Lor hung the phone up on the wall of the kitchen, sighing. "Alright, pizza's on its way."

"Edible pizza?" Reggie yelled from the living room.

"For us, anyway. Dil can have the medium pineapple and anchoivies all to himself, thanks."

"Mankind is just yet to understand my genius," Dil said, putting his feet up on the coffee table, only to get them smacked down by Phil. "Hey!"

"Hey yourself. We're going to eat off this table in a short while and I don't want my pizza to taste like anchovies or your feet."

"You're turning into a...grown up or something, Phil."

"It's less responsibility and more laziness." Phil reminded him. "I live here, so I have to clean up. Or at least, argue with Lor over who has to clean up."

Dil thought about this for a second. "You sacrifice a lot to be married, dude."

"Yeah, but there are perks."

"You get to put on weight?"

Reggie stared at the two of them for a moment in what looked something like abject horror. "I pity whatever poor woman ends up marrying you, Dylan."

"Don't. She won't deserve your pity - she'll be smoking hot."

From Here On
Episode 4: "30 Minutes or it's Free"
by Acepilot & Lord Malachite

Phil DeVille - Lor McQuarrie - Dil Pickles - Reggie Rocket

"Smokin' hot?" Reggie asked, opening the fridge and pulling a longneck bottle of beer out of a cardboard box. "By whose standards?" She asked,swimping the corkscrew the Devilles kept hanging on a magnet hook and using it to pop the bottle open. She took a long pull off the bottle, frowning slightly. "Hey, what gives? I agree to spend a perfectly good Saturday night mooching off of you guys, and the classiest beer in this place is a High Life?"

"Sorry," Phil said, "but can we pause for a moment and bask in the oxymoron that is 'classiest beer'?"

"Save it, scotch boy."

"Scotch isn't meant for getting plastered off of. It's an acquired taste. Kind of like anchovies. Or my father-in law."

"Not funny." Lor shouted from the living room.

"Anyway, I don't drink beer, so that's what you get for being too lazy to do the bottle shop run yourself."

Reggie glared at him and turned to Dil. "I'll give you five bucks to run down the street and get me something decent."

"Too late for booze runs. You'll just have to enjoy the high life while we wait for the pizza," Dil told her

Reggie slumped back down on the couch and nursed her longneck. "You guys have no taste."

"I would be careful bandying that phrase around. I've seen your CD collection," Phil told her.

"Why, because the albums I own can still be heard on the radio today?" Reggie asked.

"So can mine. Minus the agonizingly unfunny DJs and ads for underage teenie bopper clubs," Phil said.

"I take it back," Dil said. "I don't think you've become a grown up at all."

"When you grow up with a twin sister, arguing is an art you learn to master early and often," Phil smirked.

"You mastered arguing? Lil might have. You were just along for the ride."

Any possible retort Phil might have made was cut short by the sound of the phone ringing. Dil snatched it off the end table and hit recieve. "DeVille Pizzeria, we never close. Oh, hey Lil. Good timing. Who always won your arguments? You or Phil?"

"Give me that!" Phil attempted to snatch the phone from his friend, while the red-haired man played keep away.

"Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought, you might want to remind him of that, though."

Phil moved to slump back into the chair, only to run into another body. He turned to see his wife smirking triumphantly up at him. He growled at her before turning back to Dil. "Of course she'd say that. She can't lose this argument if you're the one holding the phone. What does she want, anyway?"

Dil chuckled at some kind of joke between himself and the absent DeVille sister. "Right. Right. I don't know. Let me ask." Dil lowered the handset onto his lap. "Lil says she needs to know where you keep the spare mop and bucket."

"They should be out the back near the coffee beans. Why?"

Dil relayed the message and paused to listen to the response. "She says, 'just in case'."

Phil stared at him for a moment, before dropping down on to the arm of the chair himself. "I'm not going in to work."

"I forbid you to go to work." Lor added. "You spend entirely too much time in that place lately.

"Now that we've finally got some reliable help, that should change." Phil leaned back in his chair, looking up into the eyes of his wife who was leaning over the back of the chair.

"Great. Now if we could just have less friends, we might actually do some of the things that married couples do."

