Bailey fronts a lab-themed RHCP cover band! 8809 words.

Wow. Today was a bunch of no-plot-no-problem developments. We've now got lab cover bands, piquette, Gordon and Gordon's dissertation, wine-adjacent beverages with cocktail-adjacent flavors, and Jackie turns out to be a locavore. Lord only knows what is actually happening, but there are a lot of fun paragraphs.  

In case you need to know later, Fenn has an associate's degree in Etymology of Interior Design.

Here are a few short excerpts pieced together to tell the story of the piquette.

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Jackie slammed down a glass on the counter, sloshing its viscous liquid over the side. The surface of the drink had an oily sheen, and the rest was like a snow globe, little crystalline bits of glitter drifting slowly inside. 

“For me?” Fenn whispered. “What is it?” 

Jackie nodded, said, “specialty of the house,” and then walked off into the back room. 

...

Fenn sniffed their glass and got a strong whiff of forest floor and mushrooms. 

A person approached, wearing a cape, streaky pale makeup and red plastic fangs. They held a glass full of the familiar snow globe oil-adjacent beverage. Fenn was intimidated, obviously, and wouldn’t have said anything if the stranger hadn’t stopped dead in front of them and bared their plastic fangs in a Billy Idol sneer. 

“Piquette much?” the creature said. 

“Pardon me?” 

“Piquette much?” 

...

“What’s piquette?”

The fangless creature  looked delighted, then resentful, then remarkably zen. “Ah, you have not read my dissertation, Becoming Piquette: Bodily Molecularity and the Wine-Adjacent Beverage that Becomes. What I mean is that even though grapes do not ‘really’ become piquette, a block of becoming forms between the grape and the beverage, where their molecularities mix—this is what is ‘real.’ In this sense, becoming piquette is never a teleological process, where the grape has a goal to ‘be’ ultimately piquette. As a becoming between grape and piquette, becoming-piquette is always a double movement. While it affects the piquette as much as the grape, the becoming itself is a third term that exerts this transformative force.”

...

Bailey hung an arm around Fenn’s neck and practically ruffled Fenn’s hair, like a bigger sibling to a little kid. “Fenn, meet our resident Vampyre, Gordon. He/it.” Bailey put a hand to her mouth and whispered to Fenn, “Sociology of Sociology, Jack Kerouac School of Experimental Vineyardery.” 

...

Jackie continued. “This piquette is produced in-house, made from all local ingredients, found within fifty metres of the shop. I recovered most of the turpentine that had soaked into the soil in the Trish Romance days, and I use it to make that sheen that floats on top of the beverage, and gives it a unique mouthfeel. The taste of forest floor comes from the forest floor clippings I use, and the glitter comes from the organic snow globe truck explosion of 96. Been saving it." 

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At one point, the audience was "barking and pumping their fists, in a throwback to the Arsenio Hall show." Please enjoy this clip from the opening of the Arsenio Hall show, the most 90s thing that ever happened: