InsaneJournal

The idea about pizza was that it had to be fresh from the oven - but hell, Richie wasn’t overly picky, he appreciated that SCIENCE had managed to concoct some kinda formula that meant crust still tasted decently even after sliding around in the backseat of the delivery driver’s vehicle for thirty minutes. Even the United States military had come up with a brand of pizza that could last for three years. Regardless, pizza (born in Naples, Italy and best from a wood-fired oven) could be so much more.

Admittedly, Richie did love Chicago-style pizza. The kind you got at Giordano’s - sausage, jalapeños, olives, that was his go-to. Load it up. That was pretty much all he’d eaten when he’d been in the Windy City during that fateful stop on his tour (the one where Mike called and he’d puked up all that delicious pizza, over a metal stair railing before bombing onstage because stress), getting boxes delivered to his hotel room. But here in Vallo, he had other pizza options so he took advantage.

Nino’s gave him a certain vibe - like this was the place you’d come to for Little League victory celebrations, family meals, drunk dinners, or cozy nights in. The red booths and canisters of Parmesan and pepper flakes were nice touches to the ambiance. Classic, in a way. He planned to come in and see about maybe doing some scrying, since Adam taught him a new trick - and he was hoping a certain waitress wouldn’t mind helping him pump up the volume a little bit on that.

He was definitely at one of Blue’s tables now, stuffing his face with pizza and drinking soda out of tall red cups. Just to fortify himself for this practice session.

Blue was a very good waitress, excellent even. She had dealt with her fair share of rich boy non-tippers, the Karens who complained about their food being too hot, or the persnickety eaters who wanted the cheese pizza but "could you make it with light cheese"? Blue often added her own special sauce on the way to the table and enjoyed her own form of passive aggressive retaliation for the people she knew would leave her meager—if any—tip.

But the residents of Vallo, Outlander and native alike, seemed to not hold such contempt. Sure there were food allergies (no garlic knots for the vampires) but it was insignificant in comparison to the small town Henrietta where Nino's usually took up residence. And so working behind the counter, knowing all the nooks and crannies, finicky doors, and extra stashes of napkins had made her the best waitress.

It gave her time to watch Richie from behind the register. She had cashed out one of the slower customers after she had dropped off pizza and soda to Richie's table, so she had mostly left him alone. Something was up, and since Blue wasn't a psychic despite her lineage, having that gut feeling was the best warning.

In the now semi-empty pizzeria, Blue refilled another red cup of coke, and took her break by sliding into the otherside of the booth with Richie. "Preparing for a marathon? Carbo-loading doesn't work if you mix dairy into it. I learned that in highschool health class from all the cross-country runners who wouldn't shut up about running cross country."

She paused, before adding, "Psychic marathoning?"

Heeeeeey, Bluebell. Richie paused, in the midst of annihilating some pizza crust - he could pack it away, contrary to what his somewhat lanky frame would suggest, and he basically loved food. Loved to eat. Loved to eat pizza even more so - and he would have gotten beer to go along with his slices but he didn’t want to go into scrying with alcohol on his breath. Not like he’d get tipsy or scha-wasted from a couple of beers (this wasn’t high school, with cheap Seagrams wine coolers and red solo cups at parties) but still. Best to stay as clear-headed as possible.

“Are you sure you’re not psychic too?” he quipped, dusting his hands off with a napkin. “But yeah, uh. Sort of. I wanted to see if...you wouldn’t mind helping me? Adam taught me a scrying thing. I practiced and I think I’m ready for the supercharge. I promise I’ll tip you like fifty percent, and not just because you have the best waitressing and dance moves, but because you’re just awesome.”

He’d just need a bowl of water or something, and he could get it done. And he wasn’t sure why he wanted to, maybe just because things had been weird lately and if there was anything extra weird on the horizon he might want to be aware.

"Psychic-adjacent. Psychic by proxy. And I'm foreseeing you tipping me one-hundred-percent, for my excellent service and my super boost," Blue said, in that way that meant no negotiation, final offer. Besides, if Richie was here, stuffing his face full of pizza to preemptively scry, it's not like he was going to change his mind. Her plan was fool proof, mostly. Except about the scrying thing.

Blue sighed, and dumped the small ceramic dish on the table, full of non-dairy coffee creamer, onto the table, placing it between them. She then began to pour the new glass of soda into the bowl, slowly so that it was so close to overflowing without overflowing. She slammed the plastic cup down, definitive and aggressive. Or in this case, very Blue-like.

