Morning Rituals

[chaseandoldlace]

Who: Chase and Clarice
What: Buying breakfast. Again.
Where: Sweet Lady Jane
When: January 8th, 2012, mid morning
Why: Having a pet raptor with a donut addiction means you spend a lot of time in bakeries
Rating: Chase's mouth, so PG-13 at least

Comments

[never_blink]

By now Clarice was unsurprised by the boy's donut order. She was a little concerned that he was eating as many donuts as he apparently was, but he seemed about her age and she remembered Jane (or had it been Dairine?) complaining once about how teenage boys were hollow eating machines and how it was so unfair. He didn't seem to be gaining any weight, and if he was eating himself sick, surely he would have stopped doing this by now. So maybe Chase really did have a hollow leg, or maybe he had friends he shared with. It wasn't for her to question what a customer chose to order. But...

"Good morning," she answered with a small smile, as she always did, moving to start collecting his order. "Are you sure you wouldn't, um, like to try something different? I don't know if you saw, we have these cranberry walnut muffins this morning - they're new." She lifted the lid off the sample plate and pushed it toward him a bit, and went back to filling his order, not wanting him to feel pressured

[chaseandoldlace]

"Ah, nah," Chase waved a hand at the offer of the muffins. "Nuts don't sit well with Old Lace, she's my, er, dinosaur. These are actually mostly for her." He reached over, tapping the lid of the box Clarice was filling on the counter.

"Mutant, no, alien yeah. Majesdanian. I thought you might be half because Karolina sorta...glows, in her natural form. Wait..." And Chase looked up, suddenly grinning broadly. "you know what metahumans are? Where are you from? What year?"

It would be very, very hard not to hug Clarice if the Avengers had anything to do with her answer.

[never_blink]

Clarice stared at him, trying to figure out if he was teasing her. She wasn't always good at picking up on that sort of thing. "Your... dinosaur? The donuts are for... your dinosaur?" That had not been the answer she'd anticipated.

And besides dinosaurs, aliens. And metahumans. Chase's world was sounding even more, er, diverse than Clarice's. And his bright grin was frankly alarming. She shrank back a bit. "Um, 1994?" It sounded like a question. "Miami? I-- they didn't really talk about metahumans there. We were called mutants. I think - it's about the same thing, though." 'Metahumans' was a phrase she'd picked up from Damien. "There are metas where you come from?"

And aliens and dinosaurs. Mustn't forget those.

[chaseandoldlace]

"She's genetically engineered from the 87th century...it's a bit of a long story." Again, he waved it off for another time, and because, frankly, the other things Clarice was saying were a lot more interesting.

'Oh you've got to be fucking me.'

"Mutants, yeah!" He exclaimed, not caring if he wasn't exactly using his inside voice. "The x-gene right?" If she knew that Chase would be certain--he wasn't alone!

[never_blink]

Clarice smiled at the story. It would be hard to find a place to house a large dinosaur, of course. Every once in a while, Aternaville saw fit to remind her that she was not the weirdest thing living here, or even the weirdest-looking thing. The castle was probably the best possible place to keep something like Old Lace, where she could have both shelter and space to move around.

"It must be very strange for him here. I can't even imagine how different." And that was saying something, considering the culture shock Clarice had gone through when she'd arrived. But at least she'd known about arcades and mini-golf, even if she'd never been allowed to go. And she'd seen Back to the Future. "Does anyone else live here? I know there used to be others, but they always stayed so apart, I don't know if they're still here. Merlin and the others."

[chaseandoldlace]

"Actually he's adjusting better than you'd think. Don't think I'll ever get him to prefer driving to riding though," Chase said, casting a rueful glance back towards the stable as they reached the edge of the courtyard and headed off what he'd come to recognize as a hunting path. "Merlin and Arthur are still here though you wouldn't know it, Arthur pretty much refuses to leave the grounds and Merlin's attached to his hip. The twins are totally different, Uther's other two kids." He grinned, "Them, I like."

Old Lace paused in leading them down the path to sniff at a few branches that had been bent back, growling a little. Chase shook his head.

"Adamant is with him, and he and Lace have some sort of weird pissing match going on with who can kill the most. She hates it when he gets a head start," He stroked the top of her broad head. "You don't need to prove anything to anyone, you know that, girl."

The dinosaur turned her head towards him, wide red eyes narrowing in a way that even Clarice could understand.

'Of course I do.'

[never_blink]

Clarice had to wonder how much game there could be out here. There must be more than she would have expected, if there was enough for Uther to go hunting regularly and for the two animals to have such a competition going on.

"Is there much to hunt out here?" Maybe it was a case of Aternaville providing for the people it brought here. If it had brought these people with a castle and a stable of horses and a hunting dog, how much more trouble to provide a forest with a steady supply of game? Most people came with only the clothes on their backs (or, in Clarice's case, the clothes crumbling off their backs) so she didn't know what to expect. As always, the easiest thing to do was to take the whole thing and shrug it off as 'Aternaville'. "That's lucky for Lace. Isn't it?" She addressed the dinosaur for basically the first time. Old Lace just behaved too intelligently for Clarice to keep talking about her as if she couldn't understand. "I'll bet that makes things nicer for you."