Warning: spoilers for the Inhuman Alliance Saga. And apologies in advance if this story gives you a craving for ice cream.
It’s a beautiful summer day in the city so many of the ChaotiX call home. It hasn’t been long since the war against the Inhuman Alliance.
The mosquito problem the city has in the summertime isn’t as bad as it used to be. FauCorp has been working to reduce the city’s mosquito population.
Say what you will about fluffies, call them shitrats all you want, but at least they don’t spread malaria.
Not too far from the apartment building occupied by the legendary Korkea family, and the bar owned by one Harry Kane, there is an ice cream parlor.
It only opened recently. The owner only moved to America a few months ago, and he brought some traditional recipes from his homeland with him.
As happy humanoids devour ice cream cones, sundaes, and various other frozen dairy delights, their fluffies, just as happy, devour bowls of spaghettieis, a dish of German origin.
It’s not what you think. It’s ice cream made to look like spaghetti, not ice cream that tastes like spaghetti. Strands of vanilla ice cream on whipped cream, with a dollop of strawberry sauce, and a sprinkling of white chocolate shavings.
FauCorp has been attempting to make spaghetti-flavored ice cream for fluffies, though. Victor, as the founder’s best friend, and one of the best chefs there is, has been assisting them with this.
Valerie’s fluffies, Ms. Pac-Man and Dig-Dug, gladly volunteered to taste-test, but realized that maybe they were a bit too hasty after they sampled the first few batches.
Ms. Pac-Man said that the first batch tasted like sickie wawas.
Victor took it in stride, and reasoned that he probably wouldn’t have gotten it right on the first go.
So that’s a work in progress.
At this point, the owner’s appearance must be described.
He looks a lot like Erwin and Hans Stahlberg. Dark brown hair bordering on black, and brown eyes. Well, more like Erwin than Hans. He’s taller, though, with even softer features than Erwin. Chubby cheeks, a jolly belly that probably comes with an equally jolly laugh, and a thick beard and a mustache.
Perhaps he’s sampled his own wares a bit too much.
He’s Erwin’s cousin, as a matter of fact.
Unlike Erwin and Hans, he isn’t wearing glasses. He’s wearing a white apron with red pinstripes, over a white shirt with a red bowtie, and a white hat.
You know, the kind of clothes an employee of an ice cream store wears.
He’s serving customers alongside a couple of his employees. His wife, an attractive blonde with her hair in two pleats, and a gangly, awkward teenage boy with short light brown hair and a mild case of acne.
He’s not their son. He’s a local, this is his first job. The German couple does have two teenagers of their own, but they’re currently at their jobs.
Like Victor, their father took it in stride that they didn’t want to join the family business.
He didn’t want to repeat his father’s mistakes.
Three more customers enter the parlor, and the owner smiles at them.
“Good afternoon, Herr Korkea.”
Calvin, with Marley and Piccolo, rolls his eyes.
“I’ve asked you not to call me that, Dario.”
Dario Stahlberg laughs, and sure enough, it’s a jolly laugh, that rivals Olaf Eriksen’s.
“I’m sorry, Cal. Believe me, I didn’t like Hans either. He was the schwarzes Schaf of our family. None of us shed a tear about you cutting his head off twice.”
Dario and his family learned English in preparation for their move across the Atlantic.
“Mawwey am jus gunna ass-yoom dat schwah-zuss shaff am a bad wowdsie, cuz Mawwey nu speek Gew-mun.”
Piccolo giggles.
“Fwuffies haf enuff twubbuw wif Een-gwish, mistah Dawio.”
“It means black sheep. You know, like–”
“Wike bwack sheepsie of da famiwy? Mawwey daddeh haf bin teech-in Mawwey abowt ee-dee-yums.”
“You’re certainly verbose for a fluffy, Marley.”
Marley gives Dario an audacious smirk.
“Dat am daddeh duin, tuu.”
Calvin smirks too.
“You’d be surprised by how much fluffies can learn if you put the time in, Dario.”
“Fair enough. So, the usual?”
A few minutes later, Calvin and his fluffies sit down at one of the tables on the patio out front.
Marley and Piccolo, naturally, have two bowls of spaghettieis, and Calvin has a cone with three scoops: red velvet on the bottom, then banana, then mint chocolate chip on top.
As they tuck in, four more customers walk in.
Harley and Jackie, vampiric children, and their equally vampiric fluffies Carmilla and Alfador.
Well, Jackie’s a dhampir, not a full-blooded vampire.
Their adoptive parents, Henry and Erica, also vampires, are currently taking their infant son Adrian to the doctor, for a regular checkup.
The doctor is Pierre, because most other doctors don’t really know what to do with a vampire baby.
They aren’t very common. Most vampires start their unlife by getting an Extreme Hickey.
The only other doctor who would know has been dead for a long time.
Harley looks slightly older than the last time we saw her. Like Jackie, she’s showing the early signs of puberty. Dr. Sander Gwenn’s remedy for her “small problem” has been working like a charm.
She’ll keep aging as long as she takes it. So she’ll probably stop taking it when she reaches physical adulthood.
Dario smiles as he sees the vampiric quartet enter.
“Heya, kids! I can guess what you three will be having. What about you, Jackie boy?”
They’ve been dropping in frequently since he added a new flavor to the lineup, specifically to cater to a certain demographic in the city. He has those containers marked, so he doesn’t confuse it with the red velvet ice cream.
Some people outside that demographic have tried that new flavor, out of sheer curiosity.
But NuBlood doesn’t taste very good to the living, and neither does NuBlood flavor ice cream.
Before long, Harley has a cone with three scoops of blood red ice cream, the two fluffies have bowls of it, and Jackie, not needing to consume blood, artificial or not, also has a cone with three scoops: milk chocolate, white chocolate, dark chocolate.
Jackie adores chocolate, and back when he was still unliving with his biological father, Ianos had forbidden Jackie from even putting chocolate in his mouth, just to remind Jackie who was in charge. More than once, he ordered Jackie to drink blood, despite knowing that Jackie doesn’t need to drink it, hoping to make a “real vampire” out of him.
Yeah. Father of the Year right there.
One of the first things Jackie did when Ianos was slain, freeing the young dhampir from obeying the Fiendlord’s orders, was stop by a sweet shop with Harley and Alfador.
Henry paid for everything they bought. He was happy to do it.
Jackie and Harley might be kids with vampiric powers, but they’re still kids.
And they’d both been through a rough time.
Vampires can still eat normal food, it just doesn’t satisfy the craving.
But chocolate is chocolate.
Three more customers enter the parlor.
A heavily scarred man and his equally scarred fluffy, and a fit, attractive blonde woman in furs.
“So many different colors! Why so many, Vic?”
“Those are different flavors, Loana.”
“What those brown ones? Dhukhi?”
Dhukhi is an Iokan word for feces.
Victor grins at his cavegirlfriend.
“You really think we eat shit on Modern Earth, Loana? That’s chocolate, babe.”
The Iokans have been introduced to chocolate by now, and they think it’s one of the best things to come from Modern Earth.
An opinion shared by many across the universe.
Dario’s got his fair share of Martian regular customers, due to his Oreo ice cream.
Scarface grins too.
“Weww, mebbeh hoomins nu num poopies–”
“Heh, Vanessa does now.”
“–but a wotta fwuffies num poopies. Nu cuz dey wan num poopies, foh. Eben Scawface an Gweebo owd hewd had poopie fwuffies. Asshowe smawty made Scawface choos: be tuffie babbeh, ow be poopie babbeh.”
In Scarface and Greebo’s herd, who lived in the bad part of London until a gang of drunken abusers wiped out all but the two brothers, colts became toughies as soon as they were off the milk.
Yes, those abusers were drunk, which is why they never told anyone about their encounter with Victor and June: because nobody would believe a bunch of blokes stinking of lager who said they had met a witch after a night at the pub, while abusing a foal whose weggies kept growing back.
June, for the record, has never denied being a witch. She has, in fact, openly admitted it, but before the public reveal of magic, people in her town thought she was just joking, and humored her.
And the joke was on them.
The one bloke in town who was stupid enough to outright call June a liar later found a fluffy turd in his house, in a part of the house a fluffy simply should not be able to reach.
It was weeks after June teleported one of Greebo’s creations that the daft bloke finally found the turd, after searching the rest of the house for the source of the smell.
June kept moving it around every time he got close to finding it, but eventually decided to stop tormenting him when she felt that he’d suffered enough.
The bloke realized after that incident that there may be some truth to June’s claims, and tried to convince people, to no avail. He was laughed at for actually believing something so obviously meant as a joke, and people told him that a feral probably got into the house while he left the door open.
After the public reveal of magic, and after people in June’s town realized that she was never joking about being a witch, that bloke spent an entire day walking around town, saying “I bloody told you so!” to everyone he ran into.
“So which color am meat flavor, Vic?”
“…I dunno how to tell you this, Loana…”
After much deliberation, Loana decides to start with something simple: a cone with one scoop of vanilla, and a Flake stuck in it.
A British chocolate bar, and these days, importing sweets from across the Atlantic isn’t really a big deal. The city has a significant population of British immigrants, and Dario is happy to cater to them.
Jeremy Logan, mayor of the city, is also of British descent, but he was born in America.
So yes, he is eligible to run for president.
Victor has a cone with two scoops: dark chocolate and rum raisin. Scarface has a bowl of spaghettieis.
As they sit down inside, at a table near the counter, Scarface licks his deceptive treat.
“How dey make ice cweem wook wike sketties?”
“I think Dario uses a potato ricer, Soul Brother.”
Dario shakes his head, as he serves a customer a scoop of blackcurrant ice cream.
Leslie Oldman’s recipe, and Leslie gets a cut of the profits.
“I use a spätzle press, actually. And those things are hard to find around here! I had to ask Erwin to blip to Germany and pick a few up.”
“You could have just taken the Tele-Port, I think Berlin’s got one.”
Dario laughs merrily.
“Und das sagst du mir jetzt?”