantities of crumbs form Charlie's Coffeehouse trays and plates.

The waitrats at Milliways have just become part of the landscape, for her.

"What's wrong with it?"

"You've never seen the New York City rats. They're the size of a small calf, and probably have as much meat." He's exaggerating.

But only a little.

Really.

They're bigger than a lot of New York dogs, anyway.

"The vermin in Old Town are similar. Cockroaches roughly the size of birds - you can hear the clicking as they canter across the cobblestones outside - rats and cats and mutant deer. The cats and rats, however, are so fat from eating leftovers and detritus from the coffehouse, they're not much of a threat."

"I've been to New York City... all of once, and that was in my friend Thirteen's world," she says. "The outskirts are only a five-hour drive or so from New Arcadia, but I've never been to New York, in my world."

For good reason.

Considering her world, he believes this is a wise choice - if things are that ugly in a small town, it can't get any better in a place as old and dangerous as one of the east coast's oldest major cities.

"Keeping yourself safe sounds like a good plan to me." It occurs to him, soberingly, that he may not even have time to give Sunshine a decent amount of training.

Merlin's plan, it turns out, has some serious holes.

New Arcadia had been a backwater city, far overshadowed by New York and Philadelphia and Washington, before the Wars.

Now it was one of the top ten best cities to live in, simply because the local Wars had been relatively quiet - meaning most of the city was still standing and most of its people were still sane - and because there were fewer bad spots around.

"It felt really weird in Thirteen's New York," she says, having noticed his mood before she approached and thus trying to keep the tone light. "They had underground transportation, of all things, and none of the houses were warded. I could hardly sleep while I was there."

She wasn't used to that terrible feeling of exposure.

"The underground can be very useful... and a great place for things to lurk as well. Besides, it's not very... classy."

He has a car. A classy car. Which he loves.

"The sheer number of things that'd take the opportunity to lurk in them is probably why the underground tunnels weren't deemed an appropriate use of taxpayer money," she smiles, wry.

"Not many people can afford classy, back home."

Rae has a car.

It runs, but doesn't do much more than that. The sporadic absence of third gear keeps things interesting.

He shakes his head again - seriously, he doesn't think much of the sorcerers in her world. Somehow, they have been failed greviously in their training, and have passed that on to generations of future sorcerers.

"Classy is not always 'expensive'." He points out... though in this case? It is. There are collectors who would pay a mint to get their hands on his car.

"More often than not, it is," she replies. "And if it looks like it might be classy, it's likely overpriced just in case."

Rae smiles, thinking of something. "Though, if you're lucky and the shopkeeper doesn't know what they've got, you can find some good stuff for cheap. I found a Straight Way at a junk sale for only fifty blinks."

He snorts - he doesn't know what a blink might be, but any shop owner who doesn't know the worth of his stock deserves to lose something priceless. He knows every last thing that's currently in his shop.

Even if he has no intention of selling.

Ever.

"Even a dead ward would've fetched nearly a hundred - so I suppose he didn't know what it was," Rae shrugs.

"Of course, I didn't know what it was, either. Just that it frizzled up my arm like I'd stuck my hand into a cappuccino machine when I picked it up."

"We must work on your identification skills." It's always best to know you're potentially going to touch an enchanted item before you actually do it - there's some cursed items that will make for a very bad (and in some cases, very short) lifetime, if handled.

But there's a tone in his voice, a worried one, a frustrated one - he's not sure he'll get the chance to do that. He's thinking of Dave, thinking about Dave's (barely present) clothing - it's what he considers modern. It's not some futuristic fabric, he doesn't have a bizarre hair style or weird color.

There isn't too much time left.