Hollister's (No rly)

[dirk_gently]

Dirk's starting to wear down a barstool, still a regular visitor even though Hippolyta's gone. He's not about to turn down an open bar tab to infinity, although he suspects it'll still come around to bite him in the ass some day. He's waiting, inhaling the cigarette smoke in the atmosphere. This isn't technically a date, but he's looking forward to drinks with a woman a decade younger...

Comments

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Sarah walks in carrying a decorative tupperware case. The bar gets a cursory glance -- aside from the patrons, it isn't all that unusual.

She spots Dirk and smiles, looking a little less frazzled. Time in the kitchen always calms her down. "Hi, Dirk." She sets down the tupperware on the bar, then demurely seats herself on an adjacent barstool. "One streudel, for you. Although I decided against using the time jars."

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

The bar's even less unusual these days, because it's no longer connected to the Nexus. Dirk really only comes here for the bar tab.
He gives her a nod and a smile. He's got a glass of something already, but he's not smoking. "Oh? You might as well catch a little spare time to keep around. It hasn't... sorted itself out already?" He's trying not to sound hopeful, but he figures she'll be more open to flirting if her boyfriend is still stuck as a whiny brat. He slides the tupperware closer and cracks the lid to breathe in the still-warm scent, very appreciative.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"No, I... I took one of the jars to Daniel's lab, to test it out. He was reading through his future-self's notes, and he looked so intense..." She shakes her head. "I couldn't do it." Well, that answers Dirk's question.

"You can have some now, if you like." She flags down the bartender and orders a rum and coke.

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

Oh man, she's still hung up on him. "Well, you've still got it in case you change your mind." He sighs, but he really didn't expect much. He begs the bartender for a fork and ignores the skeptical look he gets.
"So, how're your ears?"

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

What's he so disappointed about? "Don't worry, I'll keep them. The streudel was a lot of work." She grins a little.

"My ears?" She reaches up and touches one of them, confused by the non sequitor.

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"The last time I saw you, I was singing. That can't have been easy on them." Whatever made him glum, he bounces right back, accepting his fork with a nod. Sarah's rum and coke comes with it. "Did anything happen to the other two who didn't sing?"

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"Oh!" Sarah giggles. "I thought you and Jeff were quite entertaining." She sips her drink, amused over the memory. "And Hanatarou tried, he really did. It's not his fault he didn't know that song. I don't think anything bad happened to Isamu, no."

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"Are they friends of yours, those other blokes? For all the time I've been in the Nexus, I don't really know them." He starts in on the streusel and pauses to savor the first bite. "Mmmf... You're good..."

((That's streusel, not pizza.))

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"They are," Sarah confirms. "Jeff -- the one who actually sang with you -- is a writer. I met him right after he escaped from that dreadful killing game Hermes set up on that island. I've known Isamu and Hanatarou longer. All three of them spend a lot of time in the Nexus. Jeff can't go a week without being LOLed." She rolls her eyes and takes another sip of her drink.

Flirting with Sarah is a little like flirting with an oblivious brick wall who is still in love with its boyfriend, but complimenting her cooking seems to make an impact. She blushes modestly and beams. "Thank you."

((Pizza? Oh, and it's strudel, not streusel (or streudel, as I kept incorrectly spelling it. Yay German dessert words!)))

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

((Dessert thing I could never make in a million years.))

"I've suffered a few, but that was relatively mild. I suspect the people around me suffered worse from my singing than I did." He pauses and grins at her. "That's your fault, of course, but I forgive you."

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"If it's any consolation, you all cheered me up immensely." And she still has the video should she ever need a pick-me-up. "I had to sing once in the Nexus. Some sort of LOLed karaoke machine. At least I let you choose the song."

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"Are you any good? I seem to have missed that. I think I sang karaoke at Hollister's Halloween party..." He was a little drunk by that point and it's all foggy. "It's a wonder I survived..."

