spaghwetti

[spaghwetti]

Cherry was in that restaurant thing Joe has. He was dipping dry spaghettis in a glass of wine and then eating them and Joe made the face from that picture every time. Cherry had started doing this just to be annoying but now he liked it more than normal food.

"You know," said Joe, trying to drown out the wet crunching for even a moment, "using Carla is cheating. You can't just have a robonic skateboard that tells you angles or reminds you what an ollie is or says 'look out, there is a wall directly in front of you'." Joe was still bitter about the many times he had been caught out by a wall being directly in front of him.

"Wrong, because you are a gorilla," said Cherry, who was contractually obligated to use the insult at least once per fanfic and figured he might as well get it out of the way. "Carla's assistance is no more 'cheating' than being mentored by a superior skateboarder, or putting a copy of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 instruction manual under your pillow so the knowledge seeps into your brain overnight. Learning from the best isn't cheating."

"But Carla isn't 'the best'," protested Joe. "She's not a real person who had to learn all this stuff slowly and painfully from within a weak, fallible flesh-prison. She's an artificial intelligence!"

"Wrong again. Twice in thirty seconds. Still not even close to your record." Cherry performed an action that was fundamentally irrelevant to the narrative but served to break up his dialogue a bit. "Carla isn't an artificial intelligence."

"But you always call her an AI!"

"Yes, to throw people off the scent," said Cherry. "But it doesn't stand for Artificial Intelligence. It stands for Apparitions Imprisoned. Carla is full of the ghosts of dead skateboarders."

Joe's jaw dropped. "You're kidding."

"Not at all. Every time Adam hits someone in the face with his skateboard, killing them instantly, their ghost goes into Carla. There are millions of them in there at this point." Cherry took a sip of his wine, its rich crimson hue tainted by floating spaghetti bits. "It's like a kind of skater heaven, except that all of them are very much in constant pain. Offering me skateboarding assistance is their only reprieve."

Joe paused for a moment. He had never seen this side of Cherry before, the side that had a bunch of tortured ghosts trapped inside a skateboard. Sure, back in high school he'd had a haunted rollerskate, but that was just one ghost, and besides, they were young. This was on another level entirely.

A thought crossed his mind, and Joe broke his silence. "You're as bad as Adam. Or possibly worse than Adam. I haven't really decided on the specifics yet but the important thing is that a comparison to Adam is being made here so this is the bit where we get mad at each other about it."

Cherry fell silent, but the look on his face revealed his true emotions: angry but also betrayed and upset in a hot way. Adam had hit him in the face with a skateboard twice, once during the TV run and then a second time for the DVD version, but he hadn't died from it and gone inside a skateboard. Why had he been left behind? Was he not good enough? These were the thoughts that swirled around his head every moment of every day, except for when he was thinking of more interesting stuff, which was most of the time. Anyway he was sad so every bad thing he'd done was actually fine.

"I'm glad we could get that settled," said Joe, and now they were friends again and maybe more.

Cherry reached for another spaghetti. He crunched this one without dipping it, a clear signifier that he recognised the residual tension which still hung in the air. "The ghost thing was a lie," he said. "Ghosts aren't real. You can just download Carla on the app store."

"Really? Then how come every skater doesn't have one?"

"She costs £1.99."

"I'm not paying that when Candy Crush is free!" said Joe immediately, repulsed on an instinctual level.

"Exactly," smiled Cherry.

There was a moment of relative peace, broken only by the gentle clinking of dry pasta against wine glass. In the corner, Carla's subtle pink glow intensified for a moment. "The curses of the dead be upon ye," she said.

Joe glanced over. "What'd she say?"

"Nothing," said Cherry. "How much do I owe you for the spaghettis? Because I'm not paying it."

Later they fucked(?)