13044/Tell Me The Wonderland Nonsense is Over, or You're Paying for the Pizzas.

Tell Me The Wonderland Nonsense is Over, or You're Paying for the Pizzas.
Date of Scene:	12 October 2022
Location:	Giorgio's Pizzeria - St. Martin's Island
Synopsis:	Terry and Colette go to Giorgio's for one of their regular grisini-eating contests, which Colette won because Terry didn't know he was supposed to be competing. Terry shows up covered in a coat (of paint) of many colors, and Colette is half pre-prehistory major and half Ferengi. Which is quite normal for both of them.
Cast of Characters:	Colette O'Connail, Terry O'Neil

---

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette, is, of course, early. This is the /normal/ Colette after all, though normal here is a subjective phrase. It's not the equally paranoid but far more morally white doppelColette who might also have shared this universe's tendency to turn up early for things if she knew where she was going. Nor is it the possibly related, possibly unrelated woman who looked a little like her and shared a name Terry had met in Wonderland, who it is fair to guess would undoubtedly manage to find something to delay her on route to any meeting. Who may indeed have left a certain 'Keith' waiting in pizzerias on many occasions.

    No, this is the regular, surly, occasionally helpful Colette of /this/ universe, who is rarely less than half an hour early for any appointment, presumably so she can lay some kind of a trap /just in case/. The Colette who has been absent from Terry's life for the last four months of Wonderland visits, Birbworld visits, and more. Who is no doubt due a little catching up with things!

    Thus there is a Colette waiting for Terry. Seated, as is her habit, very comfortably, with that ineffable ability to seem utterly at home wherever she is, as if she owns the place. Her legs are up resting on the chair beside her, her back resting on a pillar the table abuts. There are menus waiting on the table, along with a pair of bottles of Peroni beer. Colette is on her second, but she got one for Terry too, if only to embarrass him into not refusing it when she offers. There is, of course, grisini to nibble while ordering. Colette would not have it any other way, and has mostly finished the delicious bread sticks while she waited.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry was, actually, late. By ten minutes, at least, which is a little unusual. There are also no texts or calls to explain why, which is unusual as well. This can only mean-

"Sorry I'm late," the Cheshire cat says in an unusually bland monotone. The reason for the tone becomes evident the moment he steps through the Rabbit Hole and his colorful fur appears to be a lot more colorful than usual. By several degrees of the rainbow. His suit also has wide swaths of now-dry paint across it, making him look like a walking pride parade flag. The haphazard placement of the strokes all around indicates there was not so much intention as accident in their placement.

He plops himself down across from Colette, rubbing his forehead with a strained expression. "... you don't want to know. Trust me."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette raises an eyebrow. "You're right. I don't. I do want to know why you don't just turn back into Terry now. Or is Terry also painted up to look like a My Little Pony?" She waves a grisini at the bottle of Peroni. "Drink. Don't argue, you're old enough now. I have declared it, so it is. You look like you need it."

    She picks up her own bottle, waggles it at Terry, and takes a swig. "So. I don't want to know /why/, but I do want to know /why not/. Tell me this isn't a Wonderland thing. I told you before when that Snark thing happened, no more Wonderland things in Metropolis. So far I haven't been disappointed. I presumed you resolved that whole instance. Don't tell me I'm wrong."

    She leans back against the pillar. "So, how's Gar, Kian and Kate? And the rest? And you too I suppose. Haven't seen you in a while."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Terry happens to be naked, I got the alert while I was in the shower," Vorpal says, reaching for the grisini, "And I'm not old enough! I'm five months away from twenty-one. You are contributing to the delinquency of a minor, Colette."

He reaches for the bottle, nevertheless, and takes a sip. "Wonderland's been solved and saved. I did spend two weeks basically dreaming the place alive, but that was solved too. Incidentally, we met another one of your doppelgangers. This one seemed to be a dimension-hopper and she knew me, but by the name of 'Keith.' Got footage of the whole shebang on my costume go pro if you ever want to see what Wonderland and your doppel look like."

He chomps on the grisini, eyebrow raised, "They're all doing fine. Right now we're dealing with some mythical shenanigans... Coyote showed up at the tower last night. /The/ Coyote. And apparently Kaida is linked to an old Mouse Woman... but what about /you/?" he asks, leaning back. Of course, he could broach the issue of Kian's problem... but right now, he's catching up with his friend, nothing more and nthing less.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Bullshit," Colette replies amicably. "One doppelganger, maybe. The multiverse is a big place, there's just about room for it. Two? Not a chance. You're hallucinating. Or it was more Wonderland crazy. You'd make a terrible Keith. I hereby ban you from ever changing your name to Keith. Totally unsuited to you. There's one me, and one version of something I might have been if I'd got a stick up my ass. That's it."

