Slight change in plans

I was going to post a transcript of Loki and Thor's radio coverage of the battle, but then I realized that it would not work very well since the battle is still raging. So I'm posting this bit of sillyness instead. Enjoy!

~ Rebecca

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Brea—

The slamming of a door shook Marissa from her self-meditation and she darted a hopeful look at it. Nope, it wasn’t her boys coming home early from their pack hunt, or as she liked to think of it, their let’s-let-wolf-pups-get-stopmed-into-goo-by-rampaging-hellephants—

“Hello, earth to Marissa!” Gloria said as she waved her hand in front of Marissa’s scowling face.

“Get your hand out of my face unless you want to try going through life without it,” Marissa snarled.

“Dude, really. Witchy need an intervention,” Glo shot back as she set a gallon sized cardboard coffee-to-go jug on the end table just to the left of where Marissa sat cross-legged on the floor. The heavenly smell of Kona Joe, her very favorite roast in the world, drifted over when Glo cracked open the plastic cap.

“Goosy need her head shoved where the sun don’t shine,” Marissa snapped back, though not as nastily as she might have. You know, before the scent of liquid ambrosia filled her senses. “You are not going to bribe me into not being mad. Don’t even bother,” she said more calmly as she determinedly turned away from the delightful sound of liquid ambrosia being poured into fine china cups. She forced her eyes shut and resumed her breathing exercises. Her pride said she could not accept a cup of that coffee but it had no problem with her enjoying the aroma while she faked meditation. Actually, the scent of Kona Joe brewed to perfection was helping her relax, so technically she wasn’t faking anything other than indifference. She’d have to remember this trick the next time she had trouble finding her focus.

“Mmmm, cofffeeeeee gooooddddd!” Glo moaned in exaggerated ecstasy. Probably not exaggerated, Marissa admitted reluctantly. For those who truly loved coffee, that Kona Joe roast she special ordered from Red Ram Coffee in Kailua, HI was the best money could buy. It was even better than that civet crap coffee people with too much money liked to brag about drinking.

Yeah, she’d forked over the $20 to try it once. She was a coffee nerd and freely admitted it.  Now she could say with complete honesty that Kona Joe, ground fresh and brewed slowly at high altitudes, was better than $20-a-cup civet crap coffee and it didn’t involve animal digestive issues.

“The thing is,” Glo said after a long pause in which she had probably taken several sips of that better-than-cat-poop coffee, “I get why you are angry. You are a mamma bear and your mate just took your boys hunting without you. And yes, I know you are not literally a bear, Marissa. I did mean that the way humans mean it when they refer to mamma bear syndrome. My point was that you would not be this pissed off had you been invited to join them.”

Marissa froze, shocked at her friend’s insight. Yes, that’s it exactly, she realized. She’d been sitting here fuming because her kids had been taken on a potentially dangerous pack hunt. Yes, she was unhappy about that and thought them too young for it. But her fury was at being excluded. She’d have nothing to worry about if she was there because she was a damn good battle witch. If she were there, she’d be able to make damn sure they didn’t come to harm on this hunt.

“You know, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re,” Marissa conceded. She accepted the cup off coffee Glo was holding out and took a cautious sip. Yep, perfectly ground and perfectly brewed. There were two things that made her and Gloria’s friendship so strong: coffee and the love of a wolf. Marissa owed the coffee shop and Gloria help run it. Both of them were life mated to beta wolves, her to Mooney and Gloria to Moon-Moon, though what her very intelligent goose pal saw in Moon-Moon, the dumbest werewolf ever born, was beyond her. Not that it needed to make sense to Marissa, of course. It only needed to make sense to them.

“So the way I see it, you can do two things. One, I can shift into my goose form and you can ride my back as we cruise over the battle field, watching for danger to our families and freaking the local media the fuck out. Or we can sit here sipping coffee and listening to the CD bad while our guys run around out there pretending to be weekend warriors. Because you know and I know that Nick is never going to allow Loki and Thor anywhere near the fighting. And since my mate and your mate are with the pups, they are also not going to be anywhere near the fighting.”

“I hate to say it, but I kind of like the idea of donning my best witchy garb and riding to battle on the back of a giant goose!”
"Excellent choice! I hope you noticed that I brought the coffee in a to-go jug?"