All Inclusive

Some people (mostly those gruff military types this space ship seemed to be full off) called this place the 'mess hall'. Andras Grauza much preferred calling it the kitchen. There were tables there, yes, and enough chairs for most of the crew to eat at once, but that didn’t mean this place ought to be degraded to ‘mess hall’.

The term gave off the impression that Andras was nothing more than a plain, soup-kitchen cook. That he was some canteen employee in charge of serving dollops of food from large spoons onto wet plates. That he could be spotted wearing a dirty apron and smelling of onions and old grease.

Andras was not and could not. No, this place was much more than what a mess hall implied. It was his domain, his pride, his life, his joy.
He loved his kitchen and he took great pride in his work. The stranger the meat supplies he had to work with, the better. The more exotic the herbs and vegetables, the more joy it brought him to turn them into something delicious.

Whenever he had time, Andras adorned the tables with flowers and other arrangements. He knew this lead to great hilarity amongst some of the crew, but he was convinced that a nicely decorated room added to the joy of dining. If, of course, there was time for joy of dining. All too often people just came in, ate and left just as they swallowed the last spoonful of food from their plate. A waste of well-prepared food, certainly, but unavoidable on a ship such as this.

Chiana – an alien crew member and one of the few friends he had here – had taken seat on her favourite spot on his counter, eating a bowl of left-over salad with her bare hands. Had she been human, Andras would have considered her manners to be very rude. She wasn't, though. She was reptilian, in a manner of speaking, and he respected her species’... etiquette. Just as he wouldn't demand a Japanese to eat with knife and fork instead of chop-sticks, he wouldn’t demand Chiana to change her table – or rather counter – manners.

She was talking to him, flirting a little, in a crude but enjoyable manner, and Andras' found his thoughts were straying.

Life, he decided, was good on the ship. If he were to think very deeply about his past, and about his life on this ship, he knew he would find it it as if clouded by a haze. There were gaps, he knew, but he found he wasn't too keen on filling them.

If he were to analyse himself (as psychotherapists had a tendency to do) he would likely suspect that he suffered a traumatic event, causing him to repress certain memories. But he didn't analyse himself. He liked his life as it was. No use dwelling on the past.

He smiled to his companion and she grinned. Likely he had just consented to something wicked. “I’ll be right back,” he assured her. He took a pair of scissors and walked into the refrigerated storage room

The first thing he noted was the smell. Even before his eyes settled on the decorated walls, even before his skin noted the warmth of the hall, he could smell there was something wrong. The expected smell of meat, plastic, and cooled air was absent, replaced instead with the smell of dry wallpaper, and old carpet. He didn’t recognize it and he didn’t much trust it.

He wasn’t shocked. There was no particular reason for that, other than the lack of an elevated heart-rate to be able to term his state as such. Surprised, yes, certainly. He was standing in a hall that didn’t look like any hallway on the space ship, after all. It was hardly something one would expect to happen.

His first reaction was to open the door again, but he found it locked. Not too strange, perhaps. It was an entirely different door. 

He turned again, rolled down his sleeves and removed his apron, folding it neatly over his arm, and tugged at his waistcoat to straighten it.

Best see what this was all about.


[Hannibal Lecter currently believes himself to be Andras Grauza. See profile and OOC info for details.]