[MINGLE] Harvest Feast 🍂

[sixthiteration]

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

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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.

Comments

[thenewways]

"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.

[3ofswords]

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."

[thenewways]

"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.”

[3ofswords]

"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.

[thenewways]

"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.

[3ofswords]

"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."

[thenewways]

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.

[3ofswords]

"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."

[thenewways]

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.

[3ofswords]

"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."

[thenewways]

"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."

[3ofswords]

"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?"

[thenewways]

"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."