The Interfaith House of Prayer was packed, as it was every Sunday. The vinyl upholstery of the pews held a hundred butts, and a couple dozen more waited outside for a vacancy. Acolytes roamed the sanctuary in their colorful regalia, bestowing sacraments upon the worshipers and accepting their tithes. It was in the next room, the holy of holies, that the real work was done, by a cabal of priests who jealously guarded their secrets, the invocations and formulae that allowed them to form a bridge between the mortal world and the divine. It was an intricate dance, a sacred ritual that had gone almost uninterrupted, twenty-four hours a day, for nigh on thirty years; only massive catastrophes, events that shook the whole city to its bones, could pause it, and then only for hours, days at most. It was an institution, a sacred refuge, a spot of hope in an increasingly hopeless world.
"ORDER UP FOR 37!" Pope Gryps Phallacious shouted, as they slapped a corned beef hash and a short stack of blueberry-buckwheat pancakes under the heat lamp. Neither of them were special orders, unfortunately, with no more mojo in them than they naturally absorbed from such a mystically potent kitchen. Sundays were the worst for that; most customers, sure, but fewer true devotees of the House's teachings, their weird mutant brand of Unitarianism that held as its cornerstone the sanctity of the all-night diner. Gryps themself was a Discordian, primarily, but the truth of the House's message could not be denied, and their fellow chef-priests, a motley assortment drawn from a dozen traditions, shared that truth.
The morning passed in a blur, as Sunday mornings always did. Silvia Penne-Rigati (a Pastafarian theurge, clad as always in her ceremonial colander-crown) was testing out a breakfast lasagna, which sold out before ten o'clock. The Robinsons, a married couple who'd been at the House since the beginning, had a fight over the texture of the hollandaise that nearly came to blows, and were now glaring daggers at each other from opposite ends of the kitchen. Frank Zhu's idiotic cowboy hat caught fire; the eggs were briefly haunted by the ghosts of a thousand unborn chickens; and a patron got belligerent after a few too many bloody marys and had to be escorted from the premises.
There were a half-dozen others working the kitchen this morning, as there always were, seven being a number of great mystical potency (Gryps, of course, believed five was more powerful). There was Silvia Penne-Rigati, a Pastafarian theurge, meticulously assembling a breakfast lasagna. Beside her were Reverend Billy Davis, proud owner of the best damn biscuits and gravy recipe this side of the Mason-Dixon line, and "Cowboy" Zhu, a Texan Daoist who claimed to have achieved immortality by bribing a celestial bureaucrat with his huevos rancheros. The Robinsons, Marcellus and Susannah, were two of the Interfaith House of Prayer's founders, true Universalists who did their best to worship any god who would have them; Sue was having a quick smoke break out back, and Marc was
