14467/You Should Have Been More Precise

You Should Have Been More Precise
Date of Scene:	21 March 2023
Location:	Giorgio's Pizzeria - St. Martin's Island
Synopsis:	Terry is ambushed by Colette, who has cracked his deepest, darkest secret: it's (almost) his birthday!
Cast of Characters:	Colette O'Connail, Terry O'Neil

---

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    There's nothing to fear but pineapple on pizza. It's Giorgio's! A place of regular visits by the Titans as well as the main distributors of takeout to the tower, it is also the place Colette and Terry go to catch up once every few months. Not that they won't usually have met up at some point in the intervening period, but usually there's a crowd, or a fight, or a crowd fighting, or explosions, or a fighting crowd exploding, and there's not much time to talk.

    Apparently it's Colette's turn to treat Terry. Whether this is true or not is something Colette herself doesn't know; she does not keep track. However it is the claim she made in her text to Terry: 'Giorgio's. My turn to bug. Tomorrow?'

    Well technically the claim hadn't been made until her follow up text, which read 'Buy, not bug. Fucking autocarrot.'

    As is the nature of this tradition, Colette is way too early, which means that there's no knowing how many beers she has already drunk by the time Terry arrives. There are however two bottles of Peroni waiting on the table when he does. There's also only one grisini left, a solid clue that she has been there a while, so likely the beer in front of her is not her first.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry arrives on time, which in Colettespeak is usually quite late. He's given up trying to show up earlier than Colette: you simply can't do that without deciding to simply just camp out all day, and Terry usually has things to do.

Working at the Planet, however, isn't one of them anymore, which is something that still feels wrong somehow. Like the worst rug pull ever.

"I see the grisini put up a brave resistance but there is now only one of them to carry their legacy," the red-headed human says as he approaches, one hand reaching out to snatch the last grisini as he sits down, giving it a hungry bite. "And so endeth the tragedy."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette gives a dismissive wave of her hand. "There can be more grissini. In fact, they know us here and probably were awaiting that final chomp before delivering us more, without us needing to request it."

    Colette leans back as Terry takes his seat, and picks up her beer. "So, is it my imagination or have things been quiet lately? I can barely remember the last time you sent me a message warning me you were probably about to die, so I presume you Titans have been doing no more than the regular terrorizing of innocent bank robbers and the like. I don't even recall there being an alien invasion I was aware of since January. You must be getting bored."

    She smirks slightly and takes a swig of her beer. "Talking of which, how's that... whatever her name was, the storm lady we met at the museum -- how's she doing? Did she sign her life away to the foolishness of Titanery, or did she manage to escape your clutches and retain the possibility of a normal, sane and enduring life?"

    Contrary to Colette's suggestion, no new grissini seem to be forthcoming. Colette turns, catches the eye of one of the waiters and gives a nod. The waiter nods back, grins slightly, and retreats into that native habitat of the wild grissini, the kitchen.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"She's... complicated," Terry says, giving her a shrug, "She might join, she might not, she doesn't seem to be someone you can pin down right away. We may not be done seeing the last of her... but I am surprised at you."

He knows what he want. He doesn't even need to look at the menu. If really is lucky that the Titans lead very active lives. "Remarking upon the calmness of the sea is basically begging for a hurricane to just /drop/ on you. It sounds to me like it is YOU, perhaps, who may be getting a little bored?"

He gives her one of his grins, "You know, there's a very good fix for that. I'll even help you come up with a codename and uniform, since one good turn deserves another-"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette STARES at Terry, her coal-dark eyes unreadable, yet saying so much because of that. "Terry," Colette says warningly. "A hurricane /did/ drop in on us last time, remember? And if you try mentioning codenames and uniforms again, even in jest, then it's you who'll be calling down the next one."

    Colette breaks first, letting her expression melt into a smirk. "You know I'd make a terrible superhero. Don't think you're going to fool me into thinking you're really proposing it. I'd drive you all mad and we'd constantly be stopping in the middle of emergencies to have long and complicated moral debates."

    She takes another swig of her beer, and puts it down again. "Maybe the other side of the coin though, " she muses casually. "I mean I don't really see the appeal to you guys of the hero business. Long hours, lots of danger, little reward. Those supervillains though, you can't tell me you haven't thought about it. Your Rabbit Holes would be perfect for heists. I mean you could do /both/ really. Secret identities and all that. By day, Vorpal -- hero of the Titans! Feline fighter of evil! By night, Macavity, the mystery cat, the hidden paw! Bank vaults emptied without the safe ever being cracked. Jewels missing from secure storage, and nobody saw a thing. Artworks pilfered from museums, and when the Titans reach the scene of the crime, Macavity's not there."

