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» i must give the impression that i have the answers for everything

Who: Angela and Bruce
What: The tables are turned on the billionaire playboy. Or something like that.
Where: Some cheap diner in Howl Barrow
When: Misdi evening
Warnings: None

Hunkered down in a back booth is Angela, sipping on a tall glass of ice water. Sure, she has a sweet tooth and would rather drink iced tea, but even though they said what she ordered earlier was iced tea, it really tasted like some funky bush water with a squirt of lemon. Deciding to play it safe for now, Angela peruses the menu, looking for anything familiar to order whenever Bruce shows up. If she's lucky and her prayers are answered, maybe he'll be carrying a bottle of hot sauce she can steal and cover whatever she orders. Which is what she usually does anyway, regardless of where she eats.

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Welcome to Bruce Wayne; nothing is meaningless and everything is over-thought. For now, though, whatever visible anxiety he might have is minimal and no more than what might be expected for a thirty-something nerd recently abducted into a new dimension.

"That'd be less weird than this," he says, and it's halfway a joke - see: recently abducted into a new dimension. "It's good to see you."

"I'm sure it would be. At least, I hope it would be." Just because they're in public and every word they say can and will be heard by the waitress heading towards them means nothing to Angela and her never-ending supply of euphemisms and double talk.

"It's good to see you too." She leans her elbows on the table, getting comfortable in her current company. "How've you been holding up? Knocking down any more walls?"

Her energy is cute, he thinks. It's easier with people like this - fewer awkward silences. He casts a little smile towards the waitress and orders whatever hot tea they have (she tells him it's 'a little oily for Earthians, usually', and he says that's fine).

"The apartment's been going pretty well since then. I was able to stay with a friend for a while."

Well, that explains the condition of her iced tea. Anyway, luckily for him, even through two alternate dimensions, Angela is still the talkative Energizer Bunny. Things has tried to beat it out of her, wring it out even, and though they won for a few moments, the victory never lasted long. It's hard to be down and sad when she has good looking company, even if he seems a little shy.

"Oh really? Who?" she queries as she slides the menu to his side of the table. Angela doesn't really care about who the person is; she most likely doesn't know them. But anything to keep the conversation going works.

"Hasibe." Surprise. "She said you two met when you arrived? She's the one with ... the dog ..." that is the size of a bear.

The menu is full of things he doesn't really recognize, but he picks something that might be full of protein; Bruce really will eat just about anything pending it's not over-processed, it's kind of alarming. It's not even that he has no taste or a strong stomach, but that he's been so many places in the world that nothing really fazes him anymore. Once you've acclimated so much to rancid yak butter tea in the Himalayas enough to like it, alien entrees aren't so weird.

Thus he actually looks sort of interested as he pages through the menu and asks, "Have you been here before?"

"That's not a dog. That's a bear on a leash," Angela nods, laughing again. Leave it to Angela to state what everybody else holds inside. Her choice is simple: toasted bread. It seems normal enough and it's hard to fuck up toast even in non-Earthian restaurants. Right? Hopefully. Good thing she's managed to stash some close to the familiar snack foods she's used to in her room.

She shakes her head at the waitress who questions if she wants anything else on that bread. No, just more water and the bread, please. Angela's not trusting the butter here either.

"Nope. But I wish I had because then I would have been warned about the iced tea before I put it in my mouth." Having a warning for anything she'll put in her mouth would be a good thing, honestly. "I was just in the neighborhood and figured you wouldn't want to share my Inn breakfast with me."

He raises his eyebrows when she just gets toast, and almost laughs- "We can go somewhere else, if you'd prefer. I've never been here either."

And yet he's just going for it? Yes. "I don't know anywhere good, though, I've got no taste."

"I thought you'd never ask." Really, she was being polite and sticking around since he had actually ordered food, but since he put the offer on the table, Angela barely lets it sit there for a second before she's sliding out of the booth. "We can figure something out as we walk around?"

Something closer to a real laugh, there, and he nods, rising as well. "One second, I'll see you up front."

He departs momentarily to go apologize to the waitress and pay for their tea - fortunately nobody'd started cooking yet, so it's otherwise fine. (He doesn't have money to throw around here, and it's not like he's foolishly in the mindset of doing so regardless, but he doesn't want to be a jerk.)

By the door, he comes alongside her and flashes her a brief smile. "Where to?"

For the moment, Angela lets him pay her end of the meal, but the night's nowhere close to being done. She'll get him on the second round. Pausing for a moment to check out the city map on her CiD, Angela traces a slim finger across the screen.

"Well, we're in Howl Barrow now... Dog Fenn? Which is across town, but it's in the general area of the Inn anyway."

"Sure, if you want." This whole wandering around hanging out thing is not really his preference, but tonight is not about hiding in the dark and indulging in his own tendencies. He's fine with letting himself experience something different, and Angela is pleasant enough company for it. He walks next to her, easy.

"What brought you to this area of town? Whimsy?"

"Apartment hunting. I heard this is where we starving artists like to live and I figured I might as well go back to where I belong." Her broke, ramen three times a day, scrimping and saving roots. Honestly, those were some of her best days. With Hasi being her terrible, no-good voice in her head, it'll be just like art school again. Hooray.

"I didn't find much, really, but then again, I don't have much for anything I would have found, so it all works out in the end." She moves in the direction of the nearest El station, arms crossed in front of her chest, not to seem standoffish, but from a lack of anything to do with them. "What do you do, by the way? Tell me about Tom."

If Bruce knew that Hasi was inspiring mischievous deeds to the extent of Angela cutting corners with her quality of life, he might frown a bit - and he'd expect Hasi to frown a bit too; she's got a certain lifestyle, after all, and he feels fairly confident it doesn't involve ramen noodles.

