Open Smoke and sugar

[Philomena]

88th Day of Winter, 512 AV
Early Morning
Minnie's flat near The Saville
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At last, mastery of producing her own drinkable cup of coffee had arrived. At last. At long last, Minnie Lefting, Doctor of Literature, had learned to brew something she could swallow.

But.

What was this, she had come across? In her research of the Southern Leg of the WRight Circumnavigation, she had delved into the second hand account of a traveller in the desert lands of the south, and come across a reference: to a strange, thick, very sweet hot drink popular with the southrons. Smoky, and spicy, and very sugary.

Food lore was NOT her specialty, but this idea ahd GNAWED at her. GNAWED. And finally, she had resolved to try it - though after her last adventure with a poor recipe nearly sent her to the infirmary with smoke inhalation, she decided to try it outside. She sat, then, on the steps of the shop she slept above, a charcoal brazier glowing the early dawn light, boiling a pot of creme, with a cheesecloth bag of coffee-beans, black pepper, cardamom, and lavender floating in the center. Seh stirred with the intense concentration fo the practiced academic, panicking slightly at the slightest sticky parts at the bottom (her fire was up too high, and shed never been good at regulating it). Stirring, stirring. Adding honey. More honey. More honey.

The smell of sweetness and pepper and coffee floated through the neighborhood, an... unusual mixture. Something like boiing a spice-cake in a coffeepot.

[Adnaj]

Adnaj had been walking around West Street. He needed a break. He needed to step away from his clinic and get a breath of fresh air. He couldn't understand what was going on. For 3 years Adnaj had been a spectacularly successful physician. Yet, for the last three weeks he had witnessed nothing but failure. Dealings with physiology and with life and death were routinely tense but over the last month and a half Adnaj had witnessed a uniquely alarming trend. Patients began to take unexpected and almost entirely unexplainable turns for the worse. He had lost, in the last month 5 times the number of patients whom he typically lost to death.

The gravity of the situation was too much for Adnaj and so he had to take a lunchtime walk through the beautiful city. These breaks were becoming more and more of an unavailable luxury but for now his patients were stable. They were stable enough, anyway. For one thing, he knew that they would still be alive when he returned. Secondly, he understood that he would serve them better with a fresher mind after a refreshing break from his exhaustive work.

As he walked down West Street his miniscule exposure to leisure was bolstered by the familiar smell of coffee with hints of a few other flavors which were detectable by Adnaj. He knew that he was going to have to follow this smell down the street and over to the front stoop where the smell had originated.

He scored a better view of Philomena's make-shift kitchen as he grew closer. What a beautiful distraction this would serve. What a terrific breath-air of pleasantness and brevity this interaction could provide.

"The pungent, inviting smell of coffee is obvious," Adnaj stepped forward with a subtle, but more importantly, genuine smile, "but is that cinnamon, vanilla and perhaps....nutmeg...that I detect?"

his shell of a body being all but functionally useless, he had no real use for coffee let-alone an addiction to one. Still, the Nuit worked with herbs all day. He could appreciate the purposeful creation and usage of herbs, components and ingredients. He found himself interested in the door-front attempt to create a beverage.

"The obvious scent hints that you're doing a good job but I can't help but to have my curiosity piqued by your choice of venue. First an introduction," he politely nodded his head, pulling his torso into a subtle bow. "My name is Adnaj. I am a healer happening to pass by this street when my attention was caught by the pleasant smell of your coffee."

He returned to standing straight and looked back at the pot. "Now, with introductions out of the way, might I be so intrusive as to ask why you have decided to brew on the street where the elements may threaten your fragile preparations? Is it perhaps so that your neighbors can witness the sight and sounds of your work? Are you in the business of selling your coffee?"

[Philomena]

*concentrate. Concentrate. Do not burn it...*

"Hrm, what's this?"

She heard the words before her conscious mind realized they were addressed to someone - only THEN realizing that she has replied to an external query. A short dialogue between subconscious and conscious showed in the slight glaze of her eyes. Closer now, she emits a smell of fair living, subpar grooming,and a horrid perfume that smells like violets grown in rubbing alcohol.