    She slides a menu towards Ke... Terry. "Hurry up and make your mind up so we can order. I've been waiting for ages." So unfair, he's only ten minutes late. It's not his fault she was half an hour early. "Mid March then?" she says. "I'll rent out a bar, get you so drunk you can't stand for a week. You'll have to remain as Vorpal for three days to give Terry time to recover from the hangover."

    "Kaida's the mouse, right?" Colette swings her legs off the chair and sits up properly. Properly-ish. Her elbows are on the table, but that's better than her feet being on a chair. "I mean that makes a lot of sense when you think about it. It's not like she's a mutant or something. There's just not enough volume in her skull to fit a brain that's good for human-level sentience, so it's pretty obvious she's magical. "

    "As for me... not a whole lot to say. School's back on. I've been trying to encourage kids to not be despicable little monstrosities, and to develop into something vaguely constructive. Which goes to show I'm not a monster, really. There has been a certain amount of the normal Happy Harbor craziness. One of the students returned with a ghost friend. The principal died and came back to life. Nothing particularly noteworthy."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Vorpal freezes. "Shit. I slipped, didn't I? Damn you and your insouciant way of digging things out of people... have you thought about partnering up with my mom?" The cat smirks and shakes his head "You are unbelievable. But it doesn't work like that- time doesn't pass for whatever body I am not wearing. That's how I managed to not die from having a hole blasted into my stomach. And speaking of holes in the stomach, I am going to go for a personal pizza margherita."

"I men, if Kaida is a goddess, that makes three gods, sort of, in the team- Donna is an actual Titan of myth, and Kian is a godling to his people now... and he also just had one hell of a shocker of a revelation when we visited his world."

He chomps, "D'ya wanna visit Birby Buddy's world with me and Gar next time we go? We ship them chocolate every month and they pay us in rhodium... which is handy now that I no longer have a job at the Planet," he sulks.

"Oh, I remember Doctor M dying. One of the Titans is a student over there- Maddie? Yeah, she took it hard. But go figure tthe woman would come back from the dead. That's, like, the third person we know or know of that has done that. There must be a revolving door in the afterlife... but I kid. I'm glad she came back."
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Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "More than one Titan is a student there," Colette replies, smirking slightly. "Irie too. And one other that I know of, but I don't know if you know that so I'm not gonna say who. Doctor Morrigan's a good principal. I mean she gave me a chance and hired me full time ridiculously early in my teaching career, I'll always be grateful to her for that. And if she was gone, who knows what kind of fucking idiot we'd have ended up with. Probably that ineffectual ass of a vice principal who's always following her around like a lost puppy."

    "You know, if time /did/ pass for the other one of you, then you'd count as twenty-one by now. After all you'd be aging twice as much as normal people. Two of you getting a year each every year. On the other hand, if you inherited the Cheshire part of you, and that has been around for a few centuries, then your current furry, paint-bespattered self is old enough. So shut up and drink."

    Colette tilts her head thoughtfully. "Rhodium?" she says. "Like... significant quantities of it? That stuff is ten times as valuable as gold or something. I hope this means you're disgustingly rich by now. If not, you need a better negotiator. Yeah, it would be interesting to see another planet, I've been stuck on this one for years. Well, with occasional visits to the moon. And I did go to Venus once, but that wasn't a whole lot of fun and it's a massive pain to get back from. Anyway there's actually people on Kian's world, that's going to... I mean it's gonna be more interesting. And I already kind of speak the language a little."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Oh, the place is lovely, you'd have a blast. Kian's qihar coach, Kala, has fallen in love with Gar. When we're there, she and Gar spend some time talking about... qihar tactics, I am sure." He has the most mischievous look on his face, and then he grins. "If you had told me two years ago that I'd be perfectly fine with the Akiar approach, I would've thought you crazy. You know, I have to wonder just how much bullshit on Earth could have been avoided if we had been born as a telepathic species?"

