Mutant Food Court

At lunch today I found an underground civilization of mutants. They were kind of like those mutant people who live in the old subway tunnels under the ground in Beneath the Planet of the Apes except that these guys had a Frank & Stein and a Chinese restaurant in their lair.

Anyways, I was heading to lunch thinking I would go to Potbelly's but the line was out the door. Not wanting to wait since it was 105 degrees I decided to head over to food-by-the-ton which is what I call this pay-by-the-pound food stop shop on the corner of Connecticut and L called the SOHO Cafe. The place is not at street-level so you have to go down these stairs to get to it which is really awesome. I got my orange chicken and lemonade and then paid for my food and headed over to find a seat. Of course there weren't any open tables since nobody wanted to sit outside today. I considered taking my food over to Farragut Square but then I remembered the homeless guy with the "Bush is a Necromancer" sign who lives there and thus I ruled out that idea. Leaving the restaurant to bring my food back to the office I noticed that the stairs went down further into the depths of the underground and so I decided to follow them. What I found was amazing. It was like a scuzzy cave that looked like it had once been a food court. There were still a few places to eat (I mentioned them at the beginning) but most of the establishments were long since abandoned and even the ones that were left were looking kind of shady.

The amazing thing was that there were all these empty tables and only a few other people around. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was there along with two of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bebop, this guy with, like, six arms, and a family of four from Boston. It was a pretty eclectic bunch and I wondered what the various circumstances were that made these people decide to devote their lives to mutantdom. The place also had its own private entrance to the Farragut North Metro station right there in the cave so the inhabitants could seep out into the city and prowl around without having to see the light of day at all! Seriously, this place had everything you need to maintain a functioning society--people, napkin dispensers, and recessed lighting. I was so freakin' excited as I ate my food and knew that I needed to come back again later this week, that is, if they don't find out I'm a surface dweller.

What was extra awesome was that I couldn't seem to find any way for the store owners to close off their lair from the street so it was likely that you could go down there at any hour of the night and see all kinds of vampires and stuff. Of course they were bound to have some sort of security system in place that either consisted of the most vicious of the mutants acting as guards or possibly just a high-tech system of trip-wires and swinging smack-you-in-the-face-and-kill-you logs.

Needless to say, I walked back to work happy. I wonder if they worship a nuclear bomb?