Water Cooler Talk

July 14, 2018:

Zatanna Zatara and Cassie Sandsmark run into each other in the Titans Tower kitchen after their separate efforts to help with relief duties in Hell's Kitchen.

Characters

NPCs: None.

Mentions: Red Robin, Giovanni Zatara, Cassie's Mom, Iso, Caitlin Fairchild

Mood Music: [*\# None.]


Fade In…

Clean up in Hell's Kitchen is still ongoing considering the massive scale of the bombings that leveled ten blocks of the New York City proper. But at the very least, Zatanna is able to take a little bit of a break. Situated in the kitchen area of Titan's Tower, she is busily using the blender to make herself a fruit smoothie, dressed in her typical blacks. The Titans is definitely a 'costume' culture, but she has never really taken to it, opting for civilian clothes most days. But with relief efforts well in hand, she looks a little less worn out than she has in the last few days.

The smoothie is pink, and after adding another banana into it, she works it out of the blender and pours herself a glass.

—-

Ten entire blocks. Even with all that Cassie's seen thus far, it's a bit difficult to process that so much damage was done in so little time and it's also enough to leave her in a bit of a frustrated mood that all she can do at this point is help with the aftermath.

She's absolutely part of the 'costume culture' (despite her efforts to break away from it), and steps into the kitchen area geared up with her hands in her pockets, a slight slouch and a frown upon her usually sunny features. At least until she realizes that she isn't here by herself in which suddenly a smile forms, "H- Hey! Woah, hi Zatanna!" she blurts out with flushed cheeks and an incredibly awkward laugh. "I didn't realize you got back already. uhhh.. What's that drink you have there?"

—-

"Hey, Cassie," Zatanna says, looking up and flashing the blonde a tired smile. "Strawberry-banana smoothie. Want some?" She isn't done with hers, however. It's only when she puts a garnish of sliced strawberries on top and sticks a straw in that she finally picks it up and takes a sip. One eats first with her eyes, after all, and the principle sticks whenever she makes something home made.

I didn't realize you got back already.

"Just taking a break. I'm just helping with clean-up now that people have been brought to the hospital." She had been part of the first response detail, and while she hasn't performed any incredulous feats, like turn back time, or bring people back from the dead, in the site of the trouble, what she has been doing, mostly, is healing injuries. "You?"

—-

"Absolutely," Casssandra's immediately enticed by the color- Especially so compared to that greenish stuff that Tim seems satsified with. "That sounds really good right now, thank you."

She's quick to join her teammates' side, with the occasional nod during the update. "Oh, you know the usual- Mostly the heavy lifting. Working with my strengths and all," she replies with a weaker smile. "I'm just here for more of a mental recharge. It's just so.. What's the word.. I guess 'heavy'? Yeah, the atmosphere's really heavy over there."

—-

She pours another glass for Cassie, and adds that strawberry garnish and straw before handing it to the Amazon. "Yeah," Zatanna says quietly, glancing down at her own drink. "There's no helping it….the death toll is significant, but they're just finding more and more under all of that." There's a glance over a Cassie. "Tim thinks that maybe this happened because of money - apparently Iso gave him the idea. Some major redevelopment scheme. If that's true, I don't know whether to be mad or disgusted."

She pauses. "Maybe both. You know…I've been born into a world where everything is just as wonderful as it is terrifying. Daddy and I have seen some extremely disturbing stuff over the years. Monsters. Demons. But it never ceases to amaze me just how awful human beings can be with one another."

—-

After the glass is poured, Cassie graciously accepts with an appreciative nod, but it isn't long after that her jaw ever so slightly drops as she looks to Zatanna with an expression of complete horror. ".. Money. I… Guess that's plausible."

She draws her lips inward as she focuses her attention on the glass- She doesn't want to believe something like that could motivate so much carnage. She falls silent for what feels like a minute afterward. "Yeah… It's… "I'm not really sure what the word I'm looking for, is. I just wish we could spend more time helping people bring out the best out of one another than cleaning up the messes of the worst I guess."

Another moment of silence before she shakes her head, "A- Anyway, you said 'wonderful'? Like what?"

—-

I just wish we could spend more time helping people bring out the best out one another.

There's a smile at that, directed Cassie's way. "Yeah," Zatanna admits, taking another sip of her smoothie. "Me too." The world would be a better place if it was like that, wouldn't it?

After a pause, she sighs. "Tim's hardly ever wrong though," she murmurs. "Not about things like this." Probably all that ridiculous training he has received, from assassins to forensics and criminology, whatever the World's Best Detective can throw at him. But her admiration there is plain; she is no genius, she doesn't have a photographic memory. This is the second year in which she has spent around the likes of him and Jessica Jones, and it never fails to astound her as to how they could figure things out from the bits and pieces of the puzzle laid out before them.

