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Title: The Tenth Barista
Prompt: Ben Tennyson is a barista at Saft Goldenscale’s favorite coffee shop.
Notes: I got double dog dared by Saft’s mun after it popped up in a random RP generator thing.
Azmuth's was a staple in the neighborhood. It had always been there, serving coffee, tea, hot chocolate, and pastries that some people would commit murder for. The décor was plain in comparison to most modern coffee shops, the space filled with mostly booths, some tables, and a few fake plants. The only pictures on the walls were due to local artists renting spots to try and get their work out where people could see it and hopefully hook some buyers, so the art collection tended to be a constantly-changing hodgepodge ranging anywhere from realistic depictions of everyday life to surreal portraits of the bizarre. The classiest part of the shop was the classical music playing softly over the hidden speakers, just loud enough to be calming but just soft enough to act as white noise.
While there was a rotating cast of staff members, the owner never changed. Rather old and short, Azmuth always looked exactly as you remembered him even if you hadn’t seen him in years, never seeming to age or lose any spryness judging from the way he could send street toughs more than twice his size packing with a few smart jabs to pressure points and a level of agility that would prompt a standing ovation from Mr. Miyagi. There were rumors that he’d been a scientist once, and that the delicious drinks and downright sinful pastries were part of an ongoing experiment being run on the local populous.
Well, if it was an ongoing experiment, Saft had decided that she was a more than willing lab rat if it meant that Azmuth’s continued somehow outlasting the Starbuckses and Dunkin Donutses of the world that kept trying to poach customers from its territory that was twenty minutes from the local community college campus, ten from the high school, and right at the entry to downtown. (Saft allowed herself a private chuckle as she glanced at the empty Starbucks with the For Sale sign in the window right across the street.)
She passed under the green circle with the black hourglass sign that marked the shop’s location. “Azmuth’s” wasn’t the official name of the place. In fact, it had no real official name. Local legend had it that the owner hadn’t been able to think of anything and had put up the symbol as a placeholder but never took it down or even bothered naming the place due to the shop being so popular that he didn’t have time to do either. Of course, the best way to see if that was true was to ask, but nobody wanted to irritate Azmuth with unnecessary questions since his tongue could burn someone as badly as the contents of any one of his shop’s coffee machines when annoyed.
Saft stepped to one side to allow a blonde girl with green eyes out, the girl carrying a tray of generic to-go coffee cups and a large brown paper bag of what smelled like muffins. “Eunice” was stitched onto her apron to the right of the circular green-and-black hourglass symbol that dominated the center of its chest, a matching baseball cap with the shop’s logo on her head. It took a moment for Saft to place her as the…well…nobody was quite sure how Eunice was related to Azmuth, but she worked there from time-to-time. Obviously long enough to earn the permanent nametag. Other than her, the known record of how long an employee of Azmuth’s stayed on was two months since the owner had very demanding standards.
“Thanks,” Eunice said to Saft with a grin before hurrying away to make her delivery.
“No problem,” Saft called after her before heading inside.
The shop was edging close to noisy due to the amount of students inside. Saft had planned her arrival perfectly so that she could get in line at the tail end of the afterschool rush and before the surge of people leaving work began. The line was moving swiftly as people moved to the front with their orders and the barista behind the counter put them all together alongside the owner. She didn’t recognize the barista of the week, the tenth Azmuth had hired in the past four months, possibly because they were only a head taller than their employer, still rather short overall, and kept getting obstructed from her view. The ball cap didn’t help since it hid parts of the server’s face. Judging from the height and how thin they were, it was probably a girl.
Saft found herself getting shoved aside by three guys who stepped in front of her. She scowled at them. “I was next.”
“We’re in a hurry,” one of them said, turning towards her slightly so she could get a clear view of his “trying way too hard” punk style.
“Yeah, and I’ve got homework. Back of the line,” she snapped, jerking her thumb in the direction they needed to go to emphasize her demand.
“You can wait another five minutes.”
“Next customer!” the barista called cheerfully.
