Food Lover [Closed]

[Marceline Abadeer]

Marceline nodded; you couldn't trust any of the undead, really. Their morals just got sort of corrupted. She always pointed that out to Finn whenever she could; it wasn't that she was immoral, per say, it was just that several centuries had sort of chipped away at her moral center. Things were a lot more... gray than they used to be. Which is why she wasn't feeling guilty in the slightest when she continued her little game:

"Nah, no restrictions. Where's the fun in that?" asked Marceline. She took an extra deep, extra noisy sip of her Coke, as if to suggest that she'd gladly do the same with some little kid's blood given half a chance. "Little kids totally taste the best. Like candy. And babies? Babies taste freakin' awesome. I'd eat nothing but babies if given a chance. Just pop them down like, well, like these," she grabbed another handful of fries, slathered with ketchup, of course, held them up, and then popped them down. There was no grace as she chewed, though she did make the action look almost too natural.

"Dang, knew I was forgetting something," Marceline said around the last bits of food in her mouth. She made a show of looking around, as if trying to remember where she'd put her umbrella. It did feel weird not having to carry one wherever she went, which made the motion a little more natural than it would be otherwise. "I obviously don't have a henchmen here, yet. And babies make awful henchmen. Tried it once. Lots of crying and diaper changing. ended up sucking him dry and leaving him with a family of lemurs. Not fun," Marceline sighed, as though weighed down by the memories. More Coke was definitely needed. "So what about you? Run of the mill human, or something more interesting? You certainly look interesting..."

[Alfred Jones]

Alfred stared at Marceline for a moment, trying to judge if she was being serious. He blinked a couple times, trying to process the image of the girl in front of him drinking blood out of a small child. He shivered slightly. "But that was before," he said, trying to distance the Marceline of now from the idea of child eating. "And...and you didn't eat many babies. And they can't be that filling anyway. Oh god, what am I saying?" He put his head in his hand. How could he be consorting with a child-killer?

Her story was starting to have some strange holes in it, since she obviously hadn't just appeared in this restaurant. How did she get here without an umbrella and without someone to carry it? Maybe she carried it, but it wasn't here, and why would you even try to have a baby as a henchman... The whole thing was rather confusing and still a little disturbing. Like most problems of that nature, Alfred simply decided to not think about it too much and hope everything worked itself out eventually. What could he do about it, anyway?

"Well, I'm not exactly sure," he said in answer to her last question. "I don't really remember a lot about where I come from. Or I don't remember a lot about who I was, anyway. But I know I was really awesome, and that I had a lot of friends." And he was only smudging the details a little bit--he was pretty sure on both counts. "And now, well, I'm working on getting a lot of friends, and I'm still pretty awesome. Oh, and I'm strong. You want to arm wrestle?" He put his elbow on the table and smiled at Marceline, a glint in his eye.

[Marceline Abadeer]

"I ate babies all the time. Pretty sure I mentioned that. But yeah, just slurped them down. You're right: they're not very filling, so you have to eat a lot of them to get all your essential nutrients," insisted Marceline. She was certainly loving the whole baby-eating angle and was likely to continue wallowing in it, especially as Alfy looked like he was seriously reconsidering sharing his fries with her. Speaking of: the fries were starting to dwindle, fast. Marceline felt like she should have been more put out, but her stomach space matched their fry basket pretty well.

As for what Alfy was, well, that wasn't too hard to guess. Marceline nodded, opening her mouth to suggest, only to find the guy's elbow on the table. There was a beat, the type that generally has a tumbleweed to accompany it, and Marceline looked at the elbow, then at the guy, her face drawn in a very distinct "You have got to be kidding me" expression. Marceline sighed, then took a sip of her soda, letting the hand stay where it was.

