Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn From: hutch@ibeam.intel.com (Steve Hutchison) Subject: [MG] Erik and Lex: Cooking Message-ID: References: <93200.082546ASG102@psuvm.psu.edu> Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 23:56:27 GMT [ADMIN] Have you guys ever wondered why it is that 'Raelf always has his best conversations while cooking? I don't get it. This is me and Dreamer tag-team writing again. -0-- A battle to save the universe (or at least the local bits) and a nice walk on the beach have a way of making a people hungry. Erik and Lex returned to ShadeHaven to find Luthor and Serene sound asleep in the drawing room. "Lex, what do you want for dinner? I'm going to fix something for us and the others since Luthor's out," Erik called quietly from the kitchen. "Yeah, how 'bout tacos? The surf made me hungry for mexican." Lex joined Erik in the kitchen. "I've never heard of 'tacos' or 'mexican'. Is this Earth food?" Erik looked slightly confused. "Yep. I practically lived on mexican stuff when I was in the beachhouse." "Show me then. I have to warn you though, my cooking skills are nothing compared to Luthor's." "No problem, tacos are easy." Lex crouched down and began looking for a large frying pan beneath the kitchen shelves. Erik grabbed two polished stones inscribed with fire runes and set them next to each other on a metal cooking plate. A few moments later, the plate began giving off a deep red glow. Lex put a large black cast iron pan on the plate. "Now, all we need is some hamburger, corn flour, and some veggies." Lex began walking to the pantry. Erik stepped in his path. "Lex, before you go in there, I need to know the exact ingredients." Lex's knowldge-curse went off revealing Erik's intentions, "Oh, I see. well, hamburger is ground beef. Corn flour is common enough. We also need onions, tomatoes, pepper, vinegar, garlic, and jalapeno peppers." Lex turned his back and let Erik go into the pantry alone. A moment later, Lex heard the strange resonance of ShadowMagic, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Erik returned from the pantry with an armful of the necessary ingredients. Lex smiled, "How about that, you just happened to have everything that we needed. How, er, improbable. What's the odds, Erik?" Erik turned to see that Lex was teasing him. "One, it already happened. And next time, try to turn your attentions elsewhere. Hanging around with someone who knows just about everything makes the Shadows harder to work." "Be cool, dude. I was around Luthor enough to know about how you ShadowGuys cheat on things." Lex winked at the ShadowMage, and prepared to duck. "I knew that the stuff wasn't necessarily in there, but it COULD be." Lex winked at the ShadowMage and then shifted aside so that a ripe tomato barely missed splattering on his blond head. After a bout of laughter and the wanton destruction of a dozen tomatoes, they settled into cooking dinner. Erik watched as Lex made a ball of wet corn flour, and left it to "rest" while he seasoned and cooked the ground beef in the pan and prepared a seperate pot of chopped vegetables that he dubbed "salsa". As they worked, Erik found a chance to ask some questions that had ignited his curiosity. "Now that you're seperate from 'Raelf, where are you going to stay?" "Too bad I didn't think of this, before," Lex said, skinning and chopping up a cucumber, then reaching without looking into the coldbox and coming out with a small pot of yogurt. "Think I'll make up a Raita, too. I need some cool to take down the fire a little." He grinned at Erik's suppressed expression of dismay, and replied. "That's a loaded question, dude. I've got my place at the lighthouse and I'm still gonna be livin' there. I still have to keep up my part of the family business, watch the kids, that sort of thing..." Lex shrugged and started sniffing various bottles of spice. "If I didn't know you had a place here, I'd invite you to move in with me, though. Trouble is, your kind of work could throw off the warp field generators and that's not a good idea, in a house where most of the space is imaginary." Erik wondered if he should ask, and changed the subject. "You have kids? I thought you said you couldn't do that here." "Sort of. We're taking care of a young street kid, she calls herself Little Rat. Kid's been an orphan all her life, lived on the streets as long as she remembers. It's been interesting to get her turned around. She was headed on a no-way path, but it seems better now. And then there's my other timebrother, Kev. Kev was a Low Town kid, his folks murdered him. Attempted sacrifice to the first of the batch of evil gods that the ReaversChild made, but I ate him before the thing could suck him up. Anyway, Kev is in kind of the same situation I'm in. Somewhat different curse. Anyway he can't change forms very easily, and 'Raelf can't remerge him." "Re-merge? You mean, you're going to ... disappear? Stop being a separate person?" "I hope so," Lex said with an ache in his voice. "It's a little bit like having your soul torn open. 'Raelf and I, we can be one person again for maybe ten, fifteen seconds, then it falls apart. I hate it. Same for Kev, and for 'Raf it's even worse. I can merge to 'Raf, and Raye can, but 'Raelf can't handle it. The polarities are all wrong." "Wow. So, you're telling me that I'm falling in love with a whole bunch of different people." "Kind of. You're not in love yet, you know. There's a strong attraction, about half physical, but the rest is infatuation. I really like that stage in a relationship, by the way. It's so much fun finding out about all the good things in a person, ignoring any flaws and weaknesses. Makes me feel like a cub again." Erik returned the 'kan mage's shy grin with a smile of his own. "I realize that this is going to be a hard question to answer, but how old are you?" "Not hard at all. I'm two hundred eighty four years old. 