sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] Harvest Feast 🍂

[MINGLE] Harvest Feast 🍂

WHERE: 6I Inn
WHEN: 10 November, all day
OPEN TO: ALL - MINGLE POST
NOTE: Details can be found here.

In the wee hours of November 10th, before even the earliest risers have roused themselves for another day, items begin to appear in the front room of the Inn. Decorations first — Boughs of autumn leaves in their reds and golds, wreaths of dried flowers and silken ribbon, flickering candles among the goards and berries and acorns. The food arrives next, the decadent aroma slipping up the Inn stairs to tempt those lingering in bed — Every imaginable harvest time delicacy, from roast turkey and ham to smoked salmon and oysters; fresh, soft bread warm from the oven to plum pudding and ice cream. And did we mention pie?

Once again, it's time for a feast. The bar is stocked, the coffee is brewed and the tables are groaning with food. Indulge, there's more than enough for everyone — That is, if you don't lose your appetite worrying about what it will all cost.

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The casual tone gets an arched brow, and Kira lets himself finish chewing through the sense of ah, we're doing this again. This village is intolerably small, and he swears more people seem to know him than don't. Telling some of them apart is near impossible - the party's made everyone pretty friendly.

If the place was just a little bigger, and he had some idea of how well he was supposed to know these people, he could chance a few what was your name again's. So far, he hasn't wanted to risk it.

"I am...enjoying access to fresh carbs," he says, squinting a bit as he settles on an innocuous non-answer. "Do you think it's going to stick around this time - what we don't manage to eat in one go. It's not really Thanksgiving without a week of leftovers."

It's hard to tell if this is awkward because both of them are awkward (or, okay, Nerys is awkward--she's not as bad at small talk as Odo, but she's not fantastic at the socialising thing), or if there's something else going on. Something about the arched brow and the lack of greeting sets off some concern, but she's just going to roll with it for now. It's not as if they weren't more than friendly acquaintances anyway.

"I'm also enjoying access to fresh carbs," she says, with just a faintly amused expression as she mirrors his phrasing. "As for how long it'll last, well...last time, a friend and I--"

By now she can bite back grief and present little more than a faint sadness to her tone, sure. So that's what the talk of Vee gets her. "We took a bunch of chocolates. Wrapped up to keep the air off them and kept in the cold, they lasted for a couple months. So no, it won't just go into thin air at zero-hundred hours, fortunately."

Pausing, she adds, "Sorry, what's Thanksgiving?"

For a moment, stripped of his ability to read deeper into her words, he's terrified that she already knows what happened, and he was the friend, and it's going to be Bodhi's devestated face all over again. But no - different friend, someone else he probably knew and can't produce an appropriate reaction to.

It should not be this complicated to chat people up at the feast at the end of the world, or whatever the fuck this is.

"It's a dumb propaganda holiday about how colonizers had a peaceful meal with the people they were actually enacting genocide on. It totally didn't happen, but hundreds of years later we eat turkey and potatoes with our families once a year."

Not quite the end of the world. At least not in Nerys' understanding of how that is, though the apocalypse is a bit different in most Bajoran cultures than it is for humans. It's more like the bait in a trap, she thinks, and all of her compatriots (and Nerys herself) think they're smart enough to grab it before the net drops.

She listens to the description, lips pursed, and sips some of the well-spiked coffee she has with her. This is number three, so she's starting to get a little punchy in multiple ways. "That's...really strange, yet unsurprising," she says. "Colonizers tend to tell themselves pretty amazing stories to help themselves sleep nights. But it's good to get together with family, I guess."

Edited 2017-11-26 00:21 (UTC)

Thankfully, she's not on her way to punchy alone. His own drinks take the bite out of the question, "What do you think the people who put us here tell themselves? That parties like this make up for all the rest?"

Not that he has much experience of the rest, but winding up here at all, then expected to play some game of catch-up from a year of shit that definitively did not happen, that's enough.

Kira eyes the room over his own cup. "Mark said we weren't the first people here, even. I wonder what they did to empty it out." His theory for Mark had been flippant, but in light of his own circumstances: how many times have any of them been here? Maybe he's just the first one off-schedule for a reset of the whole thing.

If truth be told, Nerys is used to rhetorical questions with bite--or at the very least, ones far more bitter than a black coffee. She can tell when it's directed at her, so when it's not...no offense taken.

