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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:08:25 GMT -6
It rankled, but only slightly. Malcolm reminded himself that it didn't matter what this woman thought of him, since she wasn't likely to run into him in a meaningful or important context ever again. As far as he could tell, she wasn't wealthy or particularly well connected -- which, granted, they had only known each other for a moment, but he fancied himself pretty well versed in figuring things out by now. He wouldn't have gotten where he was if he hadn't developed good instincts, after all.
Still, he wasn't able to break free from her, and she dragged him with her into the kitchen in a way that was mostly unpleasant but also a little bit terrifying. It brought back to mind bad memories of being dragged around by people who certainly meant him no good turn when he had been younger and less able to stand up for himself.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:09:14 GMT -6
He was beyond being spooked by such recollections, of course, but that still didn't mean he enjoyed what was happening.
... He had the curious sense that someone was watching him, and turned his head to look -- but all he could see were the pale, wide eyes of the fish fixed on him, before the woman ducked around a corner and took him with her. Then he wasn't able to see anything except the kitchen wall.
"Here we are!" she said, waving a hand at the chaos that sprawled before them. There were already a couple of other people in the cramped space, working away at various things in the process of becoming meals. There was a Kapper on a stool hunched over a pot; a horned individual tossing different things into a large bowl and mixing the lot of it together, and a portly human man preparing some kind of bird, presumably for roasting.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:09:27 GMT -6
There were also bags and peels and dirty bowls all over every counter surface, and also some surfaces that had become makeshift counters in the mess.
“... Yes,” said Malcolm, trying to school his expression so that his feelings didn’t show. It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to doing so, but in this case… Well, he had expected something like this, but he hadn’t been prepared, evidently, for the extent of it. The mess, the disorganization, and the thought that he was about to become a part of all of it… None of it made for an appealing prospect.
He forced himself to think of the promised pay.
“You’re in charge of… Well, let’s see. You can peel and chop veggies, can’t you?” The woman wasn’t looking at him as she spoke, but instead taking stock of the activity in the cramped kitchen.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:09:37 GMT -6
Privately Malcolm was a little relieved to be assigned such a simple task. It was something that he would normally consider beneath him, but chopping vegetables was uncomplicated and didn’t really rely on input from anyone else. If he had to work more closely with these people in this space, the experience would have been much more unpleasant, and he had no way of gaging the quality of their work at a glance. It was very likely indeed that these were also people that the woman had managed to scrounge up on short notice with that posting of hers, and there was no telling what surprises waited for him there.
Oh, how he missed home, where he knew his contacts and his own people, and didn’t have to pick up odd jobs to fund his ventures. But it would all be worth it eventually, so long as he could find that old friend of his. That was what he had to believe.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:09:48 GMT -6
The woman picked up a tub of potatoes and a knife, and handed them over to Malcolm. They were heavier than they looked, though not so much so that he buckled under the load. Still, it was a little harder to smile and speak without strain when he said, “Thank you. You don’t mind if I work next to my, ah, fishy friend, do you? It gets a little lonely when I’m not around, you know.”
“Oh, is that why you hauled the tank with you? I’ve never met anyone who was so soft on fish before,” said the woman, scratching her head. Then she shrugged. “Well, I don’t see why not. It’s just potatoes. Just bring ‘em in when you’re done, we’ve got carrots to do next.”
“Roger that,” said Malcolm, but her attention was already somewhere else. No, this was a good thing, he reminded himself.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:10:02 GMT -6
It wasn’t as though he had wanted that conversation to go any longer than it had already gone.
He hefted the tub of potatoes and made his way back out of the kitchen, down the hall, to where the fish tank still was. It was a good thing no one had stolen the fish from inside it and made dinner of it after all. It was a good thing, in general, that no one had stolen it -- for purposes other than eating, even. It stood to reason that some people in this city would recognize the fish for what it was, if he had managed to figure it out. And if it really was that valuable, some enterprising thief might have tried to make off with it for their own ends.
“I don’t suppose you have any powers to make this easier,” he said, sitting down on a small bench in the entryway.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:10:22 GMT -6
He had set down the tub of potatoes, and repositioned the little wagon with the fish tank so that it was relatively nearer to him. These two things also formed a little makeshift barricade between himself and the rest of the house, in case anyone saw fit to bother him while he was at his task. It wouldn’t stop them from speaking to him, but perhaps it would spare him from being bodily hauled anywhere without warning again.
The fish, of course, made no reply. It had been swimming in those same restless, quick circles when he had come back to it, though now that he was here, it seemed to settle itself again. Perhaps it had become attached to him in its own way. He couldn’t really fathom the inner workings of the mind of a fish, but he had been putting a lot of work into trying to raise this one.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:10:56 GMT -6
It was nice to think that it was finally paying off. It would have been incredibly frustrating if he had wasted all this time and effort for nothing. Of course, how useful it would be when grown remained to be seen, but all the same.