"Sounds like you were probably a super hero or something," she suggested. She tapped his upraised hand with her own. "Think about it: super sense of righteousness, super strength, loads of buddies, bombastic personality. Totally super. Can so picture you in a cape and tights. Like, what's that one guy, Sergeant USA or something? Yeah, totally," Marceline nodded, taking another sip of her Coke. she'd need another refill soon...

"Oh, and I'm not doing that," she pointed at Alfy's upraised hand with her hand, the one still holding her Coke glass, "because you're a super hero, and I'm not an idiot."

[Alfred Jones]

Alfred simply shuddered at Marceline's apparent glee concerning baby eating. He once again reassured himself that this surely wasn't an ongoing thing. She'd changed, reformed! Surely that was what had happened. "Well, I'm glad that now you eat fries instead," he managed to say. What else was he supposed to do?

Marceline's refusal to accept his challenge dimmed his smile just a bit, but her following words just about made his day. He considered himself as a super hero, swooping in to save the day, and his grin just grew as he got lost in a daydream. "Captain," he said absently, only half hearing everything that Marceline was saying. "It's Captain Amer--Wait." He shook his head and brought himself back to the present. "What was I saying?" That particular superhero was giving him a headache, so he decided to focus on the other aspect of what she was saying. "Well not the cape and tights, obviously. I think a bomber jacket would look better."

He'd forgotten that he still had his hand up on the table. He dropped it to his lap and sat there with a stupid grin on his face. "You're right," he said definitively. "I'm a superhero. The best superhero...I race in and save people, and everyone loves me, and I'm the strongest person around." He nodded, slowly at first and then faster as he became more confident in this viewpoint.

"Wow, thank you so much, Marcie!" he said, turning to her again. "You don't know how much that has been driving me nuts. Wait, if I'm a superhero and you're a baby-hunting vampire, shouldn't we be like, I don't know, mortal enemies or something?"

[Marceline Abadeer]

Marceline let the baby eating thing lie, mostly because it wasn't quite as funny anymore. She loved seeing Alfred squirm, however, and made a mental note to find a fake baby sometime. Or, better yet, find a real baby and coat it with fake blood, ketchup, maybe. She could lick it off. That would be totally wicked, and Marceline was grinning just thinking about it. The grin only widened as Alfy took off on the superhero thing, which Marceline had pretty well figured he would. He seemed the type. Just one little switchup though:

"C'mon, you'd look totally awesome in a cape and tights," Marceline insisted, waving toward Alfred. "It's totally the classic look, and you've got classic superhero written all over you," she slid the words in as soon she could, tempting though it was to wait for Alfred to fully finish. He'd eventually come around to the whole issue about creature of the night thing, which made her chuckle. Oh, how very like Finn he sounded.

"It's cool," she insisted, nodding. "Trust me: I totally hang out with heroes all the time. I'm more like one of those cool, sexy, antihero type chicks. You'll probably need me to, like, overthrow a supervillain or something and I'll skip out on you, only to show up just in the nick of time or something," Marceline punctuated this scenario with a deep sip of her drink, which she'd drained, again. She stared down at it, frowning. Would it be rude to ask for another? She had a feeling she was going to be a regular visitor in the restroom all too soon.

[Alfred Jones]

Alfred raised an eyebrow at the tights and cape comment. Didn't she know that capes were a huge hazard? And Alfred was pretty sure that with his diet, tights wouldn't look very good for very long at all. "Classic doesn't have to mean capes," he said. And what wasn't classic about a bomber jacket?

He considered her argument to be an antihero, comparing it to the mental image of heroes he had in his head. "But...hmm." He thought for a moment more. "Doesn't that work better for the darker superheroes?" he asked, still trying to sort through everything himself. As far as he could remember, comic storylines could get pretty convoluted, and the characters always changed over time. How could he say any one thing was definitely true?

Still... He squinted at Marceline. "I don't know how you'd look with cat ears," he said, trying to imagine it. "But if you say you're an antihero, I suppose I can buy that. But I still think that tends to work better with a superhero whose moral compass can appear a little gray. Not the classic style at all. But I still think there's room for gray. I hardly can wrap my head around laws and politics these days, anyway." He shook his head despondently.

