CLOSED SIGNUPS The Diner - a place of rest, relaxation, and recuperation

[Nougat]

The years passed. Wars began and ended. Pamet's neighbour, Stevie, died at the age of 123, an age which was ancient for a spellcaster, but young for a vampire and practically an infant to Pamet. He found someone new to maintain his body, a cheerful young woman with a penchant for explosions (none, luckily, involving Pamet's body).

The city grew and changed, the skyline unrecognizable to what it once was. As humans moved outward, werewolf territory began to shrink. They demanded to be given land within the city for their pack, a demand which was unanimously rejected by the other species. Tensions built. Fights began to break out, and with the rapid technological advancements of human society, it was only natural that they were soon discovered by humans. Werewolves, in the first place, were not the greatest at blending in. It was why they did not live amongst humans in the first place.

Every day another person seemed to be outed, forced to run away from those who knew them until they were forgotten. Just a short while ago, his spellcaster had called him, tearfully apologizing for her abrupt departure. It seemed her family had discovered her magical inclinations and she was going up north to find a commune she'd heard rumours of.

Mara raged every night. "Those dogs don't share a single braincell between them," she often said, generally while butchering some mysterious piece of meat. With the increased scrutiny on their society, Mara couldn't prowl bars and alleys for her meals anymore. She instead made do with animals procured through various sources. Pamet didn't ask, but he did think there was an increased number of missing pet posters in their neighbourhood. Animal blood, according to her, was disgusting, and the fact that she was forced to rely on it for sustenance had made her quite irritable.

Though everything around him changed, Pamet remained the same. He worked some odd jobs, though he never stayed anywhere for more than a few years. Every quarter century or so, he enrolled himself back into high school to learn about advancements in human society, as well as to have a steady source of food. Mara always scoffed about it, saying that there were endless other activities he could do to fill his time, but she helped him anyways, using her connections to provide him with fake records.

He was quite content with quietly going through life as he did. But of course, the world continued to change around him. One morning, Pamet noticed a distinct taste in the air, harsh and rancid. Conversations stopped as he walked by. The girl who usually sat next to him in art moved to the back of the room. Pamet went through his morning classes filled with unease, but he tried to tell himself it was just that what he'd been feeding on as of late had overwhelmingly been the trepidation which oozed from everyone around him.

He'd just sat down on the floor under the stairwell where he spent his lunch periods when Mara sent him a message. The words flashed in his peripheral vision; after some damage to his eye recently that he did not have a spellcaster to fix, he had decided to cut his losses and take it out. Mara had called it stupid and rather gross, but he quite liked the replacement prosthetic. Although it did not improve his vision as much as it supposedly did for humans – possibly because it was inserted by a young vampire who most certainly did not have any sort of medical degree – it did have rather convenient features, such as a warning system which kept Pamet from walking into too many walls. And it did, at least, improve his vision so that he could even see the leaves on the tree outside their apartment, which was something Pamet was quite pleased with. His least favourite feature were the ads which hid in his peripheral, brightly coloured and distracting. Unfortunately, he couldn't figure out how to get rid of them without paying a monthly subscription, so there they stayed.

prblm cming ur way, read Mara's message.

The messages were followed by some screenshots taken from some sort of social media site — Pamet was never able to keep up with those trends, but Mara insisted it was an essential part of blending in.

for you consideration::this weird dude in my bio class whose pulse is impossible to find and who texts like a grandpa VS this guy whose picture I found in my grandma's scrapbook (apparently tied in an art comp with her then immediately disappeared off the face of earth). Same first name and everything. Are we thinking mutant vampire or some other type of monster???

