Second Floor Common Room, Monday Evening

[cantgetnorelief]

Savannah's letter from the past, and his conversation with her earlier today, had convinced Anders that there was something he had to do tonight that he hadn't done in a long, long time. And he was really past due for doing it.

So yes, that's right, he was in the common room with mixing bowls, baking tins, and a whole lot of boxes of cake batter

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[ecirpnellehada]

One thing that Adah had started to find interesting about the construction of this building was that smells seemed to permeate through it like the air itself. Never sounds, though, or very rarely sounds, but the scents, at times, the aromas, were hard to ignore. She wondered if perhaps this was simply an effect on her, because another thing that she noticed that the smells were almost always pleasant. They reminded her of Kilanga, but in a completely opposite, reversed, backwards, sdrawkcab way: the village had its strong smells, too, that couldn't be ignored, but they were more likely to make your stomach turn in disgust rather than hunger, more likely to make your guys grumble in objection than in desire. That training to know where smells were coming from to avoid them was turning out to serve her well here, as she could now sense where smells were coming from to determine just how close they were and if they could, based on this deduction, be sought after without having to climb the stairs

[cantgetnorelief]

"Hey," Anders said, looking up at her with a smile -- the sort of smile that said 'hi, I'm not sure if I know you but I won't bite your head off, promise.' He gestured at the cupcakes on the counter and offered, "You know the drill with common room food, right? Welcome to it, unless you'd rather have yours covered with sweet sticky goodness . . . of the kind that I'll have to put on 'em from one of the jars, that is. 'cause otherwise ew."

[ecirpnellehada]

Adah returned the greeting smile congenially, enough, fingers tightening a little around the notebook she held rested against her hip, but the smile grew into a bit more of a smirk as the greeting continued on...and on, eventually drifting her eyes toward the cacophony of baking paraphernalia scattered around. Her smirk quirked at match the grin as she considered the options. Risk the sugar overload of sweet sticky goodness (from the jars, of course, indeed), or risk concocting something that would mostly end up in a jar, of the laboratory nature, to best serve as something studied and marveled at for generations of scientists

[cantgetnorelief]

Adah had clearly never seen the messes he'd made the first few times he'd tried this -- which was really probably a good thing. Now that was truly a cacaphony of baking paraphernalia.

"Have as many as you want," he encouraged.

[ecirpnellehada]

Adah's head tilted a little at the comment. An odd phrase, really, if you thought about it, but so were most things that people let tumble out of their mouths. As many as you want. Tnaw uoy sa ynam sa, clunky and unforgiving backwards, as if knowing that pursuit of such a thing could lead to an unforgiving upset stomach. What we want rarely meets agreement to what we should or what we must or even what we can. Especially not what we can. As she pondered such conundrums within the cupcake, she observed it carefully, as if weighing out the amount of sugar and eggs and milk and whatever else had gone into it, matching it up to some dietary table of what her stomach might allow and then promptly, methodically, set the cupcake down, on top of her notebook, where she could then much more easily start to pick off a small chunk of it to pop into her mouth

[cantgetnorelief]

"Did I do good?" asked Anders, her smile, however faint, coaxing an answering grin out of him. "I haven't mastered the art of making them melt in your mouth yet, but they're not gross at least, right?"

[ecirpnellehada]

Well. Did he do well, but that didn't matter as, chewing carefully, Adah held up a finger from the next piece of waiting-to-be-consumed cupcake as if signaling to the chef that she shouldn't speak with her mouth full, as if she expected on speaking at all. Which, of course, she didn't, as was to become evident in the fact that, once she did swallow, with purpose and intent, and after she waited as if letting it settle, she answered his question not with words, but through her expression, wrinkling her nose and curling her lip, a small bit of tongue sliding out from underneath the upper row of her teeth, eyes slightly squinted under lightly furrowed brows. A small shake of her head. No. Terrible. Awful. Disgusting. Blech.

Clearly, as she put the next bit into her mouth, letting her hand linger there to help hide the subsequent, following smirk.

[cantgetnorelief]

". . . hey," Anders said, his jaw dropping. He'd completely missed the smirk, because sometimes he was still a little slow on the uptake.

And he would have appreciated the not talking with her mouth full, really, but that would have presumed talking in the first place.

[ecirpnellehada]

Adah was glad that her hand was already close by, because that reaction warranted a bit of a snort of a laugh, kept quiet by the quick movement of her hand from her lips to right under her nose, head ducked slightly. She lifted her eyes a moment later, once she got a hold of the immediate response, with a clearly skeptical question dancing around inside of them to test whether or not he was sincere in that reaction.

[cantgetnorelief]

Anders crossed his arms over his chest, a gesture made rather comical by the spatula still clenched in his right hand, and gave her the puppydog face. It couldn't hurt to try.

He had faith in the puppydog face.

[ecirpnellehada]

Adah had faith in her power against puppydog faces, especially when the spatula-endowed armed crossing was likening to Adah's mind visions of her older sister. This guy was significantly better at baking than Rachel probably ever would be and, though she figured Rachel would take issue with this, prettier than her, too.

She met his puppydog face with a tilt over her head and a hardened expression wondering if he was honestly trying to pull the wool over her eyes with a move like that.

[cantgetnorelief]

That sound? The one you might hear if you strained both your hearing and your sense of imagination? Was the sadly musical tinkle of Anders's faith in the puppydog face crashing to the earth.

"Just . . . tell me they don't suck?"

[ecirpnellehada]

Adah did rather pride herself in causing ego that particularly depended on pure prettiness to succeed to come crashing into an explosive, fiery end, really. She had to smirk, as well, at the suggestion that she should tell anyone anything.

Although, for the pure sake of perhaps a bit of sympathy at the distant strain of dejection ringing somewhere in her ears, she offered, at the very least, before moving towards picking off another piece, a small thumbs up in support that they didn't suck in the slightest. That was all he was getting, though, especially if he was too stupid to realize that they didn't suck in the fact that she was continuing to eat them. She supposed he couldn't help that, though, the stupid part. He was male, after all.

[cantgetnorelief]

Also, jock. That added weight to the stupidity argument according to some schools of thought.

"Well," he said, a tiny smile twitching at the corners of his mouth when he finally processed the thumbs up, "long as you don't throw them at my head or something, I guess it's all good."

[ecirpnellehada]

Adah's eyes very pointedly went to the span of the chef's forehead, scanning it slowly. She worried that it would have been too subtle of a reaction for him to pick up on the fact that, by mentioning that, he was, in a way, just begging for her to do it. She did have a food fight or two under her belt, after all, and the usual restriction against wasting food didn't come into play, because there were probably more cupcakes being made than could reasonably be consumed anyway.

[itsjustlanguage]

Hoshi hadn't really talked to Adah since early in the fall, when Hoshi was still trying to get the hang of actually talking to people. "Hi," she said, with a warm smile. "How are you?"