pull out the second cord

[thereisnopie]

Characters: Gamzee (AU3) and OPEN
Setting: the indoor forest
Format: any
Summary: i'm tired of this motherfucking troll in my motherfucking woods Gamzee tries to cook food.
Warnings: motherfuckin' language

He could do this whole survival thing. It was easy as pie.

Or maybe it should just be said that pie was easy. Hunting and skinning your own animal? Not so much.

Gamzee wanted to consider himself a fairly competent human, though. He'd caught the animal - that was the most important part of the process down. He'd built the campfire too, at least in that he'd cleared out a pit, put some rocks around it, and dumped a bunch of twigs inside. Unfortunately, he'd forgotten to try and steal some matches from somewhere first, so he was left with the difficult task of getting a fire started without them.

What did you do now? Smack some rocks? Rub some sticks together, right?

The rabbit lay unskinned, as he didn't want to mess with that until the fire was ready just in case that would make it all nasty. ...Though at the rate this was happening, it might go bad anyway. Perhaps he should just give up and start searching for a microwave.

Comments

[thereisnopie]

"Ain't got no fire yet, have I?" He grumbles, watching curiously as the blond messes with the rocks around his fire pit. If he knew a bit more about making fires without matches, he might have guessed the reasoning, but as it was he just figured it was some weird habit from wherever the guy was from.

[warriorscribe]

Enoch finds what he's looking for - a large rock with a flat side, large enough for him to hold steady with his fingertips. He sets it at his feet a moment while he gets his Arch out, the hum of energy activating breaking the silence a moment as he opened it. Shifting his grip to the middle of the weapon, he bent down for the rock again and held it over the kindling, using his weapon as flint to strike carefully against it, generating sparks that fell into the wood.

"Blow gently on the sparks until you can clearly see a fire," he told Gamzee.

Sure, it's kind of cheating. But he'll tell Gamzee what flint looks like once he has a fire going. That makes up for...most people not having something like this, right?

[thereisnopie]

Gamzee isn't so good with doing things 'gently', but he'll give it a shot. He bends down quickly, cupping his hands around the embers and giving it a few light puffs of breath. So far, this is the closest anyone has gotten to actually helping him with his cooking.

It takes a bit, but soon there's more than just smoke crackling up through the twigs and the boy sits back with a rather bright smile on his face. Finally!

...Now he just has to figure out how to properly cook the rabbit.

[warriorscribe]

Enoch can't help but smile at that, himself, as he puts the Arch back where it normally goes on the back of his jeans. He kneels by the fire, too, and reaches for a stone he had previously passed up.

"When you want to start a fire, look for a rough rock, possibly with a smooth side like this one. Try striking it with your knife several times - if it's the stone you need, it will make a spark." Enoch hands the piece of flint over to Gamzee for later. Since Gamzee was out hunting, Enoch assumes he has a knife of some kind. He hasn't noticed yet he doesn't have the materials for a spit or some other means to keep from burning himself when he cooks.

[thereisnopie]

"Shiiit." Gamzee takes all this in, willing to learn.

Of course there's that one little problem. "...What if a brother don't all got himself a knife?"

It's probably best not to ask the boy how he planned on skinning the creature, as it's not a pleasant thought in the slightest.

[warriorscribe]

Enoch's brow furrows a bit. "You weren't going to cook your catch with its fur and skin intact, were you?"

[thereisnopie]

Gamzee doesn't really say anything, making the answer obvious by the way he awkwardly averts his eyes.

...That had been a possibility.

[warriorscribe]

"...That wouldn't have been very pleasant. I can find a blade for you if you're willing to wait for a little while."

[thereisnopie]

The boy shrugs.

"If you wanted to get your help on for a brother, sure." Might as well, at this point.

[warriorscribe]

That seemed good enough. Enoch got up and headed downstairs.

He was gone for a little while longer than one might think it would take, but emerged eventually...with pieces of his armor missing, like a side of the neck guard and a glove.

"I'm sorry I made you wait. Some monsters decided to lie in wait for me down there." He sat down, holding a knife from the kitchen, and reached out for the rabbit to show Gamzee how to skin it.

[thereisnopie]

Gamzee glanced at the man's armor and frowned, for a moment looking almost concerned. After all, if anything happened to his roommate it would be because he'd gone off to do something for him.

"Didn't all go and lose nothin' important, did you?" He handed the rabbit over without complaint.

[warriorscribe]

Enoch shook his head. "I'll be fine." That's what his armor was there for, anyway.

Enoch placed the stone he'd used to generate the sparks in front of him and rested the rabbit's back thigh over the flat side. He cut into the skin with the tip of the knife, making a somewhat annoyed face at the effort it took.

"It will never cut through the neck..."

He seemed to ensure that blood spilled on the rock in front of him as he pulled the skin away up to the neck, and it was fairly obvious why when he set the carcass aside on top of its own hide and began sharpening the knife against the now wet stone.

