Chapter Fifty-Four - Fancy Foods

"I never asked, but what sort of food do you like?" Ivil asked as she walked next to Twenty-Six.

The younger woman was pushing her dolly along with a look of concentration on her face. It was currently loaded up with her haul of goodies. Or at least, scrap that Twenty-Six seemed to think were goodies. "That seems like a pretty broad question," Twenty-Six said. "Um... I don't really know. I guess I'm a little picky?"

"Picky?" Ivil asked.

Twenty-Six nodded. "On Saturn, in the rings, we had six flavours of dehydrated food to pick from. My favourite was red. Purple was gross, and I didn't like blue very much."

"I... see, and what about after you left the rings?" Ivil asked.

"Well, then I ate whatever Hawke makes on the Held Together. We actually got into an argument once! That was back when I was newer on the ship. Hawke noticed that I wasn't eating enough and so he sat me down and ran through all of the ingredients I liked and those I didn't. From then on he made sure to include enough stuff that I'd like so I'd always get my fill."

"That's actually quite kind of him," Ivil replied. "So what sorts of foods do you dislike?"

"Hmm, well, anything green, spicy, crunchy, or too sweet," Twenty-Six said.

Ivil ran through a list of every food she could think of that fit those criteria. It was a long list. "Wouldn't that account for a great number of meals?"

"Huh? No, there's plenty of shipfood that pass! Red, pink, green ironically, yellow, all three of the metallics. That's if you buy from Shipfarors United Food. If you buy Mars Agricrop food packs, they use numbers. I like meals two, three, seven and nine from them. Can't stand four. Jupiter has, like, four different food brands, and their naming stuff is all over, so it's a bit trickier to tell what's good or not."

Ivil blinked a few times, then shook her head. "What about real food?"

"How are the things I'm talking about not real food?" Twenty-Six asked.

"I sincerely doubt that a human interacted with them in any meaningful way from the growth of whatever plant started it all to the moment they're packaged."

"That doesn't make them not food," Twenty-Six said. "They have calories."

"I don't think having calories is enough," Ivil replied.

She wasn't a connoisseur of fine-dining and excellent food. Not to say that Mars mistreated her when it came to diets, she always had excellent meals waiting for her on whichever ship or station she occupied. It was just that she didn't require sustenance. In fact, eating was often a chore. Anything she ate needed to be digested, and that led to waste and she really wasn't fond of that entire process. More often than not she just burned any food she ate within herself until nothing but subatomic particulates remained. It was much cleaner that way.

Still, she enjoyed a nice meal for the sake of companionship and for her tastebuds. "We're going to a nice food place," Ivil replied.

"There's stands in some of the corridors we passed," Twenty-Six said.

"No, I said nice. And I don't mean some dinghy bar, either," Ivil decided. She stopped by a map-screen at a nearby intersection and scanned through it until she found an appropriate enough dining establishment.

It was two stations away, but that wasn't all that far. "I can't bring my dolly all the way there," Twenty-Six said. "That's one of the nicer stations."

"They won't complain," Ivil said. She'd make sure of it. "Trust me?"

Twenty-Six eyed her, then nodded. "Okay," she said.

Ivil grinned, then walked by Twenty-Six's side. While she did so, she tugged out her pager and tapped into it with one of her powers. It sent a small encrypted message to one of the first contacts on her list. It wasn't a very complex message. I need a reservation at the Beau Manoir on Driftwood Station.

There, nice and simple.

It took them twenty minutes to arrive at the restaurant, a trip made somewhat more complicated by having to push the dolly around and stuff it into some elevators meant for pedestrian traffic as opposed to more industrial work. Still, no one complained. Ivil did overhear some muttering about maintenance, which she supposed was a logical conclusion to jump to.

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"A-are you sure about this?" Twenty-Six asked as they came up to the front of the Beau Manoir.

The restaurant was designed to fit that particular aesthetic that the rich and somewhat influential enjoyed. Private eating spaces, small rooms with singular tables. A human waiter and staff dressed in formal attire. They even had old-Earth classical music from before the first intersystem war playing softly throughout the room.

"I'm positive," Ivil said. She held the door open for Twenty-Six and her dolly which only barely fit into the small lobby area at the front.

A man stepped up to them, looking rather frazzled despite his elegant suit. "You cannot bring that in here," he said.

"We did already," Ivil replied. "Reservation for two, under the name Evelyn Ville."

The man made a passable impression of a fish while Twenty-Six abandoned her dolly and slid in behind Ivil, using the taller woman as a shield. "Is this okay?" Twenty-Six asked.

"It's fine," Ivil replied. "This is merely an application of power."

The man stiffened, then bowed. "We, we have the VIP suite ready for you and your companion, ma'am," he replied. "Compliments of the owner? You know Jean-Paul?"

"Never heard of him," Ivil admitted. Had MINT twisted the poor owner's arm for this? She supposed it was plausible enough.

Unfortunately it was currently evening station-time and the restaurant was quite full. As she walked across it with Twenty-Six shuffling next to her, she discovered several eyes on her, and when they arrived at the VIP suite it was to find it being emptied of its previous occupants.

They were not pleased about this. "Do you have any idea who I am?" a rotund man was saying. His jowls wobbled dangerously in the direction of a young serving woman who was trying her hardest to placate him. "I'm the goddamn mayor of Driftwood! You can't kick me out!"

"Twenty-Six, go take a seat, I'll just be a moment," Ivil replied. She reached out and grabbed the large man blocking their path by the upper arm and moved him aside.

Twenty-Six squeaked and slipped by and into the safety of the VIP suite.

"Who are you?" the mayor snapped. "Unhand me at once!"

"You're making a scene," Ivil said calmly. She met his eyes. "The scene will be far worse if you don't settle down. I'm certain the Beau Manoir is being reasonable about all of this. Unfortunately I have a propensity not to be overly reasonable. So don't ruin my date or I'll ruin this fine establishment by spreading your remains across it. That might upset the serving staff who won't do their job as easily, which would in turn upset me. I might have to reconstitute you, claw your soul out of hell, then show you a world of torment the likes of which your fat-addled mind cannot comprehend."

The mayor stared slack-jawed for a moment before glaring. "Who in the fuck do you think you are?" he asked.

She sighed. Would Twenty-Six be upset if she caused a small political disturbance and interrupted their meal? MINT certainly would be, but she didn't make much of a fuss about what they wanted.

The mayor started to fuss and whine, so she removed his ability to make noise. He had bodyguards, she noticed. One of them had been trying to reach her from the moment she had approached him, but his attempts were so laughably weak that she didn't really care. He was currently pushing against a constant and unstoppable pressure that was preventing him from reaching her. "Majordomo?" she asked.

"Y-yes ma'am?" the man who'd greeted her at the door asked.

"Please relocate the mayor to your second best rooms. His meal and drink can be put on my tab."

"Yes ma'am, thank you, ma'am," the major domo said.

Ivil let go of the mayor and eyed him. "Do not seek revenge. This wasn't a slight. This was a mercy. Now, I have a young lady to woo, so shoo."

Ivil slipped into the VIP suite where Twenty-Six was sitting. The young woman was shifting from side to side nervously, and seemed afraid to touch anything. Possibly because any one of the utensils on the table before her were worth more than Twenty-Six made in a year.

Still, Twenty-Six screwed together her courage and met Ivil's eyes. "Can... can we talk?" she asked. "I think that maybe we're, uh, not on the same wavelength about some things."

***