(Did anyone mention Bruce Wayne hates fun?)

It's on his mind to ask after her work - he's genuinely interested - and then she starts asking after him and, well. Okay. He doesn't sound awkward, at least. "I'm an engineer," he says. "Usually I work with large-scale computer systems."

He can frown all he wants. Angela prefers the simpler life even though her father's money means she doesn't have to live that way if she didn't have to, but having to and wanting to are two different concepts. Other people will just have to accept that or hit the road.

(Angela can fix this problem, by the way.)

"Oh, really? Me too," Angela replied quickly but then verbally backtracks, "Okay, not so much large-scale, but hacking for the government has to count for something in between the facial reconstructions." The things she is allowed to do at the Jeffersonian. Allowed also doesn't exactly mean legal at the same time.

"Oh I wasn't... hacking or anything," he says, sounding amused - maybe interested. "I'm the boring hardware side of things."

If you consider boring hardware things like building illegal spy satellites using cell phone technology or breakaway paramilitary motorcycles out of tanks. But he's not going to mention that.

"How does that work with art?"

"Hardware is important. Somebody needs to keep it hard." There really should be a rimshot app on these CiD. Angela could use one right now. "The hacking or the reconstruction?"

She's not sure which one he's asking about and she's also not sure which one she wants to answer. One answer is obvious anyway.

Either her joke goes completely over his head - it doesn't, but well, look at him, it might have - or he decides not to react to it. Bruce is never really sure what to do when people joke around like normal human beings.

"You said you were a starving artist...?"

"Here I am, at least right now..." she replies with her brows raised sheepishly. "Back home, I work in the Jeffersonian's forensics lab, where I do the death mask AKA forensic facial reconstruction... most of the time, anyway."

It sounds flashy when Angela ends the explanation at the part where she just says the location of where she works. If she goes farther, people get weird, like that guy she once dated that was a complete bastard when he saw she hung out around corpses for a paycheck.

"Last place I was in after home, nobody stayed dead long enough to decompose so those skills pretty much flew out of the window."

Bruce raises his eyebrows, seemingly impressed. He's of two minds, internally; on the one hand - let's not lie, intelligence and capability is a turn-on. On the other, intelligence and capability raises the odds of her puzzling him out, which is something he has to red flag. What a life.

"You must be bored as hell." Faintly amused, a bit sympathetic. Going from all that to sketches and job hunting in crazyland. "Last place...?"

Angela shrugs, expression neutral. "It happens. A little too often for my liking, but what can I do?" Well, what can she do that's any different from how she's been keeping herself occupied since arriving here? Not much, really. As much as Angela loves and lives for art, her projects are at the whims of the muses and inspiration and those aren't always around all day everyday.

"The City." She waves a hand seemingly at random. "It was a place like this, though with a lot more humans and more technologically advanced. Less fog too." But all of that was in exchange for other emotionally draining events and experiences that Angela's not ready to deal with again anytime soon. "Three years there, didn't get to go home between there and here."

Her voice is somewhat subdued, lower and laced with homesickness.

"Jeez." He sounds sympathetic, in a different way - a little concernrd, like anyone might be. (Bruce has been to different trap cities. Tom has not. It isn't anyone's business.) He wonders, distantly, if Angela's uncertainty tonight has to do with finally feeling the dregs of how exhausting being out of control of your own existence can be.

"What did you do for work in the City?" They're at the train platform by now, and Bruce runs potential 'typical Earth food' places he's noticed through his head.

Edited 2011-11-29 08:32 (UTC)

It's not just tonight. Angela's been carrying this overstuffed backpack of uncertainty for the last year and a half and until she manages to get home and stay there, it'll be strapped to her back. Nothing ever is stable enough for her to give serious thought to permanency, except the thought of her never being able to go home again. That, to her, seems like the start of a lost cause.

"When I first got there, I did IT for the local hospital. Then I picked up a second job doing consulting for the Police Force. After I quit there, I still worked at the hospital and taught art for a while, but that kind of dried up and I stayed at the hospital because that what paid the rent," Angela muses, shoving her hands into her pockets, looking as bored as she can be with that list of attempts at living like a normal person. And oh how she was bored. Even more bored than she is here. It's a different kind of boredom than just having nothing to do; she's wholly unfulfilled, unhappy on the inside, and restless with no control in her life. It's what beat out her eternal positivity in the end and the likelihood of it coming back the longer she stays away from her family and friends is slimming.

"You should try talking to the local sheriffs," he suggests, placid. It's different than the the Militia - the district enforcement, rural nearly, scurrying around keeping the peace and helping people get on, versus the iron fist of the capitol that people seem to be made uncomfortable by. "It's not like digital imaging is big here, sketch artists are probably in pretty high demand."

He stops himself there, like it's a conversation and not a cry for help - Bruce has a problem with... well, fixing problems, if people but a puzzle or something out of order in front of him he's going to try and solve it.

"I could, but I don't want to deal with death and crime if I don't have to," Angela admits sheepishly. The job that has now turned into a longtime career is less straining on her mentally, but the nightmares and the nausea and the emotional fatigue from seeing a side of humanity no one should still remain. "I want to see if my art takes me anywhere before I go for that last option."

His advice, though unrequested, is appreciated. Angela's quite the same; don't give her something she can't fix herself or give advice on how to fix. Otherwise, it's a great way to make her feel useless for the moment. Now on the train, she turns both physically and the conversation towards him. Angela, being herself, reaches out and taps his temple lightly. "So I take it you found something to do here with those engineer brains of yours?

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