faderift | Scents and Scent-ability

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Scents and Scent-ability

WHO: Athessa, Colin, Laura
WHAT: Making a game out of sniffing stuff
WHEN: Late Solace/Early August
WHERE: Hightown et al.
NOTES: Post-dating this so it doesn't conflict with Athessa being on a mission in Orlais most of the month.

Colin's apartment in Hightown is always awash with the smells of food being prepared, whether it's the warmth of baking bread or the earthy richness of a stew (Leave it to Colin to make the one Fereldan stew Athessa actually likes), which is why this has become the staging ground for Athessa and Laura's new game.

The premise is simple: Athessa or Colin pick a food for Laura to smell. Based on her olfactory senses alone, she must then identify the ingredients contained within that food. After guessing once, Laura is presented with the correct ingredients so she can smell the smell and have an association with the name of the ingredient. Finally, she's once again given the prepared food and can smell it with the added knowledge from the previous round.

Okay so it's more of a learning game than a game-game but Athessa thinks it's fun and Laura hasn't said she's not enjoying this, so it's fine.

Athessa is sitting at the table in Colin's kitchen, chin in hand and enjoying the smell of cooking food. She was watching the mage cook, but she's closed her eyes to bask. Because of that she only knows by listening where Laura is. Oh, she just thought of another sense-based game.

"Sometimes," she says, lifting her head so she isn't muffling herself. "I almost think you enhance your food with magic to make it taste so good."

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That gets a smile and a blush from Colin--clearly that compliment means a lot.

"Thanks," he says mildly. "There's not a way to do that," he adds, just in case there's any doubt. His gaze flickers toward the stranger in his kitchen, then away shyly, as if performing a service for some far more important person who doesn't want to be looked in the eye by the unworthy chattel.

Because there are so many people like that here.

There might be many people like that in Kirkwall, but most of them probably don't stare openly at everything around them like they've never seen the inside of a kitchen before. (She has--that's how she acquired her cat--but she's never been in a kitchen for the purpose of the kitchen itself.) She was directed to sit at the table, and she is, dressed all in black, hair hanging in her face, everything about her stock-still.

Well. Everything but her eyes. Her gaze jumps from one object to another, briefly to Colin, then to his pots and pans, then to the counters, then to a bundle of dried herbs, and onwards. It's taking some effort not to turn around and look behind her, let alone getting up and touching everything. Before now, she'd had no interest in cookery beyond it produces food--but Athessa promised this would be a worthwhile endeavor, and Laura's starting to see the appeal. This room feels very different from the Gallows.

"What are you making?" she asks, a slight Nevarran accent tingeing the question. When she looks at Athessa's friend, he isn't looking at her--so she takes the opportunity to study him in the meanwhile.

Athessa looks at Laura and takes note of her stillness, of the hair hanging in front of her face like a shield. It's a very guarded position, or seems so to the elf, so she reaches to lay her hand flat on the table as a subtle way of getting Laura's attention.

"You can relax, ya know," she says just loud enough for her to hear. Her smile is a little crooked, but reassuring.

Then, in her mock-nobleman voice, she speaks to Colin: "Yeees, do enlighten us darling, what delectable treats are coming together?"

"Um." His eyes widen a little and swerve to the side. "Am I supposed to say? Isn't she supposed to...not know?"

"Not the list of ingredients," She says, shrugging. "But I couldn't tell you what goes into that turtle-bread at the market any more than I could tell you all the spices in curry."

"There's not just one set of spices for curry," he says before he thinks. "Um. Fair enough. Everything's savory because of the sugar shortage. There's some of my mother's paella, little fish-and-egg tartlets, which are a sort of twist on a Fereldan classic that doesn't taste of nothing, little puff pastries filled with roasted vegetables, and beef chuck with onion gravy."

He takes a special pride in making the cheapest, toughest cuts of meat into melty, delectable treats.

She knows some of the foods he lists off: fish is fish, beef is beef, vegetables are vegetables. But the whole of it sounds unfamiliar. Paella means nothing to her. Tartlets are presumably small tarts, but she's only ever had tarts that leaned more towards sweet than savory. Puff pastry is...pastry that has been puffed?

It's a lot to take in, enough to make Athessa's game feel more like a test she's not sure she can pass. But Athessa is a friend, and Colin is Athessa's friend; failing the mission set before her will have no lasting consequences. Just consternation on her part--and a full stomach, it sounds like.

"I am ready," she says, sitting up a little bit straighter.

Thanks to the brand new Very Cool Scar on her cheek, though more out of habit to avoid disrupting it than because of any deformity, Athessa's smile is lopsided, more of a smirk but still fueled by the same cheeky (hah) energy as ever before. Laura's gonna do fine, because it's not really a test-test, but a means to pass future tests.

That is, if for some reason deciphering the ingredients from a dish becomes a recurring need.

"I'm hungry, so I'm ready too."

"All right. First, the paella."

Lexie has all sorts of dishes Colin didn't realize there was a use for at first. The tiny bowls are probably not meant for sample-size paella servings, but that is their purpose tonight. He sets one in front of each of his guests before standing back and waiting.