Following the text were two images, side-by-side. One seemed quite recent, a photo of him staring blankly at a textbook. The image looked like it had been taken from across the room. The other was another photo of him, standing next to a girl, holding up art pieces, though the details had faded with age. He remembered that moment, her pride a sharp and refreshing taste like ice cold water on a hot day. He was also quite certain that that was not a recent image. He made an effort not to draw any attention to himself nowadays. No, it had to have been at least 50 years ago. Perhaps a bit longer.

told u gt hs was stupid

Pamet sighed, pulling out his phone – he never could figure out how to send messages without typing it physically. If you went to school as well, maybe you would learn to spell correctly, he sent back.

He stood, Mara's messages falling away into his peripheral vision among some brightly coloured ads. He was sure Mara had more to say, but it was quite rare for Pamet to have the mental wherewithal to get into a lengthy conversation over text. He'd be seeing her soon enough, in any case.

Pamet walked slowly up the stairs, signing himself out of school through their attendance line and sending an excuse to the manager of the fast food restaurant where he worked. He would head home and figure out a plan with Mara. It would be fine.

But when he pushed open the door that should have lead outside, he was not faced with the irritatingly warm and bright sunlight, but rather the cold and harsh glow of fluorescent lighting. Pamet looked up, and– "Oh."

He had looked for the diner, casually, for the first few years. But he had never seen it again, and eventually he had stopped thinking about it so much. He had all the time in the world, after all. If it wanted him to find it, then it would show up eventually.

It seemed now was the time, although the diner in his memories did not quite seem to match what was before him now. On the surface, it was quite the same, and Pamet couldn't really put his finger on what exactly about it had changed. It was simply different.

He was not alone, someone else just a few steps ahead of him. But judging by the apprehension which fell off her in waves, Pamet didn't imagine that this person knew any more than he did. The woman was familiar, in the way that people from memories long past were. It had, after all, been quite a few years, and Pamet felt he could be excused for the amount of time he spent just thinking, unblinking and unbreathing.

Really, it would have been fair if he couldn't quite pair names with faces (or with the distinct taste of their emotions, which Pamet found to be a much more reliable method of identification). If they had met under different circumstances, he surely wouldn't have. But he was fairly certain that he was correct as he said, "You're Louelle, right?"

 

[unanun]

Lin stumbled in both relief and shock as the sensations gushed back on the other side of the revolving doors. She saw her hands, the bones within them, and the blood flowing through them. She saw herself, flexed her fingers and gripped the handle to the bathroom both here and from ten thousand kilometers away, watched her eyeballs swivel in their sockets as she herself looked into the hallway at the corpses lying all over the bar, each one with a hole neatly trepanned in their skulls. She smelled the charred flesh and it almost smelled like steak, then watched the char spread in Schlieren mode, and finally saw the lone holdout behind the bar in x-ray, the one that she must have been aiming at when she opened the bathroom door. She didn't want to wait a few seconds for a slug to arrive from the ship, so she burned him out with a laser instead; thirty-three milliseconds.

She lost her flesh body in the restored presence of the relatively infinite inertia of her second body and that felt right. The center of gravity of her two halves swung back to the stars and she felt alone again, a microscopic envoy of a mechanical god that lay in low planetary orbit. That was when she spotted it, when she opened the millions of eyes that ran along her metal skin, a ripple that could have been gravitational lensing or another astral distortion, if not for the fact that it traveled in a straight line across several stars. A hunter-killer, a sleek teardrop drawn from the core of a neutron star. She looked at it with every eye and lens she could muster, and knew that it had been specifically designed for her.

The estimated time to impact was five minutes, which gave her just enough time to take a leisurely flight back to greet him. The silver drop punched a neat ten-meter hole in her ten-kilometer long body, ignoring the interlocking composite armour that was a hundred meters thick. It ignored all the electromagnetic shielding and concussive-reactive armour, parted the ultra-hard diverting slats that crisscrossed the superstructure, and leisurely peeled an entrance into the pilot room where Lin sat in the only chair in the spherical chamber, dressed in her admiral's best with one cup of tea nearby.

