Interlude - Chef Lucy

Lucy looked up and met her own eyes.

It was always strange to look at yourself through a camera while also looking through that camera with your augs. Slightly disorientating, though without any real dizziness or nausea. She blinked, then looked at the other camera. Yeah, they were all in focus. Good.

The table was set. There was a hotplate, plugged in and ready to warm up. They had all the pots and pans they needed. Water was in a jug nearby, the other things were just to the side. The main camera saw it all too. Good good.

She turned and took in the background. It wasn’t much, just a plain window that overlooked one of the main roads of Burlington. They’d put up curtains on the sides to mask it up a little. The main camera’s angle would let people see the road and, more importantly, it would let someone enterprising enough to head outside prove that it was an actual livestream.

Which it wasn't. The window was placed in front of a high-definition screen filming another, actual window elsewhere.

Lucy didn’t need someone smart firing a rocket at their back while they did this.

Cat was the best, but she was not even close to paranoid enough.

Myalis: Catherine is on her way up.

Lucy: Tks!

She grinned. Almost time to start.

There were a few ways she could do this, but really, she wanted it to be a bit... a bit poorly done? There was just something about jank that pissed off the corporate types and made everything a little more genuine.

Across from her table were a few of the volunteer kittens that had some experience with this kind of stuff. She gave them a thumb’s up, and then a quick count-down.

In one of her aug’s side-reels, she saw herself as the internet could now see her. A single dark skinned girl in a well-lit room in front of a bunch of cooking things, smiling at the camera and wearing some rather interesting cat-ear props on her head.

The caption across the seven different streaming platforms she was sending this to was all the same. Stray Cat’s Cooking Show! Feat. Lucy!

Her grin widened. “Hello, everyone,” she said. She currently has a hundred and seven viewers. Myalis helpfully showed her the number of actual, human viewers below that. It was more like just seven, but she could live with that number too. It would grow. “This show’s mostly for the fine people of Burlington, where Stray Cat, Gomorrah, and your three local samurai are hard at work keeping people safe. Today we’re adding to that by making sure you’re fed and safe too!”

She had a live chat. It was almost immediately bombarded with ads and fake messages.

And then Myalis struck, and Lucy could almost imagine some distant servers crashing and burning. It was like using a tank on a single ant, having an AI like Myalis on her side. In a blink, the chat was cleared of any interference.

There was a large computer monitor turned on its side next to the camera with the chat’s feed on it, not that she needed to look with her augs, but it helped the viewers if she looked at something before answering them. Made it more... real.

At least, that was her experience from watching this kind of stream before.

“Every citizen of Burlington, heck, anyone within the Downtown region can order up a meal and have it delivered to your door for free. All you need to do is cook it up! So, to make that part easier, we decided to make this livestream to show you how!”

Oh, she’d just hit three figure human viewers, nice!

Rika: What’s this?

Abbatoth68: Where’s that?

MarchallGod: The title’s a lie

BestFrenVenom: We?

Alan Martin: She cute tho

DaShoe: Show feet!

She was about to go on when a door slipped open just a tiny bit and Cat slipped into the room.

Cat moved... Cat moved the way Cat did. It wasn’t something Lucy had never really seen in anyone else. Maybe some of the more experienced PMC sorts? But even they had a sort of militaristic swagger to them.

Cat moved like her namesake. Slow, deliberate, with a slight shift to her hips that Lucy really liked and she had the strange habit of touching the floor with the tips of her toes first. It made her deceptively quiet for an otherwise loud girl.

Her helmet was off, so Lucy got to see her eyes scanning everything before locking onto her. There was something very sharp about Cat’s gaze, until it locked onto Lucy, then it instantly softened.

Lucy felt her heart soften too. “Hey,” she said.

The people watching the stream must have been confused, she’d just gone off script. She was clearly addressing someone off-screen, at least until Cat walked up to Lucy.

Calloused fingers pulled Lucy’s head up, a gentle touch along the line of her jaw that arched her neck back so that Cat could more easily capture her lips.

Her other--new--arm fell down to Lucy’s hip and squeezed.

“Mm, Cat,” Lucy said.

“Hey,” Cat said. “I hate people and I absolutely don’t want to do this thing,” she said.

Lucy smiled. “We could put it off? Tell people to starve.”

“Urgh, but then they’d complain about starving, and I’d have to spend time telling them to figure shit out for themselves, time I couldn’t spend with you.”

