milliways_bar | (no subject)

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"But musing what an easy thing it were to mix our opiates in a larger cup," Autor says, patting the counter in preparation to hop over it. "And drink, and not perceive"—and here he hops—"sleep deepening lead his truer kinsman up, like undistinguished Night, darkening the skirts of Eve.*"

After a few minutes of setting up his prior preparations, the boy reaches for the specials board. "Good night, Bar."

Bitter Chocolate Aria
Hot chocolate & one croissant

Submission Sonata
Virgin strawberry & wasabi daiquiri

Ode to Blood
Giga ant eggs, sour apple juice, seltzer water, flavored ice

Fiery Trigon
Grenadine, lemon juice, apple juice, passion fruit juice, & cinnamon

Silent Overture
Free coffee if you can prove that you’re knighted

Note: Virgin bar.

[This post is open forever.]

*Ode to Sleep , Richard Chenevix Trench

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"No, it's very clever," Autor says. "It's what I would do. Goodness. There's nothing new under the sun; you'd better make use of what other people make. It also saves you the resources and the time spent banging your head against the wall to come up with that sort of solution.

"How long do you have to be an intermediary for them? Until the job is done?" he says, furrowing his brow. "I don't suppose they'll come to a compromise easily."

He holds up the coffee pot and offers to refill her cup. "Would you like a croissant?"

"Pretty much," Ellen says. "Part of being a chaplain is making sure that the members of the Brotherhood can deal with each other. Mental health and harmony is as important as spiritual health to a fighting and research organization like ours. So until things are back to normal, that's where I'll be, most likely."

She holds out the cup and adds, "Um. What's a croissant?"

Edited 2013-05-07 04:00 (UTC)

Autor nods. "I hope they receive you well, then, and that a compromise can be reached in short order."

He refills her coffee and blinks at her admission. "Oh, goodness," he says. He immediately calls out from his sylladex a regular pastry as opposed to the chocolate-filled ones, and presents it to her on a plate.

"A croissant is a yeast-leavened, flour-based pastry baked with butter," he says. "It might be too sweet for you? Obviously don't eat it if that's the case."

"Well, it's worth a try," Ellen says, "and I'm not about to waste food once I've started eating it. Sweet is easier for me to handle when it comes in the form of baked goods. We got cakes or sweet rolls every now and again in the Vault, if someone saved up enough ration coupons to get the sugar for a birthday cake or similar."

"I'm surprised people still had recipes for cakes and the like," Autor says, and then recants. "Well, no, that knowledge is easily recreated with small amounts of experimentation even in the unlikely chance it was lost."

He shakes his head. "If you don't want it once you've tried it, I'll eat the remainder."

"Vault 101 had a small library of books, although they were all originally approved by Vault-Tec inspectors, like all the personal possessions of the original Vault inhabitants," Ellen says. "Some of them were pretty heavily edited compared to the original editions, but the cookbooks made it through even though most of them weren't really all that useful. Plus the Vault stores had a number of sealed prepackaged mixes that lasted a long time. You didn't really need to know how to make a cake if you could pay for one of those with your ration coupons. You just added water and mixed it up and put it in the oven for the appropriate amount of time."

As for the croissant, it doesn't seem to be a problem sweetness-wise. There is, however, the small matter of golden flakiness. Ellen is not really used to food that flakes off all over your fingers on contact, and there is going to be a bit of a mess in a moment.

A mess is fine. Autor has plenty of napkins, some of them maternally-worded. He just hopes that the texture doesn't put her off.

Strangely enough, it seems important to him that Ellen try it, at least. He never thought it'd be fun to have people eat his croissants. Sunshine is on to something, and she's dragging me down with her. Augh!

"Oh, goodness," the boy says. "Those had to be incredibly old, then. Did you have to check them out, or were they available to anyone? I suspect they had to be well-preserved, though the Vault conditions would help with that. I guess the cookbooks could be looked at as a sort of history book. 'This is how they ate', and such."

The mixes are strange to him. He knows what they are, but they've always been odd.

