Devil's Brew Coffee

'I'm not broke, I just don't have any money right now.' Grace snickered, unable to help herself. She did hand over a mug of coffee, though, and a box of sugar packets. It was worth the story she got in turn, anyway. Grace picked up a different rag and started wiping down the counters again, just listening. You got all sorts, in a coffee place - especially in Millennium, apparently, where people had questions about your presence even if you were wearing an apron with the shop's logo..

"Me? I work here." Sure, that probably wasn't what had been meant by that question, but Grace was well-versed in the fine art of don't tell random customers your personal information, they'll follow you home and be weird about it. Mina had been very firm on that point, when Grace had started working there. Apparently it was a peril of being a redhead or something.

She gave the woman - ex-convict? Apparently? - a looking over, and then made a vague gesture in the direction of the aforementioned corset-and-stillettos set. "So if that outfit cost so much, how'd you get it down the shower drain?" In Grace's admittedly very limited experience, the sort of stuff you had to buy wasn't usually the sort of stuff you could take with you.

That was probably a metaphor for something, if Grace had been prone to random bouts of philosophy. Fortunately for everyone's sake, she regularly drove back the horrors of philosophical thinking with copious amounts of espresso. Very few things were worse than thinking too much, after all.

Eww the lady was bleeding in the coffee - Grace didn't know why someone would wreck perfectly kind of okay coffee by bleeding in it. Of course the blood became a spoon, which explained the clothes but not the situation. At least it hadn't been the good coffee. Grace probably would have been upset about that. Not enough to do anything other than stare judgmentally, but she was doing that anyway, so it was probably a moot point.

"Okay, sure, so the clothes are blood - that's gross, by the way, but I'm guessing you didn't get to pick it - but if the clothes are blood, then you didn't have to buy them, so my point about the corset murder costume remains. It's cute, by the way. I'd wear it. Except I wouldn't, because I'd probably trip over something and break a leg, but, you know, I'd think about wearing it and then pretend I was going to and then just put on yoga pants and a T-shirt. Not that I do yoga, but I do have the pants for it if I ever decide there isn't enough pain in my life."

Who are you, really? A hell of a good question, but fortunately Grace had an easy answer - or an easy out. Or both, she was fine with both. She pointed at the nametag pinned to the apron she was wearing. "I'm Grace." It did indeed say 'Grace' on the nametag, and if that wasn't what the woman really wanted to know, tough titties. "And why not act casual? Millennium's weird. You're weird but you haven't tried to murder me, so I'm fine with that. Thanks, by the way. Anyway, I talk at people because I have bad impulse control and no filter and zero social skills. And I guess I kind of figure that if you were going to slaughter everyone and steal the sugar, you'd have started with that rather than asking, so here we are. Besides, for all I know, you were in jail for unpaid parking fees. Not everything has to be a big... thing, you know?"

And yes, she was definitely talking too much, but she did that when she was nervous. It wasn't even the whole slaughtertart thing that made Grace nervous, it was just talking to other people. There was a reason she usually let someone else take cashier and stayed behind the counter to make drinks. People were hard, coffee was easy. Or, at least, coffee made sense. You did the right things, you ended up with the right product. People, Grace never had any idea what she was supposed to say to get the desired outcome, so she generally figured if she talked enough, something would stick.

Or, she was telling herself she thought that anyway. In reality, she had not thought about this in the slightest, nor anything else, but it seemed like the sort of thing to claim she'd always thought rather than just something that had passed through her head five seconds ago like everything else.

"Oh, you're that lady." Grace had heard about that whole warship thing, in the indirect way of overhearing people talk about it at the coffee shop. She probably had some of the details wrong, but at least she had the general idea. She gave this weird lady - Victoria, apparently - a looking over. "Huh. Thought you'd be taller. Oh, well. 'Don't judge people by their size, judge them by their attempts to steal battleships' and all that."

This was probably not how the saying went - or how any saying went, really - but Grace was going to go with it anyway. "And I don't think it's wrong to want one, I'd love a pirate ship. Not modern - the old ones with the cannons and the jolly roger? Walk around wearing a poofy shirt and an eyepatch and threatening to make people walk the plank and all that. But I think you have to draw the line on the whole attempting to steal one thing. And, you know, all the murder. Noooot really a fan of that. Feels like it ought to be an opt-in sort of situation, because you know there are definitely people who'd be like 'hells yeah, sign me up for the murderparty'-" - Actually, Grace was pretty sure she was dating one of them, and even if she didn't think Carmen's tastes quite ran to murdering other people, she'd absolutely put her own life on the line "-But, you know, if you're just doing your usual six-to-two at the coffee shop, that's a little different."

Grace considered the whole situation a moment later, and then, in a fit of what was likely particularly bad judgment, even for her, inquired, "Why don't you just build one? With your... nanite thingies? Might take you a while, but then you could go be all 'Evil Queen of the Millennium City Northeast Parkway Beach' without... you know... all the murder. You could reserve that for really egregious offenses, like when a guy wants a large coffee but in a small cup because they fit in his car holder better and absolutely will not understand why that won't work."

A pause, then, "Actually, no, not even then. No murdering my customers."

"Hey, I'd be a great pirate!" Really, Grace, of all the things she said, that's the part you're objecting to? Okay, so maybe she should have thought that one through a little more, but the same could be said about... well, basically everything Grace ever did or said, really. Oh, well - at least the coffee shop was safe from nefarious conquest, by some sort of completely unenforceable and likely false promise.

Still, Grace had noticed that a lot of supervillains mostly left the place alone, and other places like it. Supervillains didn't tend to have beef with coffee shops - it was usually more about taking over the world or stealing battleships or just proving that they were the world's strongest most specialest or something to that effect. Since no one in the coffee shop was likely to put up a fight or a challenge, they became, in a way, invisible.

That didn't stop them from being collateral, though, as Grace knew. Even if people like Radeka weren't out there targeting coffee shops, that didn't mean they were going out of their way to keep them safe, either. Grace supposed that was what superheroes were for, or something to that effect. It was probably best just not to put too much thought into it and keep making coffee. After all, it wasn't like she was going to stop anyone.

Just like Victoria apparently wasn't going to bleed herself a pirate ship. Too much blood? Grace thought about it, probably putting in way more thought than the whole question deserved, but that was the way her mind worked. Too much attention on all the wrong things. "I mean, you wouldn't have to make a whole galleon. You could make like a... pint... or something?" Did ships come in pints? Grace knew absolutely nothing about ship classification, which meant that it was probably a rabbit hole she was going to dive down and spend the next eight hours looking up, unless she got distracted by something else by the time her shift ended.

Fortunately, the odds on that were pretty good, generally speaking.