    The smirk gets wider. "I know, I know, you'd prefer to be exploited by a bunch of aristocratic birds who pay far too little for your interplanetary drug smuggling operation. The immorality of property theft though... it's just not you. But if you have suggestions for a codename and uniform... well I might consider it. I mean I can teleport too..."

    Still no grissini! Perhaps those wild grissini are being particularly truculent today.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"You make for a very poor temptress, you know?" He points the remainder of his grissini at Colette, like a magic wand, "For starters, I'm already making quite a bit of dosh bringing /chocolate/. But I don't /really/ mind getting exploited by the birds. If you saw Kian's ex, you'd understand why." He bites the grissini with a grin, "Aside from it being wrong, what good would theft do me? I don't like getting something I didn't earn, and everything can just go away in the blink of an eye- like my car. So..." he shrugs, "At the end of the day I've got myself and the people I care about. As long as I still have that, the rest is gravy."

"This is the point where you tell me I am being absolutely infuriating, by the by," he says, eating the last of the grisini. He cranes his neck to look around in antcipaton of reinforcements. Nothing so far.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "More gravy is good," Colette counters. "Look, you talk about it 'being wrong', but I mean there are homeless people living on the streets while a couple of blocks away there are people who own far more wealth than they'll ever need, who didn't earn it either, just getting richer and richer by exploiting people with fewer resources than themselves. How's that right? At worst you're redistributing some unearned wealth and making the world a fairer place, so long as you're careful who you steal from."

    She picks up her bottle and takes another swig. The suspicion may arise that she's doing this more to cover up her smirk than anything else. She probably doesn't entirely mean this. Entirely.

    "I mean suppose I did become a supervillain. Went around stealing from the undeserving rich, the worst, most exploitative. The people who pay millions a year to employ accountants to save themselves from having to pay millions of more in taxes that might go to help relieve poverty and make the world a better place. Then I kept say twenty percent of my takings, and gave the other eighty percent to worthwhile charities. Think about it. Would you stop me? Doing so would hurt the needy and benefit only people who don't need your help. Is that moral? Let's be honest. In that case I might be the supervillain, but you'd certainly be no hero. Was Robin Hood just another criminal who needs jail time, to you?"

    The door to the kitchen opens and a couple of waiters come out, but they're carrying someone's pizzas rather than extra grissini.

    "I know, I know," Colette says with a laugh. "I'm far too much of a fan of situational ethics. There you go, proof I'd make a terrible cape. You better drop that codename and uniform idea, no good will ever come of it."

    There's something odd about those waiters with those pizzas. The first oddity is that Colette and Terry have not ordered, but they're heading over to their table. The second oddity is that one of the pizzas /has candles on it/.

    Uh oh.

    Grinning extremely wide, one of the waiters puts the candle-bearing pizza down in front of Terry with a flourish and a "Happy birthday, Mister Vorpal!" It appears to be a margherita pizza with the mozzarella and thin slices of basil making the slightly blurry shape of a Cheshire grin against the tomato background.

    Smirking even wider and struggling not to laugh, Colette winks at the waiters and tells them "Don't sing it! Remember what I said about the caterwauling." The second pizza is delivered in front of Colette, the waiters grin, give a little bow and withdraw.

    Colette holds up a hand. "I may be out by a few days, but... well. You slipped up a few months ago. This is twenty-one, Terry. You really should celebrate it properly, even if that does mean admitting it to your friends."

    She picks up a wrapped but distinctly book-shaped package from the seat beside her and slides it across to Terry. "Happy birthday, idiot."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Wha-" uh oh, you can read UH OH stamped on his forehead as that pizza arrives. He stares dumbly at it as it is placed before him, and he looks at the Cheshire grin in delicious basil. He manages to snap out of it to say "-thank you! er-"

And then he stares at the pizza, and the candles. And then at Colette, with one raised eyebrow. "... you /are/ a supervillain!" he says in an awed tone as he leans forward to put out the candles, because there's a pizza that needs to be devoured. "You didn't have to-- but thank you!"

He reaches for the package slowly, "It /is/ twenty one already, isn't it. It wasn't that long that Gar turned twenty-one himself..." there's a slight clouding of his expression, as he remembers how Dayton treated Gar on that day. There is A Talk that is going to have to come soon, Him and Dayton.

But that's neither here nor there.

"Just go ahead and tell 'em and be all, like, 'I want to celebrate my birthday in Themyscira?' or something like that?" He says teasingly, and then he puts up a hand, "No, I wouldn't actually /ask/ for that... no matter how awesome it would sound."

