Darya and Ace: Around Town.

Ace ate his steak slowly, cutting it up into small pieces and then pouring some sort of sauce on it before picking at it with his fork. He enjoyed the texture and the flavour of each morsel before moving on to the next. The whole time he rarely took his eyes of Darya, even when he looked at the plate he was aware of her in his peripheral vision.

"Is there anything I can do to help" Ace asked softly, putting down his fork and looking intently at Darya.

Snapped out of her reminiscing, Darya smiled and leaned her head against the window, chin on hand. "For the moment...no. There's nothing to go on, not even the CEO has any information on him...but when I do have information, I think I'd like you helping me then. Thank you."

She glanced out of the window again. "For now...I think we can just enjoy things like this. These moments of piece."

She took another couple mouthfuls of food, before she start humming under her breath. It was a nice, peaceful tune, that seemed to be as much for calming herself down as for the sake of singing it.

"So...what about you? Do you have plans for the future?" Asked Darya, looking at Ace. "Anything you want to do?"

"Honestly, no. I didn't really think very far ahead when I left WA. It was all quite sudden. For now I just want to find a place to live and make some money. I guess... I'd like to know what happened to my Mom. Maybe Oracle could help with that. I don't know. I'll work something out."

Ace continued to eat slowly, contemplating his future.

Darya took another big bite of steak, before looking up again. "If you need me to help out...do say, won't you? The rest of Oracle...don't seem to talk about themselves much."

She shrugged. "I guess we've all got secrets..."

"Well... I've never really been that good at secrets, to be honest. I couldn't tell a good lie to save my life. I'm ok if I've got a cover story, but on the spot stuff is hard, you know? Hell, being a terrible liar is how I lost my left eye the first time. Nah, I tend to be fairly open about things, to my detriment usually. I am getting better at it though."

Ace went back to his steak and finished the last few mouthfuls, draining the last of his drink to finish things off.

Darya, having a much larger meal, was much slower about finishing it than Ace, and was still finishing her main with quite a few of her sides left when Ace finished.

"How do you...Sorry." She said, swallowing the bit of food she had in her mouth. "How do you lose an eye by being a terrible liar?"

"Well, we were on a mission in Siberia to blow up a refinery there. I'm not sure what they were refining but the higher ups wanted the place sky high. Well... let me put it this way when the E.I. throwing knife specialist says ‘Tell me where the bombs are or the next one is going in your eye’ you gotta make the lie convincing.

Ace smiled at Darya and then turned to try and catch the eye of the waitress who had been ignoring them in a way not often seen in WF eateries. Usually the server would be at the table every 10 minutes to find out if you needed a drink refill, if you wanted more never-ending sides or if everything was okay, but this one was staying out of the way. Perhaps it was because they were a boy and a girl eating a meal together in a nice restaurant, or perhaps it was because they moved and talked like seasoned Agents. Either way Ace wanted her attention. While he looked at the back of he waitress's head he said to Darya, “Do you want any coffee? Pudding?”

Darya grinned. "I've had a couple of things like that myself... once lost nearly the whole of my right hand because of an over enthusiastic git with a chainsaw. I wouldn't have minded, except he was supposed to be on my side." She took a swig of drink and finished her meal.
"Never use a chainsaw without the right trainings. You are just too dangerous."

At the sound of a pudding, she frowned and, seemingly on instinct, pulled out a PDA and checked something before smiling and putting it back.

"I think I'll have...that." She pointed to the biggest pudding on the menu, a mass of ice creem, chocofaux and various other sweet things. She turned around and tried to get the waitress' eye as well. "Could we order some dessert?" She asked, raising her voice slightly.

"You want ‘The Spire’? You know how big that is, right? Darya, even with your appetite you can't eat a whole ‘Spire’ on your own. How about we share?"

Darya’s shout seamed to do the trick, even if it did make Ace wince a little, and the waitress caught their eyes and at least acknowledged their existence. After a moment she came over to the table, ready to take their order.

Darya grinned. "That sounds like a challenge to me Ace." She said, before turning to the waitress. "One Spire please. And...Ace, what would you like?" She asked, turning back to her companion.

"Grande Dark Blend. Black and sharp."