What is it? she's about to ask, but the point is to figure that out without asking. However unlikely success feels at the moment, she's not going to disqualify herself before she's even had a bite of the food.

So instead, she dips her head until her face is nearly in the bowl and sniffs. (It isn't strictly necessary to be so close. She does, however, want to be thorough about this.) Heat, unfamiliar spices, something from the sea, the faint green of some kind of vegetable or herb...

It smells like it will taste good. Sitting up again, she picks up a little spoon and takes a bite. "Rice. And that is a seashell."

She taps her spoon against some kind of shellfish, spread like a little open mouth.

Athessa lifts the bowl to her nose and inhales, hamming it up a little to be silly, but also because there's nothing wrong with enthusiasm! It smells so good!

"Mmhm, I think that's a clam?" She looks to Colin for confirmation, then takes a bite and makes a cute little yummy face. Ahh, blessed flavor!

"Close. Mussels and prawns." But he has to beam with pride at the face Athessa is making.

One of Laura's claws comes out, long and lyrium-white and not quite solid, so she can stab at the pinkish thing he called a prawn. Once it's speared, she bites it neatly off the claw, chewing thoughtfully. The flavor of it is hard to put into words, but she tries: "It tastes like salt. And water."

"Probably 'cos that's where it lives. In the ocean. This is Antivan, right?" She makes a point to be as unsurprised and visibly unaffected by the appearance of lyrium claws, just in case Colin looks to her for whether or not he should be scared.

Obviously he shouldn't, but Athessa neglected to forewarn him in case he wasn't prepared.

Colin's eyes widen and fix on those claws. Several heartbeats' worth of silence pass before he unfreezes.

"Antivan, yes. It's an old family recipe. It's about the freshness of the seafood and the balance of spices, and how all of that flavor gets soaked up in the rice."

Laura is used to this, at least. People see a claw, and they become uncomfortable, and then sometimes they pretend they aren't uncomfortable. It's routine, at this point, and it isn't surprising. Colin is Athessa's friend; he speaks to her, looks at her, and Laura assumes he either has heard stories about the murders or is doing this primarily as a favour to their mutual ally.

Some part of her always feels an unpleasant sense of exposure, of course, when a person's eyes settle on her hands. But that part of her will be fed along with the rest. Taking hold of the edge of one mussel between her fingertips, she lifts it out of its bed of rice, a few grains sticking to the shell on the way. The seashell is obviously not edible; the objective is the soft bite of meat inside. Tentatively, she pokes it with the tip of her claw, testing the possibility of stabbing it like one of the prawns.

Note to self: warn people about the claws before introducing them to Laura.

"Well, now I think we should trot out the individual components, yeah?" Athessa wolfs down the rest of her sample portion because it's fucking delicious - moreso after what she's been eating for the past month - and stands to help Colin bring in what she assumes will be more curiously sized tableware. Why would anyone not playing this particular game need bowls that small?

"Which of all this stuff isn't safe to sample raw, Col?"

Colin picks a mussel from the serving bowl and shows Laura how to eat it.

"You break the two halves apart," he says softly, "then look--use the other half like a spoon. Pry this loose from the shell, and eat it in one bite." He raises his voice to answer Athessa's question. "Um. Mussels are fine, but I've never heard of anyone eating raw prawns?"

Laura watches, silent, as Colin's attention turns toward her. The claw disappears, and she mimics him: snap the shells apart, scrape the flesh away from where it clings to its old home. She pauses when she has the mussel on her shell-spoon, peering at the orangey lump that passes for some kind of...body? Is that what this is?

After she's swallowed it--also like salt and water in her mouth, smooth and chewy between her teeth, with the same bright flavors of the rice--she asks, "What is it?"

A mussel, yes, but it's a shell with a bite of meat inside it. The very idea of it, that it might have been alive once, seems inexplicable.

"It's a kind of...fish-bug, I guess?" Athessa says as she arranges the ingredients on the table. For a few of the spices, she pauses to appreciate the smell of them herself. Warm, comforting spices and herbs both earthy and sweet. Similar to the spices that fill the air in Rivaini seaports.

"Prawns are fine. Guy I knew in Kont-aar used to eat a third of his catch before they even got off the boat. Not the tails, though."

"Shellfish," Colin says with a blank look on his face, unsure how to explain it further and therefore hoping she doesn't ask.

"What was selfish?" she asks, after a moment, having been more focused on the little bowls of ingredients before her. The rice is easy to identify; Laura touches the hard little grains, two fingers swirling through them, around and around. The prawns and mussels, the fish-bugs, those are obvious by the shape of them. Everything else is mostly familiar by sight, objects and smells from market stalls, rather than by experience.

She sits back down, kindly correcting: "Shellfish, 'Lo. Here, lemme show ya how to take the shells off these buddies."

Removing the shell from a prawn is hardly a difficult task, especially when you plan on eating it raw.

