exsiliumlogs | ( open ) happy moonsgiving, everyone! (forward dated to 11/15)

( open ) happy moonsgiving, everyone! (forward dated to 11/15)

Date & Time: All Day, November 15th, 3313
Location: Focused centrally on the Moon Base Cafeteria.
Characters: Any and all!
Summary: It's a feast on the moon under the guise of being a new sort of Thanksgiving! Food, drink, merriment, food comas... lend a helping hand, fill a few plates of goodies, and meet friends new and old!
Warnings: None right now. Please PM this account should anything go beyond a "my grandmother is also reading this and that is okay" level of appropriate.
Notes: Tag in action or prose, and please specify a time of day, location, or activity your character is participating in! (Set-up, the feast, clean up, etc.) Feel free to offer multiple prompts, as your heart desires! Also, Collette is asking for people to write something they're thankful for on butchers paper on the wall before getting their first plate of food. This is 100% optional!

In the morning, the setting up begins. It's hard to say what's a morning versus what isn't on the moon, but using the lighting system as a sort of guide, those who offered to help set up the feast or continue on with the cooking will all be there bright and early.

After things are cleaned, the cooking continues on while further set up of plateware and silverware and hard to break glasses are left to those helping hands with a mind for arrangement details. The whole of one section has been converted into a sort of buffet-style lineup, waiting for the dishes to be complete and set at ready. All varieties of the usual dietary fare have been offered, some in greater quantities than others.

Then comes the time where people stopping by or trickling in aren't just turned around or co-opted into assisting; it's feast time, though not before an announcement that each person getting a plate of food must write at least one thing they're thankful for on a large sheet of butcher paper taped up to the wall. There's a variety of colored markers and pens provided, from someone's personal (and eclectic) collection. It's a soft price to pay for free food and plenty of it!

When the feasting has wound down, so begins the clean up. Tired, drunk, well fed, over fed, or simply content, people will be shuffled out or dragged into helping turn the cafeteria back into working, normal form. What decorations were added will need collecting (or stealing), plates and dishes and cooking implements and pots and pans will need washing, and floors a good sweeping and waterless mopping before things are all back in order. Leftovers, if there are any, will need to be placed in sealable containers and put into refrigeration.

And then, blissfully unaware of anything impending on the horizon, to bed, or different haunts, for the night.

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I think Ben Franklin just liked them a lot.

( They totally sound cooler than the bald eagle, though! Gobbles versus gullcry.

... Gobbles wins! )

A swan?

( She finds that interesting, given Ahiru turns into... a duck. Huh! )

Why a swan?

( As for her answer, she pauses to think, pressing her lips together. )

I'm not sure. For the whole state, or maybe just the city I lived in? Pigeon, if we're going for L.A. They can be really pretty, you know? You find them everywhere, too, but they're kind of nice, even when they're annoying.

( They're also freedom, in a way she'd never known until the moment she had wings. )

Was that one of the presidents?

[She shrugs, tilting her head in thought.]

I don't know, they're pretty! All graceful and stuff. Ooh, yeah, I like pigeons! What's L.A. like?

I... think he was an inventor, actually. Was he about electricity?

( Collette does not recall a great deal about United States History. )

Like the Swan Princess, huh? ( Or is it Swan Lake? One or the other, she recalls, has something sort of to do with swans. ) L.A.'s great! It's big, and busy, and traffic's terrible, and there's so much going on and all kinds of different foods and apparently decent laundromats! It's so alive, you can feel it the whole time, and depending where you are? You can smell the salt from the sea! There's a lot of sun there during the summer, and even in the winter, the weather's pretty mild. I love it!

( The brief visit with Caesar had been a welcome reminder of a nostalgia that will have to remain a warm part of her past. )

Swan Princess? What's that?

[A smile spreads out on her face upon hearing Collette's obvious love for the place.]

It sound incredible! Big cities like that are always fun. So it was right by the sea, then? Did you get to go to the beach a lot?

( Be prepared for her amazing recall: )

It's a movie about a princess who gets turned into a swan and captured by this guy who does magic and hates everything! Her kind of dumb prince boyfriend saves her sort of eventually. She's totally kick-butt though!

( As for the other... )

Oh, I got to go a bunch over the years! Once my brother even took me out and let me on an ATV!

( She crashed it sort of. But only a little! Barely a bruise on her, and no damage to the thing itself! )

[Pause.]

Wait, why does he kidnap her? Why does he hate everything? Why is her boyfriend dumb? I don't think I follow...

Was it a nice beach? I've never heard of an ATV!

He's a bad guy, he probably wanted to rule the kingdom, that's usually why! Plus Odette's pretty, and bad guys always want pretty girls.

( Or so Hollywood tells her! )

But the beaches? Yes, they were all nice! You couldn't swim off a lot of them most the year due to riptides.

( She couldn't in general, because they weren't built in ways that made them accessible in any good sense for her, but it'd been fun to watch anyway. )

But even if she was a princess and he could have been king by marrying her or whatever the plan was, he couldn't force her to say yes even if he kidnapped her, could he? Oh— Odette, like Swan Lake?

[There's a little pang in her chest at that, remembering Jinx and Gabriel, and the smile fades for a moment (in surprise, not necessarily sadness) before returning.]

You mentioned the food there too, though! What'd they have that was different?

Yes! Or was it Odile? It's O-something, that much I know for sure! Anyway, who knows? Like I said, he hated everything, so he probably hated her too and didn't want to be king that way.

( Her attention span for the fine details had been fairly short. )

The food? All kinds! I mean, I don't know what it's been like for you, but there's Chinese and Japanese and Korean and Indian and Thai and different barbecues and Mexican and this place we went once that was supposed to be Peruvian and you can find all sorts of dishes from places all over the world! Pizza, too. And burgers!

I wonder why he kidnapped her if he didn't want to be around her...

[She smiles, interested.]

That's a pretty good variety! I bet it was nice, having so many choices. Which was your favorite?

All of it! At one time or another. I don't know, now that I've been away from it for this long, I remember everything like it was my favorite ever, even if it wasn't!

( She sighs, temporarily lost to other dinners and familiar groups of the past. )

I don't miss jello. We kind of have that here anyway, but I didn't miss it, not one bit!

[She looks confused for a moment, but lets out a laugh.]

What've you got against jello?

( Hospital's worth of lime and lemon flavors. Her answer comes with a wrinkling of her nose. )

Way too much experience, that's all I have to say!

Did you have, like, a jello phase or something?

( She snorts, shaking her head. )

Just a lot of long stretches where jello was one of the only things I was allowed to eat.

[She makes a face because gross.]

That can't be healthy!

I know, right? But it is in a weird way, sometimes! Anyway, no to the jello, and bring on the rest of it! I'll take anything else, or at least try it once.

What about you? Got anything you really like? Veggie wise?

Well, as far as vegetables go, celery is pretty good if you dip it in peanut butter! I like cucumber too, and lettuce. I like fruits more, though! Strawberries are my favorite, but watermelon and apples too.

Oh man, fruit... I love fruit! It's been such a bummer with what grew in Exsilium... and mostly what didn't. I wonder what kinds of fruits will be growing when we get back down there? Strawberries would be nice! Oh, or bananas!

Oh, yeah, bananas! Kiwis, too, and peaches. As for food in general, let's see...

[She pauses a moment before smiling, a little melancholy, but happy all the same.]

You know, there was this guy I used to know who made the best food. Just, anything he cooked, it was so good... I wonder if anything he made can be it's own category!

What was his name?

( She feels this should count. Food made by Mom counts already as something for her, lost to places she can't get back to, and not just because she's on another world, or not exactly alive anymore back home. )

[She wasn't expecting Collette to ask, and there's a brief pause weighing the pros and cons of honesty in this situation before she moves past it.]

Mm, it's been a long while. He was a good person, though, I'm sure of it. I remember that much.

( It's always funny to note the things people do and don't share. Collette tucks this away as one of Ahiru's, probably tied in to the world from before, rather than from home. People who'd been in more than one place in that way had more they held in tight, bittersweet memories than many others; except, in some cases, the dead.

She's glad Ahiru has a happy memory to hold close. Curious about it, of course, but curiosity has a long shelf life, and never really stops being pervasive in many things she does. )

I think there are definitely categories for people like that. The stuff they make, it's just special, even if it's like, one dish they made for you all the time.

[She smiles, nodding.]

I remember, on my birthdays, he would make me these cakes... They were amazing. He worked in a bakery. It's weird, focusing on little stuff like that when there was so much more to him, but that's one of the things I remember the best, how good those cakes tasted. I mean, that's not the only thing, but you get it.

What about you? Did you have anybody like that?

Why's it got to be past tense?

( She asks with a laugh. Only she realizes there are a lot of past tense's. Her Mom, for one. Snow, who'd been helping her here. Jesse isn't a past tense, but he's hard to navigate around, spiraling in and out of control like he does. It's frightening.

Then there's Gil, who helped conspire with her to make a dinner for a boy who didn't have the decency to show up. )

Just family. The things you miss when you can't have them anymore.

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quackery - 2013-11-22 16:12 (UTC) - Expand

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