Ace shook his head as the waitress left to get their orders.

"There is no way you can eat all of that. It's half a meter tall." Ace gestured over to a far wall with 6 photos with names underneath. "They put your name on the wall if you can eat the whole thing in one sitting." He leaned forward conspiratorially, "and you know, they put just enough 'fruit' and pastry in it for it to be legally considered an apple pie. I'm just going to drink my coffee and wait until you've had enough."

Ace leaned back against the cushions and grinned at Darya.

((OOC: Rolled Endurance on 2D10. She rolled a 5, passed on the dot.))

As the massive mound arrived, Darya grinned and and prepared herself, spinning her spoon around like a martial artist in an over the top Kung Fu B movie. There was no talk, she couldn't spare the effort. A layer of chocolate sauce was first, over vanilla, chocolate and caramel ice cream. This was placed on top of a line of pastry, which was no match for Darya. The first defences were down - now the real fight begins.

An advancing column of fruit surrounded the inner chocolate sponge core protectively, iceing oozing out as a shield. She was starting to slow down a bit now, the war of attrition weakening her. But still her onslaught continued, carrying her into a line of banaoffee pie, and below, past layers of ice cream and waffers, with some more pastry and fruit doted around. Finally, the entire installation was obliterated, and she held up her prize; a single cherry, which she popped into her mouth a chewed satisfactorily.

She sighed as she leaned back in her chair. "Ok. Let me let this go down, and possibly let the toxin filters do their stuff, then we'll go."

Ace exchanged a knowing glance with the waitress as she and one of here colleagues brought the monstrous desert over to the table. Although there were not that many people in the restaurant all eyes were on Darya as she started to eat. At first people continued their convocations and casually looked up at the monstrous pudding but before long people had forgotten that they even had food to stare at the wonder before them. Slowly but surely Darya was consuming the whole thing, sure she was eating slowly but her pace never faltered from start to finish. Eventually the only sound in the restaurant was the faint noise of traffic from outside and the sound of a pudding being thoroughly devoured.

For his part Ace's face went through several expressions: First as the 'Spire' arrived he looked smug, but seeing the look on Darya's face his eyebrows knit slightly and his grin faltered. His face continued to fall slowly during the eating until by the end he was stilling there slack jawed in amazement with his eyes wide and his coffee forgotten and growing cold. As she plucked the last cherry off the stalk a small shudder went through his body and he shook his head slightly and started clapping. The room filled with applause moments later and all three members of the waiting staff, the manager and the chef all came to the table to congratulate Darya on her achievement.

The manager started "Well now, that was some feat you just accomplished there missy. We don't often get someone who manages to get through the whole thing. Now, you are clearly an agent so we ain't gonna to take your photo but we got a board up on that wall for any agents that manage it, and believe me few of them do either." He gestured through his staff, who moved out of the way so she could see the wall with its 6 photos and the list of 20 names in reasonably sized letters to the right. "If you'll just give me your hand I'll get your chip scanned and add you to the list" Our waitress declared, holding out a chip-scanner towards Darya. All through this Ace sat and grinned, not taking his eyes off Darya for a moment.

Darya held out her hand. Any information on who she was or who she worked for would be hidden thanks to her privacy license, but her name came up anyway. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and sighed again, looking a bit embarrassed to be the center of attention in the restaurant. Eventually she looked up at the chef and smiled. "That was a lovely meal, thank you." she said in English with a slightly strange combination of Russian and Chinese accents.

Once the formalities of being congratualted on her eating prowess were over, Darya turned back to Ace. "So...anywhere else you know that's good in town? Or shall we head back to Seoul?" she asked.

"Anywhere good? We are in LA. Where do you want to go?”

The waitress came over with the bill, which Ace took, looked at, raised an eyebrow and then paid with registered credit. He poked around in his PDA for a moment and then left a credit chip on the table. Then he stood up, still eyeing the remails of the glass the desert had come in.

“Let’s go.”

"Umm..." Said Darya, pulling out her own PDA and giving a quick once over of a travel site on the WDN. "It says there's a bus tour going around. We can go on that for a bit and let our lunches go down, and then we can hop off somewhere and poke around interesting things. Sound good?"

