![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lunch with the Boss (continuation of 'webs and weaving')
(set soon after this.)
Computers, apparently, were recalcitrant bastards all across the galaxy. Anthony's work computer was a podlike yellow machine with nodules instead of buttons and a roundish screen that projected graphics into a three-dimensional interactive display. At least that was the idea, according to the manual.
The problem was that the damned thing would not boot. If it could be said that man and machine had a relationship, then theirs was a dysfunctional passive-aggressive one. He muttered darkly at it, threatening it with reinstalls and cajoling it with new memory, and instead it just sat there, the screen smarmily black and naked, as though it knew that it really had the upper hand in this.
Anthony sighed, his head falling in his hands. Great. Just great. It was only barely lunchtime on his second day on the job, the computer wouldn't start, and his boss hated him for some random reason he still couldn't figure out. Just thinking about yesterday's confrontation with Ryan, when he'd basically been told that he could feel free to leave at any time because he was a spoiled little brat, made his blood rise to a fine simmer.
Problem was that he was still the intern and Ryan was still the boss and he had two options - shut up and take it or leave. And he hated walking away from a fight.
A tall shadow fell across his desk. "Hey there."
He glanced up between his fingers.
Ryan was sitting on the edge of his desk, his tall and lanky figure like a pile of matchsticks someone had dropped. His long cats' tail wrapped around the computer's hard drive like a striped scarf, the grey-striped tip twitching ever-so-slightly.
"Good morning." Anthony replied frostily, still smarting from yesterday's conversation.
He picked up the silver-framed picture of Emily that was on the desk and whistled. "Nice. She your girlfriend?"
"Yes."
"Cool." Ryan fidgeted with a few more of Anthony's desk toys. "Hey, listen, there's some pastries in the break room if you want 'em." Getting up from the desk, he set the small stuffed beanie penguin back where he'd found it on top of the monitor and started to walk away.
Anthony stared after him for a moment incredulously and then turned back to his work, shaking his head. "What, you actually remembered to take your Midol this morning, or what?"
Ryan froze for a moment in the doorway and then started laughing, sending his tortoiseshell hair bobbing.
Anthony felt his stomach dropping through the floor. Shit. Now he was really in for it. If he was lucky he wouldn't be getting a trip home courtesy of Ryan's size tens, without the benefit of translight speed or oxygen. "Uh ..."
"Cocky little bastard, aren't you?" Ryan turned to face him, that peculiarly feline grin on his face again. Before he'd arrived here Anthony hadn't given much thought to how a cat might grin, but he realized that if anyone had figured out how to capture it, Ryan had.
"Um ..."
"Come on." Ryan continued, still chuckling. "Let's you and I go to lunch, what d'you say?"
* * *
Rigel Prime's capital city was simply named Primus. The fact that this was the Latin ordinal for 'first' did not escape Anthony as he followed Ryan through the brightly lit streets; the Rigellians seemed to be fixated on primacy. The first, best, biggest, most different, most radical, most interesting of anything was really the only something worth considering. Everything else was passe before it even began.
Anthony followed Ryan down the main thoroughfare, his attention divided between Ryan's waving cat tail, the stores around him with their fantastically unreal displays, and his own queasy stomach. They passed several restaurants, with signs he could half make out, and then stopped in a long line of people which seemed to end at a small oval ... trailer?
Yes, it was a trailer. One of those silvery Airstream model trailers, to be exact - he could still read the printing on the side. The crowd was two and three thick, and the line seemed to stretch for nearly half a block.
Ryan grinned at him. "Hottest restaurant in town."
"Um, what?"
"This. Hottest restaurant in town."
"Uh ... is it meant to look like an RV?"
"It is an RV. Or it was. Did you want regular fries, or fries with gravy, or onion rings?"
"Um ... what?" Anthony could feel his headache returning. He wasn't sure whether it was the lack of food or the glittering lights that seemed to be all the fashion in womens' hairdos or the fact that Ryan wasn't making a damn bit of sense.
