Somewhere Cheap, Old Rose Harbor
"...and to this day, I can't so much as smell fried hingle without wanting to retch a little. The perils of mixing too many substances. Let my tale be a lesson to you, Miss Palmifer." Charlie grinned up at her, no inch of him (and there were admittedly not many) looking the least bit sorry about the whole affair.
The walk had been brief and easy; he had been mildly concerned when she had seemed cross with him back at his flat before he changed. Admittedly he had earned it, and not the way he usually did, which was by being so terribly funny and cutting. He should have told her about the hair bits faster--lesson learned. She had cleaned herself up in the end, though! So that was just fine. And there they were, walking to the bar side by side. That was fine, too. Not bad for being so out of practice with having friends, right? Right.
"And here we are! Somewhere Cheap!" Charlie gestured to the building they stood outside of with a flourish, as he had done before at the Duckling. There was very little he did without some dramatic gesture, it had to be admitted.
Somewhere Cheap was, contrary to the distinctly tongue-in-cheek name of the place, not actually the cheapest or least reputable bar in the area. Charlie considered it to be sort of the top of the low-brow list, really--it certainly hadn't the aura of barely sub-criminal that some of his common haunts did. Not the Kaleidoscope by any means, and not even the Duckling, but it was a nice enough sort of place. The patrons were largely a solid mix of the more middle-class humans, wicks, and even a few gollies besides himself. The proprietor, a Mr. Renshaw, was a wick; while he tended bar and directed the front-of-house, his human wife ran the kitchen. It was more of a pub than a proper bar; Charlie hadn't had dinner yet, and had only remembered when he was thinking about where to go. He hadn't had lunch, either, actually, or breakfast--he had been tinkering all day without much thinking about paltry concerns like feeding himself. Their food was, like everything else, acceptable and only middlingly priced.
What really recommended the place and made it such a popular neighborhood destination was the staff, who were all a charming mix of friendly and rude, and the decor. Charlie pushed open the door and held it for Chrysanthe, letting bright laughter spill out onto the street. The warm glow of oil lamps touched on tables covered by honest-to-goodness tablecloths, all in coordinating colors. The walls were covered in a hodgepodge of what Renshaw described as "found art"--garbage welded together and coated in bright paint, as far as Charlie could tell. They were cheerful enough though, and nestled in between them here and there were a collection of lithographs, paintings and even a few spectragrams. All of them were themed around scenes from ordinary life across the Rose.
Charlie actually particularly enjoyed the specs, which were (as far as he'd been told) taken by a spoke photographer who had lived in the city a few years before moving on. They were much less stiff-faced and straight-backed than the ones in his family home in Vienda; a few even bordered on the bawdy. Charlie's appreciation for aesthetics (beyond those of his own lovely self, of course) was without much refinement, but he liked these. Sometimes a new one would come in with a price written neatly on a sign underneath of it, far out of his currently meager range. One day, he thought, he would have established himself enough to buy them.
"I hope you haven't eaten yet?" Charlie raised his eyebrows and his voice together; it was a bit loud inside the pub. He hadn't thought to ask Chrysanthe before they arrived, driven more by his own needs than consideration for hers. She could always not get anything, he reasoned, if she didn't want to. While she replied, he directed them to an empty table not too far from the bar itself.