trans_9 | Breaking the flavors

Mei-Xing stares at her slop listlessly, stirring it around with her finger. Another slightly unpleasant meal to round out the day, huh? No matter how much she ate, even giving the tray a try (she'd been horribly surprised to find out that it was edible), it never improved the taste. "Like lint flavored pudding." She pauses, bringing her finger up to her face and examining it.

"Lint... flavored... pudding. Hm." She scoots to the side, dipping her finer into her tray again, and draws it across the surface of the table. More dipping follows, and she sketches out several equations, mathematical and mystical in nature. After about fifteen minutes and one refill, she has a good half of the table covered in a sloppy formula. "Right. Okay. Here we go." She stares hard at her tray, a new load of slop on there, and settles down in front of it. Dipping a finger in, she licks it and beams. "From lint pudding, to melon pudding. Spirits above, I'm a hell of a genius."

It only took her three or four months to figure out she could do it instead of bitching.

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Fletcher stares for a second, still trying to make sense of the bizarre writings. The numbers are familiar, but...

Well, he'll try it anyway. He takes his spoon and reaches down, gathers up a small spoonful of the woman's soup, brings it to his mouth, and slurps it.

"This is good!" he exclaims. Well, it's not the best thing he's ever had, but it's so much better than the usual slop is. "How did you do this? What do all these symbols mean? Are you..."

She chuckles and holds her palm flat. A tiny flame dances in her palm. "A magician. Pretty wiz, huh?" She closes her fist around the fire and snags her spoon back, humming cheerfully. "I just made that one up. The slop one, I mean. I'll need to refine it a bit to perfect it, but it does fine for now."

Mei-Xing buries her spoon in the gloop and takes another bite. "Too bad I can't do anything for the texture, yet. But if I pretend it's pudding, it works out pretty well." She looks back at the kid and gestures, the slop on the table sliding towards the end. Another gesture flings the entire mess into the garbage. "C'mon, kid. Sit down. You want me to tweak that drek's flavor?"

Well, that wasn't the word he'd been thinking of, but it made more sense anyway. He sat down beside her, setting his tray of original slop down in front of himself. "Ah-- can you? I mean, is it hard?"

So, there was a way to get rid of the disgusting taste... Things got better and better every day around here.

She shakes her head. "If I did a few hundred gallons of goop at once, it might hurt a bit. But the main problem is getting this formula straight in my head." She'll cut it down over time.

Mei-Xing takes a bite of her own goop and swallows, concentrating on Fletcher's plate while she enjoys the food for the first time in a long time. "I'm already done, by the way. Enjoy."

"Oh..." He looks down at the goop and then, hesitantly, downs a spoonful. It's weird, yeah, but still pretty good. "Um, thank you very much! But... a formula? You said you were a magician."

Because everyone knows only science uses formulas, and magic is completely illogical and nonsensical. Or at least, everyone in Fletcher's world.

"I'm a hermetic mage, not a shaman or an adept." She shrugs a bit, wiggling her fingers. "You know, there's a ton of different paths to magic, and every one of us things ours is the right one. Some of us take on animal totems and claim a spirit as our totem, some of us pray to our gods for power."

Om nom nom nom.

"All hermetic mages use formula. What we call them might change, and the way it's all handled might change. But many of us study the science of thaumaturgy, the study of how magic and the astral realm affects the physical world. By understanding this, we can manipulate the five building blocks of reality through our force of will."

Fletcher listens curiously, slurping the soup as he does so, taking in the information. Yet another new set of rules and scientific laws for him to remember... "Five building blocks?" he repeats, at the end. "There's only five? Not more? We have eighty-something..."

"Well, yeah. My world's not so stupid that we don't have the Periodic Table of Elements. Ours has... Around a hundred and twenty? I'm not sure." It's been a long time since she's thought about anything like that. "But for the purposes of magic, they fall under five elements that we can manipulate." She holds up a hand, flicking off the fingers as she lists them off. "Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and the Spirit of Man. As long as we have the knowledge of how to do it, and there is enough mana around, we can manipulate these substances to our wills."

"Ohhh!" So they had science and magic. Well, that made more sense, though really at this point he wouldn't be too surprised to hear about a world that didn't.

He'd heard stories where those four elements were important, but they were all fantasies, fairy tales, the kinds of things mothers read their children before putting them to bed. The fifth one was new, though. "You can manipulate them? Even people's spirits?" That was a little creepy... "And you do it with formulas like this? That sounds a little like alchemy..."

"Eeeeeh." She wobbles her hand a bit. "The Spirit of Man's a little tricky. We just discovered them a little bit ago. It isn't really manipulating people's minds when we deal with them, though we can do it. And so can they, if we ask. But, no. It's more like..." She waves her hand a bit, searching for the right word. "No one really agrees. Some of us think they're ghosts. Some of us insist that we call them 'mind' or 'consciousness' elementals. Personally, I believe that they're our ancestors, watching over us, ready to do us a favor if we ask respectfully."

Though she really has more luck with the spirits of air. "It doesn't particularly matter, I guess. A lot of elementals and spirits take the forms that our preconceptions give them when we conjure them into the physical realm."

"...oh." Well, he can pretend he understood that, and try to puzzle it out later. Maybe the media library has some texts on her world's magic.

"Oh, right! Um, I'm Fletcher." Probably should have introduced himself a couple minutes back, he realizes. "It's nice to meet you!"

She honestly doesn't expect him to. Mei-Xing's just talking to hear the sound of her own voice. And, hey, if it makes a kid look something up, then she's done her good deed for the day.

"Mei-Xing." She grins a bit. "You're happier to have good slop than you are to meet me."

"--not really!" he says, trying to save face. "I like meeting new people."

He says as he slurps some more of the slop, anyway.

She laughs and waves her hand a bit. Nailed it on the head. Still, he's a kid. She doesn't mind much. "Well, you have met new people. Person. And the slop is definitely good."

Breaking the flavors

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