Grakk's Diner, Near The Jedi Temple, Coruscant, Tuesday Morning

[suitably_heroic]

It'd been a decent couple of days - training Sparkle, avoiding Brianna, finding new places to leave rude things scribbled on the walls of the Temple that Mical probably wouldn't find out about until he was fifty - but all decent things had to end. For one thing, most of Atton's stuff was on the island, and for the other, he didn't actually want to miss the couple of quiet days there before the next term.

Why squander a perfectly good place without people he hated?

"All right, portal leaves in two hours," Atton said, pushing open the door to a charming local diner that screamed GRAKK in offensively neon-and-glittery words from the rooftop. Inside, a plethora of people of various species were hovering or sitting in their seats, but there were still a couple of booths open, including one facing right across from the diner's four-armed cook, so hey, Atton would sit down right there.

"Stick to the blue part of the menu," he said, "The white part's living food. Yellow's not for humans, and red... let's just not talk about the red."

[[ for sparks! ]]

Comments

[myownface]

"Cool," Sparkle said, reaching for his menu and... kind of... staring at it. "Uh."

Okay, so people here spoke the same language as him but apparently they didn't write in it. Or at least, this menu certainly didn't, because he was certain he'd been able to read other things here and there before. Good, good.

"Soooo," he hedged, glancing up at Atton again over the top of the menu, "what would you recommend?"

Sparkle had never really taken school seriously, but even so, it had been a while since he found himself functionally illiterate and wishing he could read something. He was finding that he wasn't a fan.

[suitably_heroic]

"The sliders are pretty good," Atton said, studying the menu.

Look, there were a lot of things he was sensitive to when it came to being the little guy in the room. But Aurebesh? ... Yeah, sure, he knew that wasn't a thing on Earth, but after being submerged in his own galaxy again, he wasn't really paying attention to the details.

[myownface]

Sparkle pursed his lips a little, and then blinked again at the menu.

"Right-o. Maybe I'll go with those."

Because now he knew that they were on the menu, which was good. But as if Sparkle was going to do something logical like point out that he couldn't read the damn thing. That would be smart or something, and Sparkle...

Well, he wasn't stupid, but he was definitely pretty stubborn.

"So, living food, huh? Like, the sort of thing you have to chase across your plate before you can eat it?"

[suitably_heroic]

Maybe if Sparkle squinted at it long enough, he'd figure out it was a fairly simple substitution to the regular alphabet!

... Yeah, probably not.

"Basically," Atton shared easily. "It's always hilarious when somebody orders it without really knowing what they're getting into." Beat. "Well, it's funny until something disgusting winds up jumping into your soup, but still."

[myownface]

There was a long pause, and then Sparkle was squinting down at the menu again.

"Soup kind of sounds good right now," he said, still ever-so-casually. "Do they have any of that here?"

[suitably_heroic]

... Okay, there was something weird about the way Sparkle was talking.

Atton eyed him over the menu. "Yeah," he said, "Bottom of the blue part."

[myownface]

"Right, bottom," Sparkle echoed, looking... down that way.

Yeah, no, none of that really screamed 'soup' to him in any way, shape, or form. Sparkle wrinkled his nose a little, tilted his head, and then heaved a sigh. He was pretty sure he could tell the difference between category headers and menu items, simply because they were aligned differently, but beyond that...

"Thank god I'm not colourblind."

[suitably_heroic]

Atton sank back into his seat. "It's the Aurebesh, isn't it?" he said.

Look, he hadn't survived this long by being slow, even if he liked to play the stupid up more often than not.

[myownface]

The shrug of Sparkle's shoulders was probably about the closest to a 'yes' as he was going to get, today.

"Probably wouldn't make a hell of a lot of difference even if I could read it anyway," he decided. "Like I know what half of what people eat around here even is. I was gonna just, like, point."

Somewhere toward something at the bottom of the blue part of the menu. See? Good chance he'd score something soupy.

[suitably_heroic]

Atton rolled his eyes. "It's not actually that complicated," he said, "A lot of what we eat and drink around here's not that different from what you guys do. I mean, human bodies don't seem to be much different."

He eyed Sparkle.

"So, think about Earth diner food. What'd you want?"

[myownface]

Sparkle was now putting forth a concentrated effort to not just sink down in his seat in order to hide under the table forever.

"I dunno. Soup and sandwich?" He chewed on the idea of leaving it at that, and then shook his head and added, "Like, it doesn't bug me that I don't know what these things are, you know. You go different places, stuff switches up on you. I've ordered mystery food from restaurants in Toronto in, like, Chinatown before, and it's usually pretty good. I get weird looks sometimes, but whatever, I'm going to eat it anyway."

But the realization that he couldn't read the menu at all on top of that had kind of snuck up on him. He'd kind of figured he'd run into that sort of thing from time to time. When they went out drinking, 'I'll have what he's having' served him just fine until he learned the drink names, and then he could usually fake it from there. And when he walked into a random restaurant in Chinatown, he was already braced for it. It wasn't like he could read Chinese, after all.

It was just... jarring, walking into a place that seemed fairly normal to him, aliens aside, and then staring blankly at a menu that didn't make sense.

[suitably_heroic]

Atton threw a glance at the big neon sign hanging just outside the window. "We work with two alphabets here," he offered. "The one you can read-- that's what the people with money and education use. This's it for everyone else, a lot of the time."

He looked back to Sparkle. "I know, it's weird," he said. "Different stuff, I mean. When I first went to Earth I couldn't even order a glass of milk without running into that."

[myownface]

Sparkle let out a bit of a snort at that. Weird, that his A-B-Cs were considered posh in this neck of the woods. He idly wondered if Coruscant had some sort of Sesame Street equivalent he could watch in his spare time or something.

