Dizzy Land

Just when he thought he’d gotten himself under control, Dean’s mid-sentence switch-up nearly set Sam off again. She must have told him something about herself, where she was from. And he had no idea…

Sam didn’t really trust himself to speak at that moment, so he got busy opening the jar of sauce.

Which took all of about six seconds.

So he just stood there staring into the open jar and holding his breath.

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Dean was busy laying out all the toppings he could find (including a few things he wasn't sure were meant for the pizzas, like the giant meatballs he found in a refrigerator), but he soon noticed Sam and gave him a look. Was he missing something again? Sam was... staring at a jar of sauce.

He tapped Sam on the arm, hoping to knock him out of whatever kind of daze he was in, then turned to Starbuck. "Are there any toppings you don't like?" he asked. He'd eat just about anything.

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Now that she wasn't quite sure about. "Uh, no fruit," she decided. "If I find anything else I don't like I can just take it off, I guess."

She glanced over at Same, noticing the constant pauses. Maybe he was having a slight nervous breakdown with all of this? She couldn't exactly blame him. She was kind of surprised that no one had yet. "I think after he's done eating you better put him to bed," she told Dean.

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Sam poked back at Dean with the spoon when his brother tapped his arm.

“Watch out what you give him license to do,” he told Starbuck with a small grin. “Dean’ll eat just about anything.” His face screwed up a bit at her last comment though.

“He doesn’t need to put me to bed,” he said, eyebrows drawn in. “I’m fine.”

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Dean grinned. "Okay, no pineapple, then," he agreed. That was just as well--pineapple on pizza was a little weird.

"You were staring at a jar of sauce for like a minute," Dean said, exaggerating only slightly. "And you still haven't gotten any of the sauce on the pizza." He gestured toward it in a go on, then motion.

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Sam gave his brother a petulant look and huffed once, before turning back to the counter and scooping some sauce onto the laid-out crust.

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She rolled her eyes a little at Sam's insistance that his brother would eat anything. "Little boy, I was living solid off of rations for nearly two years before I got here. Anything tastes better than that, no matter how weird the combination."

He stifled a laugh at the younger brother's petulance about bedtime and being told what to do. Yeah, very familiar. She fought a twinge of memory at it and picked up a pair of oven mitts from one of the counters. "Thank the gods they don't have that frakking mouse on them," she said, flipping them over in her hands. "Seems like everything else around here does."

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Somehow the bit about two years worth of rations hit Sam in a way that the mention of fifteen hour rotations hadn’t and he paused with the spoon in the jar, suddenly reminded of how much Starbuck’s life sucked. A lot more than his and Dean’s, actually.

It was weird, this sudden surge of real, stomach churning sympathy for someone who until today had been only a TV character. It was weird too as he fully realized how much he knew about Starbuck that she would certainly not want him to know; personal things, things about her past, her relationships.

He forced himself to lift the spoon back out of the jar and continue putting sauce carefully on the pizza, gripping the spoon maybe a bit too tightly.

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...Speaking of things in the shape of the Mouse, the first thing Dean found when he went in search of plates (since Sam didn't seem like he was in a hurry with the sauce) were plastic, mouse-shaped plates that he quickly tossed aside. Giant plastic cups... Plastic forks... Aha. He finally came across a stack of plates--real plates, and pulled three out.

When Starbuck mentioned gods, he turned to face her. "I meant to ask you--that lady who came when you were sick... Her name's Psyche?" He paused, wondering if there was a polite way of phrasing this, but finally just asked, "Is she one of your gods, or something?" He couldn't figure out why a Greek god would be one of Starbuck's gods, but hey, what the hell--nothing else here made sense.

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She kept her horrified look at the first set of plates as slight as she could manage, but she was more than a little relieved that he found normal ones.

The question threw her a bit. Kind of a difficult to talk about in any precise way; worship was such a personal thing for her. "Yeah," she said simply. "That's why she came - she heard me praying. She came to help."

She put the oven mitts on her hands and clapped them together in a 'chop-chop' sort of way.

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“I met Psyche when I arrived,” Sam said quietly without turning from his oh-so-involved task of spreading tomato sauce on dough. “She was the first person who came to talk to me. We talked about spirits and zombies and she told me I wasn’t dreaming.”

He smoothed the sauce carefully on the pizza, trying to see how even he could make the sauceless stripe all the way around the edge.

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"Oh," said Dean, not really sure how he was supposed to respond to that. Spirits were one thing, but gods, even Greek gods... It was hard to wrap his mind around, so he stopped trying.

"Hurry it up with that sauce, Sam," Dean complained, lifting the bag of cheese and holding it over the pizza. "It doesn't have to be perfect! We're going to eat it!"

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While she hadn't really expected any life-changing reply from Dean on that, Sam's surprised her. Mainly because he didn't sound like he knew what to think of it, good or bad. "She came at my arrival too. I probably would still be convinced that everyone here was an evil cylon if she hadn't." She wondered if Psyche came to certain arrivals for any specific reasons, if she looked for something in the person's mind, of if she had her whims just like everyone else.

She was inclined to agree about the pace of the pizza-making, though. "Yeah, if I have to keep these oven mitts on for much longer, I'm going to start use them as boxing gloves."

