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

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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.

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"Well," he says, eyeing the array in front of them, "ideally, the best way to clean up would be to distribute things to the village. It would both get rid of the food and the platters. Then, once everything is gone, people are happy and fed and ideally there should be nothing left to do but wipe the counters and wash the floor. Unless the people who were so good to give us this feast are the types of arseholes who also left the dishes." He doubts that's the case, feeling like someone would have complained by now, if they had.

"I'll happily take any of those potatoes you refuse to eat," Ravi says, always happy for a good mashed. "But I still may fight you for pie. Pie is always worth fighting for. That and a very good pizza."

"I used to love potatoes," I admit, and lean back in my chair with a bemused sigh. All this food, and my stomach has shrunk so much I can barely make a dent in what's on my plate.

"I ate a lot of potatoes when I was on Mars -- A lot of potatoes." Raw, even, at the end. You do what you've got to do, but it gets pretty bleak after awhile, particularly after the ketchup runs out.

"Did I ever tell you about Mars?"

Ravi perks up slightly, because no, he would have remembered that. "You have most definitely not told me near enough about Mars," Ravi insists with widened eyes as he sits his elbows onto the table, supporting his chin, and leaning forward to stare at Mark with the dreamy look of a little boy who loved to stare at space and think about going up there. "Tell me about Mars," he pleads.

"What was your primary objective while you were up there? Did you find anything fascinating from a scientific perspective? Signs of life?"

"Well, at first my primary objective was collecting data, but later is was not dying," I reply with a soft laugh. It's honestly not a laughing matter -- I really did nearly die several times over -- but it's one of those situations where the only sane way to cope is to find the humor in it.

"No signs of life," I add, since Ravi seems to be particularly interested in that. "But the soil has the components to support it, when you add fertilizer. While I was stuck there, I grew potatoes to stretch my rations. That's why I'm sick of them."

"How long were you stuck there?" Ravi's joking manner is fairly steady, but there are often times when it falls away and he can sense the severity of Mark's situation coming. Now, his questions are turning a little more serious, doing calculations in his head as to how long it might take someone to get to Mars. Beyond that, he hasn't even asked Mark if he got off the planet. For all he knows, this village might have interplanetary kidnapping potential and it doesn't matter where you are.

"About a year and a half," Mark answers, and takes a sip from his beer. He has points where it simply feels second nature to talk about his time on Mars; god knows he's had to do it enough, over and over for the press, NASA, his parents, his crew, strangers on the street... If it ever bothered him, it doesn't anymore.

"I was there with a crew about a month before that. I got hit by debris while we were evacuating during a storm. It fried my bio reader, they thought I was dead. It wasn't their fault I got left behind. But it took awhile for them to get back," he adds with a faint laugh. "But we weren't meant to be there a year and a half, so I had to get creative."

Ravi is already leaning forward on the edge of his seat, without realizing it. It's not that he dreamt of being an astronaut, but the sheer amount of new breakthroughs that people could make on Mars is practically a dream for him.

The unfortunate part is that you have to go through a ridiculous amount of training and physical work to get there and Ravi is really better at the behind the scenes work. "Potato-creative," he clarifies. "I feel like there were far more opportunities. How did you manage to stave off concerns like scurvy and infection?"

"Well, there were rations for six people, and medical supplies," I explain. "Just not enough for a year and a half. I wasn't only eating potatoes, they were intended to stretch the rations. But I was eating them every, single day at each meal. The worst, though, was when I finally ran out of ketchup."

God, I still crave ketchup, crazy as that sounds. And not homemade, certified organic, fancypants ketchup. I mean fucking Heinz, loaded with sugar, 100% American ketchup.

Well, that would help bridge the gap, given the math that Ravi's doing in his head. Still, there are so many potential issues that his mind is aching just to think about it. For one, the food issue might be solved, but Mars is barely a habitable planet. "I'm sorry," he says, knowing his face must be stuck on awe and shock, "where I'm from, Mars is still but a distant dream. The idea that you were stuck up there is both horrifying and amazing," he confesses.

"Not that I'm saying that you should've been grateful for the experience," he qualifies, "just that it's beyond what we can even imagine." Then again, he's in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, so his imagination has been learning to stretch, recently.

"No, it's alright," I'm quick to reply with a dismissive gesture of one hand. "I am grateful for the experience. I'm the only person who has gotten to have that experience. I'm just more grateful that I made it back home, and I definitely have no desire to go back."

I can't deny that there's still and likely always will be part of me that yearns to go back into outer space, but more present is the part of me that feels like I used up my one Get Out of Jail Free card and I shouldn't press my luck.

"It's funny, because I had to go through a lot of crazy shit to get off Mars, to get home, and the part I was most anxious about was making the descent back to Earth."

The only person to have been stranded on Mars and stayed there for a mad amount of time is sitting in front of Ravi right now. Honestly, if it weren't for the fact that he's trying to stuff his face, he'd probably be asking Mark a thousand questions about the science of it all and what it looked like and how it felt. "I mean, people can be bastards," he deadpans wryly, but he supposes he can understand.

"How was it? Adjusting, that is? I'm assuming you immediately crusaded to rid potatoes from your sight?" he guesses.

"I'll say this. If I'd been able to run right out and order a cheeseburger, I would have skipped the side of fries," I say with a laugh.

"And honestly, it was long and a little tedious. I did have the entire trip back to Earth to recoup before we landed, but after that it was a parade of doctors and press for a long time. I wouldn't recommend it."

"I don't know, I wouldn't mind a parade of press lauding me for my accomplishments," Ravi admits, because while he might labour out of love and devotion to science, he's also still selfish enough to want to see a few medals of recognition on his mantlepiece, seeing as 'curing the zombie plight' would be probably the most incredible thing this year, for him. "Isn't that what everyone wants a little, deep down? I mean, the Nobel Prize, it does beckon," he confesses.

"The Nobel Prize would be nice, given that I was the first person to cultivate crops on Mars," I reply with a smile. "Instead, I got a lot of people constantly in my business for a very long time. Couldn't walk out the front door without being swamped for awhile. The police had to help me get to my car more than once."

Sitting back, I take a slow sip from my beer, considering. "Honestly, it was the reaction from the people that was more satisfying than anything I got from my colleagues. People writing me letters, kids saying they wanted to be astronauts because of me. That part I wouldn't change. It almost made it worth it." I laugh. "Almost."

"I mean, they could throw it away and hand it to you for something so small as that," Ravi deadpans, given that he's fairly sure that if he came up against anyone with that on their resume, he ought to just throw out his accomplishments and storm off. "Sadly, it's not like I got many letters for my work," Ravi says, but there's a much more serious look on his face than usual.

"Hazards of being a medical examiner with an interest in world-ending diseases," he says. "If you do your job right, no one really knows how close they came to the apocalypse."

"Not the public, anyway," I concede. "I think that's the way it is for a lot of scientific work. It just isn't on most people's radar." Which is both sad on one hand and encouraging on the other, because as Ravi said, a job well done means those people are comfortably oblivious. Honestly, the only reason I got so much attention was because things went horribly wrong. I'd never have cultivated anything on Mars had I not been stranded there.

"Were you with the CDC?"

"Was," Ravi says with the dark and petulant look on his face that comes of being summarily dismissed when you were right about everything, but it's not his fault that the CDC doesn't recognize that biological warfare was coming, just that it was going to take the face of a designer drug and a corporate push to market to roided up dumbos (which, he hopes Major never finds out that Ravi's insulted his people like that). "I was fired because I was, apparently, a little too obsessed with the oncoming bio-warfare that was going to wipe out the planet."

"But I was right," he insists, through gritted teeth of suppressed joy, the sort that gets suppressed when you think about the fact that he's happy about something that's going to end the world. "Honestly, if things keep going downhill, Mars might be the best option," he advises.

"Wait," I say, holding up a hand, my eyebrows pinching with clear concern. "When you say things are going downhill, are you saying that the bio-warfare was used?"

If you believe the memories of the people here, there are a lot of different people from a lot of different circumstances, many of them scary or upsetting. People coming from war or post-apocalyptic scenarios. Yet this still shocks me a little, perhaps because I see Ravi as a scientific colleague -- And yeah, I know how that sounds. When you come from the background I do, it's just easier to trust in people who believe in the power of empirical evidence and the scientific method. And sure, this guy is excitable, but he's also clearly professional, and he doesn't seem prone to flights of fancy.

