A/N: This little bit of crack was inspired by a thread over at sixwordstories. The upshot is that Nero has been given to believe that red Jell-O is a dangerous substance that eats people, and so decides he needs to investigate this idea. The only thing I lay claim to here is Sharley, who I also play over there. Please do not take this seriously in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.
Night shifts at Safeway were usually so dull as to be positively mind-numbing, except Fridays. Friday was party night for everyone fortunate enough to not have to work weekends, and this particular store tended to have a run on both beer and toilet plungers, often at the same time.
Business often died down by about one in the morning, though, and the store was empty enough when Sharley hauled out the Windex and paper towels to wipe down the closed registers. She'd only been at this job perhaps three months, and had no idea how long she'd stay, but the monotony could be almost…pleasant.
"Don't go so damn fast this time. Otherwise you'll still have an hour to stand around and clean your fingernails."
She sighed. Jimmy, the most obnoxious of her cadre of voices; of course he couldn't leave her alone more than two hours at a time. Though they'd plagued her all her life, to this day they had never told her precisely what they were - to herself she'd dubbed them auditory satellites, some kind of aural moons that orbited her head.
"But they were so nice and clean last week." That was Layla, almost terminally optimistic as ever.
"Hey, hey, check it out-weirdoes at twelve o'clock." Sinsemilla, who had been wandering somewhere over by the window, drifted back to hover just behind Sharley's right shoulder, and all of them immediately saw what she meant.
Well over a dozen…men…in black overcoats, all shaven-headed, with what looked like Maori facial tattoos and-pointed ears? What the fuck? Sharley had seen weirder in the Other Place, but it wasn't the sort of thing you expected in a goddamn Safeway. Some kind of gang? With a fetish for latex make-up?
"They look like they've all just come back from an audition for Road Warrior! The Musical," Layla whispered, and Sharley snorted before she could help it. One of them, presumably the leader, turned to look at her, and she carefully looked away before she could start laughing outright. He had to be even taller than she was, and she was an even six foot, and looked rather like the sort of person who would eat puppies for breakfast. Probably not a guy she wanted pissed off at her right now, but sometimes she just couldn't help it.
"I wonder what they're looking for," she murmured. Whatever it was, it was bound to be damned amusing.
-p
Terran grocery stores were…well, terra incognita. All Nero knew was that this Jell-O was supposedly sold here - and the fact that it was to be found amongst ordinary human food made him seriously doubt its effectiveness, but the thing had to be tested. And after all, there was a certain warped logic in the idea of hiding it in plain sight, as it were, though the fatal flaw in that theory was that he couldn't imagine anyone wanting to put such a thing where any idiot could walk in off the street and buy it. Oh well. They'd know soon enough.
He left Ayel in charge of working out the bewildering mathematics behind Terran currency, and ordered the rest of his men to fan out to search the aisles. All he knew of this Jell-O was that it was sold powdered in small boxes - which, given the haphazard and apparently random organization of the shelving, did not do him much good. The only thing he and his men could really do was prowl each and every aisle, reading tags, trying to figure out what the hell half this stuff really was. Spaghetti? Cheerios? And what in all the hells was 'soy milk'? He'd never heard of any animal called a 'soy', though it was true he knew little at all about the fauna of Earth.
He ran into Idan, his engineer, at the very end of an aisle - the man looked as frustrated as Nero felt, and could do no more than shake his head. They swapped aisles, and Nero stared at neat rows of cardboard boxes and tin cans, all bright colors and bold writing, none of which said 'Jell-O'. Damn. His booted feet were loud on the tile, too loud in the otherwise quiet store-at least there seemed to be no other, what was the word, customers? No other customers to get in their way - in his current mood he might just shoot anyone who tried.
After a good fifteen minutes all his men gathered with him at the back corner of the store, mostly empty-handed - Ayel had discovered some sticky sweet called a Snickers bar that he insisted everyone needed to sample. Nero, who was fairly certain you were supposed to pay for things before you ate them, shook his head and ate it anyway.
"It must be here somewhere," he said, furtively wiping chocolate off his lip. "He said Terran grocery stores, and this is a Terran grocery store." Romulans weren't what you might call fans of logic, but even they could grasp the idea that grocery store ought to equal Jell-O.
Ayel, struck with sudden inspiration, threw what remained of his candy wrapper behind the metal shelving. "Maybe we should just ask the woman at the front. She works here, she ought to know where it is."
Nero frowned. He hadn't liked the look of the woman at the front, at the - what was it called - the cash register. He didn't think he liked the blue hair, and he knew he didn't appreciate the snort, or its following smirk. Still, if she worked here it was her task to direct people to whatever goods they wanted, therefore there was no reason not to ask.
The whole group trooped up to the front of the store, a terribly incongruous sight among all the prosaic displays of paper towels and cases of pop. The woman didn't quite smirk at the whole massed herd of them, but her eyebrows went up in what Nero thought was far too amused a fashion for a mere human. Her eyes were bizarre, too - they didn't match at all; both were dark, but the right had a lighter section that was nearly orange, and the left a larger chunk of blue. He didn't like that, either.
"We need Jell-O," he said, somewhat imperiously and without preamble. "Where would we find it?"
-p
Somehow, through some miracle of effort, Sharley didn't snort again - but it was a damn near thing. Jell-O? These obviously pissed-off, tattooed who-knew-what's wanted Jell-O?
