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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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"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.

"Yes, most of them for cutting meat and cleaving through bones," Dr. Lecter says. "I need to take the carcass apart before putting it into the marinade."

Certainly. "All parts go in? Or you take out the organs?"

"I take out the organs," Lecter says. "I might use some of them separately, though."

"Some of the best parts," she says seriously.

"I know," Lecter says. "I will definitely be keeping the liver. I doubt I need the guts or the bladder, though, and may pass on the kidneys, too."

She tsks a bit at the waste of perfectly good kidneys. Oh, well. "It will make the rabbits fat," she concedes. "--What knife is good to cut bone?"

"The big cleaver," Hannibal says, pointing at it. "That allows me to hack through the bones."

"And this?" She points to another knife.

"It's a de-boning knife," Dr. Lecter says. "Long and thin, to slide along the bones."

Gredya nods appreciatively, and touches the handle just for a moment before stepping back. "I should let you work."

"You can continue cutting the tomatoes, if you like," Lecter says. "And ask all the questions you like."

All right. She proceeds with the tomatoes, slowly getting the hang of it. "How did you learn? Cooking, knives, all this."

"When I was young, from my uncle's cook," Dr. Lecter says. "It seemed to me one of the most civilised, and most ephemeral, of arts."

"Ephemeral?" Not a word she knows.