All the characters appearing in Gargoyles and Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles are copyright Buena Vista Television/The Walt Disney Company. No infringement of these copyrights is intended, and is not authorized by the copyright holder. All original characters are the property of "Alex Checnkov."
The Avignon University presented here is not meant in any way to represent the Universite D'Avignon and any similarities are coincidental. The Flying Café is a work of fiction, and any similarities to any establishment by the same name are purely coincidental.
Author's Note: "Homefront" is meant to compliment the other arcs of the Avignon Saga. Its purpose is to flesh out some of the behind-the-curtains workings of this alternate universe which affect the main characters but with which they have little or no direct interaction.
It's also my way of justifying not making any forward progress on the other arcs, so bear with me during such periods.
Homefront: The Café
Alex
Checnkov
The success of the Flying Café, situated just outside the southern limit of Winchester, Virginia, on U.S. Route 11, as one of the nation's longest-running dining establishments is due in no small part to luck.
In 1938, Winchester was a town of barely twelve-thousand people, tucked behind the eastern Blue Ridge Mountains. It was best known in the region as the place where the transcontinental U.S. Route 50, connecting Ocean City, Maryland, to San Francisco, crosses Route 11, which connects New Orleans to the New York-Canadian border near Lake Champlain, then continues on as Provincial Route 223 to Sorel-Tracy, Quebec, at the union of the St. Lawrence and Richelieu Rivers.
A newcomer to the Winchester area, David Ruby, opened the Flying Café in the summer of that year, shortly after the United States Army finished construction on the Winchester Training Aerodrome for the budding air corps. It was a simple establishment, no more than two-thousand square feet, with the ability to hold one-hundred hungry customers. Its aluminum exterior mimicked the aircraft buzzing around overhead, while large windows in all places but the kitchen and storage areas allowed patrons to soak in the view of the Appalachians. The Flying Café was also the first building in Winchester to display the still-new neon lights, its sign burning brightly over the front door. Young pilots poured into the café after their training sessions or for a quick meal before they hopped the train for weekend leave in Washington, D.C.
1938 was also the year where the gargoyle population of the Shenandoah Valley became such that gargoyles migrated to create four new clans within twenty miles of Winchester, outposts for adventurous gargoyles who would follow what remained of eastward hunting trails beyond the Appalachians and suitable gliding winds.
After the Second Great European War ended, the Army saw little use for the training field as the nation demilitarized, and the base locked its gates on December 31, 1947. The town of Winchester suffered. Businesses which had prospered under the influx of service personnel suddenly had many-thousands fewer customers. The subsequent economic bust sent many more families to cities like Roanoke and Washington, compounding the economic problem for those people who chose to stay in the city.
But through the changing times, the Flying Café survived – albeit with shrinking profit margins. Where young airmen and their families once dined, vacationers came as they enjoyed the postwar boom. It was not uncommon for a family from New York or Pennsylvania to stop by in June on their way south and return in early July on their way home, such was the reputation and quality of the small café.
The Café's first real struggle for its survival came more than a decade after the base closed, and the country embarked on the multibillion dollar interstate project. Interstate 81 opened near Winchester in November, 1965, and over time long-distance traffic moved from U.S. 11 to the interstate.
By the time Interstate 81 was considered complete in Virginia in 1975, fifteen-thousand vehicles were passing by Winchester on the interstate. The motels which once served weary travelers began to close as chain hotels opened close to interstate exits, and it did not seem long before the Flying Café would be permanently grounded.
One February night in 1976, after the café had closed, the members of the family which ran the diner sat at a tables, financial documents dating back to the 1940s covering the surface, and debated what they should do about their business' rapidly falling profits.
"Once Karen has our baby," Larry Ellis, a man in his mid-twenties and the Flying Café's manager, said, "we aren't gonna be able to support him with these kinds of dollars."
"And where'd you go if we shut it down? Where'd any of us go?" his younger brother, Stephen, the diner's primary cook, asked.
"Jim offered me that newspaper job in town, and you could always follow Robert to Roanoke for all that construction they've got going on down there."
"You hush," Eleanor Ruby Ellis, a short woman of fifty-four years and the café's head waitress, said to her son. "Your granddaddy would be ashamed to hear you talk about closing down his business, rest his bones."
"He'd also be ashamed if we all fell into poverty because we couldn't keep it open right."