"Yeah." Ryan shrugged indolently. "First there was haute cuisine. Then they had to top that. And then they tried to top that. Eventually every entree was served stacked twelve inches high on top of itself with five sauces and on a bed of feathered kelp like some kind of fucking dildo, so the backlash was food out of paper boxes. Now ramen and greasy fries are the new nouveau. White trash cuisine is chichi." He stretched lazily. "It won't last, of course. Nothing lasts here. The entire culture is built on sand. Seriously, what did you want? My treat."
"Um ... onion rings?"
"Good choice."
The line moved quickly, and when they reached the front Ryan ordered their food in Rigellian that was so effortless it nearly made Anthony weep. God, he'd never be able to speak that fluently at the rate he was going. He could barely remember the correct word for 'bathroom'.
Ryan handed him a greasy box brimming with batter-fried rings and a styrofoam container shaped like a bottle with an angular handle, the top already opened. "Come on. Let's eat in the park."
* * *
"God, this is so much better than dicks-on-a-plate." Ryan replied, lounging on a bench and stuffing an onion ring in his mouth. "Reminds me of home, and in a good way for a change."
"Where are you from?" Anthony asked politely, taking a bite of onion ring. It was warm and crispy and light, and actually rather delicious.
"Parsippany, New Jersey, if you can believe it." Ryan made a wry face. "Tree City, USA. Part of metropolitan Newark. So the New York part of New Jersey, not the Philadelphia part."
"What about your ... uh ..." Anthony blurted, gesturing toward the long, fuzzy tail, which was curled around Ryan as he sat.
"What, the tail?" Ryan laughed. "Oh, I got that here."
"What?"
"Cosmetic manipulation. Wings and tails are big here. Expensive as hell, but everyone wants 'em. Wired directly into your central nervous system and bone structure. The wings are actually capable of limited flight." He shrugged. "I was always more of a tail man, myself. But yeah, you can get whatever you want; wings, tails, ears, whiskers. There's a guy that does porn that's got two dicks. Apparently both functional."
"Wow."
"That's what I was trying to get at yesterday." Ryan continued. "A lot of people can't handle it here. It's just too weird, there's too much shit to process. They think they can, but they can't. And then they go nuts, or get hooked into drugs or sex or whatever their addiction of choice is. I'll be your boss, I'll be your friend, man. But I'm not interested in being your babysitter. If I get a phone call from the cops or the emergency room, I want it to be because you've accidentally gotten into an accident, not because you ran straight into one." Ryan's voice was serious again, his yellow-green eyes placid and intense. "That's what I was trying to say. I don't want people to stay because they think they're gonna hurt my feelings if they can't hack it. I don't want people to think I'm gonna save them from themselves. Been on that ride and threw up on the other side a few too many times."
"So ... you being an ass was just you laying it straight on the line?"
"Yeah, exactly. Weeding out the chaff, you might say. You have no idea how many people take me up on it, too. Usually if they come back the second day they're here to stay. Most of the weak ones just crumble and grab the next flight home for reassignment."
Anthony nodded thoughtfully and took a drink from his foam pod; it tasted like frozen berries with a touch of something he couldn't identify. "What is this?"
"Alaphyat. It's kind of like the local version of soda pop. Good, huh?"
"Delicious."
"You should drop by my place this weekend. Having some friends over, we're gonna play cards." Ryan stuffed the last of his onion rings in his mouth and looked around, trying to find a trash can. He got to his feet and yelped, a screeching, painful yowl.
Anthony looked up, startled. Ryan's eyes were watering; the tail was thrashing on the ground as though it had been personally insulted.
"I hate that." he wheezed. "I just hate that."
"What happened?"
"Stepped on the damned thing."
Anthony began to laugh.
Ryan cast a pained look in his direction as he tossed his trash in a nearby composter pod, shaking his head. "Smartass. All right. Let's get back to the office before they change the locks on me again."
