6247/Yes, It Really Is The Munch Box

Yes, It Really Is The Munch Box
Date of Scene:	17 May 2021
Location:	The Munch Box
Synopsis:	No description
Cast of Characters:	Meggan Puceanu, John Constantine

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Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"I swear, it sounds like the worst place ever, but it's worth it."

So are the immortal words of Meggan Puceanu to one John Constantine, who has dined at the worst and best of tables. Better than she can claim so far. Might appeal to his pocketbook as much as his stomach, as if neither are particularly flush.

Then again, the golden-haired metamorph would know a thing or two about getting by when skint. Taken offguard by a particularly appealing pie, she may just have sworn a particularly lengthy and impassioned promise to come back. Even if that promise was to herself. It's not fun when alone.

Plus, the harbour isn't so far from the Gotham Lighthouse she dwells in and he himself can call home. Even if he chooses not to. Good reason to stay close when the girl moonlighting as a bartender, daylighting as a student, and midnighting somewhere in between as an occultish fae savant hears something about fine pie. And coffee.

"And you can't tell me you don't like pie," she chimes in brightly as they come.

John Constantine has posed:
"Who doesn't like pie?" John asks with a whimsical rhetoricism. It's been a few weeks since closing down his last big case, which apparently paid well enough for some dry cleaning and replacing some thoroughly worn-out clothing past the point of salvage.

The magus opens the door for Meggan to precede him. It gives him an opportunity to hollow his cheeks and drain the last few wisps from his cigarette, exhaling the tobacco fumes away from the door. He flicks the discarded smoke into a gutter and follows Meggan into the greasy spoon.

"Reminds me of a place in Leeds. Best bangers and mash on the planet. Must ignore the health inspectors grades, of course."

He looks around for a table that suits his taste in paranoia; one that's backed up to a wall but near some thick glass looks idea, with a clear view of the door and the kitchen. He nudges Meggan's elbow and points at the table with his chin.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"Who doesn't like pie can be divided into grossly allergic or villain. Someone not right in the head or not from round here. Suppose you can use it as a litmus test to sound out a monster?" Meggan chimes in, missing the rhetoricla aspect but certainly willing to throw down an option. The idea of running about with pies to put in front of Kangish conquerers or Zoddish warlords will be nipped out sooner or later.

"Thank you," she chimes in while John opens the door. "Look at you, dodgy gentleman /and/ right proper. Just for that, I'll slip you my number." Relentless in her joyful admonishment for anything staid, she blazes right in and curls her fingertips in a marginal greeting to the ever-busy, proper Patricia. Patricia whom was likely here when bombs fell over Coventry or Ford rolled out the first Model Ts, possibly earlier.

She wrinkles her nose, laughing. "Health inspectors have a point, but what goes on behind the curtain won't hurt me to know. Usually. Do we need to have an eye on the finer points of hacking up a cow?" Something else comes to mind, but she bites the statement back before they get thrown out. No need to suggest cannibalism.

Reaching the table isn't so hard, and she waits for him to choose the side, though her nature puts her in the chair. For the first, anything /shot/ has to get through her if it means to hit John. He gets the sight lines. Plus a not at all human shield.

John Constantine has posed:
John grins at Meggan's bantering compliment and claims his seat, slouching indolently into it with one shoulder resting against the glass. The chair's just far enough back from the table that rising swiftly won't be a hindrance.

"Yanks say the same thing about people who drink warm lager," John points out. "Walk into a pub in Ireland and ask for a cold brew, you're as like to get punched in the face as be served."

There's a worn old laminated menu in front of him; John picks it up between two fingers and examines it. "Well the menu's simple, innit," he mutters. Indeed, there are only a few items on the list. "I don't know how Americans eat this much at their first meal of the day." He turns it around to show the pictures to Meggan. "That breakfast platter's surely enough to feed a family of five in one sitting."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Glass blocks stacked up in a wall mark a certain era, one that Meggan knows little enough about. She carelessly crosses one leg over the other, leaving her hated sandal practically dangling off her foot. Bare feet are lovely but trudging around Gotham would leave her skin soot-black, as though she were an orphan from Victorian London, and no one needs that.

