faderift | all of nature wild & free

Cosima smiles, letting Ruby change the subject. It's clearly painful, and she's not going to push.

"Dude, or mozzarella sticks. Can you imagine how popular that guy would be?" Fried appetizers, clearly the innovation Thedas has been waiting for.

"I wonder if that's something we can reverse engineer. Do they have soft white cheeses?"

"Oh my God. You could be rich. And yeah, this place is wicked into cheese, it's... kind of weird, actually. I think one time I saw a guy using a cheese wheel as a shield? That's not an exaggeration, I mean seriously. Cheese wheel shield."

She shakes her head.

"It's all gouda, I guess."

"...that's awful," Cosima says, after a second. "Truly, exquisitely awful."

It does seem to work as far as distracting both of them, though. After a moment, Cosima laughs, briefly, shaking her head. "I can't imagine cheese is a super-effective shield material, though maybe it's a good distraction?"

"Un-brie-lievable." A moment of consideration, "I'm going to go with the exquisitely and filter out the awful. I think you added that by mistake, anyway."

Someone stop her. Someone stop this problem child.

Just.

Just slowly smiling. She's not going to pun. She's not.

She's definitely not.

"Where there's a wheel, there's a way?"

Cosima groans, burying her face in her hands. "Oh god."

Can someone die of puns? Probably not. Still.

"Please tell me at least the cheese-wheel-shield guy is real and you didn't make him up in order to set up this series of puns."

Ruby's laugh is far too pleased. She is the queen of puns. The big cheese, even.

"Please. I'm an opportunist, not a sadist."

She nods, before drawing a cross over her heart. "Hope to die. If I'd had this set up in advance I would have thought of a way to make a pun out of gorgonzola. Also, you are the one that mentioned cheese first, not me. This is all your fault."

"Okay, you got me. A few weeks in, and all I can think about is varieties of fried appetizers. Oh man, or spinach artichoke dip, I could murder a bowl of that."

Please don't make a spinach pun, somehow.

"I mean, sure, I miss the internet, but I do have priorities."

"Thankfully, I spent twenty-eight years working in my Granny's diner. Not in the kitchen, but I'm pretty sure I can remember a few recipes. Spinach and artichoke'll be a cinch."

Ruby laughs, and shakes her head. "They're so innocent, here. Imagine the horrors they've been spared."

"Oh god, I can only imagine. Did you ever have those cheddar puffs, the one with the pirate on the bag? I used to devour those." Mainly while high, but still. "It was like eating packing peanuts, but in a good way."

"No," she admits, brow furrowed curiously. "Storybrooke is kind of a weird anomaly. Most stuff there is only anything produced before 1983. We got some music and tv shows and random things coming through, like— pop culture kinda stuff, but nothing consistent. I'm disappointed about the pirate snacks, though. Hook might've gotten a kick out of them."

Although, she frowns, pensive. "Or Granny would have gotten a kick out of insulting him with them." It's really hard to say which would win, there.

"...Hook like Captain Hook? Did you mention him before, because I really feel like I would have remembered that." Cosima leans on the table. "Sorry, is that weird? It must be weird to have people recognize names but with mostly bogus stories attached."

"Hook like Captain Hook. I don't know him very well, but he was staying at my Granny's motel for a while. Drinks a lot of rum. Smells kind of like seaweed." She frowns a little. "Lots of eyeliner, actually. No bad perm. I think I like Tinker Bell more, personally. She's very sassy."

Ruby shakes her head and grins. "I've seen some Disney movies. They got Snow White so, so wrong. So wrong. Also there were originally eight dwarves, it kind of sucks they don't include Stealthy. I mean, I never met him, but he sounds like he was a cool guy."

Cosima squints at Ruby, unsure as to whether that's a joke. She decides on not.

"I mean, if it makes you feel any better, Disney isn't even accurate to the folktales they're based on most of the time. I'm not totally sure without looking the Brothers Grimm included a particular number of dwarves at all. And look, I know there weren't singing gargoyles in Victor Hugo, so."

"I remain offended that I didn't get a movie," Ruby replies with a disdainful sniff that doesn't actually last well enough to be convincing, given that Ruby's mouth quirks with a little smile before she tips back the last of her hearty ale.

"Hey, maybe Victor Hugo was wrong. You never know. Although Snow and Emma met Mulan and they didn't say anything about her singing, so maybe the whole bursting into song thing in general is just a horrible lie." A sigh, despairing, as she shrugs. "Lame."