Computers, apparently, were recalcitrant bastards all across the galaxy. Anthony's work computer was a podlike yellow machine with nodules instead of buttons and a roundish screen that projected graphics into a three-dimensional interactive display. At least that was the idea, according to the manual.
The problem was that the damned thing would not boot. If it could be said that man and machine had a relationship, then theirs was a dysfunctional passive-aggressive one. He muttered darkly at it, threatening it with reinstalls and cajoling it with new memory, and instead it just sat there, the screen smarmily black and naked, as though it knew that it really had the upper hand in this.
Anthony sighed, his head falling in his hands. Great. Just great. It was only barely lunchtime on his second day on the job, the computer wouldn't start, and his boss hated him for some random reason he still couldn't figure out. Just thinking about yesterday's confrontation with Ryan, when he'd basically been told that he could feel free to leave at any time because he was a spoiled little brat, made his blood rise to a fine simmer.
Problem was that he was still the intern and Ryan was still the boss and he had two options - shut up and take it or leave. And he hated walking away from a fight.
A tall shadow fell across his desk. "Hey there."
He glanced up between his fingers.
Ryan was sitting on the edge of his desk, his tall and lanky figure like a pile of matchsticks someone had dropped. His long cats' tail wrapped around the computer's hard drive like a striped scarf, the grey-striped tip twitching ever-so-slightly.
"Good morning." Anthony replied frostily, still smarting from yesterday's conversation.
He picked up the silver-framed picture of Emily that was on the desk and whistled. "Nice. She your girlfriend?"
"Yes."
"Cool." Ryan fidgeted with a few more of Anthony's desk toys. "Hey, listen, there's some pastries in the break room if you want 'em." Getting up from the desk, he set the small stuffed beanie penguin back where he'd found it on top of the monitor and started to walk away.
Anthony stared after him for a moment incredulously and then turned back to his work, shaking his head. "What, you actually remembered to take your Midol this morning, or what?"
Ryan froze for a moment in the doorway and then started laughing, sending his tortoiseshell hair bobbing.
Anthony felt his stomach dropping through the floor. Shit. Now he was really in for it. If he was lucky he wouldn't be getting a trip home courtesy of Ryan's size tens, without the benefit of translight speed or oxygen. "Uh ..."
"Cocky little bastard, aren't you?" Ryan turned to face him, that peculiarly feline grin on his face again. Before he'd arrived here Anthony hadn't given much thought to how a cat might grin, but he realized that if anyone had figured out how to capture it, Ryan had.
"Um ..."
"Come on." Ryan continued, still chuckling. "Let's you and I go to lunch, what d'you say?"
* * *
Rigel Prime's capital city was simply named Primus. The fact that this was the Latin ordinal for 'first' did not escape Anthony as he followed Ryan through the brightly lit streets; the Rigellians seemed to be fixated on primacy. The first, best, biggest, most different, most radical, most interesting of anything was really the only something worth considering. Everything else was passe before it even began.
Anthony followed Ryan down the main thoroughfare, his attention divided between Ryan's waving cat tail, the stores around him with their fantastically unreal displays, and his own queasy stomach. They passed several restaurants, with signs he could half make out, and then stopped in a long line of people which seemed to end at a small oval ... trailer?
Yes, it was a trailer. One of those silvery Airstream model trailers, to be exact - he could still read the printing on the side. The crowd was two and three thick, and the line seemed to stretch for nearly half a block.
Ryan grinned at him. "Hottest restaurant in town."
"Um, what?"
"This. Hottest restaurant in town."
"Uh ... is it meant to look like an RV?"
"It is an RV. Or it was. Did you want regular fries, or fries with gravy, or onion rings?"
"Um ... what?" Anthony could feel his headache returning. He wasn't sure whether it was the lack of food or the glittering lights that seemed to be all the fashion in womens' hairdos or the fact that Ryan wasn't making a damn bit of sense.
