The Fast Food district is good for lots of things - getting into drunken brawls, stepping on hypodermic needles, that sort of thing - but it isn't necessarily the place you go looking for a good time.

The bar in question was once called the Toppled Stool, but has over the years lost its identity somewhere in the cracks between endless management switches. It has also lost the sign that announced its name, and no one has ever bothered to replace it. The miracle was that the place is still there.

The inside has a sort of half-assed quality. Everything is done in a cheap impression of fake wood, which is mostly old and cracked and tired, but is relatively clean. Red and green tinsel (from Christmas '96, and still in relatively good shape) bedecks the bar, behind which a bored girl is serving up evil looking beverages in smudgy glasses. The sound system is blasting a fuzzy rendition of Akon's Don't Matter, a bit too loudly.

Tatters is sitting at the bar, running his finger along the rim of a glass half-full of cheap whiskey. He fits right into the scene. Five o'clock shadow, dirty hair pulled back into a ponytail and secured with a rubber band. He's wearing faded jeans, a holey white tee-shirt and scuffed work boots.

He perhaps doesn't look his best, but then again, no one in the bar really does. People at their best find somewhere else to drink. It's just been one of those days when the fact that your life is mostly boring, generally uninspiring, rather lonely and totally pointless hits you hard. Then you realise that you do too many drugs, and then you remember why.

He drains his glass and sets it down on the streaky brown counter with a clatter. The streaks are part of the 'wood' design, not dirt.

The girl looks his way. "You want another one?"

He nods, fishes some money out of his pocket.

The whisky is nasty but cheap.

Wit didn't usually leave his apartment unless he had to go work or if God Himself (or some equivalent of it) ordained it, and since Benjamin Franklin's opinion of beer was as close as he was going to get to reading scripture, the fact that he was out of booze seemed like divine intervention to him. Wit, however, was probably one of the more lazier employees in CutCo. - he didn't really do any company work unless he was too low on cash to pay for his apartment that month, and even then he was usually selling things that were not cutlery related. It was because of the fact he had not actually had any official appointments in two and a half weeks that the brown-haired man found himself in the Toppled Stool. He needed something to liquor up his thoughts, but he sure didn't have the cash to do it the right way.

He looked out of place. Wit's fashion sense usually included ugly sweaters and coffee-stained ties (he didn't like coffee, but he'd tried to hit on too many women in too many coffee shops), and the former turned out to be the venue tonight - a maroon sweater with a collared shirt stuck under it and a pair of dark denim jeans that looked like they'd gone through the washing machine one too many times to still be dark. He had neglected to brush his curly hair before venturing out of his apartment, but since his hair usually looked like a disaster no matter what he did he couldn't really tell the difference.

He managed to walk the length of the building two or three times before electing to seat himself at a bar stool; he could see a NASCAR race on the bar's only TV from here, and maybe if he was lucky he'd be left alone. Wit didn't generally get angry when he was drunk, but he liked to fall into a sleepy daze without outside interference.

"Hey." He glanced to his side; there was some rough-looking fellow at his side who looked like he was the kind guy who was around here a lot. "This place got anything tasteless?" he asked, because he figured his only other option was total crap.

Tatters looks up from his newly acquired glass of whisky. It's an improbable shade of yellow that almost resembles CitrusFresh All-Purpose Cleaner. It's not that bad, though, as long as you drink it fast and don't try to smell it.

He looks Wit up and down and then up again, his face perhaps betraying some confusion as to what the hell this guy is doing here. Wit looks somehow both too well-dressed and not stylish enough. Or at least, not in the right style. And the maroon jumper is gonna kill Tatter faster then the music in the bar is. Though perhaps not as fast as the whisky.

"Erm," he says. "I dunno, try vodka?"

Vodka has never tasted like anything and presumably never will.

"Mostly it stops being a problem after a couple," he advises the guy - the guy looks like he probably doesn't know much of anything. "The trick is to get the first few down fast."

Wit liked to think he had standards, as he'd never been driven to such desperation that he'd end up at the Toppled Stool. His usual choice to go drinking at as the Twa Corbies - he liked tourists, really, and tourists weren't about to harass him as he drank some grade-A booze that actually tasted like something he wouldn't mind having in his system for a while. He, personally, was rather fond of vodka, but he didn't put it past this place to turn it into something utterly uninteresting.

He figured he'd take his advice, though. He looked like the sort of person a guy would want to ask in a place like this. Wit wasn't really sure how much faith and trust he should put in a stranger he would be willing to bet was in places like this often, but he'd never been very good at making responsible decisions. "Vodka it is," he said, with what was as much as a smile as he dared to put on at the moment. "Thanks."

And then, because he just couldn't get enough of making an ass out himself, "You around here often?"

Tatters takes a gulp of the whisky - so called, and continues staring at Wit with grey-eyed surprise. He wonders vaguely if the guy is trying to pick him up. It's possible, but honestly Tats isn't sure he could quite stomach going home with that jumper.

"Erm," he says - that's how he frequently finds himself starting his sentences - "nope. Not really. I came here a long time ago, when Bob still owned it." Although this guy pretty clearly has not a clue who Bob was. Bob had renamed the place the Tipsy Bird, but it hadn't stuck. The names never stuck, probably because no one ever put up a new sign. "This is my first time back since I've been back here." He doesn't bother to return the question because the answer is, to his mind, pretty bloody obvious.

Where he was is pretty clear from his accent. Depending on how good you were with accents, you could narrow it down - Britain, England, Yorkshire, Sheffield.

Wit was only good at the 'what is this person really like based one what I've talked to him about?' game when he was tipsy, and he hadn't even gotten his first drink yet. Instead he looked blandly at the TV as some NASCAR driver whose name he didn't know pulled into a pit stop and the narrator talked about things he couldn't hear over the music. It didn't make any difference; Wit didn't like NASCAR anyways.

"Oh," was all he could say, since he was, after all, a master of conversation. He thought about asking a philosophical sort of question while he waited for the girl behind the counter to stop occupying herself with what looked like the only man in the bar who might have a future if he tried hard enough. Since he couldn't think of any questions to ask about God or maybe whether or not this guy thought cats really could scare away Egyptian beasts of yore (Wit was a sucker for the Mummy movies), he said instead, "You been away from Bayfield for a while or something?"

"Yeah," Tatters agrees. He takes another gulp of his drink, hoping to numb the sheer weirdness of Wit's existence. "I was."

Not having a whole lot more to say on the subject, he looks over at the TV screen. Even growing up in American, NASCAR never really made any sense to him. Wow, driving cars around and around. Whee. What fun. Not. Give him a decent game of football, or soccer or whatever you wanted to call it, any day.

"You like that?"

He jerks his head towards the telly to indicate what he's talking about, possibly because he suspects Wit's too stupid to figure it out by himself. The gesture may also be instinctive. "I never did get the point of it," he admits. "It's only about who's got the better car, isn't it? And they go 'round. Not very exciting. Mark Knopfler did an amazing song about it, though. Stunning guitar piece at the end."

The fact that no one (other then Tatter) who wasn't a teenager in the late seventies is gonna remember who Mark Knopfler is is not a problem in Tatter's mind.