"Oh, all the Vault's expendable resources got- oh, you meant the books, not the mixes," Ellen says. "Well- they were accessible to anyone, but there was a central registry for the books that had been Vault-Tec property instead of individual property. If a family brought Grognak the Barbarian comic books with them into the Vault, those weren't in the registry, but textbooks and things generally were. Damaging or losing Vault property was a big no-no."

The texture's not too bad once Ellen gets over the AUGH MY FOOD IS SHEDDING aspect of things. She'll probably wind up finishing the whole croissant, although it might take her a while.

He makes himself a cup of tea and smiles at her dissection of the pastry. "Hm, I can imagine there would be severe penalties for that sort of thing. What is a comic book?" he asks, blinking. "A funny novel?"

"No, not especially," Ellen says. "I'm not sure where the name came from- maybe the originals were humorous or something- but a comic book is a story told in a series of drawn scenes and images with spoken words and some of the narration written in. Look, here-"

She digs into Karkat's storage deck and extracts a copy of Grognak the Barbarian issue fourteen.

"The artist must have had some really fantastic models posing for him," she says as she slides the comic across the bar. "You could learn genuine combat sword fighting or axe fighting from this- I've checked."

~~Well, it is the Melee skill-raising book in-game.~~

Autor leans over the comic, blinking. "Huh," he says. And that's all he has to say for a while. He flips through the pages slowly, taking in the lines and colors.

"Impressive art and weapons training aside, isn't this lazy story-telling?" he murmurs. "You don't have to imagine the protagonist or the setting or anything. It's all there for you."

Then he coughs, and turns his head to hide his flushing as he whispers, "And I can't help but notice, because it is sort of shoved in my face, but a lot of them aren't wearing anything."

"Well, they are barbarians," Ellen very reasonably points out. "You can't expect them to dress like civilized folk. I think there's a few sorcerers in that issue who wear robes and stuff. Evil sorcerers, Grognak doesn't often meet magic on the side of good, but civilized. Hard to beat this or some of the other comics for pure entertainment value. Clothes or not."

"Well, yes, but," Autor says, fidgeting, "she's dressed in nothing but three triangular slips of chainmail, which is not only uncivilized, but impractical. Leather would suit much better, really; metal is cold, and wouldn't the links pinch her--"

And then his blush essentially goes supernova, choking off the rest of his not-quite-thought-through-all-the-way speech.

"If her gear is anything like the gear I've seen on some of the raiders I've killed back home, then she's probably lined the metal bits with leather or something like that," Ellen says. "It is pretty impractical, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was some kind of enchantment on it or something, or if she herself had an enchantment on her, kind of like the way Achilles wore armor even though he was only vulnerable on his ankle. I only have a few issues of this comic, so I don't know what may or may not have been established about some of these characters in past issues."

Autor grabs on to Ellen's cool-headed explanation and uses it as a life-preserver. "That makes a lot of sense, actually," he says. "She'd probably have to have a warming charm as well; I can't imagine that she wouldn't be cold. Have a lot of these comic books survived your world, or do you mostly acquire them from Bar?"

Spend enough time with a document that contains no explanation for its own failings, and you either come to loathe that document or rationalize it like your job depended on it.

"There's... well, there's some still left," Ellen says. "Most of the ones I find are missing pages, or they're only a few scraps. Once I found the publishing headquarters of a comic book company in the DC ruins. I took a lot of scraps and old documents from the building, and a few complete issues that had survived in between other things. But for the most part an intact comic book is such a rare thing that it's as memorable a birthday present as a functioning BB gun, to a ten-year-old child."

Autor is fluent in Rationalizese. He nods at Ellen's words and then turns back to the comic book again. The second read-through is accompanied by much less blushing on his part.

"Do you like them?" the boy asks, tapping a panel. Autor has seen Ellen reading in the bar before, but he hasn't seen enough of a pattern to gift her with a book yet. "I can't see you hanging on to such a thing if you didn't."

Then again, Karkat's sylladices are ridiculously useful for keeping things in.

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