thecapitol | LET'S JUST GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY

Entry tags:

LET'S JUST GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY

Who | Samwise and Signless
What | PO. TA. TOES.
Where | District 12 kitchens
When | A few days after Sam's arrival; a few days before the Arena.
Warnings | None expected; will update if needed!

It's been a strange few days, and no mistake. The whole place, this whole country of Panem, is easier to bear since Sam found Frodo and Bilbo, and the rest; but he can't be with them every minute of the day with the curfew going, and there's plenty of hours he's left alone in the District 12 suites, feeling little less lost than he did his first hour here.

But there's something here as he hasn't seen since he left the Shire, and that's a kitchen. A proper kitchen, with a stove and an oven and a sink and a pantry and all; more than a proper kitchen, even, as Sam's got no idea what half the devices in it are meant to do, or what they could do that the things he recognizes can't. It's a means of keeping occupied, after hours - not just using it, but figuring out how to use it, one oddity at a time (and with the help of a sturdy box on which to stand).

Still: Enough things remain the same. There are bowls and pots and pans aplenty, and it takes only a politely-worded request to one of the silent servants ever hanging about the place to get the stove on, if not functioning quite as Sam would like it. He's still not sure to whom he's meant to go if it's specific things he wants, but inside the-- the icebox, he supposes it is, more or less, there's a drawer full of vegetables, firm and fresh; and among them, all the roots a body could wish for.

"I wish I knew where it came from, I do," he tells one of the lower cabinets as he puts his head into it, seeking for a pot he won't need two hands just to get up off the stovetop. "I've not seen any market in this place yet - and it's hardly the season for tomatoes, yet here they are, and sweet, too! They'll fry nice enough, I'll wager-- but it hardly seems natural, does it, to have a year's harvest all in one place, and not a farm in twenty leagues."

If he finds it odd to be talking to nobody but himself, he doesn't seem to notice; he's focused on his work as he talks, hefting a pan up onto the stovetop and beginning with deft movements to separate out the vegetables on the counter next to him.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"From what I can gather, they have it brought in from far-away farms in the Districts."

One of the things Panem has that's actually a point in its favor over Alternia is the food. After sweeps of harsh living, the ability to walk into the kitchen in the D12 suite and obtain all manner of foods both sweet and savory (to say nothing of being able to order it to his room) is a marvel, even after a year and a half of it being the norm. The Signless was on a quest for a muffin but seeing someone new in the kitchen completely distracts him. This stranger looks a good bit like Bilbo and Frodo -- the same stature and general build, the same curly hair. The same feet. He sidesteps Sam, his own bare feet making no sound on the kitchen floor, and leans against one of the counters.

"I take it you're a new arrival here in Twelve? My name is the Signless, I live down the hall."

Sam looks over his shoulder at the voice - not startled, but a little surprised to be addressed. There's plenty of coming and going in this place, but he's been keeping a bit to himself in recent days, and most of the others have seemed more or less content to allow him that.

He divides his attention evenly between the Signless and the vegetables in front of him, giving the troll a polite nod as he steps off his box and shoves it over two feet to better access the counter. "You're right-- I've been here a week, give or take a day," he says. "My name is Samwise Gamgee-- that's Samwise and not the Samwise, though Sam will do just as well." It feels important to specify this, as he's not sure how to address someone who introduces themselves with a the.

"You're one o' them trolls," he adds, though this is more seeking confirmation than an accusation (as it might have been a few days ago, when he still took them for Orcs). This one's different-looking from the others he's met - he doesn't know much about their ways, but it seems to Sam he looks a bit... older than the other two, than Karkat and Terezi. They don't frighten him like they did when he first came, but he's still not entirely sure what to make of them, on the whole; not a one of them seems to act much like the others, in his experience.

Edited 2014-12-01 15:10 (UTC)

Oh, damn. Signless has got into the habit of leaving off the 'the' in his title when he introduces himself, knowing it often confuses people who aren't trolls, but sometimes he slips up and forgets. At least he has the good grace to look a little sheepish at the misstep.

"I am, yes, and I'm sorry that I didn't greet you when you first arrived -- but it looks as though you're settling in well enough." As well as anyone can settle in a place like this, anyway.

"You, ah. You can just call me Signless, I'm sure it's easier even if it's not a name like you're used to."

"Signless, then." Sam couldn't say what sign the troll's lacking, or if it's rather some sort of title; but it occurs to him that maybe it isn't so odd. "Everybody back home called my old dad the Gaffer, in our neighborhood; not me, of course, but I'd grown up hearing it. I don't know what manner of occupation a Signless might be, but then I don't know much of the ways o' trolls."

It's not an accusation, just the honest truth. He certainly wouldn't be unhappy to hear more. Sam deftly moves the sliced tomatoes off to one side and reaches for a leek; the paring knife he's using is a bit small for the job he's trying to do with it, but the full-size chopping knife is a sight too big, and of the two, this is the less ungainly.