"Sure. I've never been on a bus tour before, It's on of those hop-on hop-off types, right?"

Ace gave their waitress a quick simile as they left the restaurant. Taking out his PDA he looked up where the nearest appropriate bus stop was and memorised the location before putting the device away and heading off, out of the alley and left down the main street.

“It’s not too far to the bus stop. And we have to walk through the part of town full of needlessly overpriced shops, so if there is anything that catches your eye just holler.”

Walking through the shopping centre, Darya ignored the various shops selling clothes, jewellary, food and weapons, far more interested in a long and rambling story about how her mentor managed to get them lost in an old city as they were looking for a high profile target. "So then we finally manage to get to a neighbourhood where taxis go into, and we call one, and we get back to our hotel, and we turn about to tip the driver...and it was the guy! Ten murders, three bank robberies and a case of letting the air out of a UIG officers tires, and the guys been driving around as a taxi driver!"

She giggled a bit, before frowning. "Well, it was funny till he pulled out the plasma rifle...then it became really funny, because Ernest had just given me my EMP rifle..."

She stopped in the story suddenly, and glanced over to the window of a small, out of the way electronics shop. "Ace! Let's go there!" She said, pointing at it.

Ace couldn’t help but laugh at the story. Perhaps it was the implausibility of it, or perhaps it was the person who was telling it but the story made him smile in a way that he rarely did. The shop looked out of place down a side street surrounded by high priced fashion shops and Ace suspected it was probably a moderately successful small business that hadn’t yet adapted to the changing image of the area it was in, or else had chosen not to. It was interesting, though, to see a shop like that in an area like this and as it was where Darya wanted to go Ace couldn’t see a problem with it.

“Sure, the busses run every 20 minutes so we have plenty of time. Lead the way.”

The computer generated sound of a bell filled the shop as Darya entered, grabbing a basket for a pile by the door as she did so. The shop was mainly filled with consumer electronics, but instead of examining those, Darya headed straight to the back and began examining the lines of resistors, capacitors and other circuit componants. After a while, she gave a gasp and turned back to Ace, holding up a small box marked with "LS1039F", and a picture of a chip inside.

"Look! Ace!" she said, holding it up happily. "These are impossible to get hold of back home, they discontinued the line ages ago!" She put the box in her basket, and before long it was joined by other components, from sensors to chips, each one exclaimed over and having at least four uses discussed before it went in.

After her basket was nearly half full, she turned to Ace. "See anything you're interested in?"

"Well... yeah, but I don’t think it’s for sale."

Ace looked over the components in the basket quizzically, trying to work out what they were for. He could think of a number of uses for many of the components, but not all of them.

“I must confess I’m not that good with electronics, what are you planning on building with this lot?”

Darya paused and tapped her chin with a finger. "It's more of a hobby of mine than any actual plans to build something. I just like being able to do lots of stuff...and they often come in handy when I'm actually working on stuff. I actually built my own under slung knock out rifle, you know? Tried to sell the design to Y&S, but they said they weren't at all interested. Guess I know why now..."

She looked around a bit more, trying to see the item that Ace was interested in but wasn't for sale, before shrugging. "I'll pay for these, then shall we head on our way?" she asked, picking up and examining a clock before putting it back.

"You design weapons? That's interesting, I do a little bit of that myself. I know what you mean about tinkering with things, I do the same only I prefer mechanics over electronics. I just think bigger than electrons, I suppose."

Ace followed Darya to the checkout as she paid for the large number of electronic things.

“Do you want me to carry any of that?”

Darya winked and pointed to her muletech. "Anti-grav muletechs my friend. Great for running around bases with lots of equipment, and also for carrying the shopping." She tried to make her face look like one you might see in an advert, but couldn't hold it for long and began to giggle instead.

"Yeah, I've designed some stuff." she said, pulling her muletech over her shoulder after she'd paid for her stuff. "Currently I'm toying with the idea of a combined EMP and Knock Out weapon, sort of like a non-damaging galvanic weapon, you know? Either that or a long sword with an energy cell in the hilt, so you can knock people out with it if needed..."

She looked up and down the street. "Actually, while we're here, can we try and find a toy shop? I want to get something for Dusty."