On a brighter note, though, he wasn't in his old world. He grinned and sat up straight again. "At least here I don't have to worry about any of that. No big supervillains to go against here. Unless you've heard of any?"

[Marceline Abadeer]

"Classic should totally include capes. Adds to the image," intoned Marceline with complete and utter unshakeable certainty. That was one thing she could certainly do: make absolutely anything sound dire, serious, and like it was a matter of life and death. She tapped the edge of her Coke glass, again returning to the debate of whether or not she should get a refill. Her fingers started dancing over the edges, producing something very much akin to a tune. Marceline half paid attention to that and half paid attention to Alfy as he talked about superheroes. Man, this guy certainly took things at face value, didn't he? Though Marceline certainly appreciated the cat ears comment.

"Nah, it's a matter of doing what's necessary," Marceline continued, picking up the conversation thread and endeavoring to further tangle it: "Heroes have to commit themselves to the bigger picture, y'know? Think about the good of all mankind and junk like that. Very important,' she nodded, then beat off a quick ratta-tatta-tat-tat on the glass. She paused, holding her fingers on the edge while she considered the last bit.

"Haven't met many people yet," she confessed after some time. "I mean, I'm sort of a super villain, but we covered that. I think I met one guy who was sort of like one, but I think he was more like me than anything," Marceline shrugged noncommittally, then looked down at the fries. Gone, sadly. Marceline sighed, then looked at the ketchup, her mind working. "You think I could pull off the vampire look still?" she asked, looking back to Alfy. "Maybe scare the people up? Get out of paying?"

Because hey, didn't that sound like fun?

[Alfred Jones]

"No capes," Alfred insisted again. "Safety hazard." Maybe Superman could pull it off, but as far as Alfred could tell, he wasn't Clark Kent; for one thing, he actually needed his glasses.

"Exactly, exactly!" he exclaimed. The big picture, that was what was important. "You have to do what's right for the many. The end...the end...justifies...yes." And then they were back in that gray area. Politics again. Alfred had come to hate politics. "But I don't have to worry about that now. Maybe before, but not now." He grinned and spread his arms out wide. "Now I live here!"

Alfred almost slapped his forehead. "Right, I guess it's hard to get out of the house." He wondered what she meant by like her, but it hardly seemed to matter for the time being.

He turned to Marcie. "Hmm," he said, looking her up and down. "Well, I mean, I believe you're a vampire, but you just don't look very threatening. I mean, you've been chatting with me for the past half hour, and I'm clearly a good guy, so that can't help the image. Maybe if you were to suddenly attack me or something, but that would leave me with the check, and if you just wanted to do that you could walk out of here without doing anything special. I suppose it would be very anti-hero of you, though...and then maybe I could chase you out of the store, to protect all the people here? Oh, but you don't have your umbrella. Nevermind."

[Marceline Abadeer]

Marceline elected to let the cape matter drop. For now. She was totally going to get a cape for this guy at some point. Likely something made out of bedsheet or towel. He looked like he'd appreciate it, really.

There was something a bit odd in the way he got excited and started talking about bigger pictures and such. It wasn't so much the actual words or anything. It was just... it all seemed a little... off. Like he was talking about something bigger than just the two of them. Definitely the kind of talk that big superheroes often did. Marceline was again reminded of Finn... except this felt even bigger than that. Superhero. Alfy was definitely some kind of superhero. But what kind of superhero had a name like Alfred? That sounded more like someone's badass butler than anything.

But that could all be handled later. For now: their plan. Marceline cast her eyes about the cafe. Not many people here, and most of them seemed to more or less accept her presence. The waitress kept giving Marceline the evil eye, but that was as much for the ridiculous amount of Cherry Coke the Vampire Queen had tossed back than anything else. Said waitress also was one of the few who knew about Marceline's axe.