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

She shakes her head. "I have no idea. I haven't heard any complaints, but I only sing around the house. It was still horribly embarrassing, though." She lifts up her glass again and looks at Dirk pointedly. "It was a Madonna song." Considering Sarah is dressed as if she just stepped out of Ladies Home Journal circa 1950, it should be obvious why it was so embarrassing for her.

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"Not 'Like a Virgin?'" He winks and grins, but not unkindly. "It's best to just shelve the memory in a dusty corner and hope no one brings it up at parties. So speaks the voice of experience." He makes a salute with his gin and tonic. Dirk's no stranger to making a fool out of himself, that's for sure. He's learned to mostly take it in stride.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"'Express Yourself,' actually, but I'm sure that one would have been even worse." She looks vaguely amused at the salute. "I'm not too worried, no one's mentioned it yet. Or asked me to try on a cone brassiere." She makes a face. Modern pop culture still mystifies her. "Still, not all LOLs are bad. I seem to get affected by the animal ones the most."

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"It could always be worse, better Madonna than Britney Spears." He shrugs. "But I know the feeling. The Dinovirus was obnoxious and in some ways incapacitating, but being a cat wasn't so bad..." He looks into his drink and frowns distantly a moment. He misses his time as a cat, and that's pathetic. People really liked him as a cat.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Sarah nearly chokes on her drink. "Ugh, no thank you." She then polishes it off, and after a moment's consideration, orders another one. With a cherry, please.

She smiles a little, amused. "Daniel was a dinosaur, too, but that was before I knew him. Being a cat sounds nice. My first LOL turned me into a lion." She notices his frown and adds, "If you want to be a cat again, you should talk to Melinda. A friend of hers has access to some sort of plant or mushroom that turns you into one."

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

Dirk wasn't sure she'd know who that was, but watching her react was entertaining. Rum and coke with a cherry. That's so cute. Not a hard drinker, this one.
"Being a lion probably would've garnered far more respect, but it was still a pleasant interval. No debt collectors to worry about, nothing to do but sleep and eat, and..." He shrugs. Mentioning that girls like cats might be the wrong move here. "Maybe if someone comes around threatening to break my kneecaps. For now I'll suffer through life on two legs."

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

It's difficult to avoid Ms. Spears on the internet, but Sarah has seen enough of her to know she's not her style.

She sips her drink, a little more liberally than the one before. "Well, I did scare the pants off of a young man who sold me a LOLed costume for Halloween. Oh... I guess the lion was my second LOL. I forgot about the first one. But I couldn't do much at home. Can you imagine a lion running along a beach full of tourists?" She smiles nostaligcally. "It was awfully nice, though..."

She frowns belatedly. What was that about kneecaps? "Why would someone-- oh, wait. You're a detective."

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"An LOLed costume? What did you dress as?" He has a vague memory of that going around the Nexus. "And yes, I am a holistic private detective..." The kneecap breaking generally has to do with him borrowing money, and nothing to do with his work. His work mostly involves finding lost cats for little old ladies, but he's not about to explain that in a hurry.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Sarah blushes a little. "Catwoman." This is why she prefers the animal LOLs, all the other ones seem inclined to turn her into a 'bad girl'. "For Halloween, I thought I was Catwoman. That was weird."

Sarah fishes the cherry out of her drink and pops it into her mouth. "Holistic? It sounds exciting. Ever have to track down someone's long-lost relative?"

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

For a moment he just blinks at her through his thick glasses, trying to keep the grin of imagining her dressed as catwoman off his face.
"Hunh? Mmm..." He looks thoughtful. "No, I don't believe that particular manner of case has crossed my desk yet, although I did suffer a complex and disturbing case involving half of a cat."

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Too bad last year's costume of Wonder Woman hasn't come up in conversation. She sips her rum and coke and wrinkles her nose. "Ew. Half a cat? Do I want to know?"

