Cuddle City

[quinientos]

Vasquez
35 / GAMMA, Floor Five, NORTH

Bring good food, better tequila, and an open mind about who you're dealing with and we'll get along just fine. Any kind of company welcome, but I don't trust easy.

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Comments

[quinientos]

Lots of vodka. Farmers, too. It was easy to find work because when the crops were in need, they needed more hands.

[ Then you kill one asshole and your whole life changes. He could've just sat back and ignored it, let him do what he wanted, but Vasquez has never been good with impulse control sometimes. He's better now, though, especially once he knows what the consequences are. ]

Limes? Why limes?

[ Is there a problem with fruit here? Why else would they have been served drinks with citrus? ]

[dedikated]

( She can understand that, and Kate nods in response to his explanation.

(There's always that one asshole who ruins your life, isn't there?)

Then he questions the limes and Kate blinks, slightly taken aback. It's so commonplace she never thought to question it. Just how things were done. )

... Makes it taste better, I guess?

( She's sure there's some other reason, some real reason, but she doesn't know it. )

Always forget about them after a few.

( Forgets about the salt, too. But this is the first one of the night, and so Kate pours out the salt and licks it off the back of her hand before downing the tequila and biting into a slice of lime.

Yeesh. She swears the lime's the worst part, the citric bite making her screw her face up in response. )

[quinientos]

Alcohol isn't about tasting better. That's not the point.

[The point is drinking enough so that everything bad in your life starts to fade away and the only thing you have to think about is the warm, wonderful, fuzzy feeling that lasts until it all goes away and the next morning is hell on earth. But, for those few hours when you're enjoying it, there's nothing better. The worse it tastes, the better it works, in his opinion. ]

What are you doing, what is that, why are you licking salt off yourself?

[ It's official. He thinks he hates drinking in the future. Knocking back his tequila without any salt or lime, he doesn't grimace at all, just wishing he had a bottle to nurse. ]

[dedikated]

( I mean, that might be true but- )

What's th' harm in letting it taste better?

( Honestly. It's a weird thing and Kate would love to know who thought that this process was The Way, but it seems to work for easing into the night.

(Or maybe that's just a placebo effect, who can really tell? Definitely not Kate.)

She watches Vasquez finish his shot off without anything, before doing hers in the ~technical way people say is correct and slamming the lime skin down once she's finished. )

No idea. Just what people said were correct.

( Habit, this early in the night, more than anything. )

[quinientos]

It's supposed to be bad enough that you don't want to drink so much that you're always drinking. If it's sweet and sugar, then wouldn't people always want it?

[He drinks when he needs to, drinks when his state is compromised, which means that he only did it when he could be protected, but that some nights were so hard that it had been impossible not to. He glances over to see if he can't get tequila in an actual glass to work at, trying to narrow down the bartender]

Dios mio. Salt is for food, for spices. It's not to make a good drink somehow tolerable, when it is already plenty good.

[dedikated]

Find a good hangover normally changes people's mind on that.

( Just saying. Even she's had more than a few mornings of waking up thinking I'm never drinking again. Fair enough that doesn't usually last, but still. It's a nice deterrent for a while.

At least with the bartender coming over, Kate can gesture for another shot for herself. )

[quinientos]

Hangover is part of the drinking. You take the good with the bad, that's how it works.

[ In his experience, it's part of the best part of drinking. In the morning after, it gives him enough chance to actually know how much he'd drank and to enjoy it all one more time. The worse the hangover, the better the night before had been. ]

Is this what all modern drinks are like?

[dedikated]

( So... someone should probably alert him to the camera function of phones and the general oh god why of being updated on all the stupid stuff you did the night before, yes? )

All this crap?

( She even holds up the lime skin she discarded earlier to make sure they're on the same page as the bartender returns with more drinks. )

Nah. No one does this for vodka.

( God only knows why, vodka tastes like shit. A lime slice might help it. )

[quinientos]

[He still looks at the lime with the disgust of a man who has beliefs about how drinking should be and like his heart is breaking for what she's implying drinking is like now.]

What about a good glass of whiskey? Rum? Are all those things ruined now too? Alcohol should just be for drinking.

[He doesn't care what's in the drink or what it tastes like, but it's the pageantry he hates. It's too much for him, all this idea about needing limes and salt and process when it should be so simple as drinking.]

[dedikated]

Can get those straight.

( Kate's never thought about the fact that people in her day and age do so much with alcohol. Cocktails, mixers, pomp and circumstance. She takes the salt and lime without thinking until she's too drunk to coordinate extra steps into her drinking. It's just how it is. )

Wait. You drink cocktails?

( Is that too much or...? )

[quinientos]

I'll drink anything that has alcohol.

[He's not really picky, honestly, and if someone puts it in front of him, then he'll drink it. Half the time in a small town when he'd been on the run, he'd accepted whatever a bartender gave him, so this 'cocktail' thing she speaks of, maybe he has tried it.]

Is a cocktail any good?

[dedikated]

( Fair enough. Kate grabs a menu from the bar and quickly scans it before gesturing for the bartender and ordering a Zombie and a Long Island Iced Tea.

Well, if you're going to get drunk, you might as well get the drunkest. )

Depends what you get. Like these two.

( And if he doesn't want to drink them, she has drinks sorted for the next twenty minutes. So, as they come, Kate pushes them towards Vasquez. )

Try 'em.

[quinientos]

[Vasquez gives her the suspicious look that he thinks she's owed, mainly because he's not entirely sure about alcohol in this place, but he trusts Kate, so he trusts her taste in alcohol. He leans for the tallest of the two first, ignoring the straws so that he can drink back a third of it in one go.

It's...sweet. Good. It doesn't taste strong, exactly, but he's grown on backwater self-made tequila and rotgut whiskey and moonshine, so it would take a lot to blind him.]

What's in it?

[dedikated]

( Well, it's designed for that. Getting you wankered without you realising, that is. Kate chances a quick second glance to the menu, just in case Cadelle does these drinks differently to home, before she answers. )

Vodka, tequila, light rum, triple sec, gin. Bit of coke.

( Kate... )

[quinientos]

[These are all things he likes very much and they're all in the same drink? Maybe people in the future have actually discovered something decent, Vasquez will admit.]

You can put all those things in one drink? How is it not more popular?

[dedikated]

'S popular if you're looking to get hammered.

( But some people aren't. Kate thinks those people are weird, but what can you do. )

S'pose some people prefer to stick to one type of booze when they're out.

( And then there's the fact that it's more expensive than a treble vodka and coke. )

[quinientos]

Why drink if that's not your goal?

[ That said, he does enjoy the simplicity of a good bottle of tequila or whiskey, or whatever rotgut bottle that does the job. ]

It sounds like I couldn't do it easily on my own. Not unless I was very rich to buy so many bottles.

[dedikated]

Don't ask me.

( She never got that idea either. But for now, Kate shakes her head. )

Would be pricey. S'pose you could buy 'em at different times.

( But that's like ages of planning for one simple drink. Better to just drink at a bar. )

[quinientos]

Or somehow I could be given them as a gift?

[Stealing is out of the question, he gets the idea, but that would be the easiest thing to do. Unfortunately for him, not an option anymore, because now he has to be respectable.]

Women, you're lucky, I think. I see men buying women drinks all the time in bars.

[dedikated]

( She... can't deny that one. Even she's taken advantage of that little male weakness many a time. )

Can always try a low cut top if you want.

( K A T E... )

[quinientos]

I don't think that a low cut top will do anything for me the way it does for a woman.

[After all, he's missing some assets that women are very lucky to have and he...well, there's a lot of hair there, that's about all he's got going. The abs, though, are not so bad.]

[dedikated]

( She rolls her shoulders in a casual shrug, taking a sip of the other drink she ordered. )

You'd be surprised. Know a few girls and guys who would.

( Not that... they're... here as far as she knows, but hey. )

[quinientos]

It would have to be opposite, si? Instead of low-cut, it should be cut off low, so then you would see my stomach.

[Not that he knows why anyone might want to see it, but it's in decent shape. Well, or it will be, once he stops looking so skin and bones.]

[dedikated]

( Give her a moment to analyse your body, dude. )

Could work. ( A sip of her drink and a roll of her shoulders. ) Or skip the shirt entirely. - Would knock down th' number of bars you could visit, but still.

[quinientos]

I don't know how people feel about scars.

[Not to mention, Vasquez has a lot of work to do in gaining back weight before he feels confident going shirtless, thinking maybe he has a few too many ribs that show, still.]

People seem to go around half-dressed all the time here. Why would it matter at a bar?