The teardrop withdrew its tail to become a true sphere. It touched the floor that bisected the spherical room, and from within its suddenly watery depths emerged a blue-haired rogue with an eyepatch, with an open peacoat over a very loosely buttoned linen shirt.

"The privateer symbolism is hilarious," said Lin with a smile that did not reach her eyes.

Theo even unrolled a sheet of parchment paper, which he fished from the inside of his coat.

"Admiral Lin, the Union so duly charges you with desertion in our direst hour. You are charged with the first-degree murder of one planet, four billion three hundred million one hundred seventy two thousand and five hundred inhabitants-"

The crack of a ceremonial handgun's retort echoed. Theo blinked the mushroomed bullet out of his eye.

"The sentence for this crime is decommissioning, and it is writ that I am the executor of the order to detain, retain, and remand you for trial-"

The ship had not been designed to defend itself from within, but from the way Theo's teardrop deflected every laser and slug, it would not have mattered. So why did Lin run? Was it from a dogged desire to see her treachery through to the very end, to commit to her freedom that she had paid a billion lifetimes for? Had she seen the Diner as a portent of the purgatory that awaited her, and decided to avoid it at all costs? What thoughts went through her head when she crashed through the only door in the pilot room and the glass pane of the spinning door slammed her back and sent her stumbling into the Diner?

"You again."

The gun clattered to the floor.

"Here again."

 

[Kuno]

JIN CHO

Terra One, 2145

Two moons peeking through the planet's stratosphere were a fortuitous sign. The Twins, as they had been dubbed, better served the planet together; the round, mauve bodies brought an inexplicable calm to the alien world's surface. The wild winds abated, the inky waves grew gentle, and the raucous noise of the forests surrounding the colonies died down to a low hum, even the beasts themselves in no hurry for a foul temper.

The peace was strange to her, she being as much an alien to it as she was to Terra One. Warp speed consumed space and time in unforgiving measures. One week ago she had been on Neptune, dragging her plasma knife through a gorgonite's skull in a blinding haze of smoke and blood. If not for the Diner's meal, she doubted she would have had the strength to blast through the horde. Six rounds of ammo being emptied into the big ones had led her to desperate measures. That's how Nam and the rest had found her: bloodied, nearly frostbitten from the slashed leak in her space suit, and still plunging her blade into a lifeless gorgonite. Her arm had been moving without conscious thought when they had dragged her away. Up and down, up and down, stabbing straight to the heart…

A blur of frenzied moments later, and she was half-naked in her cryo pod, watching the cool air fan out into ice over the glass like tiny imploding stars. She liked to call pod periods "blinks." One blink, and you went from Neptune to Galatea. One blink, and you went from December to July. One blink, and you went from 2133 to 2145.

It was the Delta Corp. special. The time displacement wore on you like an oversized coat, the heavy presence of alien identity dogging you until you got to your respective home and shrugged it off in light of familiarity. Sometimes Delta Corp. even gave you a notarized study guide, to boot, so you could catch up on all the years you'd missed with no strings attached over your shore leave–for a small fee, naturally. But it was one thing to read something, and another thing entirely to see it in the cities, the tech…the families.

For shore leave, most soldiers liked to run off to some of the entertainment planets like Amorpho or Adonis for a good ol' hedonistic binge, but Jin always asked to go home to Terra One. It was a fairly new colony built in a manner reminiscent of what they imagined Earth to be like; Jin had made the decision to buy a large ranch when the colony was brand new and untested, and her investment had paid off. Now the home was her getaway from the madness of space and people. Jin laid out on a chair on the back porch, staring up at the Twins from her unobstructed private view.

She wasn't alone for long. A man emerged from the back door of the house, holding two drinks in his hand. He put one down besides Jin, eyeing her as he sat in a chair next to her.

"Rygelian ok?"

"Sure. Anything's better than space sludge."

"Ha! I bet."

