Interlude – Chef Lucy

Interlude – Chef Lucy

Lucy looked up and met her own eyes.

It was always strange to look at yourself through a camera while also looking through that camera with your augs. Slightly disorientating, though without any real dizziness or nausea. She blinked, then looked at the other camera. Yeah, they were all in focus. Good.

The table was set. There was a hotplate, plugged in and ready to warm up. They had all the pots and pans they needed. Water was in a jug nearby, the other things were just to the side. The main camera saw it all too. Good good.

She turned and took in the background. It wasn’t much, just a plain window that overlooked one of the main roads of Burlington. They’d put up curtains on the sides to mask it up a little. The main camera’s angle would let people see the road and, more importantly, it would let someone enterprising enough to head outside prove that it was an actual livestream.

Which it wasn’t. The window was placed in front of a high-definition screen filming another, actual window elsewhere.

Lucy didn’t need someone smart firing a rocket at their back while they did this.

Cat was the best, but she was not even close to paranoid enough.

Myalis: Catherine is on her way up.
Lucy: Tks!

She grinned. Almost time to start.

There were a few ways she could do this, but really, she wanted it to be a bit… a bit poorly done? There was just something about jank that pissed off the corporate types and made everything a little more genuine.

Across from her table were a few of the volunteer kittens that had some experience with this kind of stuff. She gave them a thumb’s up, and then a quick count-down.

In one of her aug’s side-reels, she saw herself as the internet could now see her. A single dark skinned girl in a well-lit room in front of a bunch of cooking things, smiling at the camera and wearing some rather interesting cat-ear props on her head.

The caption across the seven different streaming platforms she was sending this to was all the same. Stray Cat’s Cooking Show! Feat. Lucy!

Her grin widened. “Hello, everyone,” she said. She currently has a hundred and seven viewers. Myalis helpfully showed her the number of actual, human viewers below that. It was more like just seven, but she could live with that number too. It would grow. “This show’s mostly for the fine people of Burlington, where Stray Cat, Gomorrah, and your three local samurai are hard at work keeping people safe. Today we’re adding to that by making sure you’re fed and safe too!”

She had a live chat. It was almost immediately bombarded with ads and fake messages.

And then Myalis struck, and Lucy could almost imagine some distant servers crashing and burning. It was like using a tank on a single ant, having an AI like Myalis on her side. In a blink, the chat was cleared of any interference.

There was a large computer monitor turned on its side next to the camera with the chat’s feed on it, not that she needed to look with her augs, but it helped the viewers if she looked at something before answering them. Made it more… real.

At least, that was her experience from watching this kind of stream before.

“Every citizen of Burlington, heck, anyone within the Downtown region can order up a meal and have it delivered to your door for free. All you need to do is cook it up! So, to make that part easier, we decided to make this livestream to show you how!”

Oh, she’d just hit three figure human viewers, nice!

Rika: What’s this?
Abbatoth68: Where’s that?
MarchallGod: The title’s a lie
BestFrenVenom: We?
Alan Martin: She cute tho
DaShoe: Show feet!

She was about to go on when a door slipped open just a tiny bit and Cat slipped into the room.

Cat moved… Cat moved the way Cat did. It wasn’t something Lucy had never really seen in anyone else. Maybe some of the more experienced PMC sorts? But even they had a sort of militaristic swagger to them.

Cat moved like her namesake. Slow, deliberate, with a slight shift to her hips that Lucy really liked and she had the strange habit of touching the floor with the tips of her toes first. It made her deceptively quiet for an otherwise loud girl.

Her helmet was off, so Lucy got to see her eyes scanning everything before locking onto her. There was something very sharp about Cat’s gaze, until it locked onto Lucy, then it instantly softened.

Lucy felt her heart soften too. “Hey,” she said.

The people watching the stream must have been confused, she’d just gone off script. She was clearly addressing someone off-screen, at least until Cat walked up to Lucy.

Calloused fingers pulled Lucy’s head up, a gentle touch along the line of her jaw that arched her neck back so that Cat could more easily capture her lips.

Her other–new–arm fell down to Lucy’s hip and squeezed.

“Mm, Cat,” Lucy said.

“Hey,” Cat said. “I hate people and I absolutely don’t want to do this thing,” she said.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Lucy smiled. “We could put it off? Tell people to starve.”

“Urgh, but then they’d complain about starving, and I’d have to spend time telling them to figure shit out for themselves, time I couldn’t spend with you.”

“Hmm, that’s a dilemma,” Lucy agreed. “I got you a hat,” she said.

Sir Whale: hot
Antimater Lobster: Wait, is that actually a samurai? For real?
Devon7400: 10/10 cooking show
Name Pending: NOOOOO My Gomorrah X Stray Cat ship! It sinks!
Calob505: I like this cooking