The line moved forward, and Saft clenched her hands into fists, angry at not just the situation but her own impotence. If she made a scene, she’d get thrown out. Azmuth’s had a very strict policy on that, the old wording on the faded sign hung behind the counter having long ago been replaced via permanent marker with “Management reserves the right to toss unruly customers into the back dumpster”.
The three guys snickered as they went to the front, their snickering stopping as the barista repeated, “Next customer!”
“We’re next,” one of the line cutters said irritably.
“No, you’re not. She is,” the barista said, leaning over just enough to point at Saft, enabling her to see that the barista was male with a very charming smile but whose infernal hat continued to disguise any other features. “We’re busy up here, not blind. You guys need to go to the back of the line.”
“We’re in a hurry. She let us in.”
“Like Hell!” she yelled.
“Yeah, from the sound of that, I really doubt she let you through,” the barista said, that grin never leaving his face. (Saft silently applauded his dedication to serving all customers with a smile.) “You guys need to go to the back of the line.”
One of the trio reached out and grabbed the boy who was probably a foot smaller than them by the apron front, lifting him up slightly. “We’re. Next.”
Saft’s fingernails dug into her palms as the owner continued working on finishing up a previous order that someone was waiting on, calm as could be. Really, if he didn’t do something quick, this was going to turn ugly, Saft being perfectly willing to risk expulsion if necessary.
Still smiling, the barista asked, “Hey, Azmuth, what’s the policy on grabbing the staff again?”
“Staff are allowed to defend themselves if they feel legitimately threatened.”
“Cool. On a related note, I’m feeling legitimately threatened.”
“Fine, but get blood on the floor, and you’re getting demoted back to mop boy for a week.”
“No blood on the floor. Got it.”
With that, the barista slammed a fist into the solar plexis of the guy who was holding him, knocking the wind right out of the would-be punk and forcing him to let go. Saft watched in awe as the barista vaulted over the counter, his feet missing both the cash register and tip jar by millimeters, and slammed them into the second member of the trio who’d been so busy gawking that he didn’t have time to think about blocking, the blow sending him to the ground. The third member had enough sense to take a swipe, but his roundhouse punch only caught the bill of the ball cap, knocking it off as the barista ducked under to jab an elbow into the guy’s stomach. Saft coincidentally stretching her leg caused that last guy to trip as he stumbled backwards, falling to the tile floor just as the first guy dropped to his knees when the barista solidly boxed his ears before he could fully recover from the initial blow.
Azmuth leaned over the counter, scowling.
“Nobody’s bleeding!” the barista chirped after taking a moment to confirm as the trio clutched at their injuries.
“Get them out of here.”
“No problem.” The barista leaned over the trio and grinned toothily. “I’m gonna have to ask you three to leave. If you don’t go, well, I’ve got my boss’s permission to throw you out. Which do you want it to be?”
Proverbial tails between their legs, the three line jumpers got to their feet and slunk out of the coffee shop as the other customers started applauding. The barista took a bow before bending over to pick up his lost baseball cap.
As he straightened up, the snarky “you could’ve saved some for the rest of us” that was on the tip of Saft’s tongue was lost as she looked into a pair of sparkling green eyes that matched the shade belonging to both Azmuth and Eunice. He gave a toothy grin as he put his cap back on over short brown hair, taking a moment to adjust it so that the logo was somewhere close to being perfectly straight forward. “Sorry about that. Let me get back behind the counter.”
“Wash your hands before you serve anything. You have no idea where they’ve been, and I don’t want you poisoning the customers with whatever they rolled in,” Azmuth said harshly.
The barista rolled his eyes, flipping up part of the counter to pass through before washing his hands in the sink. “I know the drill. Jeez, I’ve worked here long enough.”
“Not behind the counter you haven’t.”
“Yeah, yeah. By the way, the espresso machine’s making weird noises again.”
“I told you not to touch it,” Azmuth groused. “I don’t even know why I promoted you. You break everything you touch.”
It was then that Saft remembered that she had seen the barista before. In fact, she’d seen him dozens of times before: He’d been the one cleaning tables and mopping up spills for the past few months. She’d just never taken much notice of him before.