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“It’s not that strange Dean,” Sam told his brother. “Remember the scarecrow god in Burkitsville? Or even the tulpa in the Hell House, like you said before. All in all I’d say Psyche being here is one of the least weird things so far.”

To Starbuck he could only nod solemnly before throwing up a hand in surrender at both their impatience. “Okay, okay!” he said, grinning again, and sloshed one more spoonful onto the crust before getting the spoon out of the way of Dean and the cheese.

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It was pretty strange, really. Dean thought so, at least--the scarecrow god was just some local legend with a cult following, but Psyche?

Then again, he'd seen some pretty strange stuff.

As soon as the spoon was out of the way, Dean sprinkled the pizza liberally with cheese, then moved on to toppings, adding some of pretty much everything (meatballs included). "Alright, I think that's it," he said, once he'd used up everything he'd collected.

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"I thought most people on your planet only believed in one god," she said quizzically at all Sam's talk about scarecrows and tulpas, whatever the hell that meant.

Starbuck picked up the pizza with her oven mitts on, circled round to the oven, opened the door with one hand and popped the thing in. "Now we wait something like fifteen or twenty minutes, I think." She took off the oven mitts and thwaped them down hard on the counter. "And don't think that just because I can use the oven for that means I'm gonna be feeding anyone on a regular basis." She actually could cook - she'd lived on her own at certain points in her life in her apartment - it's just that the food was completely tasteless.

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“Yeah, monotheism has become pretty popular over the years,” Sam said, drawing a finger along the edge of the spoon and trying the sauce. It was good. “In the western half of the world especially spiritual belief tends to be dominated by one God who is interpreted and worshiped differently by several different religions. But there’s still polytheism, too, including a widespread eastern religion which believes in a large number of gods but doesn't hold them to be the highest of all beings. And there are polytheists everywhere, in western and eastern countries, people who still follow older religions or reinterpreted versions of them.”

His stomach chose the moment Starbuck announced how long the pizza would take to rumble loudly, and he grinned and ducked his head.

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Dean gave Starbuck a yes, he's really related to me, can you believe it? look, then grinned and nodded in agreement with Sam's explanation.

"Aww, no free cooking?" Dean asked, smiling innocently. It wasn't that the food here was all that bad, or anything, but it got a little tiresome. Even the pizza made a nice change from the hot dogs and ice cream bars he usually ate (yes, ice cream was a perfectly acceptable dinner, thanks).

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((np! :D))

Starbuck fully approved of that look. Because really, the gene pool did some leaping around here. "That was... really educational, Sam." She was trying to be polite. Really, she was. The fact that she was blinking rapidly at Dean like she was trying not to fall asleep was very polite by her standards.

That innocent smile might work on those farmgirls where he came from, but it sure as hell didn't work on her. No matter how pretty it was. "There's plenty you can get from me for free, but food is definitely not one of them," she said with an eyebrow quirk, moving toward a crate of glasses. "What's everyone drinking?"

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Well, why did she ask if she didn't want to know? Sam rolled his eyes and shrugged a little to himself.

“What've they got?” he asked about the drinks, following Starbuck towards them. “Coke, Root Beer, Sprite, Powerade..." He settled on an orange Fanta after a moment's consideration. “Too bad they don't have real beer.”

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Dean's mouth twisted into a slight smirk at Starbuck's comment, but he quickly hid it, catching up to examine the drinks. "Coke sounds good," he said, filling one of the glasses. "And there is beer, somewhere. With that..." What was his name? It was from--that was it, that song. "That Crowley guy," he finished. Although he wasn't exactly eager to search for alcohol any more.

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"Not just him anymore," Starbuck informed them, filling her glass with root beer just because she had to know what the hell that tasted like. "John and his crazy-genius friend Daniel managed to make moonshine a while back. And unlike with Crowley, they don't seem to require any kind of tribute to get it. I've never met Crowley before though, so I don't know." Maybe she should give him a visit at some point just to scope out the rich and controlling aspect of the park..

She took a sip of the root beer and her lips puckered immediately. "Wow, that's enough sugar to put you in a coma. Oh, I should warn you though, that while the moonshine gets you plastered in a hurry, it tastes like engine fuel."

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“Psyche mentioned Crowley,” Sam said, pausing to drain half of his Fanta in one go. He wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand. “I was surprised to hear that there hadn’t been more commotion over one person taking control of the entire supply like that. Although she claimed he wasn’t too hard to persuade into sharing.”

He looked a little wary at the mention of the moonshine, although he didn’t say anything. When he’d said it was too bad there wasn’t beer he’d been thinking more about the fact that beer and pizza were supposed to be consumed together and less about getting drunk. Engine-oil moonshine sounded like it was entirely concerned with the latter.

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"I met him when I was waiting to be let in," Dean said. "He didn't seem too bad." Personally, he'd much rather go through whatever it was that Crowley wanted in exchange for alcohol than try anything homebrewed. Maybe he'd go look for Crowley at some point.

...On that note, there was someone else he needed to look for soon. "Hey, Starbuck, do you have any idea where the Cheshire Cat lives?" he asked. "Assuming he doesn't just sit at the entrance all day looking creepy."

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