Kaffe Mitt Du Liebe (Tylan)

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

She'd asked for a sandwich. A meat, cheese, vegetables & bread sandwich and a mug of something the third row down from the top of an exorbitant stimcaf menu.

What Ahani ended up getting on the swell and peaceful world of Kalamazoo (her name, not theirs) was the Telosian Special: A wrapped up thin smear of pastry with artisan greens, summer sausage baked to perfection on a griddle laced with poultry fat, a slice of something that resembled an Irli in disguise but they called a tomatillo and an overwhelming sense of disappointment.

Telos was going to lose a barista by the end of Ahani Najwa's visit.

That visit had more to do with scouting out a nefarious and deeply seeded untruth about a certain Empress' second cousin than murder in a stimcaf parlour, but the Echani Grand Inquisitor wasn't exactly keeping score.

She couldn't.

Ahani didn't remember what planet it was.

Her fingers rolled around the thin knife that came with her serviette, fork and spoon as the barista bounced forward on the airs of some divine grace in her opinion about to run out, when the most curious of curiosities took place.

He placed down in front of her the most delicious aroma in the natural and unnatural worlds. Her latte-majigger was fantastic. The Sith Lady set down the knife and sat back in her chair cradling the mug. How did porcelain contain such crisp, nutty and brilliant flavour without exploding? It couldn't. . . it had to have a legion of fault lines craning at their weakest points before the inevitable crash.

She wouldn't let the mug be destroyed until after she'd finished sucking back its contents. Feet perched up on the chair across from her, Ahani didn't notice the cafe was full, nor did she particularly give more than an affirmative nod when the barista came to ask her if a gentleman could share her table.

Eyes closed, Ahani hummed into her latte foam and felt the tensions of this terribly boring world fall off her shoulders.

[member="Tylan Toarinar"]

 

[Tylan Toarinar]

"Share a table? Sie müssen sich einen witz..."

Tylan sighed lightly, putting index and thumb to the bridge of his nose and rubbing lightly. He had not time nor patience for such incompetence. He'd been coming here for years, a quiet little coffee shop where he could sit, read, and figure out his next move. The expertly-coiffed Dokter did not like to be kept waiting. Looking to the Barista, he frowned lightly, then acquiesced with a defeated sigh. "Sehr gut, lead the way. And then, a mocha cream macchiato with a touch of hazelnut shavings, schnell." he said in his deep, almost velvety smooth voice.

So, he was led to a table near the window, where he was greeted by a woman who was very out of place in such an establishment. Feet upon the chair he was meant to occupy, sucking back on her cup as if her lips were hanging on for dear life. Tylan wondered for but a moment; what had he done to deserve such karmic retribution? Shooting a look that could bore a hole through a krayt dragon's skull at the barista, the young blonde boy scampered off to fetch his drink, as Tylan's temper was well known here. Yet, he was their best customer, and they did not suffer him the dull simplicities of other patrons. Looking to [member="Ahani Najwa"], he nearly rolled his eyes as he spoke once more.

"I'd very much appreciate it if you might move your feet, Fraulein."

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

Oh, the table. That's what she'd said yes to. She'd said yes to sharing her table. Without a doubt, the woman was about to smack whomever came with the edge of her foot-stool chair, until a thick velvet voice shuddered into her shoulders and shook her ribcage like a collection of castanets. The voice was better than the latte. As she let the cup clink down on the saucer, Ahani looked up.

"Fraulein? Did you call me nubile? Young? Unatt-tached? I might move them." Ahani let out a loose chuckle and yanked her feet off the chair one by one. The soles clanked on the floor with a metallic clip on the hard floor. Her mind re-wound, she glanced up at the man who came to her stimcaf bastion and as he stood an eyebrow of Ahani's rose.

To say the man caught Ahani as 'splendid' would be to call the sky a collection of atomic particulate gasses wrapping around layers of atmosphere. [member="Tylan Toarinar"] read like the kind of monster women hid their infants from. A cold, despotic calculation in the shift of his shoulders and silk of his voice that claimed above all, this place was his.

And he owned it as only a confidently commanding presence could own it. "By the way you rule the floor you're standing on, I'm going to hazard a guess and say 'regular'?"

Pity the Grand Lady liked jabbing commanding folk with forks. "How do you shave a liquid?"

 

[Tylan Toarinar]

"By slicing it with a lemon."

Tylan gave off a half-smile at that, and looked to the chair. He wiped the chair down with a handkerchief, then placed said handkerchief back into his black leather messenger bag. Sitting down quietly, the little blonde barista scampered back, setting down his drink in front of him, nodding slowly, and then scampering off once more. Tylan closed his eyes a moment, taking in the scent of mocha and hazelnut for a few, brief moments of simple pleasure. Opening his dark, violet tinted eyes once more, he looked to Ahani, and nodded lightly. "Ja. A very frequent regular, as it were. This..." he waved his hand nonchalantly, "...is my sanctuary from the common rabble." Reaching down into the supple leather bag once more, he pulled a rather old looking book out, setting it down on the table. The old looking hardcover read 'Guide to a Pauper's Prince'. A puzzling title to be sure.