"As to settling in - I suppose I am, at that!" He certainly seems to know his way around the kitchen, anyway. The leek is swiftly chopped and shoved aside. "Inasmuch as one can, in this place."

He reaches for a potato; considers it; frowns. He'd forgot to peel them, and the pot already warming, and all. He doesn't intend to cook without them, now he's got them at his ready disposal-- but lord, if it doesn't show how long it's been since he properly cooked!

"...Well, Mister Signless," he adds, after a second, glancing over his shoulder at the troll. "So long as you're here-- have you a mind to make yourself useful?"

He's more than ready to talk further about troll naming convention, of course-- but it don't mean the troll's presence can't serve some practical purpose.

Occupation? Oh, dear. How does one condense down 'heretical lunatic freedom fighter' into a simple explanation that doesn't then require a whole manifesto on troll culture and biology? Furthermore, he isn't sure if he even wants to bother trying to explain. It's a lot to dump on a new acquaintance and so for now he decides not to try. Instead he responds to the more immediate question, nodding and stepping forward.

"If you'd like -- I'm best at cooking when following someone else's instructions, but if you don't mind guiding me I'd love to help."

It's already passably familiar: simple stews and things of the sort were easy to make while traveling, so he's accustomed to helping prepare them. At least Sam isn't asking him to carve a dead antlerbeast. The nutritional dirt tuber he's holding is a lot less daunting.

Sam's starting off careful, recipe-wise, considering how unfamiliar he is with all of the gadgetry in this kitchen. Although there seems an impossible abundance of food here, something in him rebels against the thought of wasting it in some failed experiment. Anyway, food in the Shire's rarely elaborate, relying more on good ingredients and skillful preparation than any kitchen-witchery.

He approves of that willingness to help, too. Sam's king of his kitchen, so far as he's concerned, and a willingness to take direction speaks well of a potential helper. He gestures with the knife in his hand at the small pile of mixed vegetables sitting off to the side, the peeler lying beside them.

"I'll keep on with the chopping over here," he says, "And you can peel the taters, if you'd be so kind." If you'd be so kind is, his tone implies, merely a courtesy; he's not offering a choice of tasks. "And while you're doing that, you can tell me all about your signs, or lack of them, if you so choose."

Peeling vegetables is not at all a difficult task; it's something his mother would often set him to when they had vegetables to peel. The Capitol has a much more fancy implement for the task but it still all boils down to the same thing. He takes up the peeler obediently.

"The explanation for that at least is simple. In my culture it's customary for a person to have a sign or symbol associated with their name -- for a variety of reasons, I was never given one, and so my lack became my identifying feature."

As he speaks he casts his eyes with increasing confusion over the selection of vegetables, until finally he sets down the peeler again in defeat.

"Which ones are the 'taters'?"

The motion of Sam's hands stops.

He turns to look at the troll with an expression on his face usually reserved for people he either thinks much less clever than him, or whom he suspects of trying to give him lip beneath his notice. Even on his step stool, he's a few inches shorter than the Signless, but he manages to give his gaze weight-- It's incredulous, and disapproving, and a little pitying all at once. He can't decide if he's being mocked, or if he's truly come to a place so foreign that the word, used so often in his kitchen, has lost all meaning.

"The taters," he says, as though speaking it more slowly will get it past those blunt horn-stubs and into the skull beneath. "That is-- the potatoes."

He searches the Signless' face for any sign of recognition. Lawks, if he has to show him...

Unfortunately he won't find the recognition he's hoping for, just an apologetic half-wince and a distinct drooping of those pointed troll ears.

"I'm not familiar, I'm sorry. They may not grow in my homeland...?"

It's not a bad guess, really. Many things in Panem don't exist on Alternia. Perhaps 'taters' are among them.

Sam shakes his head slowly, pityingly. Not even at the Signless so much as... as everything, as the society that would allow such a travesty to occur, and the tragedy of the very idea of a world that does not know potatoes for what they are.

He steps down from his stool, pushes it over half a foot, and climbs back up. He leans over, businesslike, brushing the troll's hands out of the way, and separates the potatoes from the rest of the vegetables.

"There," he says, looking up into the Signless' face, to make absolutely sure that this is getting through. "These ones. See-- they've got red and gold here, for those're best boiled, which is what I mean to do with 'em; but they might be roasted, as well, or baked, or..." He waves a hand, making clear that this list could have been longer.

A pause, to make sure this has sunk in, and then: "Now, do you think you can peel them? Or ought I to show you that, as well?"

"Oh! The nutritional dirt tubers," he says, with the air of someone who has made a grand discovery and is very pleased with themselves. "Yes, I won't have any trouble with those. I apologize for the confusion."

He picks up the peeler and sets in to work -- mercifully he is actually fairly good at preparing potatoes, if not recognizing them by the name most people call them. It's funny how in his time in Panem he's learned so much and yet little things like that still sometimes trip him up.

"The what?" Sam stares at the Signless' hands, bewildered. He knows his way around a peeler, sure enough, but-- what were those words he'd said? "The nutritional--?"

