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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! ]]
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! ]]
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:16 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:21 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:26 pm (UTC)"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?"
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:33 pm (UTC)... 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."
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:35 pm (UTC)"Soup kind of sounds good right now," he said, still ever-so-casually. "Do they have any of that here?"
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:39 pm (UTC)Atton eyed him over the menu. "Yeah," he said, "Bottom of the blue part."
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:43 pm (UTC)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."
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:46 pm (UTC)Look, he hadn't survived this long by being slow, even if he liked to play the stupid up more often than not.
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:50 pm (UTC)"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.
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:53 pm (UTC)He eyed Sparkle.
"So, think about Earth diner food. What'd you want?"
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Date: 2014-12-23 04:12 pm (UTC)"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.
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Date: 2014-12-23 04:28 pm (UTC)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."
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Date: 2014-12-23 04:54 pm (UTC)"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."
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:01 pm (UTC)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."
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:05 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:10 pm (UTC)He held up the menu and tapped two items. "Cheese soup," he said, "nerf sandwich. Sound like a good deal?"
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:16 pm (UTC)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."
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:19 pm (UTC)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."
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:23 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:27 pm (UTC)He'd figured Sparkle could work with that.
"It is," he said mildly. "You listening to the rain?"
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:48 pm (UTC)He could handle that. It wasn't like he wasn't already used to keeping one ear open anyway.
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Date: 2014-12-23 05:56 pm (UTC)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."
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Date: 2014-12-23 06:02 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2014-12-23 06:08 pm (UTC)"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?"
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Date: 2014-12-23 06:24 pm (UTC)"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.
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