But then Wonder Girl asks about the kind of wonders her father - her world, the realm in which science holds very little sway - has introduced her to, and she grins, lifting her shoulders in a shrug. "Rainbow pools in the middle of a desert," she says softly, toying with her straw. "Secret marketplaces under the oldest places in the world. Dragon pearls in Hong Kong. Supernatural…all that stuff, it can be pretty dark and horrifying, but it can be pretty amazing, too. The kind of places where anything is literally possible."

—-

Cassie feels her spirit lift following Zatanna's agreement, and it's enough for her to raise the glass to her lips. But before she can take that sip, she cringes, "Y- Yeah, that's true. It's just kind of a mystery sometimes, you know? Like, I would never have guessed money would be involved and it makes me wonder a little about the way I think. I feel kind of naive."

Her lips twist, but following Zatanna's descriptions of the fantastic, she does appear to be in a bit of awe- coincidentally it makes the smoothie taste just a little sweeter. "That's amazing!" she then exclaims, "It's funny, it actually reminds me a little of me and my mom- She's an archaeologist. And… Since she's a single mom she had to take me around on her excavations when I was little. When you were saying all that, it made me think about how similar things were for me." a grin follows. "No rainbow pools, though, most of the time it was very mundane stuff but I asbolutely got spooked now and then."

—-

"Me, too," Zatanna mutters. "But I think it's more because I don't want to believe something like this can happen for something so…"

With a sigh, she shakes her head, and changes topics entirely. "I think Tim did mention that," the witch says. "So your Mom is a Dr. Sandsmark? Kind of like Indiana Jones, then?" She laughs. "That's pretty cool. We usually traveled because of Daddy's work, but it's not because of what he actually did for a living. He was a stage magician, so when he would perform, he would go to Vegas, New York, Monte Carlo, those sorts of places. But when he's being tasked to investigate something…." She lifts her shoulders in a shrug. "That's the Great Zatara for you, though. Hiding a tree in the middle of the forest, to keep the fact that his magic was actually real under wraps."

—-

"Yeah, that's her!" Cassandra sounds a little surprised; though considering Zatanna knows Tim's name, she realizes that really shouldn't be at this point. The correlation with Dr Jones, though, that's responded with a smirk as she gives a small shrug, "Very rarely. I can recall only having dug up two magical artifacts in our many, *many* years if we're talking that kind of excitement."

Her brows raise, "Geez. That sounds like something you would read out of a book. If your dad wrote novels, I'd probably be way more interested in reading the Mystery genre," she says, though it's followed by a pause, "O- Oh, I mean.. Like. In the non-fiction section. Ah ha ha.."

Though speaking of Tim, there is one other thing she wants to mention, but she holds it to herself for a moment.

—-

"Yeah, well. Daddy's a magician, if he wasn't a bit of a mystery, he's not doing his job right," Zatanna replies with her own smirk, albeit it is a rueful thing. She is exhausted, perhaps the expression can't help but be somewhat wan - but she feels his absence more than she could admit to anyone.

Taking a drink of her smoothie, at the hesitant expression on the blonde's face, her brows furrow. "What?" she wonders.

—-

Cassie suddenly sits up a bit more straight, "Oh! Uh, geez.. You can read me llike a book already, huh?" followed by a nervous laugh- She constantly forgets how expressive she can be so she can't help but be a little embarrassed getting 'caught'. "Anyway, I was just wondering if you knew that Tim's birthday is coming up… It's on the nineteenth. I just wasn't certain when the right time to bring that up was, that's all."

—-

"Tim's birthday? Oh, yeah, I know!" Zatanna's expression brightens visibly. "I brought him a cake last year and a small gift. Are we going to try and get together for it, or something? I know it's…I mean the timing is probably bad, but I'm pretty sure everyone could use a break also." An exasperated look falls over her. "Good luck trying to get him out of the lab, though. I think he will if we ask."

—-

"I'm.. Actually still thinking about that," Cassie replies, though she's relieved that her comment gets the reaction it does from Zatanna. "On one hand, like, we all are a group? But on the other, like, only a handfull of us even know his name so I really don't know the best way to handle it this year."

"I'm glad you mentioned the cake, though, because I'm actually planning to bake one from scratch!"

Sound the alarms!

"Cait said she'd help."

Oh.

Finaly she gives a wave of her hand, "Anyway don't worry too much about getting him out of the lab, I can pull that off. Also, this smoothie? It tastes way better than his by the way."

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