[thereisnopie]

The boy watched all of this without a word, taking in everything. All of this was a learning experience, and he was determined not to miss any of the lesson. After all, he might want to come back to the woods and do this again in the future.

"Do it gotta be all bloody like that for sharpening?"

[warriorscribe]

Enoch looked up at him, still scraping the knife against the stone. "Not necessarily. Water would be best, but the stone only needs to be wet. Blood is what we happen to have on hand."

Enoch wiped the blade clean on the rabbit hide and pulled the carcass back over to the stone to cut its head and feet off. This took considerably less effort now that the knife had been sharpened.

[thereisnopie]

"Huh." Gamzee didn't see how that would make much difference, but he paid attention anyway. He'd figured you had to have some sort of special grindstone for that sort of thing, so this was good to know. Not that he even used knives often.

He was still a little embarrassed to have Enoch fixing up the rabbit for him, but at least he was learning from the experience.

[warriorscribe]

A grindstone needed to be wet down too, and wasn't very portable, besides - not to mention didn't exist in Enoch's time. He couldn't have possibly mentioned that.

Carefully, he slit the rabbit's underside open. "You'll want to avoid cutting open or bursting anything here, or your meat will likely taste very odd."

He put the entrails on top of the hide - some of that might be edible too, but when a rabbit had teeth like this, he wasn't sure he wanted to eat any trace of anything it had bitten into...

[thereisnopie]

Damn. Delicate cutting on that. Could he manage delicate cutting? Did he have delicate hands?

With a thoughtful expression, Gamzee takes a moment to actually look over all ten of his digits and palms. He could handle gentle tasks with those hands, couldn't he?

He tried not to get too drawn off on a tangent, forcing his attention back to the way Enoch was cutting. "You just toss that out, then?"

[warriorscribe]

"Some of them can be cooked, but..."

Enoch picked up the head and drew back the rabbit's lip to reveal too many too-sharp teeth.

"Teeth like these...these creatures are altered, no doubt to attack us. I'd rather not risk eating any trace of what it's eaten."

He set the severed head aside again and picked up the body...and where was the kid's...oh, dear.

"...You didn't think to find something to roast it on, did you?"

[thereisnopie]

"That ain't normal?" Gamzee just blinked at the exposed teeth. He really failed at this human thing sometimes. Enoch clearly hadn't been exposed to the wonders of Alternia, real or otherwise.

But what was he asking about now-- Oh.

Right, that probably would have been a good idea.

The boy looks a little sheepish. One more thing to add to the ever growing list of his current failures. "Uh... nah. I was gonna get to that..."

Ack, sorry! I must have lost the notif...

[warriorscribe]

"It's no trouble." Enoch stood up and looked for a manageable low branch on one of the younger trees. When he found a good one, he cut it off with a stroke of the Arch and began trimming the branches from it.

"A dead branch can break or catch fire, itself. You want a live one, not too thin, but small enough to break away from the tree, or freshly fallen some other way."

He cut off the tip at an angle to make a point, and returned to the carcass. As he worked the rabbit onto the point, he glanced over at Gamzee.

"This creature is normal for your world?"

He'd met some trolls, but hadn't spoken much about Alternia's fauna in-depth, unfortunately.

[thereisnopie]

"Well, haven't laid gander bulbs on one just the same as that one is being, but it's not anything out of the motherfuckin' ordinary for a little bro that size to be gettin' its munch on with a set of chompers as sharp as those." Honestly, Enoch. Have you seen the teeth on the other trolls here?

Gamzee felt a little silly for not thinking to do what the blond was doing, as it made the most sense when it came to cooking an animal like that. What else was he going to do? Toss the whole thing on the fire and try to pull it out when it was done?

[warriorscribe]

Enoch had to pause for a little while, yet again, to work out what Gamzee was saying. Really it was mostly working out "gander bulbs", which was incredibly simple in its own right. Enoch nodded and held the rabbit over the fire.

So this boy came from a world where small, fierce predators were ordinary. It made a little more sense now...

"No wonder you were able to kill it. The creatures here disable my weapon when I come near them."

[thereisnopie]

Gamzee caught himself thinking about Alternia as being a real place again. He really had to shake those thoughts out of his head. Whether or not this place was as real as it seemed, the one in the machine remained false.

"What all weapon would that be?" And how would something like that hopbeast there actually be able to disable it?

[warriorscribe]

Enoch slowly turned the rabbit, shifting his grip a bit higher up on the stake for stability as he showed Gamzee his Arch again.

"This. It uses a body of energy as its edge. The creatures in this forest...somehow being near them disables that energy."

[thereisnopie]

"Weird shit." Did that mean that perhaps eating them wasn't the best of ideas? Maybe.

Was it going to stop him from eating the rabbit? No.

"Guess they're meant to be all bitin' into you first, and no the other way around."