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"Oh, it's not as bad as it sounds. Both halves were independantly alive and functioning as normal. This was before I encountered the Nexus, but after that the multiverse was easy enough to adapt to." He finishes off his drink and makes himself put the lid over the remaining half of the blueberry dessert.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"I can't imagine the cat was too thrilled about that," Sarah remarks, snickering slightly at the mental image. Looks like that alcohol, as little as it was, is catching up to her. "My cat Clio would be chasing her back half all over the house if that happened to her."

Rather than being disgusted, she's pleased that Dirk polished off half the stredel.

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

Dirk would be happy to put as many drinks as she wants on his tab. "Didn't seem to notice, and the other half wasn't... Are you familiar with the paradox of existential uncertainty presented by the gedankenexperiment of Schodinger's cat?" He hopes she's sober enough to comprehend that sentence.
Despite his appearance, Dirk's appetite is no match for Thorn's. He'll save the other half for dessert after dinner, or breakfast tomorrow.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"Gedanken...?" She repeats, her eyes crossing a little. Dirk's being generous; she wouldn't have understood that sentence sober.

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"Sorry, a thought-experiment. Sort of a theoretical mental excercise for its own sake rather than experiment intended to be carried out in a lab. Although it was, but in practice the experiment of Schrodinger's cat is unpredictable on a level Schrodinger never took into account, due to the intrinsic nature of the cat itself." Listening to Dirk is harder sober. It's easier to mellow out and just let the long words roll over you.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Okay, thought-experiment, she's heard of those before. But then she just gets lost and stares at him blankly for a few seconds. "Okay, wait. Maybe you should tell me what Schrodinger's experiment is in the first place. He experimented on cats?" She looks a little affronted. "Oh... no, he thought about experimenting on cats? Did he cut a cat in half?"

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

Dirk waves over the bartender and slides his glass out with a nod, looking for a refill. "Schrodinger proposed the idea of a cat in a box with a radioactive isotope with a fifty/fifty chance of decaying and killing the cat. The box, for the purpose of the mental excercise, is soundproof, yet designed such that the cat running out of air, food, or water is not an issue. Because the probability of the cat being alive or dead is an even split, and because our observation affects the nature of reality- and it does, I'll explain quarks later if you'd like- so long as you have yet to open the box and observe the cat's state of existence, it is in a state of... open possibility, if you will. Until observed, the cat is simultaneously both alive and dead. Existential uncertainty."

((OMG I can't believe I typed that without looking it up...))

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Sarah listens very intently to Dirk's explanation, sipping from her glass and nodding when appropriate. Several seconds after he's done, she asks tentatively, "But... what about the cat? Doesn't the cat know whether or not it's alive?" She adds, "And I'm glad that wasn't a real experiment, because the poor cat would -- is this why that cat was in half??"

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"In practice, the cat got tired of the possibility of being gassed and buggered off. In the experiment I'd have to say that the cat's perspective in the matter is discarded, which is of course a glaring flaw. The cat that was missing half of itself was in an obervable state of existential uncertainty. It had been determined that it might exist, placing it in a state of simultaneous existence and non-existence that manifested itself visually as... a missing half..." He checks her eyes to make sure they're not glazing over. Kate's told him if he watched for that telltale sign he'd have better success on dates.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Far from glazed over, Sarah actually looks quite interested. It took a few go-arounds, but she seems to understand now. "So how did you finally get the cat's other half to appear? Did you have to figure out that it existed for sure-- what? Is it my mascara? It's not running, is it?"

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"No, no, you're fine. I just wasn't sure you really wanted to hear about all this...?" His jaw is ready to drop, because he's never met a woman this interested in what he has to say. Even Hollister doesn't want to hear him ramble about quantum physics. Damnit, why does she have to be taken??!?

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Sarah smiles. "Oh, no, I find it very interesting. I love learning new things. I don't always understand them, though. You use a lot of big words, Dirk." She giggles. This is why she's so well-suited for Daniel. He can ramble about some sort of scientific theory and she'll actually listen (it doesn't hurt that she loves his voice, too).

