sixthiterationlogs | Let us eat quickly-- let us fill ourselves up. {Harvest Feast}

Entry tags:

Let us eat quickly-- let us fill ourselves up. {Harvest Feast}

WHO: Kate Kelly
WHERE: The Inn
WHEN: 24th November
OPEN TO: E V E R Y O N E
WARNINGS: TBA
STATUS: OPEN

Aside from the days when she'd been too drunk or too hungover to get up, Kate's kept a farmer's hours all her life. Even in winter, when the bitterly cold winds that'd come up from the south and make its way through the cracks and holes in her ma's hut, she'd get up, get dressed, do her chores. But lately, it's been harder to extract herself from her bed. Benedict's been sharing her bed more often than not lately, and the chasteness of their interactions does nothing to change how warm and safe she feels. How little she wants to get up, get dressed, go out into the colder spaces of the Inn and do her work.

So, today, she's late getting out of bed - at least, by her standards. She's late getting down the stairs. She's late, so she's hurrying; she lazed in bed, and now she needs to start the fire in the main room. Start the fire, open the shutters, show that the Inn is standing and warm. And welcome, so she moves the -

No, Kate doesn't move the chairs stacked precariously at the front door as a rudimentary alarm of someone, something, coming through, because the chairs are gone. She neither dismisses it as one of the residents not getting the message, nor panics. Instead, she just opens the shutters to let in the dawn light and see if there are footprints, except, no, the snow has mostly cleared. The day is sunny. As welcome as it is, that doesn't help at all. Miss Hoppity jumps down from the foyer's desk to rub her face against Kate's skirt, apparently entirely unconcerned.

Kate eyes the cat for a moment, then approaches the closed doors leading to the main room. Closed, but with light coming through the cracks between door and floor, door and door frame. Cautiously, Kate opens one of the doors and peers in.

Then, she gapes.

The fire is blazing - hot, cheery - but so are the candles. The candles: candles on the unused candlesticks, candles clustered on tables, light up sideboards. Candles bobbing in bowls of water and apples. Candles white, yellow and red, when the village had none. Boughs of wheat, corn, decorate tables and the mantle over the fire, apples and pumpkins and collections of yellow, orange, red flowers seem to be everywhere.

And the food.

Each table is piled high with food. Roasted, baked, cooked on stoves and Kate knows how to cook, she knows how long this would all take, how many people, and it's impossible. What she's seeing is impossible to have done with the resources on hand: even an attempt would have woken up the whole building.

Disbelieving, Kate walks in. For a moment, she's entirely dumbfounded. Miss Hoppity, however, is nothing of the sort. The cat has leapt up onto the sideboard next to Kate and - well, Kate isn't sure what happens next. Just that suddenly there's movement and something large seems to lunge at her. Miss Hoppity yowls and speeds off: Kate screams as she battles something, falling backwards and hitting the floor along with a broken bowl of water, spilled apples and some tiny candles, and her attacker.

Pushing the food-turkey off her, Kate sits up and is, for once, entirely lost for words.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Raven brushed against Jess' shoulder. Standing beside him, she didn't look at the feast in wonderment. Instead, trepidation weighted itself inside of her chest, feet locked in place where she stood.

Even though her mouth watered and her stomach answered Jess' with a growl, Raven didn't shoot off like a star toward the tables. Any other time, any other place, with any other set of memories, she would be at the table picking apart food without even thinking.

But she thought of Mount Weather's long tables, the feasts Monty spoke to her about that they'd been given and welcomed to fill themselves up on. She'd only seen the interior of the bunker after it'd been hollowed out and left to rot without its occupants. It still seemed as elegant as the feast before them, even though all the lights were out and no food sat on the plates.

This feast was extravagant, which gave Raven pause.

"Let me guess," she drawled, unimpressed, "this is another unexplained gift."

"So you're seeing this, too." Well, that was a relief. He wasn't just losing his mind, then. Feeling Raven's presence at his side, he slowly reached back with the apple, holding it out for her to take. Let her try that on for size--did it feel like a dream to her?

Jess was having a hard time wrenching his gaze from the spread--everywhere he looked there was a different cooked meat or roasted vegetable ready to meet his eye--and only with great effort did he turn his head. "It's either that or we're all having one impressive mass hallucination. Thorfinn's idea of giving a gift to his gods must have paid off."

She took the apple from him, firstly weighing it in the palm of her hand before she tried to let it bounce. It felt real and weighty, nothing like the berries they'd found around camp, but food enough. Apples were hard to come by in Arkadia, but Raven had felt this type of food on the Ark once. It hadn't been as weighty, not nearly as oddly coloured as the apple with its various hues, but it'd looked somewhat the same.

If Jess had passed it off to her, she didn't doubt he'd already investigated whether or not it was safe enough to eat. He never struck her as the type to offer a poisonous apple, even though he often came off like he didn't give a single shit.

She glanced around again at the feast, feeling her mouth water at the mere sight of it all. Letting the apple sit still in her palm, she pinched him hard on the arm with her other set of fingers. "Did that feel like it was a part of a hallucination?"

The pinch ended, but the vision didn't. The feast stayed right where it was, like a picture perfect magazine spread come to life.

"Ow. That feels pretty real, too," he conceded, making a noise of helpless confusion in his throat that somehow still fell on the side of helpless amusement. He looked sideways at her, clearly not knowing what to make of this. "When was the last time you saw this much food in one place?"

When was the last time he smelled real gravy?

Jess was only human, try as he might to be otherwise. His taste buds demanded he start finding out if everything tasted as good as it smelled, despite the reservations his better judgement posed.

"I think that's pie over there."

Raven's never seen so much food in her life. The dining hall of Mount Weather implied it was a grand room, feast upon feast delivered to its inhabitants. She'd never gotten to see it or even devour it, not like Harper and Monty and Jasper. Sometimes she found herself envying them for how well-fed they'd been, cared for, and even how amazing they must've felt, but she couldn't be jealous of them when she remembered just how in danger they were.

Like flies to a spider's web, they'd let themselves grow so tangled up in the webbing they couldn't move when they needed to escape. And those kids always prided themselves on being agile, able to outrun any enemy as long as they stayed together.

The question didn't make her feel entirely uncomfortable. It still felt very much like a dream to a girl who'd lived on rations of rations her entire life.

Impulsively, Raven grabbed Jess' arm, looped hers with his, and began to pull him along. "Let's test out the pie," she said.

He wasn't expecting to be suddenly tugged along and Jess stumbled a step before he recovered, having to snap his head back around from ogling one of the giant cooked turkeys. Rubbernecking seemed the most he was capable of at the moment.

That better judgement of his grew to a bellow in his ear, a persist counterpoint to his stomach as Raven steered the both of them toward the tempting-looking dessert table. What was the trick? Where was the catch? This feast had to be another test and their next move could have consequences--

But then they were there, looking down on the pies, and a cocktail mix of wonder and hunger drowned that voice out. Drooling was a very real possibility.

Lowering his voice for Raven's ears, Jess cast a furtive glance at the rest of the people starting to sample the bounty. "See anyone developing boils yet? First one to eat gets to be our guinea pig." Nothing personal to everyone else, but sometimes it paid to learn from another's mistakes.

She lifted her gaze from studying the foods before her to give him a cocked brow look. Sometimes he spoke with phrases that had lost their context since the ground had dissolved in several blasts of radiation.

Reaching out, she let her hand hover over a few pies, fingers almost reaching for cutlery before she stopped herself. A hesitant Raven wasn't a strong one; she always barrelled ahead with little regard for the consequences. It's what always seemed to both aggravated and charm Sinclair.

Steeling herself with a deep inhale through her nose, she reached forward to grab a knife and touched a pie, holding it with the tips of her fingers as she began to cut it straight in half.

"Let's have a look inside. You can tell me if it looks like what a pie should look like, and then we can go from there."

She could take it from him, she did not want to be a guinea pig, cute as they were.

Raven was quicker to get over the astonishment of finding their shoddy inn inexplicably filled to the brim with a ten course meal, and before Jess knew it she'd dropped his arm to pick up one of the knives laid out with the rest of the utensils and sunk it into the pie, cutting deeply.

Like waves of heat hovering over a desert mirage, a whiff of steam escaped. Still warm. Christ.

Once again, Jess' nose beat him to the punch. "It's rhubarb," he blurted out before he could help himself. Damn, if there was an apple pie, he didn't know if he could resist and sit back while everyone else helped themselves. If it was a trap, they'd all spring it together.

"Good news, I don't see any razor blades..." he said as Raven separated the last inch of the crust, exposing a line of red filling down the middle. He glanced to her with a different kind of incredulity in his gaze. "Is this your first pie?"

Perhaps it wasn't a good display of manners, but Raven ran her thumb along the flat side of the knife, collecting the flavour of the inside of the pie, and licked it off. It meant Jess would have to wait a second or two for her to even respond.

"It's okay for a pie," she shrugged. Not that she had any other references to go by, of course. She didn't know what a good pie was if it was to smack her in the face and leave cream curling in her hair.

Placing the knife down as best she could without it dripping on a tablecloth or even the floor, she looked at the pie and touched it with the pad of her finger. It didn't feel weird ... She looked to Jess and cocked her head towards it, "Does it look okay to you?"

Before Jess could advise caution, Raven was popping her thumb into her mouth. Well, there's that, then. He watched her like he'd watch someone who just bit a cyanide capsule--carefully, as one waiting for an adverse reaction.

"Just okay?"

He had to admit, he'd been expecting something a little more explosive and dramatic to come out of a spontaneously appearing feast left for them to find, but aside from a lukewarm opinion Raven didn't seem at all affected.

"It looks like any old one to me." Other than the fact it was a dessert the likes of which he hadn't seen in months. "Since you just sampled one, the better question is do you feel violently ill?"

