Continuing Distractions

[bashfulshifter]

Characters: Patrick Dawn and YOU
Setting: Dorm Floor One and the Cafeteria on July 16th (day after hacking plot consequences)
Format: Prose to start, can match as always!
Summary: People need to CHILL. Rick makes comfort food for this purpose (also, obligatory morning cat patrol).
Warnings: Rick is still terrified of talking to new people and will stutter A LOT. The horror!

Dorm Floor One: as promised, Obligatory Morning Cat Patrol



Rick wasn't sure what caused the commotion outside his room in the early hours of the morning, but whatever it was, he deduced it wasn't pleasant. Recent posts on the network, combined with the collar boycott going into full swing, had made him reasonably nervous for the tower's well-being the past few days, and now it seemed things were about to get much worse.

He didn't have the stomach to step outside while it was still dark. Sometimes he could hear, in the halls, the scraping of talons, the whisper of feet, the soft voices of the creatures as they stalked their sleeping prey just out of reach, leaving only their vile scents behind. They, more than anything else in the tower he'd encountered so far, scared him senseless. He was far from prepared to run into one anytime soon.

Still, Rick could not sleep. He lay motionless on his back for several hours until the first rays of artificial daylight flickered in from under the door; then he slipped silently from his corner, careful not to disturb his (probably) slumbering roommates, crept into the empty hallway and took on his typical orange tabby form. Both Rusty and Rick had settled comfortably into this morning routine of territory patrol. Now it provided them with much-needed stability and an excellent couple hours of quiet contemplation before the crowd awoke.

That is, if the crowd wasn't as restless as they were.

Floor One (Cafeteria): Soul Food

After much thought over precisely what was bothering him and what could be done for the rest of the tower, Rick remembered what he'd heard about the recent actions of a strange French man and decided that he had a passable way of bringing something from home that could also ease the nerves of his fellow captives.

Granted, his level of culinary expertise was not on par with some other members of the tower (see the aforementioned breakfast), but nothing calmed Rick's mind more than a routine, and nothing calmed his wife's mind more than a good meal. They had long since synthesized this process through daily themed dishes, either for lunch or dinner, most of which Rick cooked himself because he liked memorizing the different recipes and seeing if he could reproduce them exactly. Since this had been the pattern for nearly five years, he'd become rather good at it.

As he recalled, Tuesdays were pasta days, which left a lot of room open for seasoning and the like so long as the noodles were established. Based on the resources available for the lunch menu--despite it being more a dinner dish--he decided on a hearty meat lasagna. They were slotted to have spaghetti later, but Rick preferred to think of that meal as a source of much-needed ricotta cheese rather than a redundancy. Plus, if people liked it, he could just keep cooking more through dinner.

He arrived in the cafeteria kitchen at the closing of breakfast and did not eat. About two hours later, the first massive batch of lasagna found its way in front of the rows of bland hotdogs and hockey-puck hamburgers and the second batch was already in the oven, giving Rick some time to sit back behind the counter and breathe (and gently dissuade any cafeteria drones from disturbing the oven while he waited).

Is the lasagna messy? Yes.

Is it full of meat and grease? Yes.

Is it delicious? MOST CERTAINLY

Comments

[nobarnacles]

With everything else that's been going on, Zel all but forgot about the weird shapeshifting cat dude thing he met when he first showed up. He hadn't been in his room much at all, only returning periodically to sleep (and even then, it was sporadic and unpredictable). So, this morning, he was on the way back to his room to catch a quick nap after spending all night doing who knows what.

Of course, the moment he sees that orange tail swishing at the other end of the hallway, he pauses, narrowing his eyes.

"Hey, you. Cat-man."

There's no hostility in his voice, since he's too tired to be properly angry, but this is about as close to a polite greeting as Zel can give.

soul food

[geometry]

...Well that's different. Someone who's not Equius is doing the cooking today.

The troll was alarmed to find that there was an unusual dish sitting in front of everything else on the buffet table; normally Equius threw his creations on the side, because it seemed a bit precarious to put pans too close to the edge, so he casually picked it up and moved it over to a nice blank space near the opposite end. There. Now nobody would accidentally walk by and spill sauce and cheese all over their white outfit -- or whatever else they happened to be wearin that day.

And while he was at it, Equius also noticed that someone had thrown the salt and pepper in a completely dumb spot. Who does that? Jerks. He also put the condiments back where they belonged.

Well, one thing led to another, and eventually Equius looked up to find that he had actually spent an entire twenty minutes rearranging various items on the table. He noticed this because someone was actually trying to get at the food, and informing him of this in a not-especially-kind way. So, after apologizing about ten times, he darted into the kitchen to hide-- oh, wait, sorry. Cook.

The presence of another person in the kitchen probably shouldn't have come as a surprise to him, with the lasagna outside. But it did anyway.

"--Oh! Hello." He was in the middle of baking something else in the oven. Crap. "Uh, sorry, I didn't... you know... uh, it's not often that people really... come... never mind."

...What? What do you mean Equius might not be in his right mind today? He's feeling perfectly fine, that's a silly accusation and also a totally false one.