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"I ate a dictionary as a kid. A thick one." He rests a hand on his stomach for a moment, unself-consciously. Dirk's voice isn't much like Dr. Schreber's, but at least the accent isn't too thick for American ears. He sounds more like a news anchor for the BBC than like Thorn's thick cockney. "Is there any part you wanted to hear more about? I can go on for a while." He grins, but his internal voice is still cursing about her being taken. Maybe she'd dump the gimp for him? He's got glasses and shabby suits too! He's even got scars, but the worst of them comes from getting run over by a bike courier, which is as unglamorous as it gets. Unless you count the broken nose, which is from getting punched by a kid... yeah, not noble scars.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

If she had any inkling of Dirk's internal monologue, she'd be pretty pissed off. As it is, she has no idea, and simply grins back, enjoying his company and her yummy, yummy drink. "Oh, I don't know... what happened to the cat? And you said something about quarks?"

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"Oh, quarks are just very tiny particles, they make up electrons and protons. I think I was alluding something to the observer effect. It's been proven that the act of observation has a very real and measureable effect on reality, on minute levels. Of course I could have told anyone that decades ago, but I don't have the drive to do the paperwork to prove it to other people. You know... most people don't listen to what I'm saying this much." He starts in on the fresh drink. If Sarah was completely sober she might notice his 'wow, what a woman!' expression, at least. "And the cat is fine. I settled the existential uncertainty through fairly mundane means and he was restored to normal. Never got paid for it though."

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"Really?" Sarah looks surprised. "But what you have to say is so amazing. I mean, you're talking about reality being changed just by observing it... maybe you've been talking to the wrong people."

She looks relieved at the conclusion of the cat story. "I'm glad it's all right. A shame you weren't paid. Maybe you should become a physicist instead."

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

"That... ship sailed when I was kicked out of Cambridge." For the first time in this conversation, he's speaking reluctantly. "And it's a long story, and it wasn't exactly my fault." He frowns and drains his glass quickly.

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

Sarah blushes. "Oh... I'm sorry." Even through the alcohol, she can tell it upsets him. "I didn't mean to bring up unpleasant memories. I really think you could still be a physicist. Although a holistic detective sounds more fun."

She finishes her own drink, then blinks a couple of times. "Guess I should get going. Maybe if I don't observe Daniel for a while, he'll go back to normal." She laughs weakly at her little joke.

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

Dirk shakes his head. "It's okay, old history..." He hesitates to give her the old fundamental interconnectedness of all things speech, and then snaps back to reality when her boyfriend's name comes up. Oh well. "That or he'll be caught in a state of existential uncertainty..." Because the idea of her boyfriend being missing from the waist down is a nice one for Dirk. "Are you okay to walk?"

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"Oh..." She seems to be imagining the same thing, and doesn't seem to like the idea. She loves Daniel's upper half, but his lower half is pretty important, too!

She slides off her barstool and wobbles a little in her high heels. "Whew... I didn't feel nearly as tipsy sitting down." She smiles brightly. "I'll be fine. Thanks so much for keeping me company, Dirk. You're a really nice guy." Ouch!

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

He reaches out to steady her gently, by the arm. "You'd probably be better off going home and having a cup of coffee or something to eat. It'll take the edge off, trust me." He actually winces slightly at the last. "You're... not bad yourself." He gives a wistful sigh, but tries to smile. "Take care of yourself."

[sarah-branigan.livejournal.com]

"Back home..." She sighs. "Thorn'll be around, anyway. He can make me some tea." She still sober enough to know she's not sober enough to be messing around in the kitchen.

She smiles again. "You too, Dirk. Enjoy the streudel." She heads out of the bar on slightly steadier feet. At least she's leaving with warm, fuzzy feelings for Dirk, even if they're purely platonic.

[dirk--gently.livejournal.com]

Thorn? Wait, does she have two boyfriends? Not that it's that weird for the Nexus. "Thanks. Good luck with the... Lol... thing." He watches her go with a sigh, and orders another drink. At least he can still take advantage of her baking.
He gets along so well with women who are taken, much better than he gets along with the ones that are available.