Welcome to Gaia! ::

Al's timing was fortuitous. Jordan had come down to the cafeteria after the usual dinner rush, in the interest of not running into too many people. After the conversation with Robert earlier and finding Harrison's gift, he was feeling distinctly tired; the emotional numbness had been relatively rare today, but that mostly meant that he'd been feeling things sharply and intensely. He'd forgotten his own birthday, in the wake of everything that had happened, and being reminded had been both comforting and deeply painful.

As he entered the cafeteria, he heard his name, and sighed very quietly. There went the idea of eating dinner without socializing. But it was Al, and the bow on the top of the object the kid was carrying probably meant that Al wanted to give him a present also, and he could be grateful and friendly for a while. He pulled his smile on and called out, "Over here."

"I'm sure I will," Jordan answered, and lifted the lid curiously.

Jordan's eyebrows went up. "That smells great," he said, and pulled out a chair at the closest table, taking a seat and putting the lid aside to get a better look at the pizza. "Damn, I haven't had gourmet pizza in, " he thought about it for a moment, "years, literally a couple of years."

The pizza did smell really good, somewhat to his surprise; very little had seemed appetizing for the past couple of days, but Jordan found that he actually felt like eating this. "Thanks, man," he said, and picked up a piece. "Do you want a slice? How far did you have to go to get this?" Finding somewhere to get a specialty pizza like this would either take a portal trip or a lot of favors promised to someone who could really cook, and he hadn't heard of anyone here who could do pizza like this. And if there were someone here who could, he was sure he would have heard of it. Good cooks could make bank in bribes.

Jordan angled an eyebrow curiously over the slice of pizza, silently inviting Al to explain.

"Really? That's awesome. It's great. I can't cook unless it comes in a box and has microwave instructions, so that impresses me even more." Jordan took another bite. It was good pizza, and he wasn't sure why Al wasn't proudly claiming his work. "You could probably make some money cooking for people, especially with the usual quality of food around here," he pointed out.

Jordan's smile faded. "We're probably not going to be talking any time soon," he said. Why did everything have to come back to this? He could forget for a few minutes at a time, and then something would remind him again. "So you don't have to worry about that."

He ate slowly, trying to focus on the food instead of anything else. It would be a shame to waste really good pizza just because he couldn't handle his own goddamn problems, especially after Al had gone to the trouble of making it for him.

"I'm in room 207 now." Jordan met Al's eyes, let the unhappiness show, just for a moment. Then he shuttered it away again. "So if you're looking to talk to me, you can find me there." Al tried not to let anyone know that he was sharp, perhaps didn't realize that he was, but Jordan thought that the kid should be able to connect the dots from there.

"I won't tell anyone," he promised gravely, pulling the calm masks back into place. He quirked a small and slightly wicked smile; the expression felt false to him, but he had practiced a long time, and few people would be able to tell. "As long as you cook me something once in a while." It was mostly a joke.

"Twenty-four," he answered. "You're, like, twelve, right?" His smile said that he was teasing.