"You are... a person I have not met?" her mind clicks back and forth, as she focuses her eyes on the gentleman. But the question does not await an answer - the clicking by long practice happens quickly. What is that smell? Makeup. Makeup...

"Wait. My students have sent you. Did my students send you? We've no need of painted face gentlemen here. If I wanted to buy time, I would go to the district for it, hrmm?"

A faint, acrid smell begins emanating from the bottom of the aroma of spice and coffee. Acrid, likethe beginnings of a carbon crust, like burnt milk...

She reaches up as she says this and pushes stray, wild hairs back behind her ears, and wipes the sweat from her cheeks. Looking up now, her clothes are visible as well - a sky blue ascot tie, meant for a collar and a man's neck, both objects lacking in this case, and the sort of lace frippery normally employed by young girls playing at princess, or older women playing at the artiste. But dyed a rusty, fading black.

[Lusa]

As the wind lightly ruffled her brows winter coat, Lusa was doing her favorite activity; wandering the streets, following her nose. Her eyes were excellent for night vision, but during the day there were colors she couldn't see, so she often relied on her hearing and smell to guide her rather than her eyes. Zeltiva was so large that she often ended up horrifically lost for days at a time, and had spent several nights sleeping on the streets instead of the inn. She'd been following the faintest hint of a scent she'd learned several seasons ago, the very day her entire simple existence had changed. The rich, bodied, slightly bitter scent of coffee being prepared. She was not given to reminisce, barely thinking about anything that happened more than a few days ago, but she always remembered Zandelia, and she always remembered coffee. She'd hated it at first, even going so far as to spit out the expensive liquid, but had grown to appreciate its flavor. Her nose twitching, she skittered down streets and alleys, searching for the source of the aroma. It took her a good half hour of weaving between buildings, and more than once she had to skip and hop to avoid stepping on a rat. Finally she reached the source, a woman sitting on the steps of a shop, conversing with another human. The little deer shifted nervously as she inched closer; she was leery of speaking to strange people but she could clearly smell that the ambrosial mixture being cooked was beginning to burn. She was torn between the lessons she'd learned in Suberth about strangers and the desire to save the coffee she loved so much.

[Adnaj]

Adnaj is somewhat taken by surprise by the scene. This was definitely not the chef that he had expected. The smell certainly shifted, over his nostrils and palette, when the scent of coffee was joined by meager hygiene habits and the misguided attempt to hide these with cheap perfume.

The newly burning coffee didn't aide this assault on Adnaj's nose. Being called a prostitute was the icing on the cake. Adnaj couldn't help but chuckle. It was all too much for his ability to keep his cool. It wasn't a humble, endearing chuckle. Instead, against all of his effort to hide his thoughts, it was a condescending, pitying kind of chuckle.

He wanted to revel in this woman's pursuit of study and artistry but he was only Nuit, after all. He could only take so much before his cold, sarcastic character traits started to make themselves known.

He started to regain his composure but then noticed her outfit with the tie and the ascot which seemed to have gotten lost from some poor, male passerby. For a brief second, the irreverent smile returned to his face but he quickly brought his moment of immaturity back under control again.

"I can assure you, that I am no prostitute," he plainly informed her. "I was simply lured over by the smell of cof~Oohh!" He then noticed the smell and took a calm step back. "Hold on, I'll let you get that under control, first," he warmly smiled.

[Philomena]

The front porch of one's home is a place that one might expect... safety? Not so muhc that as, familiarity. A sense of the expected. The made up gentlemen was clearly either lying, or sinister in some fashion. He was too old for being a dandy, after all. Was he covering a scar? She knew she smelled powder...

