Cheers Roll Down: A Series Of Unfreaktunate Events

3: What's Up, Tiger Libby?

"Sushi?" Sabrina asked skeptically. "Isn't that, like... raw fish?"

"Not necessarily," Roxie said. When Sabrina stared at her, she continued, "What are you gawking at? Morgan orders it all the time, and while I'd love to say I never tried it based on that alone... actually, it's not that bad."

"But..."

"Don't worry," I told Sabrina as I picked up my bags again. "They'll have other stuff, too. In fact, I know this little place just a subway hop down - it's not as good as Ichiban in Chicago, but even so... it's gonna blow your mind!"

~ o ~

"Well... my mind is certainly blown by this."

The three of us plunked down on stools, watching the multicoloured plates drift by on a conveyor belt. "Wild, huh?" I said, opening a pack of chopsticks. "This is probably about the coolest restaurant idea I've ever heard of."

"It's really... something," she said, staring intently at some unidentified thingy as it passed her. "What do you call it again?"

"Kaiten-zushi," Roxie sighed, picking up a plate of futomaki. "It literally means 'rotating sushi' - isn't that cute?"

She nodded distractedly. "And we just take whatever we want? How do they know what we've eaten?"

"The plates," I said, helping myself to gomokuzushi and a bottle of green tea. "See how they're different colours? That indicates price; the white ones - like my tea plate - are only a buck, but those black ones are six."

Her hand was drifting toward a black plate just as I said that, and she jerked it back like it bit her - Roxie and I almost died laughing.

"Leave me alone, you guys; I'm new to all this!"

Over the course of an hour, we slowly whittled away their stock of fish eggs and seaweed wraps, taking our sweet time to stack up a ridiculous number of plates that made the employer very happy, I'm sure. At least Sabrina had ordered enough Chinese take-out by now to be able to handle chopsticks, or she'd have been a permanent target for ridicule throughout the evening - as it was, she made a lot of funny faces, especially from the wasabe. Seriously, I could almost write another book about our night of sushi indulgence; it was an unqualified blast.

Finally, having had our fill, we settled up... and the damage wasn't good.

"God," Roxie breathed.

"Not God," I said. "Oh no, this was the work of somebody else, I'm sure of it."

"FORTY-SEVEN BUCKS?!" Sabrina shouted, running outside after us. "There's no way we ate that much rice!"

"It wasn't the rice," I groaned. "It was the toro, and the whale, and all those-"

"Wait, what?" Roxie actually dropped her bags and grabbed me by the lapels. "You're telling me, a card-carrying member of Greenpeace, that we ate whale meat?!"

"She did!" I yelped desperately as I nodded at Sabrina, whose eyes flew open. "I only noticed after the second piece was halfway to her mouth, so I didn't say anything!"

"Is that even legal?!"

"Oh geez," the poor freak moaned as Roxie put me down; suddenly, she looked a little green around the gills. "I... I think the whale's swimming upstream!"

But as she was bending toward the gutter, her swivelling head rammed into a pedestrian's abdomen.

"Oof!"