sixthiterationlogs | 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

"I'm pleased to say that I personally have not murdered any magicians," Ravi states, as if giving an actual official alibi to the Seattle PD when he's yet to have to do that. His levity is starting to erode, though, all this talk of personal associations with murder reminding him of those awful moments when he'd genuinely thought that he'd been living with a murderer. If he could keep his mind away from those thoughts, all the better.

"You'd understand if you met Liv, I think. Especially when she was on a certain kind of brain," he says. "It was weird, sure, but always entertaining." Sometimes, though, it had been entirely terrifying, making Ravi step up his game when it came to looking for a cure.

"Weird is definitely one word for that," I reply with a soft laugh and a slight shake of my head. To be honest, it's still a bit beyond belief, no matter what I'm telling myself about the need for objectivity. I probably shouldn't even be laughing, but Ravi seems to be rolling with this topic much better than one might expect from a survivor of the almost-zombie apocalypse.

"So if you're here instead of there..." I arch my eyebrows. "What does that mean?"

For all that Ravi likes to joke around, there are moments when there's nothing funny to say. This, unfortunately, is one of them. "Liv and Major are in severe danger," he says. "I have another cured zombie out there with no memory, and an ex-girlfriend in deep with a drug boss. I hadn't cracked the cure," he says, shaking his head with despair. "And the tainted utopium was still out there, and Max Rager was using zombies to test their energy drinks, make them more potent."

"If time is still moving onwards and I'm not there, then I just hope someone found my 'in case of emergency' documents."

I watch him a moment, setting aside the dramatic lead-in and just taking in the weight of that last statement. "Yeah," I reply with a slight, sober nod, and curl my hand against my mouth as I stitch together the different threads of his story in my mind. Most of the likely scenarios aren't pretty.

"I don't know, though. It's a long shot of a hope, but with the claims people make here, coming not just from different places but different times? I'm not ruling out quantum physics or anything that goes along with that. Maybe some version of you is there."

"Strangely, this is the only time where the prospect of a clone of myself toiling away out there somewhere isn't frightening." He breathes out slowly and tries to guide his mind away from worrying because he does a fairly good job of keeping his brain off that. If he did think about that, he'd do nothing but obsess and obsess.

"Although, if that's true, does that mean some version of myself might be doing incredibly amazing things? If that other version finds the cure and gets the Nobel Prize, I may be moved to murderous jealousy."

I can't help but laugh, but it's a good thing. The conversation had briefly veered off someplace a bit darker for a moment, and it didn't jibe with the undoubtedly strange yet festive atmosphere.

"So setting aside the apparently unlikelihood of encountering your own doppelganger, are you saying you'd kill yourself?" I ask with an arch of my eyebrows. "That's pretty cold."

"If you were being awarded one of the most prestigious scientific prizes out there and your clone got it, you wouldn't?" Ravi points out with a look of disbelief on his face as he levels Mark with a 'bitch, please' look, seeing as he honestly doesn't think any man in a field of science is that magnanimous.

"No, man, no way," I reply with a full body laugh that rocks me forward a little bit in my seat. He's just so damned emphatic.

"That's a once in a lifetime— No, not even, once in a hundred lifetimes phenomenon, meeting another version of yourself. You wouldn't want to sit down and have a beer with yourself? Have a chat?"

"Maybe to drink him into submission and then steal my rightful prize back," he mutters under his breath, because it's his life's work. "It's the cure to zombieism, if it works," Ravi points out, keeping his voice a little lower so that no one can overhear them. "I'll be rich and famous and crawling with admirers," he sighs.

"Instead, I'm poor, trapped in the past, and delighted with turkey."

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

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