"You, however...I've not seen here before. Tourist? Or perhaps passing through?"


[member="Ahani Najwa"]

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

He wiped the seat? Baby. There was only a small amount of blood on the edges of her boots. Not enough for a microscope. Clinging fingers grabbed her mug and brought it to her lips again. "Mmmhh. What do you. . . oy! Bar-boy! What is this I'm drinking? What did I order?"

The blonde jumped and looked back at Ahani, "Ah, that's a cappuccino, Ma'am. More foam. Less milk."

"Hmm! Another!" This beverage was amazing! it zinged on her tongue and filled her belly with joy! She'd drink it all day if she had the chance, why Ahani had stuck with boring old tea and water for so long she didn't know, but blamed relentlessly on so many years of not getting out much. The people in the cafe milled about, whispered, chatted, got their cups and left in a dizzying cycle of monotony. There were no fights breaking out, not even a skirmish. Varanin's second-cousin-twice-removed had better be interesting in some capacity, or the Echani woman was likely to go dizzy with apathy. Or was that the aftertaste? Nutty, chance of hyperactivity?

"Most rabble is common. I don't know many cases of uncommon rabble, although aristocracy can be rabble. . . Hmh. What are your deffffinitions of common and rabble? Mustn't stop with definitions. "

Ahani's heel began to repeatedly tap on the floor. "This and that. Today this, tomorrow that. Business. Busy-ness. I have busy messes here." She nodded to his book, "Haven't seen many folk choosing to absorb their knowledge the classic way. Where'd you get a leather bound book? On this world? That etching on the cover is fantastic. Haven't seen anything like that since. . . two days before my last dream, if you catch my drift. Did I use that colloquial correctly? I'm learning C-c-common, you know."

[member="Tylan Toarinar"]

 

[Tylan Toarinar]

Tylan had to quirk a brow at this woman who sat here before him. Surely such a person belonged on his operating table, and not out in the general populace of any world whatsoever. Whomever let her out of her padded room deserved a brow beating, this was nothing if not the gospel truth. "There is common and uncommon, the kin and kine, the sheep and shepherd." He scoffed lightly, yet could not help but be utterly fascinated by this odd creature before him. She reminded him of someone who forgot the medication they needed in order to remember anything at all. Still, he took his cup, and sipped it gently, letting only a fraction of it's piping hot contents slip past his lips. And he did so with a satisfied look upon his face, as if he'd been waiting many a day for this very moment. Setting the cup back down, he rested his elbows upon the wooden table, clasping his hands with fingers threaded through one another, the indexes meeting at their points.

"I find the feel of the ink upon the page to be a much more intimate connection with the information a book contains then you would get with a simple datapad. Something about the feeling of the rough paper across a trained set of fingertips excites my intellect."


[member="Ahani Najwa"]

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

"What a fabulous over-simplification of sentient existence. Common, uncommon. Kin, kine. Sheep, shepherd. Light, dark. Oh, my darling young thing. You'll figure it out yet. Them and Me it boils to, eh? The 'I' and the 'Other' as signifiers of existence for those whose minds have locked themselves in the patterns of childhood, wasn't it as the philosopher said? A child thinks in patterns of All and Me. They quantify and box up the understood with the will to understand until it sinks either ever farther into the original classifications out of pride and simplification, or is shattered and unconfined. I posit to you, there is more to the universe than 'I' and the 'Other'." She sat back and sighed. A kaleidoscope of age and experience swathed around her like a warm sweater against the open-door, closed-door breeze of the autumnal afternoon. For the briefest breath it seemed the woman had collected a powerful and demanding mind, the prescience of the utterly sane in a planet of lunatics.

For the moment. The second. The pause. A predation around the eyes began it, the glimmer of a test subject long off the table, but hobbled by it. "It does strike me that those fingers must be trained. Most folk here wouldn't know which end to hold upright on a book, methinks."

Then, as the mental tapestry had woven itself to an ultimate cognizance before this enigmatic and confident man, it unravelled. A shoulder shook, Ahani put her cup down and the silver eyes, which had momentarily been crisp and clean, milked over with the stuttering cacophony of a colourful, if horrific insanity. "Pages and pages. P-pages under fingers instead of streaks of light across a screen. What sort of fingers are trained nowad-d-ddays? What sort of book brushes the intellect into a well groomed tool?"

Let me see the pages, her mind seemed to say.

[member="Tylan Toarinar"]