The man smiled, the crow's feet at his eyes growing more pronounced. Law forgive her, but she'd scared him half to death when she had waltzed through the front door. Mancel, bless his heart, wasn't as good with surprises as he used to be. The subtle changes had grown more apparent to her the longer she stayed. What was once sleek black hair was now peppered with hints of gray, and he needed glasses now to read the shore leave discharge notice in his hands, hands that had grown more weathered with time.

"Law. Gorgonites?" Mancel said, peering up at her.

"Mmhm. I'm on shore leave until I'm healed up."

"And then?"

Jin said nothing. Mancel stared at his wife, reading the silence. Whatever he saw was enough; he sighed heavily, frustrated, knocking his hands against the smooth finish of the patio table.

"That merc contract. I should have never let you sign it."

"The money was good. The money is good – ten times better than anything we'd ever been offered before."

He shook his head. "It wasn't worth it."

"Wasn't it? We got off Mars, got our own ranch on Terra One, for Law's sake. How many spacers do you know that own their own property? And Io doesn't have to mine for minerals on some backwater planet."

"And yet–"

Mancel inhaled sharply, closing his eyes. His jaw was tensed; his hands unfurled, then curled again, over and over like the maw of a beast. As he fought the storm roiling within him, Jin simply held hers, her eyes dark and unreadable.

"I don't want to fight with you," He finally said. "But this is…Jin. Our son. Is older than you now. I don't– What, are they just gonna keep you on the hook forever? I–"

She knew even before he did so that he was going to pinch his nose then and sigh, a tried and tested sign that an argument was coming. Some years she fed into it. Hell – in the beginning, she'd encouraged it. She'd never realized that the missions would mean months, even years lost of their time, and she'd tried fruitlessly every shore leave to get Mancel to sign the divorce statement.

But they were past that point now. Mancel was still here, and so was she.

Under the weight of the silence, the mercenary rose.

"I'm going to make us some drinks, ok?"

She pretended not to see the alarm meld into relief on his face at her answer. Guilt pricked her; she had done this to him, to this man she loved. Anxiety had never become him before the start of her work; now every move of hers was met with a restless, subtle fear, as if at any moment she might disappear and fade back into the cosmos like stardust. It had happened before; Delta Corp. didn't care where you were and what you were doing at the time shore leave ended. The second the clock hit the end of your vacation, your molecules were being scrambled and instantaneously transported aboard your designated vessels. No exceptions.

Jin did not anticipate any surprise transports as she walked into her house. But it was not her kitchen that waited beyond the glass doors.

The room layout came to her in a haze, like drug-induced fever dream. The garish retro theme returned to her mind with more than a few memories; this place had been buried to her, relegated to perhaps a battle-induced dream.

Until now.

The Diner was back.

Jin stared at the individuals in front of her. She remembered them, though their names–hell, she'd never been good with them. It would come back to her.

"Gosh," She breathed, unable to help herself. She took a step forward, wide-eyed. "Back again, are we?"

 

[Nemopedia]

Stepping into the diner without ma'am coming through the kitchen door felt like opening the door to her empty childhood home. Familiar in that nostalgic way that kept her safe, but yet instantaneously chilly and eerie, as if stepping into an alternate universe where Louelle was the main character of a horror movie and the serial killer jusy around the corner with a knife in hand.

Four years had passed since her first and last visit, and while Louelle had thought of the diner once in a while, she had at large moved on, her memory only retaining the strangest portions of the encounter, blurring the rest of the details which included the name, voices and the faces at large. At large as her eyes squinted at the sight of those who followed after her, her memory creaking and screaming that they had met before, but unable to recall anything else.

"Ma'am?" Louelle called, like a child calling for their mother when uncertain, and then when she was addressed she blinked, following with a "it's been a while," for a lack of anything else to say before realising the strangest detail of this place and recovering herself with a;

"At least for me. Been four years, graduated and all, but still not a doctor…" Louelle talked about the time that had passed for her, wondering if she had changed in their eyes, if she had become older or not. She herself couldn't tell, her mind frantically looking for the names of the stranger that so obviously remembered her and she had met once, but unable to register if they looked the same, or had aged, or even what they had talked about.