And then, there is the moment when the unusual turns to the inconceivable, when a deer walks down the winter streets of your city, to begin sniffing at your coffee pot. //The Fire// she thought, //It wants to be closer to the fire? IT is cold?//

And so, the old professor was left with three insoluble dilemmas: the threatening man in makeup, the almost certainly frigid deer, and burning coffee. Coffee was important, yes! Terribly so! But a threat, and the surreal, both of these much more so. So, the mind unabel to hold all three dropped the one. The remaining tasks fell to two different parts of her mind. The deer to the abstraction, the physical, the semi-sub-conscious, which though, ever so reasonably - fire, it is cold! And reached the wooden spoon beneath the brazier to prod gently at the coals, bringing them to a higher pitch. The milk grew insufferably acrid now, but of course, this reached only the subconscious, and the subconscious could connect smells to emotions - panic in this case being the proper reaction to burning food, but then panic was already rising up her gorge - but not precisely map them to proper action.

It was the conscious, reasoning mind that turned to the man. He had... why he had sneered at her! She reached for the andiron quietly with her non-cooking hand, defensively, trying subtly (but subtlety, after all, is not the strength of Minnie Lefting) to fly her eyes right and left to see if the street is isolated enough to be murdered by a strange, made-up thug of some sort.

"Under control? Sir, I assure you. I am perfectly under control. What is your business here?"

[Lusa]

Fidgeting even more nervously now, she argued back and forth to herself over this dilemma. Approach these people, who seemed to not be quite getting along, and in doing so salvage what was left of the coffee on the fire? Or be especially safe, leaving them to their situation and losing the opportunity to taste coffe once again, reaffirming her memories of Zandelia and her first true experience with humanity? Her hooves clipped on the cobblestones, ears pushed back against her skull. She didn't like the smell of the man. He smelled strange, not much like other humans, and something about it put her on edge, but worse was the scent of the milk burning. She could scarecely stand it, and finally the desire for her favorite treat won out over her social cowardice. All slim animal limbs and scruffy fur, she darted forward, taking the pot handle in her jaws and lifting it from the brazier, setting it quickly upon the chilled ground. The cold would help cease the cooking process. It didn't occur to her in the slightest that she probably ought to have shifted into her human skin to perfom this action, but she was always rather absentminded about such things. To her, her animal and human forms were one and the same, and she was equally comfortable in either. Likely, they would now realize that she was not an ordinary deer having wandered into the city, and if they'd ever seen a Kelvic before it would have been obvious now that she was among that wild race.

[Adnaj]

It was interesting, Adnaj was no stranger to the need to calm people down. Usually though, he didn't need to do this until after people realized that he was a Nuit. He tried his best to disarm her with a smile.

"I have no specific business here, only leisure and will leave immediately if you so request, my dear." His attempt to smile and be amiable was made easier by the slightly comical sight of a dear casually clopping down the street. It was certainly an odd sight but also a humorous one in the mild cuteness of a deer obliviously meandering down a busy street.

However, a deer could have only made it so far without being scared off, couldn't it? The image became slightly more humorous, to Adnaj, when he realized that this was an absent minded Kelvic. The deer had to have been a Kelvic to whom it never dawned to utilize its human form within the city. He silently watched in mild confusion and amusement as a deer walked up to them, took the pot's handle in its jaws and then took it upon itself to set the pot on the cold snow.

"And it would appear, my friend, that I'm not the only one interested in the leisure of your cooking today," he said with a laugh.

[Philomena]

Never having (knowingly) experienced the joy of seeing flop back and forth between human and animal form, and having only a passing familiarity with the idea thereof, Minnie did not properly understand the meaning of the deer's actions. Rather, the action plunged the surreality just a touch deeper and less comprehensible. The assassin-prostitute-dandy-unimaginable fellow seemed to be (her conception of his actions was only vague in the sudden dip into dream logic, but it was present) at least attempting to APPEAR non-threatening, where in the light of the morning's isolation, if he meant her direct physical harm, it would have been quite easy to effect it. Mental harm and social humiliation were threats, to be sure, but ones that could wait until she figured out how she'd ended up inside of a fever dream.

"You are... a deer. And you've... just picked up my coffeepot."