Time: Sunday 15 August
Place: The Fiendish Glow
Follows: Home Away From Home
Pen is real and is used by permission.
"Miguel" O'Malley, Consuela O'Brian-Eccevarrio, Dennis Cleary, etc. are fictional characters belonging to the Celtic Glow Worms and Tequila Fiends.
[Sunday, 15 August, 0900 Eastern Daylight Time, just outside The Fiendish Glow]
"Garbagio, garbagio, garbagio, garbagio... ¿Porque los citizens de Toronto make them tanto garbagio?" Consuela O'Brian-Eccevarrio muttered, making her way through a pile of feathers and papers outside the staff entrance to The Fiendish Glow. Except that they were scattered all across the street, on a Sunday morning, it could have easily been one the results of one of those sidewalk solicitors who handed out pamphlets to any and all passersby. "¡Dios! Muy garbagio," she muttered, kicking aside the last papers leading up to the alleyway behind the Glow. The headline on the last one caught the older woman's eye and sped her heart rate to twice it's normal rate...
"French Overthrow of Canada Imminent
High Food Prices sign of Overseas Invasion"
"!Madre de Dios!" the pub cook exclaimed, picking up the flyer and running towards the door. "No anudder coup!"
She was so worried about the invasion that she never saw three pair of beady eyes watching her from the dumpster.
[1100 Eastern Daylight Time, upstairs in the Glow Worms' sleeping quarters]
The alarm had rung an hour ago, but Pen never heard it. Caught in a Tequila-induced nightmare of stampeding vampbears, she was too busy fighting off hordes of medievally-dressed teddy bears, eyes a-glow, fangs dripping red, to realize that the even beat of their feet was actually a drum competition from the Halifax Tattoo, the recording of which had been sent them by a non-Warring friend in the Knight. The pounding got louder and louder, and the vampbears drew nearer and nearer, their growls sounding more and more like...
...the skirl of bagpipes, coming from right outside the bedroom door, and someone banging like the Devil.
Pen's consciousness fought her way past the angry vampbears far enough for her to turn over and rise half-way from her bed. It was a bad move. The second she bore down on her left hand her wrist collapsed on her and she fell back to the bed, holding the injured wrist and whimpering in pain.
"Pen! Pen! Are you ok, Pen?" came a sound from beyond the door.
"WHAT THE #$(*&@#&$^&@^%!%!!!!!!!!!! DO YOU THINK?!?!?!?!?!" she yelled back, massaging her wrist. The volume of her own voice made her cringe in pain again; and she shrugged her shoulders to her ears to try to block the echoes and the incessant loud cacophony from beyond her door. "Shut that #$(*)#&@)(@^!!!! thing off!" she mumbled, trying to avoid the sound.
"What was that?" a whisper peered into her room through a too-bright crack in the door.
A muffled moan was Pen's only reply.
A few seconds later, the noise stopped. Blessed silence.
Then came the light, and someone pushing on her back, rocking her none too gently.
"Time to rise and shine, Pen!" it told her. "Breakfast in less than a half hour," it warned.
Pen fought her way through the blankets, rising this time on her forearms against the now-subsiding pain in her wrist. She rose to meet a fully-dressed Brenda, more cheerful than anyone ever had a right to be -- particularly at dawn on a Sunday morning.
Pen cussed as her fingers ran over a particularly sore spot on her naked wrist.
"I told you you should've kept that strapped up overnight," the older woman nagged.
"Yeah, babe, yeah..." she waved off.
"Well, it's after eleven," Brenda offered, trying to get the morning back on track.
A bleary-eyed Pen looked over towards the VCR to verify that yes, indeed, she was running late. "Shower, shower, caffeine, shower, shower...." she muttered, lumbering to her feet and out the bedroom door. On the way out, she collared the kirtle-skirted woman. "Don't you EVER do that to me again!" she warned.
Brenda looked puzzled. "Do what?" she asked.
