xp_logs | Rahne, Anika, Mick: Lunch, sort of

Rahne meets Mick and Anika, briefly.

It was, Rahne had decided, lunchtime. She had put a smallish venison roast in the oven, which seemed a reasonable thing to try, and was waiting for it to reach levels of rare that qualified as human-edible while interrupting it slightly to put oatmeal bars in and out. And if the odors of venison or peaches or cinnamon bled across a little, she wasn't really that worried about it.
"Ani, let's go back upstairs," Mick protested, trailing along after her as she headed down the hall, a distinct bounce in her step. There were too many people out and about in the mansion at this time of day. He didn't like it.

"I want to know what smells like that," Anika tossed back over her shoulder at him.

Rahne turned her head at the sound of approaching voices. Not very familiar ones -- she was fairly sure they belonged to Nathan's friends, but she'd studiously obeyed the injunction not to pester Mick Foley and hadn't actually run into Anika yet. She set the pan of oatmeal bars down and went to look out of the kitchen. "Lunch and dessert, if ye're on the way here."

"Ohh," Anika said with a laugh. "It is food! I wasn't sure... the combination was so interesting." She stopped for long enough to let Mick run into her, then took his wrist first and pulled him along. "You need to eat," she told him firmly. "Don't think I haven't been watching."

"Er... yes." Rahne stepped back into the kitchen, a little baffled, and started cutting the last batch of oatmeal bars but one -- they were just cool enough. "I'm afraid the roast isna ready just yet, but the oatmeal bars are." A pause, then with polite confusion, "What would it have been besides food?"

"Stubborn people having sex and possibly playing poker at the same time," Anika said brightly.l

Rahne blinked at her, going faintly red and by now utterly sure she was lost in this conversation. "...What?"

"She interprets emotions as smells," Mick said very quietly, lingering by the doorway. "Part of her mutation."

Rahne supposed that in its own way this made as much sense as Manuel's colors, but while she had identified scents as belonging to particular emotions to a certain extent, she didn't recall any of them resembling her lunch. "Poker is an emotion?" she ventured uncertainly.
cablewriter (4:04:11 PM): "Not poker. A particular kind of competitive instinct, plus a little cameraderie. Poker is generally the closest activity that creates that," Anika told her. "Smells mean entirely different things in combinations than they do separately, sometimes."

"I've noticed some scents that go with emotions, but none of the kitchen smells really remind me of them." Perhaps, Rahne thought, she wasn't actually a proper feral-type mutant at all. None of the others she'd encountered seemed to shapeshift, after all. And she was half afraid to ask about the rest of the scents. She'd... well, she'd smelled sex-scents; as Kyle had remarked more than once, that was hard to miss around here. She wasn't now, and didn't think it was just because she wasn't shifted.

"It's pheremones," Mick explained to Rahne quietly. "Not actually scents, per se..." He was still lingering by the doorway, clearly unwilling to come in all the way.

Rahne opened her mouth to say that Manuel saw emotions as colors, remembered just in time that bringing up empaths to someone lately rescued from Mistra was probably a bad idea, and changed it to, "I'm a wolf part of the time, but I suppose I must not... er... process quite the same. ...Would ye like an oatmeal bar? I've made lots."

"They smell nice," Anika said cheerfully. "And he - " She pointed back at Mick, " - needs very badly to eat. I swear he's lost weight since I got here."

"Well, we canna have that." Rahne offered Mick a smile and one of several warm plates, then cast Anika a curious look. "...Which part do they smell like?"

Anika snickered. "The less risque part."

Rahne colored slightly again and arched an eyebrow at the oven. "I doona think the deer's doing much of that anymore..even if 'tis the season for it."