He was sure it would agitate itself again soon enough, but that was the other reason he had chosen to come out here. Being in that busy kitchen wasn’t something he had wanted to put up with anyway, but here he could also keep an eye on the fish. For something that swam around in a tank all day, it was surprisingly restless. He had tried keeping it in a bigger tank at home -- as big a tank as he could reasonably afford -- but after he had come home one day to find it ramming into the tank walls, he had reluctantly scrapped that idea.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:11:08 GMT -6
The matter of sticking his hand in every so often to keep it calm was not the compromise he had hoped for, but it was the one that worked, so here they were.
He still did have to peel the potatoes though, and for the moment the fish wasn’t making any trouble, so he picked one up out of the tub and set to work with the knife.
It was, funnily enough, not work that he was terribly familiar with. He knew his way around a shiv -- everyone he knew growing up knew their way around a shiv. It was more just that he didn’t have much occasion for peeling potatoes. If they had gotten their hands on any when he was a kid, they would’ve eaten it, peels and all. And after he became affluent enough to eat regularly, he was also affluent enough that someone else was doing the peeling before the food ever reached him.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:11:41 GMT -6
The transition hadn’t been gradual enough for there to be a period where it was preferable, for reasons of budget or otherwise, for him to do his own cooking, so he had never picked up the associated skills.
He was hoping the presence of knife skills would make up for the fact that he hadn’t actually peeled a lot of potatoes in his time. But then, if he proved to be truly terrible at it, well, it wasn’t as if this was a job he was hoping to get or anything. He would simply make a botch of it, be assigned to some other task, and move on.
True to what one might have expected, his first potato went… not very well. It was hard to take off just a little bit of the peel, and he had taken more potato than was probably preferable with his attempts.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:11:55 GMT -6
But he didn’t take it to heart -- why would he, when this wasn’t a skill he intended to cultivate? The second potato was waiting, so he simply gave it another go. It was easier the second time, and he began experimenting with it slowly, figuring it was best to find a good technique that he could start practicing rather than trying for speed right off the bat and making even more botches. The second potato was a little painstakingly peeled, but came out much better than the first.
Then came the third, and the fourth, and the fifth… By that point he was starting to get the hang of it, and get into a rhythm. But the sound of something hitting glass caught his attention, and he looked up to find that the fish had become unsettled again.
“There has to be a better way for you to get my attention,” he muttered.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:12:08 GMT -6
He didn’t know if the fish understood him, or if it was just a curious coincidence of timing, but after he said this, it lashed its tail near the surface and sent a splash of water at him.
Malcolm stared flatly at the fish, who stared back. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Not like that,” he said. It hadn’t reached his shirt, but it had wet his shoes and the hem of his pants, and that was bad enough in his book. “Well, what is it? Are you bored, or something?”
He presumed it must have been boredom. He couldn’t imagine it was anything else. There was nothing to be alarmed about or surprised by here, not in the few minutes that had passed. No one had even come in to bother them, though he realized belatedly that he had chosen a rather inconvenient place to camp out.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:12:31 GMT -6
There would likely be other helpers coming in to respond to the ad, if nothing else, and they would all be passing by himself and his fishy companion… But he had already set his things down here, and wasn’t inclined to move them again without good reason. And no one else had come yet.
The fish couldn’t respond, but Malcolm chose to chalk it up to boredom anyhow. “If you’re bored,” he said, picking up one of the potato peels, “you can play with this.” He opened up the tank lid and dropped it in, then closed the lid back down. The potato peel drifted down, and the fish startled visibly, rushing to the other side of the tank to stare at it distrustfully. Or at least, Malcolm thought it was a distrustful look, anyway. It was kind of hard to tell with fish, at least for him.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:12:44 GMT -6
He sighed. “If you don’t want it, then just leave it alone. It’s not going to do anything to you.” At least this had distracted the fish for a moment, and after waiting to ensure that it wasn’t going to do anything else worth being concerned over, he went back to peeling potatoes.
Against all odds, things went pretty smoothly after that. The fish had, after a period of hesitation, made a slight game of pushing the peel around the floor of the tank, or burying it under the gravel that was already there. That gave Malcolm more time to do the actual work of peeling the vegetables, and once he had settled into a proper groove, it really wasn’t that hard. He was good enough with a knife, and after a while the work had gotten so repetitive that it was actually boring rather than frustrating.
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Post by Malcolm on Feb 5, 2022 15:13:35 GMT -6
It was still not the way he would have hoped to spend an afternoon, but it was the less unpleasant state to find himself in, all things considered.
“Oh, not bad,” said the woman, when she came out later to check on the two of them. Well, mostly Malcolm, since the fish wasn’t about to contribute anything useful to the preparation efforts. “I’ll take those off your hands and bring out the carrots. Up we go.” She picked up the tub of now peeled potatoes, and true to her word, returned from the kitchen shortly with the tub filled with unpeeled carrots.
It seemed this had become his designated job for the occasion. Well, there were worse outcomes to this, he told himself, thinking again of the state of the kitchen. No, really, being assigned to peel everything that needed to be peeled was probably one of the better outcomes.
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