And then, the cat raises an eyebrow, and waggles a grisini around, like a baton, "Of course... Kian's people were /not/ born as a telepathic species, it seems."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Of course they weren't," Colette replies with a slight roll of her eyes. "Races don't get born, they evolve. Telepathy is pretty much the most complicated evolutionary development, it takes a long time. Kian's people aren't really there yet, though they're on their way. If I... well, Kal'at would have been fascinated to visit Kian's homeworld. I suspect they're on the cusp of developing a true... noosphere is the best term for it. There was a Jesuit priest by the name of de Chardin who came pretty close to figuring it out, though his version had a whole lot more God in it than is necessary. He came up with the term. For the Martians it was the 'Great Voice'. With a sufficiently advanced telepathic species, the interaction of all those minds... each mind becomes a node of something bigger, kind of a neuron in a shared mind that arises from the interconnected subconscious minds of the entire species."

    She twists a little in her chair, leaning one should against the pillar, resting her beer-holding elbow on the table and taking another grisini from the rapidly-diminishing supply. "Kian's people seem to have everything necessary for it. The telepathy itself, of course. But also a species-wide tendency to cooperative behaviors. A sense of shared direction. A lack of antagonistic elements that would disrupt the harmony. I'm sure they're on the verge of developing a Great Voice of their own. Probably within the next ten thousand years or so."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry snaps another grisini in half and munches on it in between sips from the bottle. When the inquiry about their orders comes, Vorpal places his order, and asks for a side pizza to go later, for Gar.

"I remember reading about Chardin in class, the Peking Man and all that... pity he's dead or he'd be over the moon with Kian's people. Well, way beyond the moon. As for the Rhodium earlier... they're paying a pretty penny. I'm getting about five thou per shipment, split with Kian so he can have his own bank account and, you know. That sort of stuff. We still need to figure out a living arrangement of sorts- my apartment is too small for the three of us because of the space Kian needs, and the tower rooms... well, can't exactly /live/ at the tower full time."

He takes a long sip of his bottle, and licks his chops. "Kian's people didn't evolve into telepathy, either," Terry says, mysteriously, "J'onn didn't tell me about the 'Great Voice' when I talked to him. But he might have- I may have been distracted. That costume of his."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Five thousand?" Colette repeats in disbelief. "You've got to be kidding me. You're shipping a fantastic new drug which you have sole and exclusive access too, and that's all you're getting from them? What is that, a half ounce of Rhodium a time or something? You're doing this wrong. Let me renegotiate the deal. We need to set up a proper distribution network for the birds. Or find someone amongst them who can do it. Supply them with enough chocolate to keep it scarce but widely known about. Make it rare but not too rare, and the demand increases. Then if you're coming away with less than five pounds of Rhodium a trip you're being done."

    What is she talking about? She figures that half an ounce is worth five thousand and then extrapolates that Terry should be netting 320 times as much as that? That's like a million and a half dollars a month. Eighteen million dollars a year. She's mad.

    "No wait, I take it back. You're not being done, you're being taken for a pair of idiots. They're ripping you off and probably laughing their heads of at your naivety. I better fix this."

    "J'onn probably doesn't like talking about the Great Voice. I know enough... I mean I remember enough of who Kal'at was to know that a Martian who has lost the Great Voice is going to feel pretty terrible about it. It would feel like losing a part of who you are. A part of your soul or whatever. There's enough... sometimes it bothers me even. A little."

    Beer sip. "Whadda you mean, cat. You're being intentionally mysterious in a transparent attempt to whet my curiosity. Stop it. Tell me or not, don't leave it hanging."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Colette, I am /not/ going to create false scarcity and try to squeeze Kian's royal family. For one, it's unethical, and for another- they're telepaths, they'd /know/," the Cheshire smirks. And then he frowns, remembering some things J'onn told him. But that wasn't his subject to talk about, was it?

"Well, Caitlin came with us, and she did a few... well, you know how she is. She can't resist laboratories. Long story short? It looks like Kian no longer can say that Earth is weird, because all signs point to the Akiar being... well."

Munch. "Neanderthals."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "I'm not talking about artificial scarcity," Colette replies in her reasonable voice. "I'm talking about a real scarcity. How much chocolate are you taking? How many Akiar are there? I'm pretty sure you are not currently taking enough for everyone. I'm suggesting you take /more/. Not industrial quantities, but maybe a few tons at a time. Enough that it's available, but not flooding the market, that's all I mean. If you want to talk about unethical, how about those birds taking advantage of your lack of business acumen? Five thousand a time. That's fucking disgusting. Let me deal with this. I'll be fair. I'll be 'moral'." It's not exactly distaste in her voice when she says the word... but perhaps a hint of contempt. "And I'll make you a hundred times as much money."

