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The rest of Katya’s shift was fairly uneventful. Her sous chef burnt a steak and she scolded him in Russian quite thoroughly despite the man’s inability to speak her language. He seemed to get the point though and was on his game for the rest of the afternoon. No one liked burned food, but they especially didn’t like waiting twice as long for their mid-day meal than they should have, and Katya didn’t appreciate her skills in the kitchen being confused for someone’s of a lesser standard. Half past three rolled around and the gossip-mill began to start back up again. “You gonna find out Pie Bloke’s name tonight?” one of the waitresses asked her. “Why?” Katya replied earnestly. His name made no difference to her, she could shag him regardless of his name and what if he was named something horrible like Axel or Stacy. That would ruin the whole allure he had going, and it wasn’t as if she were planning to stick around long enough to make him a regular in her rotation. “What are you going to call him, then?” the witch asked sincerely. “Pie Bloke,” someone else suggested. “No..” the waitress complained but she was drowned out by laughter.

Four o’clock came and Katya was officially off the clock. She threw her chef’s coat into her locker and grabbed her handbag, throwing the strap over her shoulder. “Proschay, Gerald.” Gerald made kissy faces at her and Katya rolled her eyes loudly at him. Children, the lot of them. Pie Bloke was sitting near the front entrance when she stepped out into the dining room and Katya raised her eyebrows then looked at her watch. He was rather prompt. “It is a little desperate to be so early,” she said as she approached, giving him a teasing smirk. She had been told on a number of occasions that she came off more harshly than she had intended, owing to her thick, foreign accent and blunt tongue. She proudly claimed anyone who couldn’t appreciate her sense of humor deserved to be offended and they could fuck right off.

Life was chaotic all on its own, but this business with the Ministry seemed to only amplify things. Katya tried her best to stay out of all things politics, but too much of her family had aligned with the Dark Lord and she frequently held a sense of dread not only for herself but for her family. Her mum had sent her a letter recently claiming Katya was living with her “head in the sand” and recommended she connect with her cousin Igor, as they were both currently living in the same country. Katya ignored her mother’s well-intended advice and she tried to ignore the chaos filling the beautiful streets of wizarding London, but even she couldn’t avoid the pamphlets that practically rained from the sky demonizing muggles and muggleborns, the posters advocating citizens to turn in their neighbors if they saw anything “suspicious”, or the bright yellow bracelets some of magical folks were forced to wear. Kat found relief in her work. She enjoyed cooking and baking, hell, even cleaning up in the kitchen was sometimes a cathartic experience, depending on how things were going. They employed dishwashers at Almathea’s though, so she generally reserved her pan washing therapy for at home.

They were a week into December and Katya was kicking around the idea of getting out of town. She adored London, the nightlife was amazing and if you ignored the blatant supremacists, the people were amazing too. She’d been here three years, a hell of a long time for the wandering brunette. Was there anything tying her to this place that was worth overlooking the political strife the country was in?

“Pie bloke’s back.” Hazel eyes flashed over her shoulder, her hands continuing their work as she filled a cherry pie on the woodblock countertop. “Are you news announcer now, Gerald?” she asked sarcastically, a little smile flashing quickly across her face. “You know he fancies you.” “Everyone does,” she retorted. She didn’t need to play into the restaurant gossip games the rest of the kitchen staff partook in, but she liked hearing about Pie Bloke. Gerald shrugged and picked up several plates, placing them onto his tray and backing out of the kitchen toward the dining room. Katya peeked through the swinging double doors toward the main room of the restaurant, seeing if she could spot Pie Bloke. A quick smile flashed again as she spied him near the Christmas tree. “Privlekatel'naya svin'ya,” she said to herself as she turned back to her cherry pie and prepared to put the lattice crust on.

Having slipped the pie into the oven and flicked her wand toward the timer, Katya gave another glance toward the dining room. With the doors now shut, she could only see through the circular windows the festive tree near which Pie Bloke was sitting, but not his handsome face. She wiped her hands on a towel and pursed her lips. If she was going to skip town, she might as well have some new kind of fun before she left. Leaving her chef’s coat in the kitchen, Katya slipped through the double doors and casually mentioned taking her break to the sous chef on her way out. Her hair was still up in a messy ponytail and there were flecks of powder in her hair from when one of the bakers dropped a bag of flour in the middle of the kitchen and coated the room with an indoor snow. Kat sidled up to Pie Bloke’s table and rested one hand on the empty chair across from him, the other on her hip. “No compliment for me today?” she said, smirking through the accusation. He always sent his remarks to her via the wait staff though he had only received his pie by the looks of it, and likely hadn’t had the chance yet to flag someone down for a compliment.

If that wasn’t confirmation that the bloke did not speak Russian, Katya didn’t know what was. She’d not been hitting on him in the slightest, and as he seemingly joked about her to Karla, Katya muttered “tupaya zadnitsa” under her breath. Alright, he was being rather cute but also very presumptuous and Katya was not in the mood to be ogled by a man interested in her pies. He was complimentary, both with his eyes that had fallen on her tits and with her words regarding her baked goods. She was pleased with her skills in the kitchen and supposed she couldn’t fault him for trying to be funny, even if he was failing at it. “Spasibo,” she replied, then corrected herself and spoke in English. “I am happy you like my pies.” She raised her brows a little, smirking at the man but otherwise she kept a professional look about her. Smacking a customer with her hand bag and calling him an attractive pervert was not likely to keep her as the head chef. Compliments to the chef were usually delivered via the waiter while she was still in the kitchen, where upon she would ask if the customer was attractive and make a joke about sending the hot ones a little something extra, but it was all in jest and she wasn’t prepared to make the same sort of remarks to an actual customer. Brown-green eyes shifting back to the hostess, Katya tried to make a speedy exit. “Try not to smile at this one when you ring him up, Karla. We do not want him thinking you are flirtovat with him.” She grinned at the hostess then, giving Hottie one last quick glance, she turned toward the door and pushed it open, stepping out into the street. She was ready for a little time to herself, not sure what she would do with the rest of the day off but certain something entertaining would catch her eye.