The door of the diner opened once more, revealing the most ragged looking of them all stumbling in a fashion familiar to their first meeting, triggering a memory with Louelle.

"Canine fingers!" she breathed in a rushed whisper, before realising that it wasn't quite right, it was just how she remembered it, and then an actual name after, "Jin?"

She had remembered at least one name.

 

[Nougat]

One by one, more people appeared. It took but a moment for him to place them, connecting the unique notes of their emotions and fuzzy impressions of their past appearances to the people who stood before him now. The past century had been rather stagnant; he'd hardly met anyone of interest, and of the people whom he did speak to, he rarely bothered to learn so much as their name. Perhaps as a result, he didn't have much difficulty at all placing the people in front of him.

"It's been a while for me as well," he mused. "A hundred-odd years, perhaps. I think proportionally it feels like a similar amount of time, though." It had been Stevie who had brought up the proportionality of their time perception, during an introspective phase sometime in his mid-70's. I may as well be a mayfly in comparison to how long you'll live, he'd said, tasting of some odd mix of bitterness and sympathy. And it had been true that his life seemed to end in no time at all, while Pamet had not really changed at all.

So it was rather nice to see some people who (at least at first glance) did not seem as though they had changed too much from when he first met them, even if some of them seemed a bit worse for wear. It was curious, how they all seemed to find the diner again at the same point in time, even if the time that passed in their own dimensions seemed to vary. Perhaps he should have spent more time studying parallel dimensions, rather than taking Calculus I for the fifth or sixth time — well, he had plenty of time for that in the future.

Those who had yet to appear were a niggling thought in the back of his head, particularly the missing presence of the owner of the diner herself. The honeyed taste of her concern would have been rather nice.

Pamet meandered deeper into the diner, studying his surroundings. Altogether, everything looked to him quite the same as it had the last time he'd visited, the surfaces still meticulously clean and orderly. And yet, it seemed, there was something off, which he attributed to the missing owner. He stopped in front of the counter, leaning against it as he peered into the kitchen through the serving hatch which separated it from the rest of the diner. He wasn't particularly surprised to find the kitchen was as ordered as the rest of the diner, but eerily silent, all of the equipment shut off.

"I don't suppose Ma'am just forgot to lock the doors before closing."

 

[unanun]

"God only saw fit to give the rest of you time, then." Lin picked up her pistol and twirled it by the finger guard. It was highly decorated, ornate yet tarnished, a work of art rather than a service piece, and her neglect had destroyed all of its delicate tolerances, ironically making it safer as all the mechanisms were gummy and she had had to pull extremely hard on the trigger to shoot at her hunter-killer. There was no negligent discharge.

"I've been away for about ten minutes. Maybe fifteen."

She followed Pamet as he wandered deeper into the diner, and split off to walk behind the counter, leaning low so she could peer at the contents of the shelves.

 

[Kuno]

JIN CHO

Almost all of them were there from before. The fancy Earth girl, Goop boy, and the space gal - they were all before her, front and certain, propped around the diner like a distorted memory of her last experience there. Jin stared awhile longer at the Earth girl before her face slowly cracked into a smile. It should have brought nostalgia and comfort; she remembered it well, that warm, soothing feeling she'd gotten from her last session with the diner and Ma'am.

And that's when it clicked in her mind what was off with the place. Ma'am - where was she?

"Place don't look closed," The soldier remarked in her own rough patois. But it felt closed...abandoned, even. Jin wasn't one for paranoid feelings, but when lived long enough under the hail of gunfire, you started to trust your gut when it got to squirming in tense situations. Something was wrong with the Diner.

Hell. Of all the times to not have her gun.

The name of the bespectacled girl finally came to her, and she looked over at her sharply. "Miss Louelle, have you seen the old lady?"

 

[Nemopedia]

"F-fifteen?" Louelle repeated, the imagination of returning to the Diner within the hour more implausible than a hundred years. She had met someone from the 18th century after all, and was able to carry a conversation. And when Jin asked about the 'old lady' she responded in a daze with; "I see one in the mirror every morning, meuf." For she felt truly a little old knowing that four years had passed for her in a literal blink of an eye for some.

Fiddling around with the lightswitch in the kitchen, Louelle blinked at the flicker of the artificial white light flooding the kitchen, reaffirming what Pamet had observed before and revealing all that was needed to make a stack of pancakes she had missed out on before. "Do you think ma'am minds if we?" The question rang, reaching for one of the pans hanging onto the wall. Taking a swing the female checked its weight, judging that it was appropriate enough for whatever meagre shenanigans she could pull in a professional kitchen.

If she could pull any.

 

[unanun]

"Maybe the amount of time that passes is a metaphor for how lively your life is."

Lin leaned forward on the counter, resting her torso on the shiny-but-now-dull veneered surface. The gun did hula-hoops around her index finger, which she stopped shortly after the weight and metal began to abrade her skin.

"So, what happened to you three? I'll start: once I step through that door I'll be a dead woman."

 

[Nougat]

"I'm sure she wouldn't mind you making food, as long as everything's cleaned up afterwards. I imagine she wouldn't want you to go hungry." At least, that was the impression he'd gotten of the owner back in the day.

Pamet picked up a napkin dispenser, studying the tarnished metal exterior. It revealed absolutely nothing of their current situation, but it, as well as the comment by Lin, did bring more questions to his mind. "I wonder how much time has passed for Ma'am, then?" he wondered. Surely some time had passed, as it seemed evident that something had changed since the last time they had visited the diner. He hoped not too much time had passed in this dimension, though.

"For myself, suspicions have recently been raised that I am not human. I don't imagine that I'll die; I don't think anyone knows what I am yet so I doubt they know of a way to kill me. I may have to move, though. I'd prefer not to be captured and studied if possible."

Pamet set down the napkin dispenser, swapping it with a salt shaker which he studied with the same amount of interest. He did rather enjoy being able to see the details of objects so clearly. Even the ads were gone now.

 

[Kuno]

JIN CHO

It seemed their roles had all been switched. Jin looked at first Lin and then Pamet with no small amount of concern. Fate had dealt them a dose of danger in exchange for her own personal reprieve. Would that she could shoulder their burdens for them. Jin never cared much to see other people suffering. She was the strong one; she could take what others couldn't.

"I wish I could take you both with me," Jin said with sincerity. "Me, I'm just...sitting around at home. I'm on medical leave from the Corps. 'Course, I'd have to ask Mancel, but I'm sure he wouldn't much mind-"

Oops. There she went on another tangent. That conversation could wait.

Jin patted her pants as she strode forward towards the kitchen. She used to carry a standard issue scalper on her even during shore leave; there was a rush of relief when she felt its capped edge near her right thigh.

"I'm going on back to see if Ma'am is in the backroom somewhere."

Surely they wouldn't have been allowed in the diner if she wasn't there...

Right?

 

[Nemopedia]

Even the kitchen looked off. Too dusty and empty, with its fluorescent light that just washed away all colours and made everything look unappetising, if there was any. Too little of ma'am's presence, for sure, despite the kitchen being the one space she hadn't been to before.

Lin's suggestion at the eventfulness of her own life didn't sit well with Louelle, even if there was no threats of deaths coming at her, she had made plenty of them and meant them. Sorta.

"I'm a graduate now, uncovered some family secrets as well that somehow involves the world," she answered instead, opening a door that looked like a fridge to see its contents and throwing it shut when she found it empty.

"Maybe she went grocery shopping?" Louelle raised the question when all she could find was a bag of flour and the question of tap water was safe here, wherever ma'am's diner was located.