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[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

It's smooth. It's pale. It's yellow-green and vaguely comet-shaped, and it's about the size of Ellen's fist and a few inches of forearm. It goes squish when she pokes it.

Dogmeat does not understand his human's fascination with the thing. It's only fruit. If it were meat, maybe it'd make sense, but it came from a plant.

Squish squish squish. That poor fruit.

... look, sometimes Ellen is easily fascinated by the new and unusual.



[OOC: Post is open until it scrolls off the page! Also, Ellen is in her Brotherhood fatigues at the moment, rather than the Vault suit implied in her icon.]

Comments

[mnt_mike]

Mike walks past, a towel draped over his shoulders and a mostly empty bottle of Gatorade in one hand.

He stops a few paces past Ellen, then backs up.

"Did it wrong you in some way? Dishonor your family, perhaps?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"No, no," says Ellen, who's still prodding the thing with one finger. "I've never seen one of these before, that's all. Most of the fruit in the Capital Wasteland these days is mutfruit, other than the plants Jack of the Green helped me with and the plants from Oasis. These are new."

Poke.

[mnt_mike]

Mike's head tilts to one side. He's certainly never seen the fruit before.

"Kind of looks like a mango had a freaky night with a Buddha's Hand."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"I don't know either of those," Ellen admits. "The man who sold it to me said it's called a punga fruit. He brought it on his boat- he had a whole boat full of stuff to sell."

A boat. An actual boat.

[mnt_mike]

Well that's easy enough to rectify. Mike looks up and over at Bar, silently ordering both a mango and a Buddha's hand. A wait-rat will deliver them shortly.

"Did he happen to mention what one does with one? Or is like...poking it like it's tried to go through airport security with contraband what it's used for?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Well, they're edible," Ellen says a little doubtfully. "At least, he said they are. And they're supposed to be good for you, although I hear that about a lot of things that turned out to be lies. I'm just not sure if it's a good idea to eat it yet."

She's eaten two hundred year old canned potted meat, you understand. But one fresh fruit....

[mnt_mike]

"Lots of things are edible, that doesn't really mean you should eat them though." Trust him, he used to eat garbage.
No no, actual literal garbage.

"You want me to give it a go first? Or are you concerned that you've only got the one?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"No, Tobar sold a bunch of them when he pulled up at the dock," Ellen says. "I can get more if I really need to. If you wanted to try it, I can have a medical kit on standby in case something went wrong between home and here..."

[mnt_mike]

"Unless it's actually deadly, or for some reason has some ridiculously high amount of lactose in it, I'm sure I'll be okay. But...sure! Why not! It's been a while since I've put something questionable in my mouth for no good reason."

Just then the wait-rats arrive with a cutting board, knife, and then two prime examples of both a Buddha's hand and Mango.

"Good timing, guys."

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Well, he did take a bite out of one," Ellen says a little doubtfully. "So there's that-"

Ellen then looks from the punga to the Buddha's hand and back again, and then to the mango.

"... you're sure these weren't irradiated or something?"

[mnt_mike]

"Posi..." Mike turns back to Bar. His eyes narrow. "Nope, she says they're totally ship shape and ready to eat."

Mike turns back, looking over the cutting board.

"I don't actually know what to do with the Buddha's hand, I just know they're weird looking and smell nice. But I do know how to eat a mango. Can you just bite into that thing?" he asks gesturing towards the punga fruit.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"I think so," Ellen says. "It didn't look like it splattered too much in Tobar's beard when he did. Maybe a spoon might...? I don't know."

[mnt_mike]

"Bah, why use a spoon when we have a knife?" he says picking up the knife and spinning it in his hand with a flourish.

Then he reaches for the punga fruit, though he's clearly less confident with the fruit than he is with the knife.

What?! It could explode or something!

[basic_powers]

...she's not the only one, but Ellen's not 10 years old and bound-bored.

Tyler's just going to do that silent approach to stare at just what that thing is.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The motion catches her peripheral vision; Ellen looks up. "Hi, Tyler," she says. "Have you ever seen one of these before? The seller said it was a punga fruit."

[basic_powers]

"Nope. Not even on a Bar's Blue Plate Special."

That...that is one freaky fruit man, one has to give props to Ellen's world for producing some really messed up meal supplies.

... Poke.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Squish.

"It's not any kind of fruit I've ever seen before," Ellen comments. "Mutfruit aren't this color, and the ones that aren't crunchy are big and segmented. You don't see them often because they take so much water to grow. This man had a whole bunch of them."

[basic_powers]

...It feels like a grape? Or a peach. Except it's probably weirder than anything else.

"...where ever he's from it's got to have plenty of fresh water."

Sniffasniffasnifffffffff...

...look he's going to see what it smells like! You don't log umpteen hours in a canine shape without wanting to sniff as part of your investigation skills.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

It smells... well, we could go into the kind of details that wine snobs use here, with notes of green twining with blah blah yah dee yadah, but probably the simplest way to describe it would be to say it's not all that different from the scent of a kiwifruit that was violently mugged by a honeydew melon.

Ellen's just going to stand back and let Tyler do his thing.

[basic_powers]

Tyler has many skills, but he has not developed the superpower of a perfume tester's ability to pick out notes and specific scents.

Hrmmm. Ofcourse the first thing to spring to mind when he smells the kiwifruit is a certain five-armed multi-brained family member.

He's just going to open up a swiss army knife and carefully cut out a chunk to sniff again, before taking a bite. "You'll run me to the infirmary if this goes bad, right?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Of course," says Ellen. The inside of the fruit is bright yellowgreen and squishy, about the texture of a hard boiled egg. The taste is hard to describe, but overall not too bad. One might make a reasonable jam out of it if one had sweetener.

[basic_powers]

"...it's okay, kinda tart." Tyler says after smacking his mouth a few times to get the texture bits out and the flavor around. "Can I ask something weird?"

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Sure," says Ellen, who's reaching for a spoon herself (it's only fair, you don't ask someone to eat something you're unwilling to swallow unless both of you are testing the taste of something only one of you is immune to). "What?"

[basic_powers]

"Where did this come from, and how much does the seller want for a milk-crate of em?"

...Look it's hard enough shopping for some family members during the holidays.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

"Um." Ellen thinks. "A man named Tobar showed up in a boat at the docks near the Citadel yesterday. He had a bunch of them in his hold. He was charging around thirty-five bottlecaps each, which is three pints of water at Capital Wasteland exchange rates, so..."