"I feel the same as I always do whenever I'm around you," she was quick to say. Giving it some consideration, she seemed to come to a conclusion only moments later and announced it with a shrug. "Okay. Kind of hungry. It's kind of heavy on the tongue.

Scrunching up her face, Raven grabbed the pie and brought it closer to her face, narrowing her eyes as she assessed it. Then, she placed it back down, figuring it wouldn't be entirely neat to eat it without cutlery. She might be one to wear grease on her face proudly, but she didn't enjoy wearing her food.

Grabbing a knife, she held the pie with her fingers on the plate and cut it again, aiming for a smaller slice. Once that was done, she glanced at Jess with an eyebrow arched and teased, "Do I look different?"

The way Raven lifted the dish and scrutinized it like she were weighing the pros and cons of lifting out a handful of the rhubarb pie right then and there, it certainly seemed like her first encounter with even the basic concept of a pastry.

Jess continued to watch the dialogue between girl and pie with interest. Deep-seated instincts that Hansel and Gretel had lacked when they'd taken the lure (and stuffed it into their faces, to be exact) kept him from picking up a plate of his own just yet.

But damn if it didn't look good.

"Can't tell yet. Maybe a little taller." This could be less "candy houses" and more "drink me" potions. Who could say? This place was capable of anything at the best of times, and the proof was literally in the pudding in this instance.

He looked at the rest of the dessert table, then the table next to it. Then the others already eating. Weighing.

"In that universe do you cook for your unwilling guests? There are so many things I don't like about this I wouldn't know where to begin."

Raven figured if anything was going to happen, it'd happen. The acid fog back home had been quick and pungent, sending rats and beetles and all types of wildlife scurrying away. It'd been obvious in its descent, a thick cloud of putrid yellow coating the world she had to call home. The appearance of a mouth-watering feast was a lot softer in its approach, but it was one Raven knew from the stories she'd heard from the kids who had survived the mountain.

Listening to them had to come in handy someday, and she found that that day might as well be this one. She looked at the pie as she ate, finding that it was just as delicious, if not more so, than the foods she'd been consuming on the ground and in this town. All her fingers and all her toes were still in place, and she knew without a doubt if anything happened to her features Jess wouldn't be too shy in letting her know.

"Some," she said, mouth full. Swallowing, she continued, "They did it to give us a sense of contentment." She placed the pie back on the plate, finding it was warming her hands a little too quickly. Sucking her fingers, she looked at the table of food presented before them, finding her stomach might as well have turned itself into an endless pit that could never quite be filled. "If you're nice, you're not threatening. It gets people to lower their guards. People probably do it all the time, you're just never invited because you're pretty uptight."

Still looking off behind him: "Better uptight and alive than naïve and dead."

Not entirely disagreement on the part of her observation. She could take that as she wanted.

Jess turned back, giving a plate of cinnamon rolls by his hip the kind of look a chess player would give pieces on the board as they contemplated moves. "There's just one thing wrong with that--they're not hiding their threats. Last week it was carcasses in the street. We'd have to have pretty short memories to forget that."

Which begged the question--why the sudden change in tone? Their captors had wound them up, balancing them on the top of a steep precipice. Was this the last meal before the fall?

She'd stopped believing in last meals. Every meal felt like her last, and thus lost its impact on her. But she didn't tell Jess that. As open and blunt as she was, Raven had self-control. She didn't need Jess prying into why she thought that, and she didn't particularly want to add anymore gloom to an already dreary situation.

What would happen if he misread her words and thought she believed this was their last meal?

Glancing at the pie before her, her brows furrowed. "Do you think those animals are our food?" It wasn't a strange concept to her, given how she'd been forced to survive on the very land her ancestors had tried to destroy. But something about it was confusing and sinister all at once if that was true.

He blinked at the question. "I don't know how well venison goes in rhubarb pie," was the first offhand comment out of his mouth.

His factitiousness was no great secret to him, but because this was Raven he was speaking to, who by necessity looked at these sorts of things in a more literal light, he was quick to follow up his throwaway answer with one that was more to the point.

"The ingredients had to have come from somewhere. Our friends clearly have access to everything you'd need to run a village." Their captors must have livestock on hand for them to keep allocating them supplies, and leaving all manner of puppies and chickens and other farm animals on their doorsteps. Those exact carcasses, though? They still have the bodies here in town; doubtful Margaery's sheep ended up in the stew.

That's something to be thankful for.

Her eyes narrowed in thought. Raven didn't stop eating, beginning to chew thoughtfully. Her stomach would probably hate her come morning, given she wasn't used to eating so much on any given day, but Raven knew she had to treat herself now.

Regardless, she suspected she was going to regret it.

Looking to Jess, she wore an expression that seemed as though she was studying him. "Do you think they have a place nearby? Like a vegetable garden. Some kitchen. There's no way they cooked this here."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Let us eat quickly-- let us fill ourselves up. {Harvest Feast}

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject