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((Warning for (non-gory) dead animals!))

Busy day today for Gredya.

First she's in the kitchen, putting up one more freezer bag of meat. That's enough for now, she thinks: she's filled one shelf, a cache for the hardest times of winter. She has another bag, marked again with a note like last time: Ganibal Leckter. You see this before? Gredya. It'll wait for him at one end of the bar if he doesn't happen to show up. Inside--if anyone cares to snoop on Lecter's mail!--is a smallish dog-like creature (deceased) with a forked tail-tip and oddly squared-off ears.

Once she's taken care of that, she heads outside with a stack of books. It's not just her adult-literacy text now. She's expanding her reading material.

(And she's botherable in either location!)

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"Not much." She stands and brushes off her hands. "We don't cook. In winter, sometimes a pack keeps matches, wood, somewhere dry. For the cold. But we don't need it, not in fur. And fire tells everyone where you are."

"But you do know how to build one and keep it going," Dr. Lecter says.

He lays out the ingredients for the marinade on the carts.

"It's good to know." She shakes her hair back from her face. "I talked to someone. He said, this is the end of the universe. Or universes. How is that? Is that true?"

There was a train of thought there, leading up to the question: but yes, it's rather abrupt.

"That is what they say," Dr. Lecter says. "It apparently is one end. of one universe."

Pause.

"Hardly a dead end, though, as inter-dimensional journeys and time travel go."

He puts on a long, thick pair of sturdy oven gloves. Then, he takes the carcass of the Set animal by the hind legs and thrusts it into the fire.

Edited 2014-10-27 19:34 (UTC)

"But universes end. I did not know that," she says quietly. There are some people that visit Crossroads that she could ask, but she'd rather not.

She folds her arms and watches Lecter with the animal carcass. The smell of burning fur makes her nose twitch.

He holds the thing into the fire for a while, and then the fur flares up into a gruesome, stinking halo.

"Universes begin and end," Dr. Lecter says, holding the carcass far away from his body.

"When? And all worlds in them, they are gone?"

It's just not something she new she had to worry about. She frowns coldly at the Set-animal, which obviously no longer has to worry about universes ending.

The halo of burning fur dies down as quickly as it flared up, and Dr. Lecter quickly puts the carcass back onto the table with the knives.

"All the worlds in them," he says. "Everything ends, eventually."

Gredya shakes her head and sighs. "I thought, maybe it was one of those thought experiments."

"No, it is literally the end of something," Lecter says, picking up a knife to slice off the paws and then cut along the legs of the still-smoking animal.

Quickly and smoothly, he rips off the entire singed, hairless skin of the creature, up to the neck, which he then chops through with the largest of his cleavers.

Mmph. She just learned about universes, a whole new way of mapping worlds' relationships, and now it turns out they die. Gredya makes a rather peevish noise.

But she's also paying attention to Lecter's knifework.

Lecter lifts the skin, with the paws and the head still attached.

"I think," he says, "I'll let the demon bunnies have this."

"Good. Keep them fat." The supply of demon bunnies seems quite steady so far--but she'll have to see how winter affects them.

"And procreating nicely," Dr. Lecter says. "They're the basis of the carnivorous food chain here, after all."

"Feed them, they get tame." Next thing you know, you're practically a farmer--but it's not a bad practice, as far as it goes.

"Well, I won't keep feeding them," Lecter says. "Just the odd leftover. I doubt the garden people would want parts of a dead Set animal on their compost heap, anyway."

He takes up a smaller knife, and starts chopping tomatoes.

Probably not, no. Scorched dead Set animal probably doesn't make the best compost.

"A little tame, that's not bad." She nods at the tomatoes. "Can I try?"

"Of course," Dr. Lecter says. "Here, have a slice of fresh Roma tomato."

He offers it to her on the tip of his knife.

She takes it with a laugh. "I meant the knife, cutting." But she'll eat the tomato too. It's an odd taste, but not bad.

Dr. Lecter smiles, and offers her the knife hilt-first.

She takes it gingerly. The Wyr spend much less time than humans using their hands; she has to think how to hold it, mimicking what she'd seen Lecter do.

...Yeah, it turns out tomatoes are weird and difficult to cut, for something that soft. They squish.

"You need to slice squarely with the blade," Dr. Lecter says, showing her again.

Hm. She gives it another try, this time with much less mangling and squishing. "It is useful.

"Yes, just so," Dr. Lecter says, watching her. "Your draw the thin blade through the food you are cutting."

It's less...stabby...than she had expected, and she wonders whether handling a knife like this is any kind of practice for handling one in a fight. In any case she perseveres, fiercely slicing tomatoes. "You have many different ones," she observes, with a little nod at the collection.