just_displaced | Open Post

[Radu has been spending a lot of his time since he arrived eating pizza. Largely because A) unreplicated food, and B) He has this allowance the city's giving him and what else is he supposed to spend it on? (Except maybe clothes that aren't his old school uniform, but baby steps).

He's at his usual haunt when hey, it's that guy he spoke to when he arrived. He's not sure what Earth ettiquette is in the situations but... well he's eating alone, too. Isn't not alone preferable?

So Radu wanders over a little awkwardly, pizza tray in hand.]

Uh, hey?

[The pizza place doesn't have mirrors, and that's about what Ginsberg's looking for right now. Okay, he could probably see his reflection in the silverware if he tried hard enough, but he's not about to use silverware on his pizza, so he thinks he's probably pretty safe. Besides, pizza seems to calm him down, and he's not exactly going to complain about that. Whatever's going on around here seems just a little more manageable when there's pizza on the table.

So when the kid he'd talked to shows up in front of him, pizza tray in his hand, he nods at him, and smiles around his way too big mouthful of pizza, then gestures to the seat across from him.]

Hey! Sit down, eat with me.

[And maybe he's just a little desperate for companionship at the moment.]

[Radu lets out an obvious sigh of relief.]

Thanks. I feel like it was starting to get a bit weird, coming in here to eat by myself all the time.

[He scoots himself into the booth across from Ginsberg, and then takes a few moments very gingerly pulling his gloves of and placing them neatly beside his tray before he tucks into the pizza. He will try very hard not to leave any handprints in the table, but no promises.]

Is it weird to eat all by yourself? I do it all the time.

[That's not... actually a good defense against it being weird, to be fair.]

Anyway, this place is good, and it's cheap, and now you're not eating alone, so it's a win-win-win.

I, uh, don't really know. There's usually people around on the ship. Kinda, you know, one galley.

[This really is delicious pizza OH MAN. How do people not eat it every day?]

You a regular, then?

[People should eat it every day. Some people do.]

Yeah, I'm here a lot. I mean, I think a lot of people might think it'd get boring, but there're a lot of different kinds of pizza, and you haven't really lived till you've tried them all.

[Ginsberg you are his new mentor in life.]

I've only managed five so far but they're all amazing.

[He really is tucking into it with the enthusiasm only a teenage boy faced with pizza can muster.]

[And soon enough, you too can have a giant mustache, Radu.]

Which one do you have right now? You should probably get another slice after that one, just to compare. You can't really know if you like something until you compare it to something else. Do some market research, taste test the products, that kind of thing.

[Thankfully Andromedans can't grow hair from their faces. That would be a very long mustache.]

Isn't that kinda extravagant?

Maybe. Probably. Or it could be excessively logical. I mean, are you hungry?

[He's not waiting for a response before he continues. Radu's a teenaged boy, of course he's hungry.]

Do you want to know what kind of pizza's best? Of course you do. How else are you going to do that except try all of them? Can you really trust the word of a bystander like me to tell you which kinds are best? I might have some kind of pizza-related agenda, and would try to sell you on the kind I liked, which you might actually hate.

[You make a reasonable argument, Ginsberg.]

There's not, like, a huge rush with anything, though. It's not like I have a whole lot else to do here.

[He's wiping his hands off on a napkin before his gloves go back on. He gets a little nervous without them, okay.]

No, there's not a huge rush. But me, I'm gonna have another slice of pizza, one of the ones I haven't tried yet, because what if they retire that flavor without me ever having gotten to try it, and then I never know what it was like, and I spend the rest of my life wondering what I was missing?

Do you spend a lot of your time wondering about pizza flavours?

Yeah. Of course. Don't you? I mean, it's natural: we all spend time wondering about the things we don't know, until we find out about them and satisfy our curiosity.

Do you not have pizza where you're from, too?

No, we have pizza, but my dad always wanted to order the exact same kind of pizza, every time. I've got to make up for lost time, you know?

Do you live with your dad? At home?

Yeah. And yeah, I know that's absolutely the opposite of cool and that I'm way too old to live with my dad and believe me, I feel that way too, it's just...

It's complicated.

I really don't know anything about it being, y'know, cool or anything but I uh...

I think it sounds kind of nice, actually.

Believe me, if you knew my dad, you wouldn't think it was...

[A pause to take a bite of pizza and reconsider what he's saying. Because he's just realized...]

Oh. I mean, you came from a spaceship, right? So your parents probably weren't there.

Well, uh.

[God he hates sounding like a weird alien freak, but he already learned his lessen about lying when it comes to families...]

I never really had then, actually. Andromedans do it kinda differently.

Differently how?

[He sounds interested, not judgmental. Maybe a little too interested, actually, since he's always been convinced he's an alien, and maybe what Radu says applies to him, too.]

I mean, you had to come from somewhere.

Yeah. It's from, uh... eggs.

[Yes, he is flushing bright red right now. He knows it's weird, okay.]

We're raised in the hatcheries until we're 6 or so, and then, you know, school until you're an adult. Families are kinda a foreign concept.

Okay, so doesn't that kind of mean that your family is everyone you were raised with in the hatchery?

[He doesn't seem to think it's that weird. There're weirder things out there.]

I mean, yeah, it's not family like humans think of it, but that's kind of overrated, anyway.

They sent me to the Starcademy when I was young so I, uh, never really spent much time with the other kids from my cycle.

The crew of The Christa, they're kind of my family now.

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