"I dunno," she said, sounding half bored. Marceline slitted her eyes slightly, milling it over, her fingers drumming against her cheek. "I can't really run out on a check here, I guess. Not enough places serve pie and soda," she licked her lips, remembering the taste. True, she hardly needed more now, but, still. She sighed, looking over at Alfy. "Sure you don't want to pick up my tab? C'mon, I'm a hot chick, and you've just been going on about how awesome and cool you are. Awesome and cool guys pick up the checks for hot chicks," Marceline arched her brows expectantly, and you could practically hear the "check" behind her words. That is, if they were playing chess or something. Given these two, it was probably more likely to hear a "Finish Him!"

[Alfred Jones]

"You can buy soda at the store," Alfred argued. "And even I can make apple pie. I'm sure cherry is hardly any different, if you're picky." But he wasn't really going to push the issue. After all, it was still probably not a good idea to get into trouble at the restaurant. And maybe Marcie was an even worse cook than himself. She might not be able to make pie at all.

Looking at Marcie's expression and listening to her sultry and convincing voice, Alfred was almost swayed. "Well...I really would like to..." He broke eye contact, and suddenly he was able to think again. "Wait, are you using your vampire powers on me?" It was hard for him to consider that it might just be her ability to know who he was and what he would be swayed by. He might have believed in womanly wiles, though. "It won't work anyway. I barely have enough to pay for myself. They don't take a tab here, and I haven't had a chance to get a credit card. I don't even know if they have credit cards here."

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet, leather and almost worn through at the folds. He held it open and pulled out what little was there. "See?" he said. "I'm almost out of the money they gave me. I'm going to have to get a job soon or something. Do you have enough for what you bought or are you out, too?"

[Marceline Abadeer]

"It's not the same," protested Marceline. "They put little straws in this, and I think they actually have some cherry syrup in the back. And really, have you tried making your own pie? It's harder than it looks."

The vampire glanced over her shoulder, debating. Running out on the check was still a possibility, as was trying something a little more... drastic. Marceline was certainly theatrical enough to be able to pull something like that off, if needs be. However, she was feeling a little lazier than normal, which meant that she was downright lethargic. Probably from drinking too much soda.

Alfy wasn't helping. "Oh, I totally could," admitted Marceline. She turned her head slightly, smirking as she looked to her eating companion. "I totally have hypnotic powers. I've used them on some buds of mine before. we totally got over it though; we're cool," she looked back, drumming her fingers on the table. A quick flick out of the corner of her eyes showed that Alfy was right: he was definitely lacking in the fundage. How was it that some people didn't seem to be able to come up with money? Marceline had always had a knack for running into the stuff just when she needed it. That had been half her hope when she'd gone and rescued Alfy: free meal.

"I have a job," she said, smiling, "I play, remember? I even got enough for my stuff," she dug into her pocket, producing a few coins which she laid on the table. "I just figured that since I was the one saving your life, you should be doing the buying. Seriously though, what was your plan? Choke to death on the food here and get out of paying?" she smirked, her eyes twinkling. Hey, it was an idea, and totally something she'd do if given the chance.

[Alfred Jones]

"You can get cherry syrup and straws," Alfred said defensively. "And yes, I have made my own pies. I especially like apple pie, though pumpkin and pecan pies are good around Thanksgiving, and I also like peach and cherry pie...but apple pie, mostly. The hard part is a good crust. You can buy filling." He wasn't a good cook, not really, but he still had his specialties.

"If you have hypnotic powers why don't you just convince the waitress to let you off the hook this time, or to let you set up a tab? That shouldn't be too hard." Even he had almost been convinced to help, and he was too dense to get through to most of the time.

"No, I was going to pay. I told you, I have enough for myself. But not for you, too. Sorry. But we can both pay for ourselves this time, and I'll bake you a pie for saving my life. Two pies even. And you'll be my first choice for music any time I have a party. I'll even tell my friends. Deal?"

