fandomhighdorms | Second Floor Common Room; Sunday Evening [09/15].

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Second Floor Common Room; Sunday Evening [09/15].

After a trip into town, Tisarwat returned to the dorms, changed into something a little more comfortable than her uniform, and then headed with her bags to the common room with an air of determination. With the ubiquitous nature of so many ungloved, uncivilized hands everywhere here, she still couldn't bring herself to trust the food prepared on the island. She was sure it was safe and she understood that latex gloves were a thing, but the idea of it just made her feel weird. But with no decade to do this sort of thing for her, she figured she had better start learning how to actually cook.

She'd done well with cutting up some fruits and vegetables; if she had issues with that, she should just give up right then and there. But the real challenge would come, of course, in the packaged noodle dish she'd picked up to try, the one that left her wondering how anything that had boasted "Quick and Easy!" on the packaging would require so many different pots. But she got it going, and it seemed to be going well enough. Frowning, though, she looked over the instructions on the box again while waiting for it to heat up, flipping the package around in her hands to make sure she wasn't missing anythi--

Ssssssss.

"Fuck!"

Tisarwat dropped the package to rush over to the stove to lift up the smaller pan as it boiled over, quickly trying to move it to the sink in an effort to curb some of the mess it was making. And as she was there, she noticed the other pan was starting to smoke an awful lot. She dropped te first pot in the sink and went to pull the other one off the burner, looking at the sauce that was definitely burning onto the bottom.

"Aatr's tits!"

All this knowledge and all these memories from dozens of entities and thousands of years of experience, you'd think at least one of them would have picked up how to cook in all that time!

Well. At least she still had the fruit and the vegetables and plenty of the cheese that the weird bear had foisted onto her.

[[ work was the worst today; this post channels my sooooullll. open common room is open! ]]

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Trevor either didn't remember his lesson about random fridge food or didn't care enough to be wary of it.

Because he was back on his bullshit, eating out of a mystery Chinese food container as he watched this cooking mishap with mild interest.

"Wow."

And, honestly, at this point, Tisarwat had shot so far past just merely embarrassed, that she wasn't entirely sure if it was more misery now or just complete surrender. The look she sent at Trevor, once she was able to draw her eyes away from the horror show that was supposed to be the sauce for her noodles, could at least be easily classified as desperate.

"I think I actually managed to burn the water," she noted, out of morbid awe for the culinary destruction she'd wrought.

"That's kind of impressive in a way," Trevor decided, craning his neck to see the damage wrought.

And Tisarwat, helpfully, tilted the worse of the two pans, the one with a now mostly black goop clinging to the bottom of it, his way. Far be it from her to deny someone else from getting the full picture of exactly what sort of horrors she was capable of.

"The box said 'Quick and Easy'," she bemoaned, then dropped the pan back in the sink to cover up her crime with water, as if that would ever help get that gunk off of the bottom of it now. "That box is liar, and whoever wrote that should be executed."

Or at least re-educated.

"Even easier solution," Trevor said, gesturing toward the Chinese container in his hand. "Don't cook."

Yes. Give up on cooking. Sage advice.

Tisarwat looked like she wanted to whimper at that idea, but she was trying for a rueful smile, so the results ended up being...intersting.

"Then someone else will have made it," she pointed out, not expecting him to understand, but she'd explain it anyway. "And I won't know if they made it wearing gloves," she lifted her own gloved hands as if that explained it better, "or not."

And then it would just be a waste, because the idea of it would then make her lose her appetite.

She was trying to get better about accepting it, but that was going to be a pretty high mountain to cimb.

"Why gloves?" He was totally picturing cloth gloves, Tisarwat. He wasn't exactly up on all the modern things still. Just the ones that made his life easier.

