[log] Chopped: Link's Exploded Backpack Edition

[unsheathedfromreality]

Who: Anyone who wants to salvage the Unreasonably Large Food Pile left in the kitchen ... and elsewhere ... by Link's departure.
What: An Unreasonably Large Pile of delicious fresh food!
When: April 1st
Where: The kitchen and surrounding areas in the Lobby. The bugs and lizards might spread ...
Content warnings: Contains live insects!! Potential insect-eating. Should be pretty tame otherwise!

It starts with a hurried post on the bulletin board in Illarion's efficient script:

There is an enormous pile of food in the kitchen that needs to be saved.

Anyone who can prepare or preserve it welcome.

After an hour or two, a tidy little inventory appears beneath the initial message, along with an attempt to track -- by name or description -- who's taken what, and how it's been used. There are some inventive descriptions on there for the items Illarion doesn't recognize.

(It doesn't look exactly like this -- because Illarion doesn't know the names of everything in the pile, or everyone who stops by, and certainly wouldn't make a spreadsheet -- but the poor digital substitute will have to stand in for his glorious real list.)

---

Those who do respond to the urgent missive will find the kitchen exactly as described: Absolutely full to overflowing with fresh produce that could've grown in the Library's garden, alongside a veritable market wagon of fresh fish, meat, and more produce. (Along with ... rocks and wood?)

Oh, and there's also a minor infestation of live bugs and reptiles actively escaping into the stacks.

Illarion's right in the thick of it for hours, first tirelessly triaging the mass into what should be cooked or preserved first, what will store well in the icebox, and what can be kept around on the shelves. Then he turns his hand to preparing the meat and fish for drying (and saving the fat from the richest cuts).

Once he's certain the most perishable items are taken care of, he sets aside some of the fat, honey, and berries for himself. Then he goes out hunting, pursuing the bugs and lizards loose in the Lobby and stacks. He's got no shame whatsoever about chasing them under furniture or up bookshelves, and soon has his sabertache full of squirmy tidbits.

Then it's back to the kitchen, to render the fat and make crunchy insect pemmican from his prizes.

(He's enough of a magpie he can't resist making off with some of the gems. There's someone out there who will look stunning in rubies and amber...)

((OOC: Feel free to use this as a jumping-off point for whatever you wanna do with your top levels! No need to tag Illarion -- go wild.

The spreadsheet above is fully editable -- feel free to put in what your guys take on tab 2 & I'll eventually get some automation going to track the item inventory and tab 1 will do inventory for us. Have fun!!))

Comments

[codeswitchcraft]

Apples

Siobhan has ten apples out in front of her. She might have taken more, but there's something nicely symbolic about the ten. It's how many are in her family heraldry, after all.

"... does anyone know how to bake?" she asks the room suddenly. "Because I do think you could make a nice apfelkuchen with these."

Huntress

So. Siobhan is, actually, a very fine huntress, able to shoot a lizard crawling up the side of a bookshelf at twenty paces. The problem is that for some reason the library considers this a Safe Zone offense, which means instead of being able to easily retrieve her lizard, so that she can take it out to the garden and burn it as an offering to Thorne, she instead gets sent to the brand new forest for the next five minutes—so hopefully she had a hunting partner to watch her kill for her until she gets back? Or, I guess, take it out to her in the Safe Zone woods. Either way.

Sacrifices?

Now that she's got her lizard, it's time to set it in the (very safe! hopefully not going to get her sent back to the safe zone!) brazier she pulled out of a book with her newfound resource manipulation skills and dedicate it to her goddess.

"Hail to thee, Fae Warden of the Wyld," she chants aloud. "For the many gifts you have given me, I offer you thanks and praise. My blood and breath to thee, Thorne, and that of my prey today."

She tosses the lizard onto the brazier.

It fails to catch fire. It continues to fail to catch fire.

"Why is this lizard fireproof!" she says in frustration, throwing her hands up in the air.

Hunting (cw: loud noise warning from the link)

[aetherweaver]

Nara'a is watching from high above, sitting on top of a bookshelf. He's been following Siobhan quietly, making his presence known to her but not intrusive.

He grins when he sees her make her shot, and is about to congratulate her - but then she's whisked off to the Safe Zone. ... Of course. He sighs and makes his way over to the shelf and pulls the arrow - and lizard - from the wood.

In a blink he's in the Safe Zone as well - apparently he wasn't gentle enough. But he's still holding the skewered lizard so... success?

Re: Hunting

[codeswitchcraft]

"Thank you," she says in relief, reaching up to take it from him. "Ugh, I really hope the next Story has me visiting instead of a character."

[aetherweaver]

He hands it down to her and nods. "I wish for the same. It would be helpful if we could always be ourselves, but it seems that is not in the cards."

[codeswitchcraft]

"If we're both ourselves and it's somewhere there's game, we should hunt together," she says. "We can make sure to keep our weaponry on hand once the library starts recommending reading to us again, so that we'll have it when we get sucked into a story again."

Then she brightens, "Oh, I finally had a breakthrough for doing things with the books, so now I can get arrows and things out from them and they stay. So I don't have to worry about making more myself."

[aetherweaver]

"We should, yes. I didn't have mine on hand for the first one... I really should have." But it was probably not going to be a place where carrying weaponry was looked upon favorably...