[Marceline Abadeer]

"Told ya: not the same," argued Marceline. She folded her arms over her chest, daring Alfy to try and contradict her of this. On this point, she simply would not be moved. However, she might have been slightly moved by the idea that Alfy might possess some culinary ability. At the very least, it sounded like he was capable of making pies. Somehow though, the idea of this guy making apple pie... didn't seem as weird to her as it should. And grilling. And shooting off fireworks. And what was Thanksgiving again?

"Because most of my powers were drained by the whole Shifting thing," explained Marceline, waving a hand airily, "that's sort of what happens to people. You're pulled here, and you're reset to zero, totally human and everything," Marceline paused for a moment. Did that contradict what she'd said earlier? The bit about being able to turn someone into a zombie henchmen? Well, that was sort of still mostly true. She could still kill people; she had an ax, after all, and she could probably coerce people into becoming her henchmen. Totally valid.

"Right, deal," said Marceline, extending her hand to shake or hi-five, as the case may be, "two pies: strawberry and cherry, or both cherry, whatever. And I woulda played at your party for free."

The girl grinned, wiggling her fingers in what she sincerely hoped was an enticing manner.

[Alfred Jones]

"You're right it's not the same. Homemade is always better." Nothing like some good home cooking. Just thinking about a homemade apple pie was making Alfred happy. Despite the argument, he sat with a stupid grin across his face and a dreamy look in his eye.

Alfred frowned. "I guess...maybe the memory thing is part of that? But I'm still pretty strong...do you think I was even stronger before?!" If he had been reset, maybe he was even cooler before. Which would, of course, make total sense. Especially if he was a superhero. "But you still have some of your vampire powers, right? Just not enough to totally hypnotize someone? That's a shame. That could've come in really useful." It would probably be a good idea if his villainous ally had some really cool powers, but just being a vampire was pretty cool, so he figured it would be okay if she couldn't hypnotize anyone.

He grinned and shook her hand. "Cherry pie it is, then. I guess you like red stuff, huh? Well, I'll make you pie, and then you will see how much better it is when it's homemade." He was already formulating ideas about coloring the crust. "It's all right, music is your job. You just said so. You can hardly expect to survive if you are always giving it away free. Besides, you're the one who saved my life, as you just mentioned."

He looked at her waving fingers and frowned, his brow furrowed. "What's that supposed to be? Are you saying goodbye?"

[Marceline Abadeer]

"You've obviously never ate at my house," replied Marceline, smirking. She was many things: singer, battle-maiden, rock star, decent friend, vampire queen; cook was not among them. Which was why she daily said her thanks to the inventor of the microwave.

At the mention of the memory thing, Marceline shrugged. She wasn't exactly an expert. You'd have to be some crazy insane person to want to talk to everyone who'd ever Shifted and start gathering data or something. Plus, that would require a much stronger desire to hit the books than Marceline had ever had in her entire existence. When Alfy came back around to her vampire powers, Marceline just gave him a smirk, one that bared a little fang but didn't really outright say anything. Let him think what he wanted about her powers; Marceline definitely still had moves.

Though apparently, not as many as she thought. She sighed, palming her face with her hand. Why couldn't everyone just be awesome and pick up this stuff the first time around? Seriously, was that too much to ask? "The finger thing is my way of telling you you just got played, Alfy," she said, lowering her hand. "C'mon, didn't your mom every teach you how to talk to girls? You'd think you were raised by a bunch of clueless dudes or something," she chuckled at the thought, shifting to lean back in the booth again. She didn't want to think about moms and such too much though; Marceline's mom was... not around anymore, and her relationship with her father was... strained at best. She reached down into her jeans, squirming around to work up the correct amount of money, most of which was done in smaller denominations of coin.

"If you need change, just ask," she said, frowning as she held up the lowest denomination of coin, "people really don't like to tip guitar players with their big coins."