Oh thank the Maker, Colin thinks, releasing a breath that he didn't have to clarify that because what if he winds up explaining something she already knows and she gets offended? He turns to garnish the fish-and-egg tartlets.

"Oh." It feels...strange, she realizes, sitting there in a warm kitchen with good food and the vague sense that she's done something wrong. Athessa is Athessa, friendly and reassuring. Colin says little to her, doesn't look at her, and finds her claws unsettling. He feeds her, which is a form of kindness, but she feels less and less comfortable in his presence as time goes on. When he turns away, it's a relief, and she doesn't know why.

Partly, perhaps, because she wants to use a claw to pry a raw shrimp out of its shell, and she doesn't think he'll like that. Following Athessa's lead, she splits the meat out of its shell and bites into it, then finds one last cooked prawn from her abandoned dish of paella. Laura holds the two prawns up to the light, examining the differences silently: how the flesh looks more solid, how it turns pink, how the powdery spices cling to it once it's been cooked with them. She eats first the raw prawn, and then the cooked one. "They taste less like the sea after cooking."

Edited 2020-08-03 03:35 (UTC)

Chalk it up to the Bard training that Athessa notices some tiny shift in Laura's comfort when Colin turns away. She taps her knuckle twice against the table-top to get Laura's attention and mouth the words you're okay before standing.

"Colin, can I have a super secret meeting with you in the hallway real quick?"

Colin's face goes a shade paler. He nods, already looking rather glum. He did something wrong without even knowing. Was he not friendly enough? Did his face not emote enough again? It's all running through his head, along with worse, as he looks to Laura.

"Beg pardon," he says breathlessly before following Athessa out.

Laura glances over at Athessa at the noise. You're okay, Athessa says, without saying anything, and she nods, her brows coming together. That much is true; she is uninjured, and while she feels somewhat uncomfortable here, that's frequently the case.

And then they leave, presumably to talk about her, and she has to debate the merits of attempting to eavesdrop. Normally, she wouldn't hesitate--she's come to a point where she loves to listen to others' conversations--but she's not sure she wants to hear what needs to be said about her. So once they're gone, she returns to the paella ingredients, pulling the tiny bowls of spices toward her. These, she's careful not to touch; they have the same fragrant scents she remembers from the marketplace, and she's learned from watching the buyers and sellers there that they're expensive.

Out in the hall, Athessa turns to look at Colin with arms akimbo.

"Okay, I should've warned you about the claws, but Laura's a good kid and my friend and you don't need to be nervous around her, I promise."

"She's not the problem," Colin hisses, tucking his hands under his arms and not looking the least bit reassured. "I'm the problem. I'm always the problem. I do things wrong. I could say something she already knows and offend her that way. And I have no idea how to explain what a shellfish is. I don't really know what a shellfish is besides a shellfish. What if I can't answer her questions? I'm terrible at remembering things around strangers because I'm terrible with strangers."

By the end, he's hyperventilating just slightly.

"Wh--So just say you don't know!" She puts her hands on his shoulders and gives him an insistent look.

"You're okay. You haven't done anything wrong. Just...be yourself, that's all you gotta do. If she already knows something--" Athessa shrugs. "--Great, there's no way we can know what she knows without...finding out."

She makes it sound so obvious. Only thing is if he's himself, himself is still terrible at strangers. But Athessa believes in him, for some reason. He could protest, but she'd say he's being stupid, and if that's her opinion, then it's probably true. Therefore: he can do this.

He closes his eyes, nods, and takes a deep breath. Himself is also amazing with food. He knows food. He can talk about food. Okay.

Striding back to the kitchen, he collects himself as well as a sampling of each of the spices in the paella.

"All right. Um. The prawns taste a little sweet when they're cooked, right?"

When she hears them return, she sits up straight, a claw disappearing from an onion she found and decided to cut into. It's in two halves before her, her hands settling at the edge of the table as if it might be necessary to hold on.

Colin speaks to her, and she looks up at him from where she's seated. Her green eyes are steady, her expression mostly neutral save a little pinch to her brows. "Yes. And they turned pink."

Athessa sits back down at the table with a sigh, hoping that she's made things better rather than worse. She smiles at Colin, then at Laura, and idly turns one of the bowls back and forth.

"Do you think you'd be able to pick these spices out of the cooked dish?"

Oh that's a good idea. Colin keeps making little bowls of spices.

"I'm making little samples of every spice I use in these dishes. For every dish, you try to pick out which spices I used."

When done, he scrambles the little bowls and lines them up for her.

Laura sniffs at the tiny bowls, and then at her rice again. Squinting at the different bowls before her, she pushes away a few of them, then sniffs again, and pushes some more off.

What's left is a bowl with something reddish and powdery within it, another with some kind of leaves dried to a silvery green. There are a few others she's unsure of; these, she thinks must be in there.

"Laura have I told you lately that you're amazing?" Athessa doesn't have the correct answers to this one. Maybe this red spice, the pepper, salt just by guessing. But even without knowing, she'd be willing to bet that Laura sniffed out at least half on her first try.

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Scents and Scent-ability

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