"What the hell for?" Jimmy muttered, zooming in to hang out just behind her head. "What the fuck could these guys want to do with Jell-O?"
"Um, look at them, Jimmy. It's probably best not to ask." Sinsemilla paced Sharley at her shoulder as she moved around the counter, and that did make her sporfle - she just couldn't help it. She could feel the head honcho glaring at the back of her head, and that only made her want to laugh even harder.
"It's down here with baking supplies," she said, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from cracking up entirely as they moved after her en masse. "What kind are you looking for?"
There was some quiet confabulation behind her, in a language she couldn't even guess at; it was guttural enough to be German, but German it definitely wasn't. "The red kind," their leader said at last, intoning it as though it were some great and wonderful substance.
"Not even a flavor," Jimmy observed, from somewhere at the back of the group. "Just 'the red kind'. What a bunch of weirdoes."
"Hey, Sharley, I think these ears are real." Sinsemilla was…God, what the hell was she doing right next to that guy's ear? Thank God he couldn't hear her.
"…Huh. Sharley, I think she's right. They're way too good to be fake." Jeeze, even Kurt was out of hiding; if she didn't get these guys out of here soon she was going to start ranting at nothing in front of God and everyone.
"How much of it do you need?" she asked instead, when they reached the stacks on the shelving - she had no idea how they could have missed it, really, it was so obvious. When she turned to look at them she saw the whole group huddled in a knot, again conversing in that odd language. This went on for she didn't know how long - so long that she finally gave up paying attention and started picking at her ragged cuticles.
Finally, Head Honcho turned back to her. "We'll take everything you have," he said, with solemn gravity.
"Everything?" she said, incredulous. "Are you sure? That's…a hell of a lot of Jell-O."
"Maybe they're making a swimming pool," Layla said brightly, and Sharley had to turn away and smother a choking laugh in her hand.
"Okay, uh, give me a minute," she gasped, biting down hard on her incipient giggling. "I've got to go get a box." She hurried off down the aisle with what had to be unseemly haste, until she'd reached the swinging doors to the back room and dared speak again.
"Will you all shut up? I don't want them trying to rob us or anything because I'm laughing at their Jell-O."
"But come on, it's hilarious," Jimmy protested.
"I don't care. I'm getting this box and we're getting them the hell out of here.
"I think she was laughing at us."
Nero looked at Ayel, who was staring up at the ceiling and scowling. "Why would she do that?" The ways of Terrans were a mystery, but he saw no reason she should have laughed at them.
"I don't know, but she was." Ayel seemed quite convinced of it, and quite annoyed because of it.
"She's bringing us the Jell-O. The Jell-O is all that matters." Nero said it so fiercely that he at least didn't hear the hastily choked-off laugh that emanated from the other end of the aisle. Ayel did, though, and scowled blackly when a hand-truck stacked a good six feet high with crates of Jell-O turned the corner. Somewhere behind it was the woman, who was doing a very poor job of maintaining a straight face, however much she was trying.
"Okay, this is it." Yes, there was a great deal of amusement in her voice, and a certain amount of what could only be called glee as she wheeled it up to the register. "Seventy-three pounds of red Jell-O. Ought to last you a few decades or so. Now, you realize once you've opened it up you can't return it, right?"
Nero blinked; how and why would you return such a thing? "I see," he said, not knowing what else to say. He was beginning to agree with Ayel; the damn woman was laughing at them, for whatever mysterious reason. Not out loud, not really, but he could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes when she punched keys seemingly at random on that thing, that register.
"Okay," she said, swiping some sort of scanning device over one of the plastic-wrapped cases. "That'll be two hundred and seventeen sixty-four."
Nero had no idea what that meant, but Ayel was the one who choked now-was that a lot of money, Nero wondered? He had no idea how much something like Jell-O was supposed to cost. He watched Ayel, who carefully stood at the counter and tried to count out what looked like a disproportionately large wad of green bills. There was palpable tension around his second-in-command, the lines of his face taut with strain as he tried to keep track of all the paper and coins. The woman - her nametag said 'Sharley', didn't it? - leaned against the thin wall beside her register and watched him with those odd mismatched eyes, until she finally seemed to take pity on him.
"Here, that's too many twenties, and I don't need all those nickels. Just - look, just let me count, okay? I'll give you back the change when I'm done." She actually shooed his hands away, fingers flying as she organized the coins into piles that meant nothing to Nero, and after a few more moments and complicated button-pushing on the register, the bulk of the money was in the drawer and a slip of paper was in Ayel's hand.
"Have fun with your pool party," she said, giving them a wave and a smile that was entirely too sunny, and as soon as Ayel had manhandled the load of Jell-O out the door Nero could hear her laughing, hysterically and helplessly, at he had no idea what. Terrans. He'd shoot her if he didn't think it wasn't worth the effort.
It was a good thing there weren't any more customers in the store, because Sharley was actually sitting down beside the counter, trying and failing to get her breath back. She'd laughed so hard she'd actually cried, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and ruining her mascara. All she wished was that she could have got pictures - she'd pay to get a copy of the security footage, though unfortunately they wouldn't have sound.
"How much you want to bet they'll try to return it all tomorrow?" Layla asked, somewhere right in front of her. "Probably stuffed back into the opened box, no less."
"I wouldn't take that bet. I'm just glad I won't be here when they do."
Yes, completely random and stupid, but I just had to. I can only imagine Nero's reaction when he realizes that Jell-O is not, in fact, some kind of people-eating wonder-weapon. XD