"Not intentionally," is Ravi's dark reply, seeing as that's possibly the worst part about all of this. If it had all been some megalomaniacal plan to take over the world, at least Ravi could understand the motive behind it. The fact that this was nature's way of pushing them towards the apocalypse didn't exactly set his heart at easy rest. "One part designer drug gone wrong, one part massive corporation's new energy drink launch and...well, let's just say that I was still dealing with the ramifications of that, back home."

Judging by his inability to fabricate a cure that works and the growing number of zombies in Seattle, he can only extrapolate how long before the rest of the US and then the world are infected.

Ravi's story sounds like something created for a novel or movie. Not that I doubt his sincerity -- It's clear he's telling the truth. It's just one more reminder that many of us -- Most of us, maybe -- come from extraordinary circumstances.

"So, what? Are we talking about an extinction event here?" I ask, my brow deeply furrowing as I watch him. I don't know where Ravi is on my timeline or if he's on my timeline at all, but it's kind of hard to not worry about a pronouncement like that.

"Eventually, yes, if things keep going the way they are," Ravi shares, utterly serious. "You're really not going to believe me if I say the word," he goes on, because even he hadn't believed it until he had weeks worth of empirical evidence, including the fact that his coworker had a pesky habit of stealing brains and then eating them with hot sauce doused all over them. "And honestly, despite us sitting at a giant feast that appeared out of nowhere, I have no intention of sounding mad."

Because, honestly, what happens to you if you go crazy in a place like this? He does not want to be the one to learn about what the village asylum might be.

"Have you actually talked to the people around here?" I ask as I lean forward, forearms braced against the edge of the table as I level Ravi with a stare. "Being trapped on Mars for over a year is one of the least weird stories in circulation around this place. Try me."

I don't want to give the impression that I don't sympathize -- I think most of us, particularly those of us of a more analytical, scientific ilk, had concerns about what to believe and what not, at first. But there comes a point where, in a place like this, you have to make up your mind to believe everything or believe nothing, because when the laws of physics and reason might not apply, it's really hard to judge.

Ravi feels like he's been given a nice safe cushiony space to present all his crazy to and he's still dreading saying the words out loud, but why not? After all, it's not like he has anything to lose at this point in time. "If you combined Max Rager energy drink and a dose of tainted utopium into a body's system, it created a catastrophic crisis event," he describes, trying not to shiver as he thinks about the worst cases he'd both seen and had described to him. "The subject's body chemistry changes," he says darkly. "Heart stops, hair turns shock white, and they develop a very particular taste for brains. And, unfortunately, it's contagious."

"It's sexually transmitted, even with condoms, and scratches are how it's transmitted. I mean, bites obviously, but the patients don't get to the rabid state until days or starvation. Liv called it full zombie mode." It had been enough to scare Peyton out of town without even a phone call, but then again, it's not like everyone could have deduced it like he had. "My coworker and roommate were zombies," he says, breathing as he gets it out. "I haven't actually told anyone that ever. I mean, Peyton knew, but she also fled the city when she found out and Blaine, well, he just forgot everything..."

It's funny, because I wouldn't have thought that there would be levels of plausibility to something like zombies, and yet apparently there are. Because had Ravi simply stopped after describing the condition, the contagion, I would have actually had no problem believing him. Like I said, you get to a point in this place where you simply have to give people the benefit of the doubt.

But even now, even here, after all this time, my brain still catches on 'my coworker and roommate were zombies.' I don't think I'm being unreasonable in needing a moment to process that one.

"Wait," I say, lifting a hand to stop him before elaborates further. "They were zombies and yet they were sentient?"

"Someone who'd been infected could go roughly three days without feeding before symptoms of full shift started," Ravi says, given the timeline they'd established while Major had been imprisoned. "From there, there's a brief few days that you could provide brain food and gain their sentience back, but there is a point of no return." Breathing in slowly, he's feeling fairly good. He's not being strung up for being mad and nothing's been thrown at him so far.

"My coworker, Liv, worked in the morgue with me. Convenient food supply," he provides. "If you were rich and had connections, there was a local dealer who would provide you with the necessary food you needed. Of course, we had to go and cure him, but he had underlings. For now, the zombie population is in check, but the potential for spreading is monumental."

"It's why I was working on a cure, before I got here. I had something, it was so close, if you ignore the whole 'temporary' part and how the generation two version had that slight little amnesia problem."

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

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