'Raelf is two hundred seventy four, but we'll equalize that when we finally remerge. I've been part of 'Raelf for ... oh, about forty years, give or take my extra ten years. But then, there are some parts of me, as 'Raelf that is, memories and persona-elements, that are _much_ older. This is gonna be confusing. I'll refer to `me' and I mean 'Raelf, or I mean Dave, er, Lex. Ask if you're not sure which I'm talking about." Lex removed the cooked meat from the stove, adding some seasoning, then offered a taste to Erik, who approved. He covered it and handed the ball of dough to Erik. "Make this into balls about a thumb-length across, please." He watched the first one, nodded approvingly, and continued, "My oldest relative is the first of my line. He was born out of the chaos that happened when my home corner of the multiverse clotted out of the random collision of the archetypes, and a large part of my identity, who I am, comes from him. Memories, though, we tend to put aside when they get too much to bear. I could remember everything that they've passed on to me, and everything that ever happened to me, but it would take me, oh, almost the same amount of time it took for all the things I remember to happen. Weird, huh?" Lex stirred the cucumber-yogurt thing he was making, and added some spices. "I guess *you* won't have a problem with my age then. Many people are bothered by my apparent immortality." Lex grinned. "I can see how some people might be bothered, but I don't have any problem. You're still going to die some day, just like I am, eventually. But that's a ways off, and neither of us knows when it's gonna happen. Thanks for small favors. So it must just be the lasting youth thing, which ..." "I don't understand it either. I guess they're just jealous. But it was that human jealousy that drove me to seek out the Golden Elves. If they stay in their home forest, they can live many millenia, so my unaging state seemed normal to them. That's how I met Luthor." Erik grinned at the irony of the situation. "Well," Lex laughed, pouring two glasses of citrus juice, "There's considerable effort expended by people who want to get that. Case in point one Acting Supreme ArchMage." He waited quietly and Erik spoke. "It's really not that difficult of a thing to do. When I was studying ShadowMagery, I used to fear death...I almost died when I was very young. Anyway, I got in the habit of waking up and saying, *I could look as young today as I did yesterday* (with the Shadows behind it, of course). The strange thing about ShadowMagery is that it takes the path of highest probability. After decades, it became more probable that I was ageless than just coincidentally unaging, so there you have it. I don't even have to say anything in the morning anymore." "Huh. I guess there's some similarities. I don't age because I don't want to, and I rebuild myself every few seconds the way I want to be, but then, I could be old if I wanted, so it doesn't count. Which reminds me, when I put Luthor back together he didn't really want me to fix the aging -- Does he do something like what you do?" "Luthor? No, he never took that route. He didn't study the sphere of time until very recently, besides, he does want to die eventually so he can rejoin his wife and son. Lex, you should have seen them together, their happiness was contageous. When Joshua was born, it completed their existence." "Oh yeah. I know how that goes. When Raye and I had our first kids together it was just ... Well, it was worth being separated. You never heard that one, did you? We had one of those stupid Montague and Capulet family feud things. Her family and my family wanted the same business, the same specialty. In the Traveller's college, all feuds, all outside debts, were suspended. So when I met ar'Elya at a party, we had to be polite and talk to each other. Kind of a shock to find that we really liked each other. Had some classes, we even went on our first partner travel together. We just meshed. So when it was time to graduate, we couldn't see getting caught in the feud again. Besides, it was out of hand by that time. My sire had been injured, her grandmere was almost out of pocket. We had to stop it before things got to the point where the Justiciar could step in." "We registered a mate bond, which wasn't legal for members of feuding family, and we created a pair of children, blending our two elemental suites. I protected her child, and she protected mine -- we have to get away from our children, until they can stay coherent by themselves, it's a tradition from when we first learned to reproduce, and found ourselves eating our own children." Lex smiled reminiscently, and Erik felt a strange chill run down his spine. "Her child was so beautiful. Had my shape, the catman form, but completely silver. Reflective. He was really smart too." Lex spilled a little water onto the heat-rock and steam rose. He shaped the steam with his fingers, presenting an image of two fierce looking humanoids, shining like they were poured out of light. "That's what they looked like. My child had the spirit of the first sentient I had ever consumed, hers was the same. That broke another law, by the way; it turns out that the Omnivores had snuck in some new laws about starting new clans, and what we did was the old ritual for creating a new clan. We were supposed to pay the price for the clan creation up front. Used to be that a new clan could amortize the price over the first century of their existance, and we knew that the contested business would pay off inside a