He brightens a little and smiles. "Oh, excellent! My own weapons don't run out of ammunition, but I have been able to pull things out of books for my projects. ... If your bow needs repairs, please let me know. I'm quite good at carpentry."

[codeswitchcraft]

"I didn't either," Siobhan admits. "But the high school had an archery club, so I was able to steal one from the shed." Which was how she'd been able to hold some of the aliens at arrowpoint during the first story.

"I promise I'll let you know first if, Thorne forbid, it breaks."

[aetherweaver]

"I see. ... Having a centralized school for everyone seems like it would be convenient if not chaotic... how do they teach multiple subjects in there?"

Ah, something to consider later. "Of course." He thinks for a moment and then takes out a black stone. He holds it in his hand for a moment and then, in a blink, his outfit changes completely. He stretches and unsheathes his scythe. The inner blade glows faintly blue. "If we can't do too much damage here, it might be a good chance to at least do a few swings."

[codeswitchcraft]

"They have different teachers that move from room to room," Siobhan explains. "They each lecture for an hour or so and then switch off."

Her eye go wide as she watches him interact with the stone.

"How did you do that?"

[aetherweaver]

Oh good, explaining aetherial tricks. Genuinely one of his favorite pastimes.

"Essentially it's storing my gear in an aetherial pocket in the soul crystal. I can take it off manually, but the gear can also be equipped by 'pulling' the aether out of the pocket."

He holds up his red mage crystal. "This is where the previous equipment set went. I can also change to Paladin." Tucking the crystals away, he thinks for a moment.

"... Though the one I'm wielding right now is a little different. I - can you keep something quiet for me? Please." Only Kai knows so far...

[codeswitchcraft]

"Of course," she promises. "I have kept many secrets that were asked of me, Nara'a."

(In particular, she kept the secret of Io's wounding secret from all the Players, even those she accounted her friends, until Hikaru had figured it out and began to tell people.)

[aetherweaver]

"Thank you."

He turns and gives a few swings to a tree - they don't seem to do much impact - and then a cloaked figure appears in front of him, swiping at the tree with long claws before fading with a few strands of black smoke lingering in the air. It also seems to have not done much to the tree...

"... It came with a voidsent that I made a pact with." He touches his chest. "It's... attached to my soul now."

[codeswitchcraft]

Siobhan is very quiet at first. Then, softly, "I understand such things. A small piece of my goddess is always within me now."

[aetherweaver]

He lets out a breath. Gods might not be the same thing as primals where she’s from. “… Does it cause any ill effects for you?”

[codeswitchcraft]

"No!" Siobhan says, shaking her head. "She has been nothing but helpful to me, I swear to it. The gods of my world... I told you that they are a real and physical, not requiring belief, but they... they are the same thing we Mundanes are, just infinitely more complex and powerful. And she is but a fraction of her greater self. So it is like having a friend inside my head who is always there, but she knows when to hold back her commentary and when to speak."

[aetherweaver]

“I know, I know you did, it’s just a little… hard to get my head around.” His ears flick back. “But I understand that. The avatar is not the only thing attached to my soul.”

He lets out a sigh. “There’s also the person who shares my soul from another reflection. He let me absorb him so I didn’t turn into a monstrosity. And.. then there’s the…”

How to even explain? He digs his boot’s toe into the dirt a little. “… It’s complicated to explain, but something like… repressed feelings manifested as another person.”

[codeswitchcraft]

Siobhan is quiet for a moment. "Another person inside your body or another physical person?" she asks.

[birdchasingecho]

"A little? It won't be exactly like a chef would do it, but we've got nothin' but materials."

[codeswitchcraft]

"Chefs and bakers aren't necessarily the same people," Siobhan says. She peers at Mei. "Do you know apfelkuchen at least? Baking is a much more precise art than cooking. You cannot just improvise. Even I know that and I only went to the kitchen to give our cook menus."

[birdchasingecho]

"As in baked apples?" She closes her eyes and tries to recall the details. Sugar, a hint of cinnamon, an oven burning to--

Oh. Damn it. That's Amalia's memories, from living on her own. She hums and taps a foot in irritation. "It's probably not the same recipe, you're right. It's not even something from home, it's-- from when I lived alone. A spinster's version."

[codeswitchcraft]

"As in a cake of apples in batter," says Siobhan. "If we can find a cookbook without photos but with intact recipes, perhaps we can make it. But just baking the apples would be nice, yes. My family had orchards, so I've always eaten a fair share of apples."

[birdchasingecho]

"Thankfully, temperature control's a lot easier with a modern oven than a wood-burning one." She throws that sucker to 375, hears the electric hum, nods, and dithers about which knife to use from the block, which, of course, is already missing several, including the paring knife she would have preferred.

"But yeah, we should find cookbooks on general principles."

[codeswitchcraft]

"I am able to pull things from them now and have them stay things," Siobhan says. "Which would have been good to give us more of a variety of food, before all of these were given to us."

[birdchasingecho]

"Oh! That'll come in handy. I should learn it too." And then, as she slowly struggles with properly coring the apples with an improper knife, she adds, "I wonder if it could work with paring knives..."

[codeswitchcraft]

"I'd need to find the right book, but I don't see why not," Siobhan says.