Her thought process was interrupted as the boy leaned over the counter, still smiling. “So what can I get you?”
“Um…uh…” she stammered, feeling somewhat embarrassed because she’d basically ignored this guy for months and it turned out he’d been pretty cute the entire time. “Large hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and cinnamon. And a chocolate chip scone.”
He tapped a few controls on the register, murmuring the order back to himself before saying louder, “That’ll be five even.”
She handed over the money which he popped into the till, somehow managing to smile even more brightly as she tossed some loose change she dug out of the bottom of her wallet into the tip jar.
“Name on the order?”
“Saft. S-A-F-T.”
He wrote it down on the side of a to-go coffee cup before handing it over to his boss who started on the hot chocolate. The barista then went into the baked goods display to retrieve her scone. “I’ll refrain from any and all Shaft jokes.”
“You’d better! I’ve heard them all a billion times, so they’re not even remotely funny anymore.”
“Wouldn’t want you to take back the tip,” the barista said cheekily as he bagged the scone.
She was positively regretful when Azmuth slid the hot chocolate her way with the usual efficiency that helped make this place so popular. The barista set the bag down next to the cup.
He then gave her the receipt with that friendly smile still on his face. “Come back and see us again!”
“Thanks, I will.” She stuffed the receipt into her jacket pocket before she took both items and hurried away, trying to hide the blush.
She’d planned to do her homework here as usual, but suddenly the thought of having that cute barista guy she’d ignored all this time standing right there made just the idea of studying difficult. Instead, she hurried home with her snack and went to her room, setting down the coffee cup on her desk and looking at her name written there by…by…
She groaned, flopping backwards onto her bed and burying her face in her hands. “I forgot to ask his name! Augh!”
Sighing, she sat back up and took off her jacket, pausing when she heard the crinkle of paper from the receipt in the pocket. She pulled it out, looking over the receipt miserably until she noticed a lopsided, clearly hastily-scribbled doodle of the coffee house’s symbol at the bottom.
Next to that was a printed out line:
Your server today is Ben Tennyson.
Prompt: Ben Tennyson is a barista at Saft Goldenscale’s favorite coffee shop.
Notes: I got double dog dared by Saft’s mun after it popped up in a random RP generator thing.
Azmuth's was a staple in the neighborhood. It had always been there, serving coffee, tea, hot chocolate, and pastries that some people would commit murder for. The décor was plain in comparison to most modern coffee shops, the space filled with mostly booths, some tables, and a few fake plants. The only pictures on the walls were due to local artists renting spots to try and get their work out where people could see it and hopefully hook some buyers, so the art collection tended to be a constantly-changing hodgepodge ranging anywhere from realistic depictions of everyday life to surreal portraits of the bizarre. The classiest part of the shop was the classical music playing softly over the hidden speakers, just loud enough to be calming but just soft enough to act as white noise.
While there was a rotating cast of staff members, the owner never changed. Rather old and short, Azmuth always looked exactly as you remembered him even if you hadn’t seen him in years, never seeming to age or lose any spryness judging from the way he could send street toughs more than twice his size packing with a few smart jabs to pressure points and a level of agility that would prompt a standing ovation from Mr. Miyagi. There were rumors that he’d been a scientist once, and that the delicious drinks and downright sinful pastries were part of an ongoing experiment being run on the local populous.
Well, if it was an ongoing experiment, Saft had decided that she was a more than willing lab rat if it meant that Azmuth’s continued somehow outlasting the Starbuckses and Dunkin Donutses of the world that kept trying to poach customers from its territory that was twenty minutes from the local community college campus, ten from the high school, and right at the entry to downtown. (Saft allowed herself a private chuckle as she glanced at the empty Starbucks with the For Sale sign in the window right across the street.)
She passed under the green circle with the black hourglass sign that marked the shop’s location. “Azmuth’s” wasn’t the official name of the place. In fact, it had no real official name. Local legend had it that the owner hadn’t been able to think of anything and had put up the symbol as a placeholder but never took it down or even bothered naming the place due to the shop being so popular that he didn’t have time to do either. Of course, the best way to see if that was true was to ask, but nobody wanted to irritate Azmuth with unnecessary questions since his tongue could burn someone as badly as the contents of any one of his shop’s coffee machines when annoyed.