John's position gives her something to orient off of, leaning casually to where she blocks some of his vision but not all. His visual appeal to an Irish response to bad liquor practices makes her laugh aloud, eyes green as leaves, brilliantly shining. "They'd deserve it too. I might throw the pitcher of ice water on them for a mercy."

The same pub might be responsible for turning her into a mermaid, so that's all that.

"Half the menu isn't on the menu. You play your cards right, they bring everything you ask for. Though I haven't the foggiest why they offer sliced tomatoes or cottage cheese as a side. Was that a thing for food anywhere?" Bemused about how those are edible, she plants her elbows on the table, leaning forward in a conspiratorial lean. "You can ask for a few silver dollar pancakes. Or just say 'the special,' and watch what happens. Like magic, you know? An incantation in a British accent does wonders here, John. You might try it."

John Constantine has posed:
John lifts a speculative eyebrow at Meggan's suggestion. At that moment a waitress approaches, flashing a polite smile at the table.

"Welcome to Munch Box. Here for breakfast?" she inquires. "Can I start you with something to drink?"

Constantine looks at Meggan, then shrugs and flashes a disarming smile at the waitress. "Coffee for me love, burn it a bit and I wouldn't say no to adding a little Irish to it. And--" he glances to Meggan, then back up at the waitress. "I'll have 'the special', apparently," he says, and grins.

The waitress smiles back at John with a more natural expression and takes down his order, then looks to Meggan. "How about you honey, what'll it be?" She stands poised with pen to pad and a ready expression on her face.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"The pie, and a cup of coffee for me, please. May I have cream, too, if it's no trouble?" Meggan swirls her finger in a circle for the waitress, beaming with a smile that could charm the birds from the sky. Maybe much less Patricia who is practically immune to charm, but it never hurts to try. She at least knows the way rules work in these old diners, having seen the backbone of them over much of the UK. As one does, when a tired environmental activist.

"He's with me," she adds, and taps the laminated, ancient excuse of a menu with her fingertip.

"Trust me, you're going to love it. They have strawberry syrup here," she adds when the waitress heads on to refill coffees everywhere and get the order in. "Not a strawberry in sight, but it keeps me running for a good six hours on its own. Could be laced with cocaine, for all I know." She lightly blows a kiss to the air, and settles back. "So, what mischief is ahead of you for the next week?"

John Constantine has posed:
"Bumping up my accommodations, for one," John says. "I've enough in my pocket to get by nicely for a while. Getting a bit tired of the pier and the smell of fish," he says. Coffee arrives and John accepts it with both hands; finding no bourbon in it, he elects to add his own from a silver flask in his pocket.

"Might take some of it and see if I can work out something to get House back. She's been miffed at me before but it's been months now since I was even indoors there. So she's not peevish enough to let me die, but definitely not welcome enough to access my own bloody liquor cabinet."

He slurps his coffee. "I'm supposing something's going to go wrong sooner rather than later. Too long a spell of peace and quiet lately, just little jobs dealing with a couple poltergeists and a boggun living in a playground. I get twitchy if I go a month before some ancient god decides to try and make me a smear on the pavement."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Meggan waits until the coffee gets there. She adds a blotch of cream and several sprinkles of sugar, since having it black as sin is for morning. This is not her morning, not at all. Sipping hers is patently unfair given the molten consistency, though she hardly notices. "Mmhmm. We haven't seen any vampires running through the street or some monster moaning about its partner eating up all the good souls."