    Colette takes another swig of beer, and gestures to a waiter. "You've got seventeen seconds to make up your mind about what to order. And Kian's not a Neanderthal. They didn't have wings, we'd have noticed. Also I'd be very surprised if they were telepathic."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Pizza margherita, personal, and a peach tea, of course. But no- right now I'm only selling to the royal family. Widespread distribution can come later. I'm thinking I can set up some fair trade exchange with independent farmers in Ghana and things of that sort- you know, give them a better deal than the big chocolatiers would. But we can talk about that /later/-"

He taps his grisini against his thumb, "Neanderthals. That were somehow modified into acquiring wings and telepathic powers. Their own myths speak of them being granted those gifts by ... how did Kian put it? Elders? Who were not Akiar. And the genetic evidence kind of speaks for itself. The Akiar started on Earth. And /some/ meddlesome aliens decided to meddle."

And then he grins, "And poor Kian has been tasked to find out the who and the why of it. Because of course he is."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette adds a pizza with basil, parmigiano and prosciutto to the order, along with two more bottles of Peroni. She's being quite Italian today it seems.

    "Absolutely," she tells Terry. "Fair trade. Cut them in on it. Go for the very best, offer them some proper money for it. Ten times over retail, why not? You can afford it, and they need it. Cut them in on your profits. But why limit it to the royal family? Find some local distribution to sell to wholesale, take over a few crates at a time. Say a hundred thousand dollars worth, that'll probably get you like... half a ton, being really generous to the growers. Sell it to the distributors for a million, and there's not a person involved in this trade who won't be deliriously happy."

    Terry's being serious about the Neanderthal thing, which takes Colette somewhat aback. "Huh. Well, I guess that makes sense," she says. Which is perhaps not the most expected of reactions. "I mean a whole lot of aliens did mess around with you guys in the past. You should see what the hominid genome was like when the Martians first visited your ancestors. I r... Kal'at read about it. Long before her time, of course. You guys kind of got caught up in the Martian civil war. Though I guess that would be somewhat later. I think Neanderthals were extinct at that point."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Extinct. Or... you know. Transported /elsewhere/. Man, I'd better not tell Lois about this or she'll rage. NEANDERTHALS NOT EXTINCT AFTER ALL /would/ make one hell of a scoop for the Daily Planet... and it'd really make them feel sorry about letting me go." He chuckles.

"I imagine that after Caitlin takes ten years or so conducting the rigorous studies and the experiments necessary to prove it beyond the shadow of scrutiny, she'll probably get some award as well. But in any case... I promised Kian I'd try to help him find the answers the Viceroy demanded. Figured maybe I could talk to someone who'd know how to find records of what was done... I haven't seen J'onn in a while, anyways..." he says impishly, and then he raises an eyebrow, "Then again, it's best if I don't. I find him very distracting and I tend to have to ask him to repeat himself."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "It's too early," Colette explains with a shake of her head. "The Martian civil war was uh... fifteen thousand years ago or so. Neanderthals were gone what... thirty? Forty? Something like that. There just wasn't any attention paid to Thu'ul... Earth back then. There won't be records of anything specific that happened to the Neanderthals."

    She shrugs her shoulders, then stretches and rolls her shoulders, shifting in her seat again. A faintly troubled expression crosses her face. "I guess the line of research for Doctor Fairchild to look into would be the presence of metagenetic markers in remnant Neanderthal DNA. Regular humans were lousy with metagenes just waiting to express when the Martians first got involved with Earth. There were indications that wasn't natural. Someone interfered with hominid genetics a very long time ago, and people have been messing around with humanity ever since. That only really stopped when Mars became aware of what was happening on Earth and... well that's a long story, and perhaps something I should be telling Kian, not you. But let's just say that if you tell me some race of aliens showed up to mess around with Neanderthals for their own purposes, it hardly comes as a surprise to me."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"So back then, there was no Earth, only Thu'ul?" Vorpal manages that with a straight face, to his credit. "If science and records won't reach that far back, then I guess I'm going to have to think out of the box and resort to something else. Could poke around in the Dream world to see if any ancient entities there might have a few dreams from that time stored up... but we're already in arrears to some powerful people there, so ... maybe something else."

He shrugs, "In any case, that's enough shop talk for today. Now we should discuss my continuing plans to puzzle Kian... and this year, I think we should take him to Rocky Horror for Halloween, and explain nothing beforehand." He grins and finishes his bottle, "What do you think?"