Ninjas of Love

It's Burger Time

"McDalton's again, I imagine." Weiss mused gloomily towards the floor, but- quite deliberately- still loud enough to be heard by her eleven colleagues. "Yep! Same orders as last time, gang?" Penny asked, turning Weiss' borderline-emo presumptuousness into her own trademark cheeriness in a possibly futile attempt to cheer up her girlfriend's team. Of course, it was only natural they weren't wearing their biggest grin. Ruby was concerned for her older sister's health, Weiss had chipped a few of her unnaturally white teeth on a brass knuckle shot, Blake had spent five minutes on her back like a tortoise that had fallen onto its shell and was waving its limbs in some kind of useless attempt at a rudimentary SRIMECH, and Yang had just possibly turned her hand to powder by smacking Yale Cambridge into the middle of next week. I can tell you, dear reader, that I too would not be too chuffed had I just possibly Dekued myself. "Well, same orders?"

"No, probably not, Penny." Emily advised, in a voice that managed to sound vaguely friendly but with no hint whatsoever of any other underlying feeling. "Oh ok. Shall I call a ship to come collect us?"
"Yeah, probably a good idea." Em replied again. "Ok! I'll do it now!" A small metal arm popped out the front of Penny's torso, brandishing a dog-eared, creased piece of cardboard (from an old box of Pumpkin Pete's Marshmallow Flakes) with the words "Gib ride plox" clumsily scrawled across it, just in case a ship pilot really hated legibility. "So that is the way you, a high-tech, Atlesian automaton, plan to call a ship?" Nora asked, not intentionally being rude, but coming off as slightly mean-spirited. She'd never been formally diagnosed with anything, but most people who'd met Nora would suspect her of having a very minor case of severe Autism Spectrum Disorder.  "Yes, fellow redhead girl, it is!" Penny replied, Momo-like smile beaming beautifully across her ceramic-white face.

Surprisingly promptly, a ship soon arrived, though- much to Charlie's disappointment and chagrin- not one piloted by the man who was nothing if not tactful, Maul Purphy. Its pilot was instead a Valish woman of short stature, whose mousy brown hair hung in greasy locks to her shoulder and smelt, rather unnervingly, of dust and musk and all the other stuff that your hair doesn't smell of if you wash it. "Hello guys! The name's Helene, Helene Blanche, to be precise. But, if you gang want, you can just call me the H-ster." She greeted the dozen with a concerningly middle-class accent for someone who referred to themselves as "the H-ster", and a worrying level of adrenaline. "Nice. I think I might go with Helene, though." Emily diplomatically declined to use the pilot's admittedly bizarre nickname. "I think I prefer H-ster." Helene rebutted, looking round at Em's semi-strapped-down wheelchair. "I think I prefer Maul Purphy." Emily muttered under the sound of the now-whirring engine, so that only her fellow passengers could hear. "Ok cool! Taking off now! Sure hope I don't crash and cripple you even more!" Helene yelled above the noise of the ship, cracking a perverse smile at her flabbergasted passengers.

Charlie was sat, his face turning the sort of lime green colour that made you think Kerian could transfigure into a donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy at any moment as Helene violently jerked the ship- a cheap old Mistralian Datboi Hiroshima, according to the font of engineering factoids that was Blake Belladonna- from side to side, coming worryingly close to smashing in the side of the city's McDalton's franchise as she landed her Datboi death trap on the same area of land that Maul had touched down his Parovstelar upon the day prior.

After the twelve-strong horde of hunters and huntresses-in-training had left the ship, feeling rather shaken up, they were confronted again by the familiar red-and-yellow visage of McDalton's, sitting above the city on a retail park, looking out majestically across the urban sprawl that had once been the beating, industrial heart of Sanus, but was now just a seemingly endless benign tumour of housing estate upon housing estate. Charlie looked out, thinking about something or other that wasn't massively important, until he was snapped out of his trance by the flame-haired leader of Team PINC. "Charlie, what do you want for lunch?" Penny's question was concise and simple. Charlie stood there in silence for a second, taken aback. Despite Penny's voice being so typically childlike and human in its demureness, innocence, and relentless upbeat tone, when Penny was stood barely at arm's length from Charlie- as she did now- Charlie realised that there was a faint underlying sound to her voice that reminded you that it was entirely synthesised. It was so easy to forget that Penny was spat out of a factory, not a vagina. "What would you like to order, Charlie?"
"Erm, I guess I'll go with a Big Mac."
"Ok. Enjoy the view."

Once Penny had rounded up everyone's orders again, she instructed them to wait outside. Unsurprisingly, this bemused her eleven colleagues, whose confusion she chose to fix by opening up her stomach and allowing a tightly rolled up picnic blanket to fall out of the gaping incision in her belly. "Nadeshiko, roll it out while I go get the food." Nadeshiko bowed to show her willingness to follow her team leader's orders while Penny sauntered into the restaurant. Weiss simply looked at the blanket at sighed. "You know," she explained to all ten of her, at most marginally interested, colleagues, "I like to make it a point to avoid eating al fresco, as you may feel it necessary to call it. My butlers don't like to travel outside, not to mention the fact that you wouldn't want to risk getting a grass stain on a good-quality wine decanter now, would you?" Charlie held his face in his hands and tried to stay silent as Penny turned back toward the door with three trays of food.