Saft stepped to one side to allow a blonde girl with green eyes out, the girl carrying a tray of generic to-go coffee cups and a large brown paper bag of what smelled like muffins. “Eunice” was stitched onto her apron to the right of the circular green-and-black hourglass symbol that dominated the center of its chest, a matching baseball cap with the shop’s logo on her head. It took a moment for Saft to place her as the…well…nobody was quite sure how Eunice was related to Azmuth, but she worked there from time-to-time. Obviously long enough to earn the permanent nametag. Other than her, the known record of how long an employee of Azmuth’s stayed on was two months since the owner had very demanding standards.
“Thanks,” Eunice said to Saft with a grin before hurrying away to make her delivery.
“No problem,” Saft called after her before heading inside.
The shop was edging close to noisy due to the amount of students inside. Saft had planned her arrival perfectly so that she could get in line at the tail end of the afterschool rush and before the surge of people leaving work began. The line was moving swiftly as people moved to the front with their orders and the barista behind the counter put them all together alongside the owner. She didn’t recognize the barista of the week, the tenth Azmuth had hired in the past four months, possibly because they were only a head taller than their employer, still rather short overall, and kept getting obstructed from her view. The ball cap didn’t help since it hid parts of the server’s face. Judging from the height and how thin they were, it was probably a girl.
Saft found herself getting shoved aside by three guys who stepped in front of her. She scowled at them. “I was next.”
“We’re in a hurry,” one of them said, turning towards her slightly so she could get a clear view of his “trying way too hard” punk style.
“Yeah, and I’ve got homework. Back of the line,” she snapped, jerking her thumb in the direction they needed to go to emphasize her demand.
“You can wait another five minutes.”
“Next customer!” the barista called cheerfully.
The line moved forward, and Saft clenched her hands into fists, angry at not just the situation but her own impotence. If she made a scene, she’d get thrown out. Azmuth’s had a very strict policy on that, the old wording on the faded sign hung behind the counter having long ago been replaced via permanent marker with “Management reserves the right to toss unruly customers into the back dumpster”.
The three guys snickered as they went to the front, their snickering stopping as the barista repeated, “Next customer!”
“We’re next,” one of the line cutters said irritably.
“No, you’re not. She is,” the barista said, leaning over just enough to point at Saft, enabling her to see that the barista was male with a very charming smile but whose infernal hat continued to disguise any other features. “We’re busy up here, not blind. You guys need to go to the back of the line.”
“We’re in a hurry. She let us in.”
“Like Hell!” she yelled.
“Yeah, from the sound of that, I really doubt she let you through,” the barista said, that grin never leaving his face. (Saft silently applauded his dedication to serving all customers with a smile.) “You guys need to go to the back of the line.”
One of the trio reached out and grabbed the boy who was probably a foot smaller than them by the apron front, lifting him up slightly. “We’re. Next.”
Saft’s fingernails dug into her palms as the owner continued working on finishing up a previous order that someone was waiting on, calm as could be. Really, if he didn’t do something quick, this was going to turn ugly, Saft being perfectly willing to risk expulsion if necessary.
Still smiling, the barista asked, “Hey, Azmuth, what’s the policy on grabbing the staff again?”
“Staff are allowed to defend themselves if they feel legitimately threatened.”
“Cool. On a related note, I’m feeling legitimately threatened.”
“Fine, but get blood on the floor, and you’re getting demoted back to mop boy for a week.”
“No blood on the floor. Got it.”
With that, the barista slammed a fist into the solar plexis of the guy who was holding him, knocking the wind right out of the would-be punk and forcing him to let go. Saft watched in awe as the barista vaulted over the counter, his feet missing both the cash register and tip jar by millimeters, and slammed them into the second member of the trio who’d been so busy gawking that he didn’t have time to think about blocking, the blow sending him to the ground. The third member had enough sense to take a swipe, but his roundhouse punch only caught the bill of the ball cap, knocking it off as the barista ducked under to jab an elbow into the guy’s stomach. Saft coincidentally stretching her leg caused that last guy to trip as he stumbled backwards, falling to the tile floor just as the first guy dropped to his knees when the barista solidly boxed his ears before he could fully recover from the initial blow.
Azmuth leaned over the counter, scowling.
“Nobody’s bleeding!” the barista chirped after taking a moment to confirm as the trio clutched at their injuries.
“Get them out of here.”
“No problem.” The barista leaned over the trio and grinned toothily. “I’m gonna have to ask you three to leave. If you don’t go, well, I’ve got my boss’s permission to throw you out. Which do you want it to be?”
Proverbial tails between their legs, the three line jumpers got to their feet and slunk out of the coffee shop as the other customers started applauding. The barista took a bow before bending over to pick up his lost baseball cap.
As he straightened up, the snarky “you could’ve saved some for the rest of us” that was on the tip of Saft’s tongue was lost as she looked into a pair of sparkling green eyes that matched the shade belonging to both Azmuth and Eunice. He gave a toothy grin as he put his cap back on over short brown hair, taking a moment to adjust it so that the logo was somewhere close to being perfectly straight forward. “Sorry about that. Let me get back behind the counter.”
“Wash your hands before you serve anything. You have no idea where they’ve been, and I don’t want you poisoning the customers with whatever they rolled in,” Azmuth said harshly.
The barista rolled his eyes, flipping up part of the counter to pass through before washing his hands in the sink. “I know the drill. Jeez, I’ve worked here long enough.”
“Not behind the counter you haven’t.”
“Yeah, yeah. By the way, the espresso machine’s making weird noises again.”
“I told you not to touch it,” Azmuth groused. “I don’t even know why I promoted you. You break everything you touch.”
It was then that Saft remembered that she had seen the barista before. In fact, she’d seen him dozens of times before: He’d been the one cleaning tables and mopping up spills for the past few months. She’d just never taken much notice of him before.
Her thought process was interrupted as the boy leaned over the counter, still smiling. “So what can I get you?”
“Um…uh…” she stammered, feeling somewhat embarrassed because she’d basically ignored this guy for months and it turned out he’d been pretty cute the entire time. “Large hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and cinnamon. And a chocolate chip scone.”
He tapped a few controls on the register, murmuring the order back to himself before saying louder, “That’ll be five even.”
She handed over the money which he popped into the till, somehow managing to smile even more brightly as she tossed some loose change she dug out of the bottom of her wallet into the tip jar.
“Name on the order?”
“Saft. S-A-F-T.”
He wrote it down on the side of a to-go coffee cup before handing it over to his boss who started on the hot chocolate. The barista then went into the baked goods display to retrieve her scone. “I’ll refrain from any and all Shaft jokes.”
“You’d better! I’ve heard them all a billion times, so they’re not even remotely funny anymore.”
“Wouldn’t want you to take back the tip,” the barista said cheekily as he bagged the scone.
She was positively regretful when Azmuth slid the hot chocolate her way with the usual efficiency that helped make this place so popular. The barista set the bag down next to the cup.
He then gave her the receipt with that friendly smile still on his face. “Come back and see us again!”
“Thanks, I will.” She stuffed the receipt into her jacket pocket before she took both items and hurried away, trying to hide the blush.
She’d planned to do her homework here as usual, but suddenly the thought of having that cute barista guy she’d ignored all this time standing right there made just the idea of studying difficult. Instead, she hurried home with her snack and went to her room, setting down the coffee cup on her desk and looking at her name written there by…by…
She groaned, flopping backwards onto her bed and burying her face in her hands. “I forgot to ask his name! Augh!”
Sighing, she sat back up and took off her jacket, pausing when she heard the crinkle of paper from the receipt in the pocket. She pulled it out, looking over the receipt miserably until she noticed a lopsided, clearly hastily-scribbled doodle of the coffee house’s symbol at the bottom.
Next to that was a printed out line:
Your server today is Ben Tennyson.
