II.
Vulcan. It was a Vulcan. Joseph secretly congratulated himself, remembering his evening of obsessive examination of a group of people he considered now to be not-so-detestable. Disgusting still, since they were, you know, nerds, but not as detestable as he would have considered them to be as before.
The same group had appeared again that evening, dressed in the same costumes. Joseph hadn't observed them very well the day before, but he did now, and he could distinguish them after watching each and every one of them. They all wore red Enterprise uniforms; two of them were Klingons, one thin and soldierly, one thick and thunderous - one was a Vulcan, short, slim and unassuming, with a rather faraway look in his eyes - and the other was a rather "abstract"-looking human, full of bulges and a hearty laugh. He reminded Joseph a little of Picasso's cubist paintings.
Some other waiter had seated them and waited on them. He continued to watch them from afar, sometimes coming very near to observe, and this was when he found out it was the Vulcan who had drawn on the napkin. As they sat and waited to be served, the Vulcan had quietly and carefully pressed his napkin flat before himself, and fetching out what looked like a ball pen from his pocket, begun to draw on it as the others chatted on. Sometimes they'd talk to him and he'd look up and reply and smile – and my, did that ever brighten his face – and then he'd turn to focus his attention back again on his napkin, continuing from where he'd stopped last. Joseph found himself hovering close once too often, trying to look at how the piece was progressing.
The diners were piling in, and Joseph found himself called away and rather busy waiting on other diners. The evening wore on, and the crowd eventually died down – thankfully the four of them were still seated there. He turned around for a bit to place a glass of juice on the table he was waiting on, relieved. But when he turned around again to look, to his horror, he found that they had left and his colleague had begun to clear the table up. Uttering a loud, "STOOOOOOOOPPP!" which temporarily rendered the boy immobile, Joseph rushed to the table and snatched up a napkin from where he knew the Vulcan had been sitting.
His heart sank when he saw it. It was partially ruined. Some runny gravy had fallen on the napkin and spotted it, smearing the ink and causing it to bleed. He took it to the back and dabbed it with some tissues, hoping the water wouldn't seep in more. It dried and after a while, he put the napkin in his pocket and carried on with his work. After a bit he began to smile. It was a cute picture, in any case. The lot had called for a bit of seafood that night. On the napkin was a picture of a crab with a fancy border and a scroll lettered simply, "CRAB".
Caption: Image 2: Damaged Crab