He ponders this while slowly unwrapping the package, "... Weeeell... if I tell them now, they don't have a ton of time to make a big deal out of it, maybe just going out to eat somewhere. Yeah, that could be fun..." he turns the idea over and over in his mind.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    "Do it," Colette recommends. "Tell them. You've got rabbit holes, right? You want to go to lesbian land for your birthday, the only thing you're missing is permission, right? So ask. You're a Titan, ergo Donna Troy thinks the sun shines out of your ass. Bet you she says yes."

    "Seriously though Terry, tell 'em." Colette takes another swig of peer before attacking her own pizza. "'Cos if you don't, I will. And I'll make sure they make a fucking /massive/ deal out of it. Do not test me on this, I am not kidding. You know they'd want to celebrate your twenty-first. They're meant to be your friends. Titans family and all that vomitously twee stuff. You'd deprive them of that?"

    Thankfully a mouthful of pizza stops her continuing and Terry can open the present in peace.

    Which turns out to be a slightly tatty copy of Alice in Wonderland, dated 1867 which makes it a very early edition -- technically a first, but the text on the fly leaf reading "first 17,000" indicates it's a fourth printing. Rare, but not obscenely so. The Tenniel signature on the frontispiece definitely adds a little though!

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry freezes at the signature, and the edition marker. He's seen some go up for sale and auction across the world- yes, he has looked. He knows that, off the top of his head, a third edition with Tenniel's signature can easily commands six thousand. He stares again and gulps. He's thought about it, multiple times, but then usually other things come to his mind where money could be better spent: something nice for Gar or Kian, or pitch in to help his mom with yet another series of repairs to a car that she refuses to sell and which, by all accounts, is probably held together by stubbornness and spite more than anything else. Even now that he is doing well enough for himself, he never quite seems to spend money on comforts or expensive things for himself...

" ... thank you ... " he says, staring at the book, "This is ... thank you."

And he quickly wraps the book in the wrapping paper, and carefully puts it next to him on the booth seat, so as to keep it as far away as possible from residual grease as can be. Before leaving, he will probably send it to his apartment via Rabbit Hole to avoid any risk.

"... Nnno, Themyscira is, like, not Chuck E. Cheese's, Lette, it'd be the height of /gall/ for me to ask something like /that/. I mean, think about it, "Oh, hello, ancient semi-divine people, do you mind terribly if I throw my birthday party here? I mean it's a /wee/ bit insulting. I'm sure Cait'll make a meal of sorts and it will be delicious and we'll hang out at the tower and play video games and it'll be /fine/, really," he tries to convince Colette as he finally starts digging into the pizza with care and gusto, "The last thing I need is Hekate being cross at me for having that kind of hubris. You've never met her. But you /don't/ want to cross her."

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    It might be a little less than that, the cloth is a big ragged. Still, Terry's seen Colette's apartment. She clearly has money to burn. Maybe if she did take up Supervillainry in the mode she suggested, she'd steal from herself.

    "People live there right?" Colette counters. "Don't get so fucking /worshipful/ about it. It's just a place. Seriously, every day thousands of Amazons fart, fuck and take a crap on that island, and you think that it's somehow unworthy for someone who once helped rescue it to hold a celebration of the most important birthday in their life there? Fuck that noise. I'm not suggesting you hold a kegger in their biggest temple and throw up all over the altar."

    Colette looks at Terry levelly, eyes narrowed, over the top of a slice of pizza. "Ask. Sun, ass. remember? I mean your best buddies with the two fucking princess. Ask, or I swear Terry, I will punch you, birthday or not. Which as it comes to it you admitted is in a few days time so it's not. So there's no reason I should punch you"

    Colette jabs a finger towards Terry. "Ask, or I'll get Gar to ask for you. If you're worried about offending the gods, think about that."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
The redhead raises his hands defensively, "Okay, okay, I'll ask! Honest, I'll ask! I gotta pull a double day tomorrow at STARR so I can get Monday off- but I'll ask when I come home from that!" Yes. Terry is still actually working part-time for Karen Starr. The paycheck he draws from there, combined with his galactic chocolatier business, means he is doing considerably well. It says a lot that he still hasn't decided to move to a glitzier apartment but still shares the same old place with Gar and Kian when they're not at the tower.

If asked to think about it, he'd probably admit that there are some /good/ memories attached to that apartment.

"But I will, honest," he says, as he takes a bite out of the pizza. He won't- not quite consciously /intentional/ about it, but already his subconscious is digging up all sorts of things that really NEED to be tended to as soon as possible, things that will keep him busy and perhaps a little bit frazzled, until it is too late, and then an 'oops', a shrug, and that's the end of it.

Or, well, that's what his subconscious thinks. Other people have other plans...