"Bagpipes in the morning. It should be illegal," she admonished.
"Bagpipes in the morning..." Brenda smiled dreamily. "What a wonderful way to wake up!"
Pen strode off to the shower while Brenda considered the very-non-PG possibilities of waking to the sound of bagpipes with her Very Significant Other lying next to her...
[The Fiendish Glow, 1130 Eastern Daylight Time]
At eleven-thirty sharp, Pen and Brenda descended the stairway to the pub for their traditional Sunday brunch and staff meeting. Unless there was a lot of business to attend to, the atmosphere was laid-back and convivial... almost a ceilidh type atmosphere. Today, it was tense and quiet. Something was wrong...
It didn't take long to find out exactly what was wrong. Instead of everyone congregating around the buffet, several of the boys were gathered around the Latina cook, who was shaking a flyer between sobbing and spouting forth a mixture of Spanish, English, and Irish obscenities.
"I cumm here looking for good life," she sobbed, "and now dees high-price #(*&@^@!! want to cumm tek eet from mee..."
"Consuela, look at me," an Irish lilt followed. "There's going to be no French invasion. France and Canada are both members of the United Nations, which is less than two hours' away in New York. If France tried to invade, don't you think the Mounties would be on it in an hour, the army and air force within a day, and a UN peacekeeping effort would be on station within the week?"
"Ay dun no," she replied half-heartedly.
"Miguel" responded with a soft, soothing stream of heavily-accented Spanish.
"What's up?" Brenda sidled up to Dennis, who was standing on the outside of the knot of people that had gathered around the two cooks.
"Soam coakuhmeymie insurrectionist pamphleted Toaronto," he explained. "Pat an' Seamus jus' finished swaiepin' oap their gaerbage noa."
The woman picked the top sheet off the indicated recycling bin and began reading, cringing at every misspelling, and her brow wrinkling at every turn of faulty logic. By the time she finished, she looked like a water bomb ready to explode.
"Whae's sae funny?" the Irishman whispered.
"It reminds me of the 'Victims for Vamps' group -- you know, the idiots who believe that every mortal should have the opportunity to be stalked and dined upon by a vamp... that cross-over clinics should be provided in all the provincial universities... that vamp blood should be fed to every person with an IQ over 150 after they've had their 2.3 kids... and be approved as a bona-fide cure for every mental illness known to mankind..." the woman chuckled, remembering her first encounter with this sort of would-be political activists, back when she was a college sophomore... "The person who wrote this flyer has worse than a grade-schooler's sense of spelling, and absolutelyno understanding of logic!" she shook her head, chuckling. "Whoever would think of taking over a country by replacing its wait-staff?"
"The Chuyneese did it buy plottin' in the boxing rings," he reminded her.
"Not quite the same thing, Cleary," she responded. "Besides, most folk cook at home most of the time, anyway. Or they go to MacBurgers or Harby's. Or they go to a chain like Thursday's or The Olive Grove. Or they come to a place like the Glow... More than half the population can't afford to even stare at the window menu of one of those places mentioned in the flyer."
"Opening time," Pen noted, looking at her watch.
Outside the Metro entrance to the pub, several dark critters skittered across the poured concrete platform, disappearing into a shadowed corner and up the stairway to the street.
Yes, there really is a Halifax Tattoo. No, Brenda didn't get the non-warring friend in question to record it for her. [2011 edit] Professional recordings can be found here.
(2)Consider what vampire blood did for Joey's intelligence and communication ability in "Fallen Idol"... of course, the withdrawal process ran a lot more like Flowers for Algernon...
(3)Brenda really did run into this type of group in college -- though obviously not in the vampire arena. It was an anti-nuclear-energy group called "Mutants for Nukes". On Hallowe'en, its costumed adherents paraded through campus, handing out copies of their "manifesto" which included such gems as putting high-level radioactive waste-water in grade-school drinking fountains and using spent fuel rods in living room fireplaces...
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NEXT STORY: PEST PANIC
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