As if these are regular affairs in the likes of Gotham. Her wide, thoughtful eyes are downcast for a moment, crackling incandescence banked while turned elsewhere into the dream. "The House... or is it just House? If she's so bothered, have you tried mollifying her somewhat? I mean truly doing that, not just flirting and soothing her over." How does one talk about a magic house? "Supposing that something isn't /wrong/ with her, that is. You know she's okay?"

John Constantine has posed:
John blinks at Meggan. "I... hadn't thought of that," he admits. Johns' brow furrows and he sets his cup aside. "It was a few months back. Nipped in with a bag of some hoodoo talismans I nicked from a job down in New Orleans." His pronunciation is distinctly more French than Creole. "There's a few, uh... call 'em 'vaults'," he suggests. "Lockboxes for things I don't want to fall into public hands."

The warmth at his fingertips reminds John of his coffee and he gulps down a few sips, ignoring the heat. "I dropped them off, powdered my nose, and settled in for a drink. Next time I stepped out the door slammed shut behind me and locked me out entirely. I've a key to the back door for emergencies, but if House doesn't want me in there, I'm bloody well not /staying/ in there. I've nipped in once or twice and felt like she was trying to kick me out the entire while."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Lockboxes, hidden things. "Caches. Censored objects. I know about the like, Roma and Merlin had heaps of them in the citadel." Meggan accepts these explanations from him with equanimity, partly adopted from the delicious coffee she has appropriately improved to her liking. Heat saturates through her bones and the subtle genetic shifts immediately start accommodating piping hot nonsense assured to slag lead and other lesser metals by such contact. Her fingers steal in the warmth through the speckled brown and oatmeal cup, same as his, the chunky old things unchanged in design since the Franklin Expedition.

"Sounds like you rightly ticked her off, if I can be honest, love," she says gently. "You possibly snatched up something that she had to clean up, since anything from down that way could have a very unpleasant tang to it. No woman... or housekeeper, I'd say... cares for another mess to tidy up without so much as a thank you. She's not an old-fashioned Fifties sort, is she? Showing you she's mad at the treatment may be the only way she can communicate and not lose face. I mean, short of pinning you to the bed or hoisting you by your own trenchcoat, which I would rather she not do."

Her eyes widen slightly, still stung by shadows and dreams, a fracture line being mended by forcible determination. Empathy is an oddment. Along comes the pie, the first round of small pancakes with a splat of honey butter and cinnamon throughout. Not a stack; this is small. The rest with sausages and the like will be a bit later. "You need a proxy, you have them."

John Constantine has posed:
John pulls a face at Meggan. "Cor, women's lib strikes again," he mutters sotto voce. His eyes track someone outside the window and he pauses to shake his head before sipping his coffee.

"I'm pretty sure House is 'fifties' in the sense she was around during the first fifty years the universe," John clarifies. "She's old. Very, very old, and I'm far from the first occupant. Can't even properly say 'owner'. The lore says she's a way of picking who lives there. You don't find House; she finds you. I won her in a card game off of this batty witch a couple of years ago."

John shrugs and reaches over the table with his fork to steal a bite of pie. "I don't even know everything about the House. There are a lot of rumors and stories. I've heard it is intelligent, that it exists in different points in space and time-- there's even a prison in the basement, and in truth I've rarely ventured any deeper than I had to when locking something nefarious away forever. Someone even told me it can sprout chicken legs and walk around. All I've ever seen her do is open a door," he admits.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"Then you might well say she's not happy about it because she had to put up with it so long. I'm impressed by her antiquity and her longevity. An impressive accomplishment, and she probably loves a good fry-up as much as anything, being that it's delicious."

She offers a smile, more than happy to accept John's descriptions as they come. Meggan isn't perturbed; either he pulls her leg or has told her the actual truth, and her statements stand. "I would still say treat her nicely. Just let a girl know she matters, and that will turn out better than not. At least it gives you a chance to have access to your liquor."

She sips the coffee again, and soon enough it seems to have vanished. How did that happen? Oh well, room to wait for the next one.