milliways_bar | (no subject)

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dinah lance

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The woman who enters the bar is older than she used to be. (Heck, who isn't? Diana, probably.)

She's blonde, without a wig, and sports a few more scars than she used to. This doesn't stop her from exposing her midriff between her shortened shirt and her jeans, though.

Dinah pauses at fhe door, looks around, and rolls her eyes.

Where has this place been for the last few years?

Well, time to see if Bar's dim sum is as good as she remembers it.

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At the bar, there's a very pale young man in dark, slightly ragged robes and a frayed straw hat, with dark lines running out from under his clothes that look decidedly unhealthy.

However, he is quite pleasantly munching his way through a basket of paradoxes.

We'll be honest here: Dinah's seen worse. Much worse.

Her first focus of course, is the food. And she has a list.

"Okay," she tells Bar, "I want pork puffs, shrimp dumplings, black bean chicken feet, lo mai gai - oh and a bowl of that chongqing hot enough to make Ollie cry. And - oh, egg tarts. And I don't know, everything. With paradoxes on the side."

She really missed bar's food, okay?

The pale young man can't help but giggle. "Oh, you must be hungry! Would you like some sliced radishes with that?"

"Yes," Dinah says emphatically, turning to him with a hungry look. "Are they Daikon? I had this amazing roasted spicy Daikon in Dengfeng and I've never been able to find anything like that again. I bet Bar could replicate that recipe if I ask her."

Honestly, she's like a kid at Christmas. But at least she's willing to share, offering one of the baskets of food over to him.

The young man pulls a small bag out of his sleeve that is, however, larger than the sleeve itself. From the bag he pulls a large white radish that is considerably larger than the bag itself, plus a little knife, with which he slices a few almost translucent slices off the radish, which he adds to a corner of one of the plate.

Then, he pinches one of her paradoxes to see what they taste like.

They taste, in the best tradition of Milliways, almost, but not quite, entirely unlike onion rings.

"Bar, honey," Dinah says, picking the slices of radish up with the chopsticks that came with her noodles, and adding them to a napkin, "can you do something with these?"

The resultant dish of spicy roasted radishes actually makes her do the chef's kiss gesture, and she proffers it back over to her new friend to try.

"So good."

Edited 2020-09-30 18:04 (UTC)

"This is -- spicy!" her new friend says, tasting them. "Really, I have to know how they are made and make them at home. We have oodles of radishes!"

This would be a recipe with which even Wei-gongzi might learn to appreciate their radishes in a new way!

"Hopefully she'll give you a recipe," Dinah says.

"Sorry I can't help with tips, my relationship with food is all about eating, less about the actual preparation. But if you need a taste tester, I'm always willing to make the sacrifice.

"To make sure I get this radish recipe right?" he says. "I'd be honoured."

Pause.

"Ohh!"

He stands, and bows to her, arms held before his chest.

"I'm Wen Ning, courtesy name Qionglin, and some people call me the Ghost General," he politely introduces himself, with all his names. Even though his title is admittedly terrible.

Dinah hops to her feet and returns the bow, practised and polite.

"Honoured to meet you, Wen Qionglin," she says. "I'm Dinah Lance, and some people call me the Black Canary, but I'd prefer if you just called me Dinah."

And she sits back down again and offers him a chicken foot. "But you'll find you can call me what you want if you feed me."

"You like spicy things, do you?" Wen Ning asks.

"I like tasty things," she says. "Doesn't have to be spicy. But I used to live with someone who put a lot of chili in his cooking and I developed a taste."

You develop callouses on your tongue if you live for any length of tine with Oliver Queen.

"You should try Wei-gongzi's spicy congee," Wen Ning says, grinning. "I wonder if Bar can make it as terrible as he does."

"Why would I want something terrible?" says Dinah, ever so slightly offended. "When I have all this good food to choose from?"

"It's terrible for people who don't like spicy food," Wen Ning says. "People who do probably find it as great as Wei-gongzi."

"Not if he's too much like my old friend," says Dinah, gesturing with a slice of roasted radish. "Some people think heat and taste are the same thing."

"Wei-gongzi says pain is a flavour," Wen Ning says with a little giggle.

"Wei-gongzi sounds like he's wrong on a lot of things," Dinah says, her straight face cracking just slightly.

"No!" Wen Ning protests. "He's a good friend who helps us a lot, and he's very clever. He's right most of the time."

And Wen Ning is his stoutest supporter.

"Good friends and clever people can still be wrong," Dinah says levelly.

"Trust me, my best friend is the cleverest woman alive and she's wrong all the time about things like whether coffee is a vegetable and whether it's possible to be the best version of yourself on less than one hour's sleep."

Wen Ning giggles outright. "Wei-gongzi is definitely his best self after less than one hour of sleep; I would never tell him otherwise. Only my sister does that."

Pause.

"Seems our friends are somewhat similar. But what is coffee?"

Wei-gongzi sounds more like Oliver than Babs - maybe a combination of Bruce and Ollie which sounds terrifying.

"It's a bean," she pauses to see if a voice in her ear will say 'actually it's a seed' but Babs can't hear he in here, so Dinah conitnues: "from South America in my world but the Italians perfected it. Like the most concentrated black tea you can think of but more so."

She thinks for a second and asks Bar: "Hon, can you give my new friend your tastiest lactose-free cappuccino, please?"

Just in case.

Edited 2020-10-01 12:33 (UTC)

"A bean for drinking?" Wen Ning says, eyeing the cup that appears. "It has a handle! And, erm, clouds on top?"

"That's the foamed milk," Dinah says. "The bean juice is under that.

"The milk takes the edge off a bit, I figured I wouldn't go straight espresso on your first outing into the world of bitter caffeination."

Wen Ning starts drinking, and then --

"This is -- what is this??"

His upper lip is full of foam.