milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

((OOC: Warning for some (not-gory) dead animals!!))

Gredya comes in with a sack slung over her shoulder and looks around for Hannibal Lecter. He's not immediately apparent: but she has come prepared. While the children were rounding up dinner, she had sat with her notebook and pencil and textbook and produced one of the first Wyr written documents. She'd had to guess about the spelling for the name.

Ganibal Leckter. You cook? Gredya.

The note is pinned to the bag with a long slim thorn. Having placed it on the Bar and glared fiercely at anyone nearby who looked like they might take it, she retreats to a less middle-of-the-room spot to work ahead on another reading lesson. And to make sure no one takes the bag. She can easily bring another ibis, but the pair of flying snakes had struck even Gredya as unusual.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dr. Hannibal Lecter comes downstairs today, carrying a cookbook.

When he finds the note and the bag, he takes them, then turns to walk over to Gredya's table

"Hello, Gredya!"

[[OOC: I totally love the Russian style transliteration of H => G!!]]

She closes her notebook and nods at the bag. "Those are from this morning." Suddenly there had been colorful flying snakes. It had been...a thing.

((:D!))

"Excellent," Hannibal Lecter says. "I know how to make Chinese snake soup. Have you ever eaten soup, or would you prefer stir-fried snake at first?"

Gredya gives him a doubtful look, but shrugs. "What you like. I never eat--soup."

She's never seen Bela Lugosi's Dracula either, but she has the delivery down.

"But you would try some cooked human food?" he asks.

"Yes." She nods and stands up, loose-limbed. "I will learn."

"It will take some time," Hannibal says. "But while we wait, I can show you around the kitchen."

"Yes." Gredya packs up her reading work, ready to go. She has a notion, uncertain, of her children adapting to those kinds of worlds as well as the forests, werewolves walking in cities. Maybe.

He walks towards the back, and opens the kitchen door with the hand not holding the bag with the dead snakes.

"Have you ever been in a kitchen before?"

"I go through here before." She laughs, remembering opening the cold food-box with her paws. "--And I know another kitchen. They have, hm, long metal spear, I don't know that word. For cooking sheep, animals like that. You turn it. Too big for those." She gestures at the bag of snakes.

"That's a spit," Hannibal Lecter says. ""We've got one somewhere, but the snakes are too small, you're right. You know what this is?"

He points at the stove.

Gredya gives a non-committal shrug. This is like one of the more aggravating vocabulary exercises from her reading book. "It cooks. On top, inside."

"On top is a stove, and inside it's an oven," Hannibal Lecter says, putting the bag with the snakes down and opening it.

"In my world, they never haver wings," he says, pulling out the first one.

"New for me too," she says drily. "They come this morning, I go to the water, snakes flying, birds fighting them. Funny world. Probably it is their season."

Hannibal Lecter spreads out the winged snake on the worktop, carefully opening the wings to their full extent.

"Here in Milliways, or somewhere else?"

"A world. I stay there sometimes. Quiet, when there are no snakes flying."

They're very colorful: she hadn't realized how much so when she saw them with canine eyes.

Hannibal Lecter gets the others from the bag as well, to see how many there are, and how much they vary in size.

There's a pair of them: not very large, a bit less than a meter long, but well-muscled. Close inspection will show that they have very small hindlimbs that tuck in very close to the body.

Gredya looks at them skeptically. "They are not poison. Aksana ate one."

"They are nice and large," Hannibal Lecter says, finishing his inspection. "I'll cook one, and freeze the other for later."

The slightly smaller one is also slightly more colourful. He picks it up, rinses it in the sink, dries it in a fresh dish towel then rolls it up to place it into a plastic container with a clear lid, which he labels with his name, the words 'Winged snake, from one of Gredya's worlds' and the date, before opening a heavy iron door.

Behind it, there is arctic cold, and shelves upon shelves of silent, frozen things of a food-like nature.

"Cold storage," he says. "Very important in any kitchen, to keep food from spoiling. Most kitchens have both a refrigerator, at around 4° Celsius slightly above freezing point, and a freezer, at -18° well below. Things go in the fridge if you use them soon, and into the freezer for long-time storage."

She wrinkles her nose at the cold stale air. Freezer, fridge. Oven, stove. It's all very remote from the concept of food.

"...Shepherd, farmer with many animals. That is how they can have so many, kill so many more than anyone can eat one time. Yes? Faster than smoke to make meat dry."

Agricultural surplus.

"Yes, that is the principle behind farming and agriculture," Hannibal Lecter says, closing the freezer door.

He returns to the work top with a large, sharp knife and lays out the snake on the cutting board. Then, he quickly chops off the head and the tip of the tail, and then the colourful wings, and the rudimentary hind limbs. He loosens the skin of the snake at the top end, turns it over, and then quickly pulls it off the snake, in one smooth movement.

"Yes, but--" Gredya makes a frustrated noise. "I know idea about farming. Principle, that is the word? Principle behind farming?" She mimics his tone, not maliciously but precisely. "I know that, but this, with electricity, it changes...size. Of farm. Where I live, shepherd has thirty sheep maybe. He kills one, two, for market, that is all. No one can keep more. This--if he keeps five, six, twenty dead sheep, cold, he kills more sheep, he keeps bigger herd, he needs more shepherds."

She shakes her head, impatient with herself and with language. It's a matter of scale. How quickly would a place change, just bringing in a better way to keep meat?

The skinning technique is admirably smooth. Gredya can at least approve of that.

He slits open the underside of the snake next, and removes all the entrails.

"That is one of the problems of our modern age," he says. "The illusion of unchecked growth. People seem to think everything can keep growing, but that's not true. Something that keeps growing is a cancer, and sometimes it does seem that humanity is that for the planet."

With a questioning look--he's the one with the knife, she's not going to grab without checking--she takes the discarded entrails to look at and sniff. They're not markedly different from any other snake's, except for the lungs.

His metaphor is rather a linguistic stretch for her, or at least takes some thought. After a while Gredya gives a shrug. "They will keep going. For long time." It's a food source that's far from exhausting itself, though it's largely inaccessible to her.

"Not if they eat up everything," Hannibal Lecter says. "If there are so many people eating so many sheep and cattle that the feed gets exhausted, or they feed grain to the cattle that would be needed to feed people, and make it in turn too expensive for the poor to eat. Humanity is a sickness that planets get."

He slides his knife along the spine of the snake, and then deftly peels the long, lean flesh off the bones.