La macchina

The man, Giorno, rolled his eyes and carefully folded away his newspaper.

"Little miss, has this man kidnapped you?" he asked.

"I didn't kidnap her, you idiot!" Yuuji snapped.

"Shut your mouth! Nobody was talking to you! And your damn shirt! Put it back on! You're scaring my customers!"

"You don't have any customers! Anyway, forget that! Are you looking for help or ain't you?"

"I am! But this girl? How do you know her?" Giorno looked down at Aiko, eyebrows furrowed. "For you to come here together with a child is very suspicious."

"Damn it, Giorno! She's that missy I told you about before. Saved me from those dogs!"

"You should have let the dogs eat him, little miss," Giorno said with a sigh.

Aiko didn't hear him. She had spent their whole exchange looking around at all the strange things hung on the walls, or set into nooks and crannies behind the tables. Even though she'd not yet been able to find the courage to go inside, Aiko had looked through the windows into plenty of restaurants since she'd woken up in this world. This was also a restaurant, but it felt somehow different from those other places. The little statues and paintings that hung everywhere had an entirely different feel from everything she'd seen up to now, and while it was all unfamiliar, it somehow reminded her of the provincial areas in Impalia. Corlstone or the Ghinelands.

"Granpa Yuuji? What is this place?" Aiko asked.

"This is a diner. Giorno here makes decent coffee."

"Decent! The best you'll find anywhere around here! And it's a cafe not a diner."

Yuuji shrugged.

"C-Coffee?" Aiko tried out the unfamiliar word. It was unmistakably something this body had said before, but it wasn't something she could map easily onto her experience as Mathilda, so it didn't quite resolve into a memory.

Giorno raised his eyebrows. "You... don't know about coffee?"

"She's foreign," Yuuji said, as though this explained anything.

Giorno frowned, and gestured at one of the empty tables. "I'll show you. For now, you sit down there," he said to Aiko.

Aiko sat at the table, and watched as Giorno walked back behind the counter. As Yuuji made himself comfortable, she leaned over to get a better look. Giorno busied himself at the side of what looked like a giant silver box. He switched it on and began to measure out what looked like dried beans into a large machine that whirred and growled and spat out a powder. He tapped and scraped this powder, then loaded it into a little silver cup affixed to a wooden handle. Then, he clamped it onto the silver box, and pushed a button that made the machine rumble. When Giorno decided it had rumbled enough, he switched it back off again, and with one final turn of a lever the machine let out a long sigh of steam.

With little ceremony, Giorno came to their table and put a tray of drinks in front of them. Two tall glasses of water, and two much smaller cups filled with a black liquid.

Aiko looked down at the tiny cup. It was made of glass, and much smaller than anything she'd ever seen before, almost comically so. It was certainly too small to be practical for drinking. It was filled with an impenetrably dark black liquid, topped with a thick layer of caramel-white foam.

"What's this?" Aiko asked.

"Coffee!" Yuuji said. "Give it a shot."

"They call this espresso," Giorno said. "If it is a little bitter you can add some sugar."

"Espresso," Aiko tried out the word, then lifted the little cup. It was so little that she wondered how something like this could be satisfying at all. Still, she wasn't paying for it, and it would be rude to turn it down without at least trying it.

Aiko gingerly brought the tiny cup to her lips, and sipped.

Bitter.

Aiko's eyes widened. It was more bitter than anything she had ever drunk, but at the same time it was somehow also sweet. It was not thick like soup, but neither was it thin and reedy. It was velvety, and coated the inside of her mouth. Aiko shivered.

What was this? Why had she never drunk this before? Why had she wasted so much of her life?

When she finished, Aiko jolted up from the table and threw her hands up.

"Espresso!"

"There, see? She likes it," Yuuji said, drinking from his own tiny cup.

Giorno laughed. "Well, of course she likes it! What did I tell you?"

Aiko frantically dug around in her pockets until she found some of her coins. She held them out to Giorno, eyes wide. "More."

"I'm happy you like it, but little miss, if you are not used to it you should not drink so much. It'll give you the shakes."

"No problem."

From across the table, Yuuji put his cup back down. "What do you think? Reckon you could make her a waitress?"

Giorno frowned, arms folded, and tapped one foot on the floor. "You looking for work, little miss? You ever worked at a cafe?"

"No." Aiko shook her head.

Giorno sighed. "Would you like to try making one?"

"Yes," Aiko said without hesitation.

"Come on then, to the kitchen."

"Go on," Yuuji urged her. "I'll be back here reading Giorno's newspaper."

Giorno took Aiko behind the counter and positioned her in front of the large machines she had seen from afar. They all looked like gnomish contraptions, large and silver and covered in buttons. He reached into a bag and pulled out a single dark, oily bean. He held it out to Aiko.

"Espresso is very simple, little miss. You take many of these coffee beans, and grind them very fine, into a powder. Then you put that powder into this here, the portafiltro, and press it down tight until it has become a solid little disc. Last, we use this here, la macchina to push very hot water through the little disc. What comes out is caffè espresso. Here they call it just espresso."

"La macchina."

"Yes yes, exactly so. Look, let me show you one time. Pay attention."

Aiko nodded, and leaned in close while Giorno worked.

"First we set the portafiltro to the grinder. This is all automatic, very simple."

The grinder had a container on top that was already filled with beans. Giorno pressed a button on the machine and it whirred to life. The beans shuffled in the large container and a neat little mountain of dark powder was deposited in the portafiltro.

"Now here, we tamp the grinds. Some places do this automatically too, but here I just do it by hand. Like this, see?"

Aiko watched as Giorno flattened and compacted the powder using a little metal tool, then he showed her the result. The beans were all evenly pressed together.

"Fix the portafiltro in place, and run the water."

There was the same buzzing sound from before as Giorno started the machine, and Aiko leaned in to watch as the espresso streamed out of the machine and into another small cup Giorno had set below the portafiltro. When the cup was a little over halfway full, he switched off the machine.

"Here, try it," Giorno offered the fresh cup of espresso. It was dark black, with the same thin layer of crema on top as before.

Aiko took a sip, and once again felt the same pleasant tingling sensation.

"Good. Same."

"Yes," Giorno said, smiling and puffing out his chest. "It is exactly the same. I could do it a thousand times and each time would be exactly like this time."

"Oooh." Aiko clapped.

"What a good girl you are! Now little miss, you try."

Aiko nodded, and faced the array of machines in front of her. As Mathilda, she had once delved to the bottom of a mechanical dungeon and torn the clockwork heart from a demon made of cogs and driven by steam. Surely this couldn't be that hard.

Trying to follow the same steps as Giorno, she ground the beans, tamped them down, set the portafiltro in place, and set the macchina to work.

Her espresso was weak and watery.

"Yuck." Aiko stuck her tongue out. "Sour."

She wondered if Giorno would be angry, but he just laughed. "Oh well, it's your first time after all." He took a step back and looked at her appraisingly. "Do you want to try again?"

"Yes," Aiko said without hesitation.

"That's the right attitude. Well then." Giorno clapped his hands together. "Let's get started."

Before she left, Aiko drank seven cups of espresso. She couldn't stop shaking until late at night, and had the worst night's sleep of her life.

It was worth it.