"One of my," there's the barest hesitation, "sisters is really into musicals. But even she doesn't just break into song out of nowhere." At least in front of Cosima. "Given what you've said and what I've seen in Thedas, magic doesn't seem to make people more likely to do it, either."

Sisters. Right. The sisters. "Do you have a lot of sisters?" Actually, her head tilts to the side, and there's something she wants to ask but that feels weird and faintly inappropriate, somehow. Or maybe just ignorant? Huh.

"But, I mean, if we were strangers here and the natives kept bursting into random choreographed dance routines, it'd be pretty creepy, right?" Right? It'd be pretty weird. But! Ruby taps the side of her empty flagon. "Can I interest you in another round?"

"Yes please," Cosima says, maybe a little more fervently than she means to. She isn't sure how much she wants to discuss her sisters, but she's the one who brought it up. She can see there's something more than how many that Ruby wants to ask. She wonders what it is.

A pause, then almost abruptly: "Three I've met. But I know of at least five more."

"Holy crap."

Wait. She pauses, partway to standing and holding both their flagons, and is kind of frozen in that oh god that was a terrible response place, gentle mortification written all over her face as she tries to think of something - anything - to say that might salvage the situation.

"I..." Uh. "Mean." Help. "That's... impressive?"

Impressive? She makes a face at herself, wondering if there is an etiquette book like Speaking To Clones For Dummies, and opts instead for: "Same again? Or, uh. There's wine?"

"Holy crap is accurate. Wine please."

Cosima realizes there's a difference between "I'm a clone" and "god knows how many genetic identicals I have running around." She'd learned both at once, but the first didn't necessarily mean the second, after all.

"Once we've got drinks, I'll answer whatever that question was, if you want." She sounds a bit resigned; she'd let herself relax with Ruby but it's not as if she can expect people to just take it in stride.

"Got it."

Wine. So much wine. Ruby rests her hand on Cosima's shoulder for a second before wandering off, a quiet gesture of solidarity or something. It doesn't take her too long to return, with two full glasses of wine and a full jug to match, setting them all down without spilling a drop. "I got the Orlesian stuff. Fereldan wine is kind of like drinking vinegar."

Spoken with a little partway smile at Cosima, before she drops back into her seat. "Okay. So, straight up... you can totally ask me anything about the fairy tale stuff. Fair's fair, right?" And since she's holding Cosima to what she said before about asking, she starts. "Is the clone stuff... I mean, is it just a physical thing or do you kind of gel personality wise, too? Is that a horrible question? You don't have to answer it."

"No - I mean, I think it's a normal question. If normal applies in this situation. But one of the major reasons I could think of that someone would approach human cloning this way would be to look at nature versus nurture. What traits show up in all of us, even if we're raised by different people under different conditions."

She sits back, and takes a generous drink of wine.

"But to answer your question... we're genetically identical, but our personalities are pretty different." An understatement - she almost smiles, thinking briefly of Alison and Sarah. Even Beth, though that's complicated. After another pause, she adds, "Our interests are different, too, pretty radically. The others don't wear glasses, at least not at our current age, so that's environmental."

"Huh."

She takes up her glass, lightly taps it against Cosima's, and tips back a generous mouthful of it. "I was finding it very hard to imagine a bunch of Cosimas, somehow." Didn't really seem possible to have more than one of those.

Despite the complicated nature of it all, she grins. "Didn't eat your carrots, huh?"

"Too many all-nighters reading textbooks. Or too much screen time, you can pick," she says, with a half smile. "No, there's only one me. And X-many identical twin sisters. Sort of. It was really weird the first time I met one of them with a radically different accent."

Weird in the sense of more weird than having clones.

"Those kids and their darn video games." It lacks the Lucas flair that Granny would probably put into it, which is really just the Eugenia Lucas flair, but God forbid anyone ever told her that she had a penchant for the dramatic.

Slowly, Ruby exhales and shakes her head before sipping her wine and setting the glass back down. "That definitely sounds surreal. I mean... I can't even imagine getting my head around suddenly more... Not-Rubys. I can imagine a few colourful things my grandmother would have to say about it, mind you. 'Ruby, you don't wear enough as is, you can't afford to go sharing your wardrobe with every floozy that has your face.'" Dramatised, of course, and said entirely in good humour as she huffs out a laugh.

"Did you have accent envy? Is that the real problem, here?"

Cosima laughs a little - subdued, but warm. "No, not really. Of the three I know well, two are Canadian and one's British." Referring to Beth as "is" instead of "was" is still habit - it hasn't been that long. "I talked with a German on the phone, but we never met in person. I don't have much of an ear for mimicry, though, I'm stuck with good old California."

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