"People are always gonna be hungry, and we can bring those folks here if we just think of a way. We've done it before."
"We need maybe another seven-hundred people per month at minimum to turn a good profit. That's almost five percent of all of Winchester."
"No, we just need their money."
"Okay, fine, we need another two-thousand dollars per month at minimum to turn a good profit. Anybody got any ideas?"
"Well, you've gotta spend money to make money," Stephen said. "Maybe we should take out a few more radio ads – television, even – and maybe try and get in some of those traveling guides people use. Or get a sign up by the interstate."
"We don't have enough money for any of those things," Larry said.
The group sat around for a few moments in thoughtful silence before Harold Ellis, Eleanor's husband and father of Larry and Stephen, the only member of the family who did not have a hand in the café's operations, said, "How much you reckon a gargoyle can eat?"
"Say again, Pop?" Larry asked.
"Gargoyles. I figure one of them can eat about as much as two or three folks; and so long as their money's good, why not get some of it? There are a bit over fifteen-hundred of them in this and the neighboring counties, that's maybe four-thousand people as far as food's concerned."
"Pop, we're trying to get people to come here. If word gets out that we're serving gargoyles, nobody'll come here. Besides, we're not open late enough to serve gargoyles, if we were going to – which we're not."
"Back when the flyboys were coming here, this diner was open twenty-four hours a day all week except for the Lord's day," Eleanor said. "We could go back to those hours."
"Which means we'd need to hire another shift for the late night and early morning and buy more supplies, which is more money lost. And, again, there is no way we can serve gargoyles and stay open. You show me one business around here that serves humans and gargoyles and turns a profit. We'd be out of business in a year."
In March of that year, Larry took the job at The Winchester Local he had been offered when his parents and younger brother contacted gargoyle clans in the area to announce that they would begin serving gargoyles. Harold took over as manager.
It was not until April, however, that the Flying Café got its first winged customers. A small hunting band of five gargoyles showed up in the middle of the third shift after a successful hunt. Bad weather was forcing them to travel on foot on their way home about thirty miles southwest of Winchester, and they had worked up a large appetite as they made the trek.
Three male and two female gargoyles sat down at the main counter while the few humans who were dining in those late night hours quietly paid their bills and left, leaving the gargoyles alone.
As Eleanor prepared to take the gargoyles' orders, she smelled something out of place in the otherwise clean diner. She leaned over the counter and saw that the gargoyles had brought in the sacks which contained the remains of their kill. Eleanor looked at the leading male square in the eye and said, "You can't leave that on the floor. You're gonna have to take it outside."
The male, several feet taller than Eleanor and packing more than her weight in muscle, looked out the window at the rain coming down and then back at her. "The meat will rot out there."
"It'll rot on that floor, too, and bring in the health inspector. You give it to me and I'll stick it back in our refrigerator for you until you leave."
"This meat is for my clan. It does not leave my sight."
Eleanor's will power easily matched the gargoyle's muscle power. "Then you don't eat," she said without hesitation. "We'll take care of it for you, but it isn't gonna stay on my floor."
The two stared at each other in silence for what could have been a few seconds but what felt like minutes. Eventually the gargoyle turned to his friends, gave them an order in Appalachian Common, then looked back to Eleanor and said, "Show my friends where your refrigerator is."
David had framed the first customer receipt from 1938 – an order of chicken and waffles with a bottle of soda, sold for seventy-five cents. And so Harold framed the receipt from the first gargoyles to eat at the diner – two "Egg"straordinary breakfasts with hash browns, a total of six eggs cooked over-easy, three orders of steak and eggs, five extra sides of sausage, five glasses of water with two free refills each, three sodas and a second "Egg"straordinary breakfast with hash browns, another three over easy eggs, all sold for nineteen dollars and thirty-eight cents.
Unaware of the custom, the gargoyles failed to leave a tip. One gargoyle, however, spotted the comment cards on the countertop and left a note. Written in Appalachian Common, the note said, "It is good food, but the portions are too small."
When word first got out that the café had catered to gargoyles, there was a slight drop in the number of human customers. However, as increasing numbers of gargoyles began to appear in the late night and early morning hours, more humans did as well. Since gargoyles live while humans sleep, few in the Winchester community got the opportunity to interact with gargoyles, but now they had a reason to.
Rather than serve as a deterrent, the presence of gargoyles became a point of fascination which attracted customers to the diner.
In winter that year, the lifestyle editor of The Winchester Local ran a story about the Flying Café which began, "All it takes to bring gargoyles off the mountains is food, and Winchester's own Flying Café is bringing down whole clans at a time."
A copy of the article made its way to the governor's office in Richmond, and not long after the Virginia Department of Health and the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Virginia sent a letter to the Flying Café declaring that its license to serve patrons had been suspended while the Commonwealth investigated "recent reports that your establishment has repeatedly violated numerous health and human preservation laws."
The laws which the Commonwealth said the Flying Café had been in violation of were a combination of laws penned back in the colonial period when it was believed that gargoyles could be carriers of disease; all together they barred gargoyles and humans from living together, working in close proximity, and sharing food sources. They had rarely been enforced not because there was a lack of will, but rather because there was a lack of need; gargoyles stayed with their clans, humans in their towns.
Rather than close its doors voluntarily, the Flying Café sued the Commonwealth, and in so doing it drew national attention – and desperately needed legal support. The Commonwealth forced the diner's doors shut at the beginning of 1977.
Under intense political and media pressure, the case rocketed through the legal system, and in March 1977 the Virginia Supreme Court unanimously upheld the injunction against the Flying Café, citing of all things the newly-signed United States Endangered Species Act which prohibited humans from affecting the environments of protected species, gargoyles included.
The Flying Café's legal team appealed the ruling to the United States Supreme Court, and in the meantime the Congress began work on what would become the Gargoyle Health and Welfare Act of 1977, taken after the language in Article Five of the Constitution which says simply, "The Gargoyle population, long-surviving on this Continent, shall have their Health and Welfare preserved and protected, to that extent which does not infringe on the Rights and Laws of Man enumerated herein."
The Act became law on November 22, 1977, and effective January 1, 1978. Among other things, the federal law superseded state laws which prohibited gargoyles from sharing work or public establishments with humans; and it while it would remain up to private establishments as to whether or not they would cater to gargoyles, the states could not prohibit them from doing so.
The Gargoyle Health and Welfare Act came under a flurry of constitutional challenges, but before the Supreme Court would hear them, it heard the case of Flying Café vs. the Commonwealth of Virginia in December 1978. In April 1979, it issued its ruling which struck down the injunction against the Flying Café and the laws which the Commonwealth had used to file it. One year later it would uphold the constitutionality of the Gargoyle Health and Welfare Act, and use Flying Café as one of its precedents for doing so.
After the Supreme Court's ruling, the Flying Café sued the Commonwealth again for money lost while it was closed. Rather than lose in a string of lower court cases, the Commonwealth settled with the diner for three hundred-thousand dollars.
The diner's last appearance in national headlines came in 1980, as the weak alliance of lower Appalachian gargoyle clans began to unravel. As various factions began to form in the alliance, many predicted that the region would plunge into civil war. Instead, leaders of the emerging factions met one April night in the Flying Café, and there they began a week of negotiations which eased tensions and resulted in the peaceful creation of the present four gargoyle nations of the Shenandoah Valley and Southern Appalachian regions.
Stephen left the family business soon after the Appalachian Accords to follow his girlfriend and future wife to Memphis, where she would serve as an executive for a fast-growing advertisement agency started by her college roommate. Two years later, Harold died from a heart attack, and Eleanor took over as manager.
In 1983, as Winchester expanded southward, the Commonwealth approved a plan to add an interstate exit just half a mile from the Flying Café; and when the exit was completed in the spring of 1985, customers began to frequent the diner in unprecedented numbers, due in some measure to their brand-new interstate billboard, designed by Stephen's wife as per Eleanor's request.
Eleanor left the Flying Café in 1992 to tend to her health, but not before she sold the diner to a restaurant chain – on the condition that they maintained the name and design of the diner, given its historical significance. After some negotiation, the chain agreed, and the new management took over in the early months of 1993. Eleanor died in 1995.
The Ruby family line, however, returned to the Flying Café in the summer of 2017 when sixteen-year-old Kara Ellis, Larry's granddaughter, took a job as a waitress to begin saving up for her own car.
Kara asked for the third shift, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., in order to interact with the diner's now-regular gargoyle customers.