trans_9 | Breaking the flavors

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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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Carrying a tray of slop, Fletcher is on his way out of the mess hall to head down to the Sensoriums when he passes by Mei-Xing and sees what she's doing. He stops and stares; what exactly just happened there?

He peers around her at the symbols drawn on the table. "Huh...?" he says to himself as he tries to make sense of them.

It's certainly an odd mix, at least three different kinds of math are mashed together. Chinese symbols are matched with Arabic numerals in a long formula that, in the end, probably barely makes any sense.

But that's when you get when you have a magician who uses a bastard hodgepodge of three different traditions of magic.

Mei-Xing glances down at Fletcher as she takes out her omnicomm and snaps some pictures of the mess, so she doesn't forget. "Yes, it's a bit inelegant. I just made it up off the cuff of my sleeve, sue me." She grins and settles down, gathering a spoonfull of slop from her tray. "But, hey. Give this a try, see what you think."

Should he dare trust the mad Chinaelf, it's going to taste like muskmelon. With a little bit of salt.

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."

Kang didn't share his shredded venison with many people, and for good reason; there hadn't been much of it in the first place, and he'd saved it for last after eating the other meager stores of meat he'd found in the tavern. But, if this woman could make the slop not taste disgusting it was definitely worth it to let her have some.

Spotting Mei-Xing, he made his way over and sat across from her, holding a small cloth bag in one hand, "Here it is, ma'am. I wasn't kidding when I said I didn't have much left."

She knew that he was coming before he even walked in the door. The mess hall is low on mana, and the magical... seed, or whatever it was, in his heart was like a beacon in the nearly empty astral space.

Being this close to a drake was still unnerving, but hopefully he'd consider that he owed her a favor if she did this. Besides, having a chance to eat meat that wasn't crawling in the sewers was practically a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

"As long as I can get a good taste, it doesn't matter." She holds her hands out in a 'gimme' gesture. "I'm pretty sure this should work, I'll get my wiz on right after I finish. Just warn me if the slop tastes like melon, yeah? I'd have to rework things."

Oh, if she could really get this to work, he would definitely owe her a favor. He handed her the bag and looked at the markings on the table; they were... interesting. He'd always used words and things like sand and feathers for spell components when he used to cast. "Two pieces left. If you can do it with just one of them..."

Rituals and alchemy have their place, but Mei-Xing doesn't need it for simple sorcery. "I'll do what I can." She takes one of the pieces and sniffs it carefully, as if examining for poison.

It's her first time having meat. Giver her a break.

Carefully, she nibbles. Then takes a larger bite and chews, frowning a bit. "Tangy." Replicating this taste would be a challenge. She takes a few more large bites, then sits back, chewing. Give her a moment.

Swallowing, she takes a sip of water and tugs on her ear, considering. "Get yourself some slop, we'll see what I can do." Already, she's tracing the math in the air.

"Alright," Kang nodded and got up, returning shortly with a tray of slop and setting it down on one of the few clear spots left on the table. He didn't want to mess any of the markings up if they were needed for Mei-Xing's spell. He knew better than to distract her with speaking, too, even if he did have a few questions he wanted to ask her about her world; concentration was important.

"Ah." She gestures, the slop on the table gathering together, then flowing into the garbage. "Sorry, didn't mean to crowd you." She yawns, then rests her chin on the palm of her hand, giving Kang's slop a sudden, tired look.

"Give it a try. I might be a little off, but I can tweak it a few more times."

Huh, that was a nifty skill. Mei-Xing's magic was different from anything he'd ever seen before. "It's fine. I thought you might need those."

Kang poked at the slop once with a spoon, then took a bite.

...it was close. It was damn close. But not quite.

"Very impressive. Just a little bit more intensity, and it'd be perfect."

She rubs her eyes, suddenly looking a bit peaked, but she waves her hands again. The spell was relatively simple, the handwaving was just for show at the end of things. "I just upped the intensity a bit, see how that does you."

Damn, but doing magic so far away from any decent mana pulls wore on her. She eats a bit of her own slop, then stirs it, waiting for Kang to give his opinion.

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Breaking the flavors

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