"If you're going to scry in Nino's you need to know two things," Blue said, carefully, seriously, a wizened woman for all of her twenty years and short-stature. "One, you get a time limit. Since you're new at this—" Blue said it like a question that only had one answer, and arched her brow in a way that said try me. "Five minutes."

She cleared her throat, laying her hands palm up on the table, offering up Richie to hold. "And two, always have supervision. I'm your supervisor today, but if there is not a person across from you next time, you wait. No one scries alone. I don't care what Adam told you, he's got his own help. He's the exception, not the rule."

One-hundred percent. Hm, okay, Richie could handle that - he always liked to tip decently anyway. Because it was the right thing to do and because he wasn’t actually a dick - if he was your friend he was generous, and had been since he was a kid. Chipping in to pay for ice cream if one of the Losers couldn’t afford it, or giving up his spare video game tokens. So this wasn’t much of a negotiation.

“Alright, dealio - on all of it,” he agreed. Using soda in a creamer bowl worked for him - it could basically be any liquid, he’d fall into the zone either way. “I promise I don’t even want to scry alone. I’m not practicing by myself.” Adam had made it clear he was not to do that (or use a mirror), and despite the sheer number of years between them Richie actually listened to his Yoda, not treating him like a kid. He wasn’t a kid.

Hands sliding across the table, he placed his larger ones in Blue’s. Zing. The flow of it felt like electricity - was his hair standing on end? “So...you’re timing me. If I like, get stuck or something - honestly, stab me with a fork?”

Amplification wasn't as tricky as it had been before. Blue was used to being plugged in, all the time. But since the whole kissing business, she had made it a point to have it off. Turning it on now, pushing it through, was all in a rush. So she might have had a teeny, tiny smirk of satisfaction when she could tell Richie was feeling it. She always did her best amplifying psychics.

"Stabbing you with a fork would be a kindness. I've stabbed people for less and with sharper things," Blue said, proudly, before flinging her attention over to the cup of extra cutlery on the table. There were dull butter knives and spoons. She had options, and she wanted Richie to know that she was not uncreative with her stabbing.

"Don't—" Blue's face fell, a momentary uncomfortable second. She shook her head, forcing the bad memory away. "Don't get lost. If I have to watch you get all weird and non-blinky or whatever other creepy stuff happens when psychics scry, you can do me the favor of not going after things in there."

She squeezed his hands. "Alright, Richie, clock's ticking. You have roughly the entire length of Total Eclipse of the Heart to figure out whatever you're wanting to find."

He even hummed it a little bit - turn aroooound, every now and then I get a little bit lonely and you’re never coming ‘round. Such a great time, big 80s hair and big dreams and a bombastic song to boot. “Okay, gotcha,” Richie said, because of course he could measure things in terms of Bonnie Tyler tunes being the scale.

So he just - relaxed. That was most of it, really - and staring at the water (or in this case it was soda) and letting his mind and body enter that state where he wasn’t even really concentrating on any one particular thought, just vaguely drifting and zoning out. It took him a few lyrics to get there (...tired of listening to the sound of my tears) before there was enough of a charge and a jolt, and then as sudden as a thunderclap, he was no longer in this world. His eyes went white, and maybe it was a thing for other psychics too - definitely for Richie, an erasure of iris and pupil as he was pulled away from the present and landed in the future.

It was - bleak. That was the only word that registered, so fucking bleak. Buildings, these run-down ones he’d never seen before yet they felt familiar - aging concrete that bore cracks and ivy snarling its way through broken windows, stems as thick as trees it seemed; water dripped from somewhere, and all he heard was plink, plink, plink, and the roof was grimy and broken down. Everything was broken down.

However, it was hard to discern much of everything. Dust lined the atmosphere, a fog that was gray and felt damn near carcinogenic and gunky - it rolled in like an ominous hazy carpet, and he struggled to see through it, to make out what was what in this vision. “Blue!”

He saw her face, thought he heard himself call her name - and then Richie was wrenched out of it (whether he did it subconsciously or there was some mechanism in place to bung him out before he could get trapped, who knew - he didn’t have that much of an understanding of his seer powers yet) yanked to the present and he jumped a bit in his seat, eyes blinking and back to their regular hue. Damn, those power-amplifying tricks were no joke. He could practically taste that fog.

Blue spent her fair share around the lightly supernatural business. It came from the territory of her home being used as a place she lived and a place where her mom ran their psychic operations. Scrying was not a new experience to witness, but Richie's sure was. It had all the markings of otherworldly, but the white eyes were unnerving. Still, Blue held fast to Richie, her frown growing deeper the longer he was under.

There was no good way to tell what a psychic saw when they were scrying—no smiles for happy futures or furrowed brows for concerning situations. Blue just had to wait it out, and wait, and wait. And much like she had when Adam would scry, the longer it lasted the more her worry peaked. Since this was new for Richie, it was compounded.

Just when she thought she was going to have to shank Richie with a fork, Blue ripped her hands away and cut the cord to the amplification. A second, a minute, an eternity lasted before his eyes went normal and some color came back to his face.

Blue scrambled for her pen and notebook from the front of her waitress apron and slid them over to Richie. "Write down what you saw as you tell me. You should get it down before you forget the details."

“Oh, right - yeah. Good idea,” Richie mumbled, taking the pen and notebook. He hadn’t really had a vision like that in awhile since he’d started with baby steps - first learning about the swinging pendulum, then the tarot cards. And he did like Adam said, he pulled a card everyday. He’d been right about how it helped kind of disperse the psychic energy too, by putting effort into making tarot or readings part of Richie’s routine - but a vision was just such a whammy, it kind of rattled his brain for a second.

Still, he jotted down what he saw - drawing was out of the question, they all knew he sucked at that. But he wrote the words dark, fog, rundown buildings, and then Blue. “I saw you,” he said, glancing up at her. “It’s like we were in some...dystopian city. Everything looked familiar except rundown but - there was so much fog.” Literal, actual fog.

I saw you. That chilled Blue, more than she wanted to admit. She had been so focused on watching Richie write everything down that she sort of paused for a second, unsure if she watched to look up. But she did, because Blue Sargent had been given shitty future news before and she had faced it all head on, in a sensible, terrifying sort of way.

"That's not good," Blue said, her mouth turning down into a deeply annoyed frown. The bell over the front door chimed, and she twisted around to see customers walk in. Though normally a welcome distraction, Blue did not have time for her job right now. She pointed to a table that was absolutely not in her section. "Sit over there, grab your own menus, someone will be with you whenever!" When she turned back around in the booth, she shrunk down, to whisper with Richie.

"You said it looked familiar, but nothing specific? Storefronts or street names or anything?" Blue asked, purposely avoiding asking about herself. "And was it like 'oh it's the morning' fog or like creepy 'something is definitely lurking run for your life' fog?

Richie hated to be the bearer of bad doomsday news, but - maybe it was helpful, having a heads up. Or maybe it would just cause more anxiety, oops. “It was definitely more of the ‘lurking, run for your life’ fog,” he confirmed. “It...well...let’s see...”

He doodled a little on the notepad, just seeing if anything would pop up and flow from his brain to his pen, and he wrote a couple other words. Dust. Debris. Morningside. Yeah, that was it - he was pretty sure he saw the apartment building he’d lived in, that all newcomers lived in. Or most of them, anyway, unless they decided to rough it in the forest. Not his thing. Even Skyhold had electricity and toilets.

“I saw Morningside. I’m certain it was there.”

Part of Blue wanted to stop asking questions because every answer only made her stomach twist sourly. But the other half of Blue, the practical part, knew that Richie shouldn't be alone in this knowledge and having a 'second set of eyes' on a topic could help—direct them both to a solution or a more clear warning.

Still, Blue didn't look pleased when the fog was definitively bad, and her face fell more when he said Morningside. She was quiet for a moment. This was not her forte: she wasn't as abrupt for action as Ronan, or critical of events as Adam, or even as patient with knowledge as Gansey. Blue just looked at Richie, was a sad expression. Determined, but sad.

"Something is going to happen to Vallo itself, then," Blue said as if she wasn't quite believing it. "Something bad. Not just an attack or dinosaurs or whatever, but the whole place. With no indication of what caused it, just that it was and that—" She swallowed hard. "I was there, too."

Blue made a frustrated noise, and pulled the notebook back over to reach Richie's writing again. "I don't like this, Richie."

“Me either,” Richie admitted, pushing his glasses up and scrubbing a hand over his face, over his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. He could already feel a headache coming on - it was settling over him, a dull ache at his temples that would no doubt expand and pound on his skull for awhile. “I’m - well, shit. I’m sorry. Maybe Adam can give more insight? Or better insight?”

Adam or Persephone, either one. Richie didn’t claim to be the greatest psychic in all the land - he thought he was doing pretty well for the months he’d been here, but he was still new to it so maybe someone more seasoned had a better perspective of weirdo fog and ominous dystopian future city.

“But, you know. If we’re there at the same time - I won’t let you deal with it alone.” He could promise that much, at least.

"Yeah, maybe," Blue said, already wondering if they hadn't had some weird psychic situation today. If all the Vallo psychics were tuning into this event maybe it meant it was sooner rather than later. But how did anyone prevent a dystopian-apocalypse with spooky mist? She had been so focused on the how-who-when-what of the situation, that she seemed genuinely shocked when Richie said he wouldn't let her deal with it alone.

"If we're there at the same time," Blue said, a slow smile growing across her face, "I'll protect you. I could probably axe a mostly intangible demon cloud, right?" She had taken down a giant wasp, Blue could do anything. Or that was the attitude she needed to bring into whatever this potential nightmare-bizarro world of Vallo.

"If—when—this happens, I'm going to look for you at Morningside. That can be like a rendezvous point or something for everyone." She paused, before asking the other question she had been avoiding. "You didn't see anyone else did you?"

A demon cloud with an axe? Sure, why not - stranger things had happened. “I mean, I guess anything’s possible?” Richie chuckled, but it was literally like the real life version of the I’m in danger meme. Still, Blue was pretty mighty and he liked her enthusiasm and belief that she could hack a fog to death. It was nice to have allies. “Morningside sounds like a decent rendezvous point to me. Better to have some kinda plan than to act like it’s not gonna happen.”

Because something would happen - they just only had strange bits and pieces and were unable to come to solid conclusions. Super awesome. “I didn’t see anyone else though,” he added. “Maybe at some point I can try to go back in or whatever, and look around.” Though he doubted Blue would let him do that now, and regardless, he was pretty brain-fatigued at the moment anyway.

"This is where we're going to say better safe than sorry?" Blue asked, knowing full well that's what it was. Sometimes it was easier to just shove her head in the sad and not pay attention to the goings on of the world around her. But that would make her an asshole, and Blue did not want to be one. She wanted to be helpful, she wanted to not be trapped in a weird world without some awareness around her.

Burnt out Vallo? Check. Scary fog? Double check. Possibly the end of the world and alone with Richie? TBD.

Blue shook her head. "Don't do it now. Drink some caffeine—" Her attention shifted to the bowl of soda. "I'll get you a new cup. And a slice of pie, though I can't account for it being anything but mediocre. Persephone always gave people pie after scrying. I assume it's the sugar rush or something."

Tearing the piece of paper out of her notebook, she slid it to Richie to keep while shoving the rest back into her apron. "Keep that, in case you think of anything else. Pizza is on the house. But that doesn't get you out of a tip."

It was true that the pie might be mediocre (especially compared to Aunt Persephone’s pie) but Richie wasn’t going to complain about the sugar rush. He could use one, and a bit of caffeine too - he felt sluggish and fatigued, and curling up in the booth and taking a nap might sound good though he’d try to not do that.

“Thanks, Lady Blue,” he said, pocketing the piece of paper. In return, he fished for a couple of twenties and tucked them into her apron as well. It was definitely a one-hundred percent tip and then some - she definitely deserved it, especially because they may have just seen the literal, actual end of the world so maybe she oughta buy something nice for herself while she still could; hashtag yolo. “For the pie and the boost. I’ll finish that and then get out of your hair.”

Then he’d nap. If he could. But when such melancholy lay on the horizon, who knew how much sleep he’d actually get.

Blue was not going to complain about the extra-extra tip. It wasn't every day she got a cut from boosting. But Richie had just seen the end of the world of Vallo, and like any person who was saddled with the guilt of the future, giving away something like money was probably whatever to him. She eyed the twenties with soft contempt, but didn't give them back.

"One positive outlook," Blue said as she slid out of the booth to get Richie his pie and to actually do the job she had taken an extended break on.

"If Nino's is still around in this weird Vallo, I know where the management here keeps the shotgun behind the counter and the combination to all the food storage lockers."