"Ha ha." Reggie stated, rummaging through the liquor cabinet in search of something more her speed. "You know you'd miss me too much. Who else is going to introduce some irresponsibility into your lives?"

Dil hung up the phone with a smile. "Sounds like the hired help is in for a busy night."

"What - no, no, y'know what, I don't want to know."

"How long did the pizza place say our pizza is going to take?" Reggie asked. "Just so I know for sure if there's time to run down to the bottle shop."

"There isn't," Lor said. "They're generally very fast."

"Trust you to have the world's only reliable pizza delivery. You guys got a deck of cards?"

"I think there's a deck in one of the junk drawers. But it might be missing a few cards." Phil advised.

"That's okay." Dil stated. "I don't mind playing without a full deck."

Reggie rolled her eyes, opening her mouth to say something and then closing it again. "Never mind. That one's too easy."

"Sometimes I like to set you up for a free kick," Dil explained. "I can't have all the fun."

"I would be having fun if we had some decent booze. Have you guys even gone to a liquor since you got married?" Reggie moaned.

Phil sighed. "It's on our to do list."

Dil's eyes narrowed. "That sounded almost genuine. You guys don't actually have a to-do list, do you?"

Lor and Phil exchanged a glance. "A short one," Phil told him. "I think it says something like 'Go to liquor shop' and 'Have lots of sex'."

"Well based on your liquor cabinet, it's obvious which of those tasks is being neglected for the other." She retreated back to the fridge, pushing based the case of beer and finding a few half-empty six packs of malt liquor. "Smirnoff Ice? It's better than the High Life,but I'll need like six of these to even get a buzz."

"You know, Reg, the entire object of the evening isn't to get wasted." Dil chided.

"I know that. We're supposed to get wasted while eating pizza and watching bad movies."

"Hey! The Warriors is a cinematic masterpiece," Phil argued.

"It's a bad movie," Lor corrected him. "I mean, it's a so-bad-it's-good bad movie. But still..."

"It's got awesome music and a lot of pointless violence and the acting - well..." Phil trailed off anticlimactically. "Yeah, okay, so it's not a great movie. But it's still a more convincing portrayal of life in New York than Fame was."

Just as that can of worms was begging to be opened, the phone rang once again. Lor scooped it up.

"North City Moviegoers Society. Yes, Arnold, how can I help you?"

Phil held his hand out for the phone but Lor batted it away.

"I don't know. I'll ask." Lor turned to face her husband. "Arnold would like to know what, roughly, the coverage is on the Java Lava's insurance policy."

Phil's entire body stilled for a moment, before he asked, slowly and deliberately, "Why?"

"He wants to know why," Lor told Arnold. There was another pause as she got her answer, before she turned back to Phil and said, "Arnold says it's best not to trouble yourself with such things."

Phil felt a heaviness settle into his guts. "I'm not going into work."

"He's not coming into work," Lor reiterated over the phone. She listened and nodded for a second. "Arnold says that's a good idea."

8 - * - * - 8

"Alright, so where's this pizza, anyway," Reggie asked. "I could have been to the bottle shop and back twice in the time we've been waiting."

Lor looked at her. "It's been fifteen minutes."

"I walk fast."

"Why are you so determined to get hammered tonight, anyway?" Phil asked. "Not like you broke up with someone or anything."

"No, I'm just basking in the newfound joy of unemp - "

There was a long pause.

"Unemp?" Dil asked.

"Yeah, uh, unemp...eccable...beer snobber?"

"Uh huh." Phil stated, a telltale tapping of his foot beginning.

"Yeah, didn't think you were going to buy that one..."

"What happened, anyway? You piss off one too many higher ups?"

"No. Well, yes, but no. They're closing the paper."

There was another long pause.

"That bites," Dil finally offered.

Phil finally turned to face his wife. "Funny that. They're closing the paper - at which you're an employee as well - and you're not losing your job. Because I'm sure that's something you would have told your husband."

Lor sent her friend a dirty look. "I was going to tell you."

"When?" Phil asked, throwing his arms up in the air. "When our rent check bounces?"

"No, I was just...planning it out. For when you would be in a better mood. And your mind was more clouded.

"My mind does not get clouded."

"When you woke up next to me on the living room floor last month, you distinctly asked me how we got there."

"And yousaid you didn't remember."

"Well, neither did you."

"Have you two ever thought of doing a reality series?" Dil interjected.

Phil slumped back down on the couch. "Well. Okay."

Lor looked at him worriedly. "Are you mad? I'll get another job."

He sighed. "I'm more upset about being lied to. I can take care of us financially. But you could have told me. I could take it."

"Despite recent evidence to the contrary," Reggie muttered.

"And I never lied to you." Lor protested. "I just...left out a few details. We'll be fine, trust me. Reggie and I have a lot of talent to offer. We'll land on our feet."

"And it's not like you're falling from too great a height," Dil noted, before getting slapped over the back of the head by Reggie.

"At least we were off the ground, Pickles."

"Hey, I've just got a lot of irons in the fire, Reg. You can't expect to tie me down."

"Alright, I'm starting to get disturbed by the imagery here."

"I second that," Lor said. "When this pizza arrives I do want to be able to eat it without immediately regurgitating."

"I'd settle for still having my appetite." Reggie added. "Speaking of which, I'm really thinking its time I hitup that bottle store and brought back something quaffable."

"I'm telling you the pizza will be here before you're back," Phil told her. "If the delivery is more than thirty minutes, the pizza is free. It's been twenty-three minutes, the bottle shop is five minutes each way - and it's a metaphysical impossiblity for a pizza shop to give away free food."

"That doesn't mean they won't be late. They'll just quibble about the time of your order. Besides, if they're cutting it this close, how do you know the drier isn't some rookie who got lost and gave our order to some people in a completely different neighborhood?"

Dil stared at her for a moment. "You really want to get drunk, don't you?"

"I thought I had made hat clear. If I leave this apartment tonight in a clear state of mind, I am not responsible for what happens."

"The pizza place has questionable hygeine. You'll be in an altered state of mind, trust me."

"If I find hair in my food, I am going down there. This is my night to get lit up and lament the loss of my first serious job in a long time."

Dil chuckled. "Hey, I think we're all sorry for your loss. Phil especially. But I'm pretty sure if Arnold were here, he would classify your complaints as 'first-world problems."

Before Reggie could fire off another shot in return, the phone rang yet again. Lor leapt upon the phone with a vengeance. "International House of Bedlam. Lobotomys on the hour every hour. Arnold! Funny, we were just talking about you. No, no, you're not interrupting. What's up?"

Phil felt his body getting increasingly tense as he waited to find out what had befallen his cafe now.

Lor finally turned to him. "If one were to be looking for the fusebox in the Java Lava -"

"I'm going into work."

"No you're not!" Lor ordered. "Where's the fusebox?"

"It's in the store-room, in the back closet," Phil said. "I'm going in."

"Stop him!" Lor ordered the others. Reggie and Dil jumped on Phil as he made for the door, Reggie around his legs and Dil clutched to his waist as he dragged them both for the door. "No, Phil isn't coming in," she told Arnold. "If he does, I'll be mightily impressed."

"Let me go!" Phil shouted.

"No, nothing unusual is happening here," Lor assured Arnold.

"You are going to enjoy a relaxing night off!" Reggie ordered Phil.

"Not like this I'm not!" Phil said, prying an arm free of Dil's grasp, grabbing the front door and flinging it open -

- only to find a man standing in front of him, clutching a pizza, and absorbed completely by the tableau he was staring at. The standoff persisted for a full minute, before the man with the box said, "One medium anchovies and pineapple, one large supreme?"

Phil looked up at the deliveryman, with an awkward smile on his face. "That's us." He stated, turning his head around to face Reggie as best he could. "Told ya."

She stuck her tongue out at him in retort.

"That'll be $23.69"

Lor, shaking her head like a long-suffering wife, twirled the portable handset in her hands, stuffing it into the pocket of her jeans. She reached into Phil's back pocket and removed her husbands wallet, taking out two bills. "Here's thirty to forget everything you saw here. She said, taking the cardboard boxes and shutting the door fast, bolting it. "Dinner is served. And you're still not going in."

"Can I go in tomorrow?"

"Not if the police tape is still up."

8 - * - * - 8

Episode 5: Skates, will be out next week. In the meantime, do let us know what you thought about this one.