"Yeah." Ryan shrugged indolently. "First there was haute cuisine. Then they had to top that. And then they tried to top that. Eventually every entree was served stacked twelve inches high on top of itself with five sauces and on a bed of feathered kelp like some kind of fucking dildo, so the backlash was food out of paper boxes. Now ramen and greasy fries are the new nouveau. White trash cuisine is chichi." He stretched lazily. "It won't last, of course. Nothing lasts here. The entire culture is built on sand. Seriously, what did you want? My treat."
"Um ... onion rings?"
"Good choice."
The line moved quickly, and when they reached the front Ryan ordered their food in Rigellian that was so effortless it nearly made Anthony weep. God, he'd never be able to speak that fluently at the rate he was going. He could barely remember the correct word for 'bathroom'.
Ryan handed him a greasy box brimming with batter-fried rings and a styrofoam container shaped like a bottle with an angular handle, the top already opened. "Come on. Let's eat in the park."
* * *
"God, this is so much better than dicks-on-a-plate." Ryan replied, lounging on a bench and stuffing an onion ring in his mouth. "Reminds me of home, and in a good way for a change."
"Where are you from?" Anthony asked politely, taking a bite of onion ring. It was warm and crispy and light, and actually rather delicious.
"Parsippany, New Jersey, if you can believe it." Ryan made a wry face. "Tree City, USA. Part of metropolitan Newark. So the New York part of New Jersey, not the Philadelphia part."
"What about your ... uh ..." Anthony blurted, gesturing toward the long, fuzzy tail, which was curled around Ryan as he sat.
"What, the tail?" Ryan laughed. "Oh, I got that here."
"What?"
"Cosmetic manipulation. Wings and tails are big here. Expensive as hell, but everyone wants 'em. Wired directly into your central nervous system and bone structure. The wings are actually capable of limited flight." He shrugged. "I was always more of a tail man, myself. But yeah, you can get whatever you want; wings, tails, ears, whiskers. There's a guy that does porn that's got two dicks. Apparently both functional."
"Wow."
"That's what I was trying to get at yesterday." Ryan continued. "A lot of people can't handle it here. It's just too weird, there's too much shit to process. They think they can, but they can't. And then they go nuts, or get hooked into drugs or sex or whatever their addiction of choice is. I'll be your boss, I'll be your friend, man. But I'm not interested in being your babysitter. If I get a phone call from the cops or the emergency room, I want it to be because you've accidentally gotten into an accident, not because you ran straight into one." Ryan's voice was serious again, his yellow-green eyes placid and intense. "That's what I was trying to say. I don't want people to stay because they think they're gonna hurt my feelings if they can't hack it. I don't want people to think I'm gonna save them from themselves. Been on that ride and threw up on the other side a few too many times."
"So ... you being an ass was just you laying it straight on the line?"
"Yeah, exactly. Weeding out the chaff, you might say. You have no idea how many people take me up on it, too. Usually if they come back the second day they're here to stay. Most of the weak ones just crumble and grab the next flight home for reassignment."
Anthony nodded thoughtfully and took a drink from his foam pod; it tasted like frozen berries with a touch of something he couldn't identify. "What is this?"
"Alaphyat. It's kind of like the local version of soda pop. Good, huh?"
"Delicious."
"You should drop by my place this weekend. Having some friends over, we're gonna play cards." Ryan stuffed the last of his onion rings in his mouth and looked around, trying to find a trash can. He got to his feet and yelped, a screeching, painful yowl.
Anthony looked up, startled. Ryan's eyes were watering; the tail was thrashing on the ground as though it had been personally insulted.
"I hate that." he wheezed. "I just hate that."
"What happened?"
"Stepped on the damned thing."
Anthony began to laugh.
Ryan cast a pained look in his direction as he tossed his trash in a nearby composter pod, shaking his head. "Smartass. All right. Let's get back to the office before they change the locks on me again."