"I bet," he replied, nodding a little. "It's like... whatever the hell is there, you know you can eat it unless you have allergies or something, fine, but even if it's similar to what you know, it's not the same."

...

"I mean, I really like nerf steak, though."

[suitably_heroic]

"It helps if you don't have some notion stuck in your head of what the same is," Atton said. "I don't have a Toronto the way you do. That helped."

Just a string of places he'd visited and then left.

"Anyway, hey, it could've been worse. You didn't go running at the first sign of an alien the first time I dragged you here, you actually ate the nerf steak, a little weirded-out about the menu isn't going to crack your stoic streak."

[myownface]

"Yeah?" Sparkle looked at the menu a moment more before setting it down on the table. It wasn't like it was doing him any good, anyway. "I might have to learn how to read Aurebesh or something, if I'm going to keep visiting like this."

If it was the one that people without the snob education learned around here, how difficult could it be? It wasn't like the language was any different. Just the letters.

[suitably_heroic]

"It's not actually that far off from the alphabet you know," Atton said. "Just some different symbols and a couple of extra characters."

He held up the menu and tapped two items. "Cheese soup," he said, "nerf sandwich. Sound like a good deal?"

[myownface]

Sparkle squinted at the menu for a moment as though maybe doing so would make the letters make more sense. If that word-- it was repeated down the menu on a few items, so it was probably 'sandwich' -- and that one, which he figured was soup, looked like...

Yeah, it was going to take more than a few moments spent staring at a menu to lean an entire alphabet, but he was pretty sure he'd figured out what S looked like, anyway, if it was that 'drunk minus sign poking a lazy V-shape in the ass' looking letter.

It was a start.

"It's hard to go wrong with cheese," he decreed, leaning back in his seat and giving Atton a crooked little grin. "And the sandwich sounds good, too. Thanks."

[suitably_heroic]

"You're welcome," Atton said, dropping his menu on the table and waving over a serving droid. He placed their orders rapid-fire style and the droid shot off again.

No time wasted. See, that's why he came here.

"So, you think you're going to remember the stuff we practiced on?" he said. "Because if we go back and you immediately get possessed by something again, I'm going to be annoyed."

[myownface]

"I'm going to try," Sparkle replied, shrugging his shoulders. "I mean, I'm pretty sure Boo won't be able to pull that stunt off again or anything. That stuff seemed pretty thorough."

Hard to be positive without an actual ghost floating around and trying, but it didn't feel to Sparkle as though Atton was just teaching him hokey Jedi superstitious bullshit or anything, and he was usually a pretty good judge of that, at least.

[suitably_heroic]

Atton had been an expert on keeping things out of his head long before he became a Jedi. It was just... keeping your mind occupied in weird ways, overfocusing on small details, making up details that weren't there, that kind of thing.

He'd figured Sparkle could work with that.

"It is," he said mildly. "You listening to the rain?"

[myownface]

"You're going to have me playing pazaak in the rain while trying to ride a jetski across a lava flow one of these days," Sparkle replied, only half-snarking, but he nodded all the same. "But yeah. I mean, I have to get used to doing it all the time or whatever, but..."

He could handle that. It wasn't like he wasn't already used to keeping one ear open anyway.

[suitably_heroic]

"Hey, if playing pazaak in the rain while trying to ride a jetski across a lava flow works for you, I say go with it," Atton said.

The droid put down two glasses of something purple in front of them. (It was better not to ask.)

"But it's probably easier to stick with something more... I don't know, Toronto."

[myownface]

"Nothing has ever tried to possess me in Toronto," Sparkle pointed out, shrugging his shoulders. "Toronto solutions are great for Toronto problems, but, you know, apparently pretty shitty for Fandom. Or Coruscant. Or wherever."

He reached for one of the purple... somethings... contemplated it for a moment, and then decided that if it was there to be drank, drink it he would do.

[suitably_heroic]

It was drinkable, and at least not alcoholic, and some kind of fruit. Honestly, Atton had just ordered whatever juice came up first on the menu.

"Toronto solutions are actually fantastic for this problem," Atton said. "Actually, hey, let's make this a teaching moment. Things here are different, right? Off-putting? The letters, just to start with? Think about that. And then think about what you'd be hearing if you were sitting in a place just like this back home. What's different? What's the same?"

[myownface]

Sparkle looked between the juice and Atton for a moment, and then grinned.

"Well, I'd expect this to be grape-flavoured, in Toronto," he decreed, before shaking his head and deciding to take this a little more seriously. "But, I mean, some of it's the same. Grease smells like grease no matter where you go, and there's the sound of people just... eating. Clanging dishes, food being cooked, background chatter that you'd have to focus on to pick anything out from."

He licked his lips and sat there quietly for a moment more.

"Some of the different stuff is obvious. I mean, everyone is human back home. Even if I don't speak every Earth language, at least I can make a stab in the dark about what language I'm listening to or looking at if I run into it. Some of the food looks similar to what I know, but I still wouldn't be able to identify any of the meat by looking at it, beyond, you know, 'that's probably meat.' And this time of year, there'd be Christmas carols blaring from some hidden speaker somewhere and everything would be decorated for the holiday and half the people in here would be dragging shopping bags in for something fast to eat before getting back to their last minute holiday prep. And... I dunno... some things are just tweaked a little sideways, aesthetically. A table's still a table and a chair's still a chair, and the function for both is still pretty clear, but there's something about the design to either that's different, and the clothes people wear, and even the textures on the walls."

It seemed more... industrial? Maybe that was it.