decade." Erik raised an eyebrow. "So you have lawyers and accountants?" "Yeah, we have lawyers. They're one of the archetypes, unfortunately." Lex started rolling out corn tortillas, then laying them one by one on the hot rock to cook. "Well, the Justiciar was called in. Declared the feud ended, the new clan got the business like we had planned. But we hadn't paid up front. Justiciar was a friend of ours, one of the Ascetic caste, an admired teacher and one of my role models. Decided that because the new clan rule was punitive, that the Omnivores didn't _have_ clans, so it was overturned. That left us with the original rule from the dawn of time. We were ordered to never see each other again -- in the old phrasing, until we were rejoined by death. That was the old way to pay clan-price for a new clan." "So, why are 'Raelf and ar'Elya back together?" "We died. How else? Even in a non-magical world, people can be brought back after death sometimes. It's pretty hard for my folk, because we're so strongly tied to Life. When we're tired of living, we split into other selves, or share ourselves out to others. Actual death, the dissipation of our identity core, that isn't something we expect to happen." Erik thought about what he'd heard, tonight, and earlier by way of rumor and overheard gossip. "Lex, now I don't want you to think that I'm getting too serious too quickly here, but can we have children? I mean I never even considered it before because men are not usually compatible with each other, but then again, you are a shape shifter, and definitely not a species anything close to mine. I just thought I'd ask." Lex shook his head, pulling his fingers through his hair. "Wow." He looked close into Erik's eyes. "Do you _want_ to have children?" Before Erik could answer, Lex hurried to speak. "Well, it's possible. I can't be a female human, not long enough for a child to grow and survive. But, yes, we could have a child. You could even _become_ my child if you wanted." Erik frowned, closing his eyes, then opened them again. That was a very strange thought. "How does your process of reproduction work anyway? I think you made some mention of 'budding'." "When we've collected enough excess personality, enough archetypal mass that we can't remain stable, or when we've eaten someone who's not compatible enough to merge completely. We sort of bud off, or split, or sometimes we mix together in groups and contribute jointly to the new offspring. At least, that's how the Hunter caste work. The Ascetics only bud off, usually, and the Omnivores seem to think it's great fun coming up with new weird ways to breed. Oh yeah, as a human, if I was to spend, say, a week in focus so that I could form fertile sperm, I could be a father, but it's really draining." "Just as well," Erik replied. "I'm not all that interested in becoming a female. How does the other bit work, I could _become_ your child?" "If and only if you were about to die naturally, I could, if you were willing, consume you and eventually bud you off as one of my family, or if you wanted, add in other 'kan persona matrices. Otherwise, if you can handle deep spirit-meld, then we might be able to merge long enough to form a bud. But in either case, my offspring have to be made in my home plane, or they die." "Oh." Erik envisioned an elemental falling into pieces and scowled. "Yeah, it's a drag. That's one of the reasons I need to re-merge, even if it's only a few seconds every few days. It keeps us from becoming separate people, keeps paradox from tearing me apart too." Lex added some of the salsa to the pan with the browned meat, and started to stir it while he spoke. "Part of taking things slow, is that I really want to be with you tonight. But I think we better hold off on that side of things, until you've really adjusted, and until I get the chance to mix it up with my time-brother. Got any plates here?" Erik pulled some plates down from a cupboard, feeling his heart pounding hard. Yes, maybe it _would_ be a good idea to take things slowly. Being eaten. Brr. The 'kan began laying the browned tortillas out on plates for the two of them and for the household staff. Meat joined with the shredded lettuce and the cheese, and then salsa on top. Erik was surprised to see an extra plate. "Serene will be waking up in half an hour, half-starving. And Luthor will be awake in about ten minutes, which means I need to dish up that raita for him." He emptied half the bowl of the cucumber with the yogurt sauce into a serving bowl, and pulled a grey crystalline sphere from nowhere, dropping it onto the bowl. It popped like a bubble, and the bowl was surrounded by a grey haze. "Stasis. Keeps it at the right temp. Wanna help me take this stuff down to the rest of the staff?" "Sure." Erik leaned over and gave Lex a quick kiss on the cheek. Lex jumped, and laughed. "Erik, I like being around you. Lately I can tell what everyone is going to say and do before it happens, but with you it's a lot more fun. Sometimes you catch me completely off guard." Erik blushed. "Thanks, I suppose. It's a side effect of working with chaos for a few centuries. I've become impulsive. It has it's downside because I get distracted easily and go off on a tangent on a whim." Erik noticed that the tray of tacoes was ready, and that the remaining salsa was bubbling over the heat with the rest of the yogurt. He inhaled deeply, "Wow, that smells great...is it supposed to be that color?" Lex looked over at the stove. "Yeah, the yellow comes from some flower pistil shreds. That's a spice that sells for hundreds of times its weight in gold in some places, by the way." "Flower pistils? No wonder. Hey, are we just going to leave it sitting there?" "It'll be ready when Luthor comes in."