“Hmm, that’s a dilemma,” Lucy agreed. “I got you a hat,” she said.

Sir Whale: hot

Antimater Lobster: Wait, is that actually a samurai? For real?

Devon7400: 10/10 cooking show

Name Pending: NOOOOO My Gomorrah X Stray Cat ship! It sinks!

Calob505: I like this cooking

Cat blinked at the non-sequitur, then she let Lucy out of her grasp. Lucy picked up a big white poofy chef’s hat, and placed it on Cat’s head.

“I... how stupid do I look?” Cat asked. Her cybernetic cat ears twitched, which Lucy thought was adorable, but they didn’t throw the hat off.

“You look very cute,” Lucy said truthfully.

“Yeah, no, I don’t think I want people to see me in this,” Cat said.

“A bit too late for that,” Lucy said.

Cat was a big dumb softy in some ways, but in others she caught on quick. She snapped her gaze around and locked it on the cameras one at a time, then she looked at the chat screen (Oh, they were well into five figures! And the number of blushing face emotes was nice!) then her gaze returned to Lucy. “We’re live?” she asked.

“Mhm,” Lucy said.

“You, uh, didn’t feel like telling me?” she asked.

Lucy smiled sweetly, that same smile that let her get away with a whole lot. “I was getting there, but then you decided to be all romantic and sweet, and you stole my breath away.”

“Fuck,” Cat muttered. There was definitely a lot of warmth in her cheeks now, and the flush was distinctly not the fun, sexual kind that Lucy loved seeing. No, this was the fun embarrassed kind that had Lucy biting her lips to stop a mean giggle from escaping.

Oh, Cat was going to punish her so hard for this later.

Lucy was looking forward to it.

“So, Chef Stray Cat,” Lucy said. “As I was telling our viewers, today we’ll be cooking up something easy to cook. We only have a few minutes with our brave samurai, everyone, so let’s not waste her time, hmm?”

Cat, still flushing, cleared her throat, then looked from one camera to the other. It was cute to see her so flustered. “Yeah, right. So, what are we cooking?” she asked.

She was quick to roll with the punches.

“Mac and cheese,” Lucy said.

“Really? We’re teaching people how to make that? Aren’t the instructions on the box?” Cat asked.

“They are,” Lucy said. “But you know how people are.”

Cat rolled her eyes, something she was doing a lot now that she had two. Cat wasn’t commenting on it a lot, but it was clear that she was silently appreciative of having two of those again.

“Yeah, fine. So where do we start?”

“With the instructions,” Lucy said. She smiled. “They’re on the box.”

Cat bumped into her with her hip, and Lucy laughed as she stumbled closer to the ingredients. “Right, I’ll turn on this thing... like that. Are these pots clean?”

“No, I thought we’d cook with dirty pots today,” Lucy said.

“Ah, yeah, get that real bachelor-chow taste going, rat droppings and all,” Cat agreed as she picked up an obviously clean pan and spun it around before putting it on the hot plate.

Lucy handed Cat the water, which was in a large gallon jug. “Every food order comes with a gallon of purified water, two boxes of noodles and a small container of milk,” Lucy said to the nearest camera. “The first step is setting your water to boil.”

Kirania3: Oh no, they’re sassy

Jonah94: How water boil?

Arkimedes: Why water boil?

Racheet: They’re cute

Majaguru: Sassy and sexy tho

Inle68: lmao

“That one’s hard to fuck up,” Cat said.

“Yeah, imagine someone forgetting that there was water in the pan and then leaving it to boil overnight?” Lucy said.

Cat froze, then she turned a frown towards Lucy. “Lucy, that was you.”

Lucy laughed. “But you got in trouble for it.”

“Only because that bitch didn’t believe me!” Cat said.

It was an argument they’d threaded a number of times. They each knew their part, what to say, which memories to bring up, and why, even if it was all said before, it still made them warm. It was comfortable complaining about an easier time, when an overworked orphanage worker and a bit of boiled-off water was their biggest worry.

They made mac and cheese, and it wasn’t perfect. Lucy didn’t measure the milk, and ended up not putting enough in. Cat added the macaroni before the water was boiling because she was too impatient to wait that long, and Cat complained at length about how only using one packet of cheese powder was for scrubs while Lucy tried to remind her of the times where they’d ended up eating mac-and-no-cheese because of that very habit.

It was nice, and in the end they got to enjoy a few bites of subpar food while a seven-figure audience watched and they both still pretended that it was just the two of them.

***