He picks up one of the potatoes, to hold in front of the troll's nose. "This. You're talking about this, right? The potato?"

"Yes, that," he says, going slightly cross-eyed as he focuses on the root in front of his face. His hands still.

"Potato is what you call it. I know it as a nutritional dirt tuber, which admittedly is more of a mouthful." He's noticed that - when the universal translation kicks in, sometimes it leaves parts of troll speech rambling and over-specific. Perhaps that's a mark of how weird the Alternian language is, that some words simply cannot be cleanly translated. He's noticed they don't even bother with things like 'moirail' or 'lusus', which is a small blessing.

"I'll say it is." Sam makes a sound that anyone who knew him in the Shire would have said could have been made by his dad, and they'd never've known the difference - it's the same kind of judgement-reserving hmph! the Gaffer responded with to news he considered too outlandish to bother considering. (No news has ever been too outlandish for Sam, but it's an easy enough sound to repurpose for chastising trolls.) "Why, my old dad would laugh you right down the road, if he heard that."

Thinking of the Gaffer's not so warm a memory as it used to be, since he came here, and Sam regrets having brought him up. He scans the pile of vegetables in front of the Signless, as though looking for a change of subject there, and points at the carrots. "How about them?" he asks. "What d'you call them?"

A body can be curious, can't he.

"Ah..."

His ears droop guiltily. He already knows the answer is going to drop him down another peg on the ladder of this young man's esteem and he's bracing himself for it as one would brace against a deserved smack to the face.

"Also a nutritional dirt tuber. Sometimes my language is overspecific and sometimes it casts its net too wide."

“Also a—!”

On a first glance, he’d say the creature’s feeling a bit of real chagrin about its absurd ignorance. But he’s certainly not practiced in reading the facial expressions of trolls, and it seems to him far more likely that he’s become the butt of a strange and elaborate joke, as some young Hobbit who thought a great deal of his sense of humor and little of his elders might play.

“You’re havin’ me on,” he says accusingly, with great wounded dignity. “You’re having fun with me, knowing I couldn’t know any better. For how’s one supposed to cook with potatoes and carrots who thinks they’re all the same thing!”

Edited 2015-03-10 21:05 (UTC)

"I don't think they're all the same thing," he says patiently, though his eyebrows have drown down a little and the corners of his dark mouth have decidedly turned down.

"Look at them. It would be nearly impossible to mistake one for the other. If I could speak the language I was raised with -- there's a difference in the intonation, the pronunciation. You'd hear it."

It's times like this more than ever that he hates the chip in his head.

"...Well, I wish I could hear it," Sam declares, after a long, suspicious pause. "So I could use the right word. For how am I supposed to ask any help of a troll, even if he be inclined so to help, if I must explain every vegetable before it's used?"

With a shake of his head-- "Well. Get 'em all in the pot, anywhow, and we'll begin this soup proper." He steps up on his stool again to drop his pile of vegetables into the pot, and takes a second again to marvel at the many colors of them - an impossible array, he would have said, for this time of year.

"--We have trolls, you know, or things as call themselves trolls, where I come from," he adds. "Only so far as I know, they call taters taters, same as anyone."

Regardless of what they're calling them now, Signless finishes preparing the potatoes/nutritional dirt tubers/troublesome vegetables and tips them into the pot along with the others.

"From what I've experienced, trolls where everyone else comes from are very different from the kind of troll that I am." Hiding under bridges, being cruel and violent, and more often than not imaginary. Not at all the kind of things he'd like to be associated with.

"Tell me about your trolls-- other than what they call what they eat."

"I've only ever seen a dead one, begging your pardon," Sam replies, with a glance at Signless, hoping he's not actually given offense. "Or, one as was turned to stone. For they hate the sunlight, trolls do, and can't abide it at all. Why, I ate breakfast in the shadow of three stone trolls once, as had sat there for years, caught off-guard by an argument over cooking! Funnily enough."

He stirs as he speaks, leaning over the pot to take in the smell, and nodding at what he finds. "They're bigger n' you," he adds. "By a fair margin. And not near so well educated." For while the Signless might have no understanding of what a potato is, he's a good deal better-spoken than any troll Sam's ever heard tell of. "And they like the taste of Manflesh, or Dwarf, or Hobbit, or-- whatever it is they can find."

A doubtful sidelong look. "...You've not got that in common, I hope."

"No," he says, with a small laugh that may not be very encouraging -- only, the Capitol has already thoroughly tried to push the 'trolls eat people' angle and sometimes it still pops up as a now mostly-debunked rumor. It's far off enough that he can think of it with amusement rather than annoyance.

"We eat beasts and bugs and plants of all names, but that's all." He carefully glosses over the fact that trolls -- at least the trolls that can afford it-- eat their own young. It's technically not a lie to say trolls don't eat humans (or dwarfs, or hobbits). Best not to ruin it by mentioning the infant cannibalism.

"We have an aversion to the sun in common -- where I'm from the sun is harsh enough to burn and blind, and so we only go out at night. Here it's not nearly so bad."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

LET'S JUST GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject