Lawndale's cyber-cafe gets broken into and all of the computers are stolen. So, no one really seems to care, except dear old Mr. O'Neill, who feels violated and makes his students discuss their feelings on this "real-life tragedy" instead of doing normal schoolwork. After several failed attempts to get the students of lesser brainpower (Kevin) to share with the class, O'Neill gets frustrated and calls on Daria, who makes a sarcastic comment about it.
Unfortunately, as we have seen before, the sarcasm is totally lost on O'Neill. He interprets the remark to mean that Daria thinks the Lawndalians should open a "coffee-house of yore," and gets approval for this potential money-maker from our favorite tyrant. He then tries to convince Daria to work on it, but she refuses.
Later, at the Morgendorffer residence, Helen, who is obviously still caught up in the college-acceptance phase, decides that Daria needs to have some extra-curricular credits to get into a decent college, despite both Daria and Jake's insistence that it doesn't really matter as long as you can pay. So Helen threatens to send her to music camp if she can't get the credits herself (which Daria thinks is punishment for doing something very, very wrong).
Daria remembers that the coffee-house project is extra-curricular, so she convinces Jane to help her sell chocolate bars to raise funding. The first house they go to is inhabited by a scary hypoglycemic lady (who rather reminds me of a certain recorder teacher I had in fourth grade) who faints out of excitement when she discovers that they're selling chocolate. Jane, of course, whips out a camera and preserves the event with a magical Kodak (okay, well, Polaroid) moment. When the lady comes to, she demands the chocolate, but Jane and Daria intelligently refuse to sell it to her.
Quinn, meanwhile, is having quite a bit more success selling phone cards to lonely guys who think she's pretty, and Kevin and Brittany have stumbled on the abode of Mr. DeMartino and have failed miserably at getting him to buy anything.
The next day, Ms. Li chews Daria and Jane out for not selling the chocolate to the scary fat lady, and O'Neill tells Daria that he can't give her the credit unless she reads one of her stories on the coffee-house's opening night. She agrees, but begins planning quite an interesting surprise for O'Neill.
The big night finally arrives, and after a number of, er . . . interesting acts, including Kevin and Brittany's version of Shakespeare (which ends with Brittany getting pissed and giving Kevin a black eye), Daria takes the stage and reads her story. This story, which concerns a secret agent named Melody Powers (who do you think she was named after, eh?) Who enjoys running around and killing masses of communists, is met with great enthusiasm by the jocks. In fact, as Jake reads in the newspaper the next morning, the jocks became so enthusiastic that they decided to stone Lawndale's Russian embassy, and are stopped only when they discover that there are no embassies in Lawndale. And so the coffeehouse must close temporarily. However, the closed state becomes more permanent when, at the end of the episode, the coffeehouse is broken into and all the coffee-making devices are stolen.