"It's...a cultural thing," Tisarwat explained, now having to consciously try not to notice Trevor's hands, and deciding to blame Seivarden for the fact that she felt a little trepidation about explaining it all of a sudden, when everyone so far had been so nice and understanding about it. "Where I'm from, it's considered incredibly rude and uncivilized to do anything in public without proper gloves."

Trevor looked at his own hands for her. Which may or may not have helped the situation.

"Maybe in some circles that applies where I'm from," he replied, shrugging as he leaned against the wall to keep eating. "Mostly upper nobility."

Which was clearly not him.

Clearly.

Tisarwat blinked at him a moment, then pointedly looked away, and then turned away, her attention going back toward the food that hadn't required cooking and was therefor still salvageable, going to find a bowl to put it in.

"Either way," she said, "if I can't feel comfortable eating because I don't know how it was prepared, then it's a good idea to start figuring out how to do more of it myself. Unless I plan on subsisting entirely on raw fruits and veg and...cheese."

It was quite a lot of cheese. She was really regretting letting that panda talk her into all that cheese.

"Aatr's tits, I never thought I'd actually ever miss skel!"

Trevor sighed because, under all that aggressive disinterest, he cared about helping people.

It was the worst.

"What do you cook back home?"

"I don't cook back home," Tisarwat sighed. "That's the problem. Back home, almost all my food was provided for me. By my parents when I was younger. By shops when I wanted to go out. By school, by the military, by my decade..."

And it was frustrating, realizing how helpless she really was without all those things to depend on, all those things she never thought about and took for granted...

"I mean. The food here is pretty clean." Low bar coming from him.

With a good chance of being handle by someone's crass, bare hands...

"I'm sure it is," Tisarwat said, with an expression that clearly said otherwise, even though it was sort of true. It was pretty clean...by some standards, she was sure.

"It doesn't exactly hurt to try and learn while I'm here, though," she added.

The pots, however, might not agree with her there.

Trevor eyed the wreckage for a moment. "Good luck there."

Tisarwat followed his eyes.

"Well," she said, shrugging again, in resigniation for this pursuit at least for the rest of the night, "hardly anyone ever gets it perfect on the first try, right?"

Unless they were talking about modifying accesses to liberate AI systems, anyway.

Oh yeah. Totally! Totally easy to do, uh, that. Yep.

"Maybe try one of those frozen pizzas?" Even he couldn't screw that one up.

Again with the pizza. Tisarwat's brow furrowed a bit.

"Is pizza just a very common staple here on Earth?" she asked. She could perhaps give it a try if it really was a cultural thing for this planet, but she was definitely going to be one of those weird people who at it with a knife and fork because she was never going to risk getting grease stains like that on her gloves.

Okay, the 'Earth' thing still kinda threw him off.

"It seems to be," he said, recovering. "Never had it before coming here, honestly."

"So where are you from?"

Here, as in Fandom, Tisarwat, not here, as in Eart--oh, nevermind.

"Wallachia." Which meant nothing to her, huh? "A few hundred years back apparently."

Not a thing, but it was always nice to add another one to the repertoire of places to potentially investigate.

"The time travel thing," Tisarwat said, nodding knowingly, because that, unlike cooking, was something at least a little more in her grasp, what with the two people she knew that didn't know her because they were coming from a time before they'd met her. From before she was even born. "A hundred years doesn't seem so bad, though."

Relatively speaking, of course, from the perspective of a consciousness that had been around for thousands.

"Do you find it's very different?"

"The indoor plumbing is nice," he said with as much sincerity as he ever had. "And refridgeration."

Also the fact that the Church didn't literally control everything anymore. That was cool.

Tisarwat's brows lifted.

A hundred years in Wallachia was clearly very, very different from a hundred years in Radch space.

"I can see why those things could be considered a net positive for you," she mused, and then her head tilted thoughtfully. "Is there anything you miss?"

"Hell no," Trevor said with a bark of laughter. "That place is a shithole."

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lilac_eyed_lieutenant - 2019-09-16 01:36 (UTC) - Expand

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