“I wanna rock and roll all night. And party every day.” The crowd was singing along as Katya belted the lyrics into the mic, her beer bottle raised into the air and her head bobbing along to the beat. The music faded out but Katya’s voice didn’t soften with it. Instead, she put on her best Gene Simmons impression and shouted away from the mic “Thank you London!” sticking her tongue out to mimic the rock star. She took a dramatic bow, keeping her bottle upright as to not waste any beer on the floor of the stage – a mistake she only needed to make once. The crowd clapped loudly, and Katya grinned as she slid the microphone back into its stand and then hopped off the stage with a little bounce.

Weaving her way through the crowd back up to the bar was easy enough. The place was crowded but well organized, with a vibe that Katya really enjoyed. She’d come here often since discovering it, and she made friends with the staff well enough that they all knew each other by name and had a few inside jokes with one another. Hiro had teased her that she ought to take the job of head chef for the Nakamura, who served little more than bar food, and she would wiggle her eyebrows at him and claim they couldn’t afford her. “Can I get another, Hiro?” she asked from the far side of the bar, shaking her nearly empty bottle at him then swigging the remainder. “Mimyette!” A friendly face at the other end of the bar had caught Katya’s eye and she happily shouted the woman’s name in her thick accent, raising her hands into the air excitedly. Leaving her now empty beer bottle on the bar, Katya slid through a few good looking blokes – and a few not-so-good looking ones, and made her way to where Mimi was sitting. “You came! Otlichno!” She leaned into the small space between Mimi and the wizard sitting at the bar next to her. “What are you going to be singing first? Have you decided?”

The nice thing about working at a restaurant were the hours. Her shifts as the head chef were pretty regular and the restaurant closed at ten which meant she was done by eleven, sometimes earlier, which left plenty of time to go out and have fun. She even was able to get a respectable amount of sleep most nights, even after working a full dinner shift and hitting a pub or billiards club. Tonight, as Katya said farewell to her colleagues, her mind was on one thing; Karaoke. She had mentioned it to a few local friends and extended an open invitation but there were no hard plans made and she would be plenty happy singing on her own and making new friends at the pub should no one else make it out. She did like to chat with people, ask about their life and possibly get an idea of her next big adventure but sadly most of the people she’d spoken with were a little of the dull side. One witch thought her trip to southern England to visit her sister for the weekend was cause for fanfare and another bloke only had a list of bands he’d seen in concert to talk about. Katya enjoyed going to concerts as well but when asked about the most amazing parts of her life thus far, she wouldn’t be talking about the time she saw Deep Purple live.

There were plenty of places that did karaoke around London. Katya had visited several of them and while she always had a pretty good time, the muggle places couldn’t compare to Nakamura’s in Whimsic Alley. Whimsic didn’t get Kat’s money much during the day, it was rather posh and not at all Kat’s speed but at night it was practically a different place. Bars and clubs and strip joints. She’d gone to the Gentleman’s Club a few times with friends and even made friends with some of the dancers. Her favorite place was the dive bar at the end of the alley, Rellik, though the Chinese food place had an excellent habit of staying open late and they had a bar which put Shangri-la in a tight second because it was hard to beat beer and eggrolls. Maybe she’d stop by there on the way home tonight, but more than likely she was going to get an enormous plate of nachos that she had no hope of finishing by herself and have a couple beers while she made eardrums bleed belting out Rock and Roll All Night from the stage.

“Privyet, Hiro! How are you tonight?” Katya greeted the bartender warmly as she stepped inside the building and approached the man. “Can’t complain,” Hiro answered. “How about you?” “I’ll be better after a beer and a song,” she said cheekily before quickly adding “whatever’s coldest.” She wasn’t overly picky about what she drank and she preferred a bottle over a glass simply for the fact that there was a smaller opening through which to spill it. She wasn’t clumsy by any means but she did like to dance and at least once a night her beer would accompany her to the microphone while she was singing, so it was just best to play it safe. Hiro returned with a dark bottle and popped the cap off in front of her before sliding it across the bar. “Thanks,” she said before taking a sip and turning to inspect the crowd. It looked to be a fun bunch tonight. “I’ll be back,” she said to the bartender, taking her beer and hopping off the barstool with a quick wave. “Gonna put my name in.”

She made her way to the corner of the room where a little table was set up like a sort of DJ booth. The MC waved at her and handed her a quill and a slip of parchment to write her song choice on. “You don’t need the book, do you?” he asked, just as he always did. “Does this look like my first dragon fight?” she asked rhetorically and scribbled out the name and artist of the song she wanted. There were already several people ahead of her and when the MC called her name she’d already started on a second beer. Since her friends hadn’t shown up to keep watch over her drink, her fresh bottle made it’s musical debut for a little KISS number.