"I think they probably like playing with our emotional responses. Part of it seems like an emotional ride, keeping us uncertain of whether the next thing that appears is positive or negative. Classic psychology for most sentient beings, and plenty of semi-sentient ones. And if some feel good about themselves and sleep at night, probably it seems like it's a..." She laughs, shaking her head. "Like it's a nice thing to do."

She lifts an eyebrow at Kira. "What do you think?" It's honest curiosity--eventually if she gets enough people's theories, maybe she can build some sense out of this place herself.

"Honestly," he says, swirling the mixture of coffee and thinner alcohol in his own mug, "I think I might wake up from this extremely detailed stress-dream in an entirely different experimental situation." It didn't surprise him at all that the virus in Manhattan was man-made: of course it was. Things like that don't just appear overnight, spritzed on dollar bills.

If he's not crazy, he's just been teleported into a more scenic, low-tech ant farm. Today is apple slice today, tomorrow is probably the magnifying glass and heat-lamp day.

"But if you're asking how I think the people in charge sleep, I think they probably just don't care. I think they see us as so small and stupid that it doesn't matter what they do. We're ants, or rats. They can get attached to a few of us and dole out more cheese than electric shocks, but they aren't going to bust us out of the maze."

"I've thought that before, but I'm pretty sure my dreams would be weirder than this. Either that, or I'm really good at guessing and making up Earth flora and fauna." Nerys looks around them at the woods, but as she's tipsy, it's sort of pointless considering it's nearly dark. It doesn't quite make her dizzy, but it's a little hard to focus on anything.

Therefore it takes her a minute to hear the rest of what Kira says, and something about it rings true to her. Or as true as anything else around here can be. She nods, then says quietly, "It doesn't even take all that much of a power imbalance, really. Just a winning strategy, and even your average sentient starts acting that way."

Part of what the Cardassians had had going for them was that their entire dominant culture was focused on lies, espionage, and manipulation.

Earth flora and fauna gets a squint, but only just. He's spent enough time moving house with his apparent long-term roommate, who claims to be some kind of space-trucker, to accept that part of his new situation is literal space-cases.

The rest of the squint is trying to parse what else she's saying, through his own softened judgment. Eventually it resolves in a slow nod. Eventually, he puts his ass down in a chair and motions permission for her to do the same. "You mean they could just - be people?" That warrants a deep breath, and a deeper sigh. "I could see that, yeah. We're already treating each other like garbage where I'm from."

"In my experience...yeah. I've found that most sentients who live in linear time have particular motivations and ways of thinking--even when their morality and ethics are completely foreign. Everyone's got to consume energy, excrete, rest, have pleasure of whatever kind they’re into, secure resources for themselves and their people. And sometimes the way they go about it is seriously fucked up.” Nerys shrugs and sips the dregs of her drink, trying to eke it out a little. Yeah, she can go and get more, but she doesn’t really feel like getting up yet.

“Where’re you from?” she asks, after a second of debating whether to pose the question. “I mean, if you’re okay with saying it. Not that I’m new to the world of people mistreating other people for kicks, but that happens in a lot of places.”

"Why don't we just--call them people," he asks, squinting until his eyes close. And he lives in that a moment, with the alcohol and the existential dread, then blinks back into his fraught existence. Awesome. "Calling them sentients makes me feel like, I don't know. Like how they must be looking at us."

Which, maybe was clue enough of the kind of place he came from, where sentience and personhood are inextricably linked, to the point of denying one in a subject you want to deny the other. "I'm from Earth, I think we were just wrapping up the year 2015, and there's this little island off the coast of New York where all the important shit happens. I grew up on that, and we were dealing with a spot of engineered plague."

Admitting that deserves another drink, so he tops off his mug without bothering to add more coffee, and starts to suck it down.

"Okay, people," Nerys says, gesturing just a touch indulgently (she's had a few drinks) with her free hand. "Sorry, it's mostly Federation inclusive speech training taken hold--if we don't know what kind of beings they are, some language implies assuming being humanoid forms, or carbon-based life, or whatever...look, ignore me," she finishes, trailing off and actually listening. "People works."

And then she winces, her mouth curling in sympathetic disgust. "Engineered, huh. Ugly, I'm sorry." For a second, she opens her mouth, about to tell him about the time or two she knew about the Cardassians trying something similar, but she didn't actually see it herself, and it's not the kind of thing that makes for small talk.

"I mean, normal plagues are pretty ugly too," he says with a shrug, plowing on whether or not it's good small talk. It's something he's maybe needed to say, to someone who will let him go ten minutes without a reminder that he's disappointing half the village with a spot of memory loss.

Memory-never-having, really.

"This one though, someone put it all over our currency. This holiday they're giving us a feast for? We have uh--" what wording works for someone who talks about sentients and Federations? "Commerce? We do a lot of it afterward, getting gifts for the solstice celebrations. It feels kind of similar to this shit at the end of the day. The social aspect."

As Nerys only really met Kira once before now, and that in a situation where complex conversation was kind of a moot point, she's not entirely cottoned on to the fact that he doesn't recognize her. And in that case, well, it doesn't really matter. She knows when people who've seen some shit need to talk about it a little, knows that feeling all too well.

"They're nasty, yeah. But biological warfare is a particularly unfair fight in my book, to put it mildly." She kicks back and tops up her drink a little further, waving the bottle at him slightly in question.

"So they passed it around on currency. That's ugly as fuck, pardon my language." Despite the Federation take on money (which, in fairness, Nerys still isn't sure how to parse, because they still use credits), Bajor's economy continues to run on the lita, and Nerys knows how much spending happens around festivals, especially stuff for Peldor.

"That's the thing," he says, all of him kind of going still. Licking an incisor, trying to really think about it from this strange vantage of finally being outside of it, even if it's just in another dire situation. "We weren't at war with these people, it was just--another home-grown terrorist. Some guy who thought ebola and smallpox should get married and wipe out a city together."

Not that it directly had. Plenty of people had made it off the island, and Kira hadn't gotten so much as a sore throat from it.

"Like I said, ant farms. I'm glad it's apple slice day instead of a magnifying glass to the sun."

Nerys isn't entirely sure what an 'ant farm' is, but the context is pretty clear, and she nods thoughtfully. As for the rest...as her profession was once homegrown terrorist, she's not entirely sure that's worth mentioning in this context. Besides, the resistance wasn't exactly that kind of organization--harming civilians with bio-weapons? Inexcusable.

"Sounds a little like he might have done it for the hell of it," she says. "Rather than have a cause, really. There are people who just like to fuck shit up to see what happens, or who pretend they have a reason but just enjoy seeing people hurt."

It's a motivation she doesn't really understand.

Edited 2017-12-20 23:09 (UTC)

"I was a little busy not-dying to read his manifesto, but I'm sure he left one." That would have been Ty and Nicky's purview--understanding, apprehending. Kira had been more concerned with stretching old Bisquick to feed sixty people crammed into a garage, and wondering what would happen when the air warmed up and the smell of mass graves started to creep out of the park.

It makes the silver linings of this place shine a little brighter. He certainly didn't have to cook any of this.

"This place," he says, rolling in his lips, pursing them, trying to get a handle on what he wants to say. More alcohol won't help that, and he slows himself down, keeps his glass at his hip for now. "At least there's enough room to breathe and really think about what's going on. Which is a shitty condolence, but--looking at all this, I feel like it could be worse. I know it could be."

"Yeah," Nerys says quietly. Though manifestos (manifesti? Standard is such a strange language) were never the Bajoran thing; they didn't need to be, when everybody knew what was happening and why. Besides, the Cardassians have never failed to spin things whatever way they feel like, regardless of what people say.

"Yeah, I know it can be. My situation...well, a few years ago, anyway...wasn't great. My people were colonized for several decades, and..." She shrugs, because she's not trying to play the game of 'who's got the worse sob story', it never achieves anything useful. "Anyway, this is bad. But it's different, it's psychological, because the enemy is still unclear, and what our goal should be is unclear as well."

"Maybe they're just keeping us inside while they move the set-pieces," he says, a little flare of his eyebrows as he finally takes another sip. What do you really say to the rest? It happens? It's not like he meets a lot of people who have been recently colonized. He can't just be like, yeah, hey sorry, the effects of that basically last fucking forever.

"Not that I'm inclined to go out and look, from what I've heard about last year." Licking the taste of the alcohol from his teeth, he considers her: "Have you been here that long? Since the beginning, or whatever Mark thinks the beginning is?"

"Venturing into some places has been proven...ill-advised," Nerys agrees, though it strikes her as vaguely odd that he's talking about others going into dangerous places without mentioning his own brush with those weird insects earlier in the year. "I think it'd work better to investigate if we knew what risks we had to manage and mitigate, but since we keep getting..." shit, what was Sisko's term, "curveballs, it's hard to process."

She clears her throat, then adds, "Yeah. I've been here a while. Came with the first batch. Or, if the condition this place was in is any indication, the latest first batch."

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[MINGLE] Harvest Feast 🍂

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