Some Culinary Research [open]

[enter_aeneas]

There were some things Aeneas had to attend to before he could continue with his project. Mainly it was contacting the Command Crew and seeing if said project could even begin to be contemplated, much less be carried out; but there was also that matter of knowing his tools, figuring out what he had available to work with and how he could better use

Comments

[sanguineroyal]

Nanashi was scoping out the ship, setting into memory every nook and cranny. She just so happened to be up to the Media Center at the same time that Aeneas was exploring the computer. The odd, artificial glow attracted Nanashi's attention. She leaned against the doorway, watching the strange words on the screen. She had never seen such devices, and frankly she missed the books she was familiar with. It seemed like these electric devices had all but taken over. Still, her curiosity drew her to them. She felt the need to know how she could use these for an advantage. Always she was looking for an advantage. It was either that, or pleasure.

[enter_aeneas]

The alien coiled tightly in the center of the room, though obviously facing the main screen and not the door, saw Nanashi possibly before she saw him. Funny how his peripheral vision worked that way; regardless, a few months of seclusion and the months before of traumatizing experiences had left him weary of unexpected visitors. Aeneas started noticeably and, flexible ears leading the way, swiveled around to get a better look at who was leaning on the entranceway.

He knew he should’ve closed that door. But the artificial lighting was similarly unnerving to be immersed in, and having a single human female curiously investigate his studies was infinitely preferable to being stuck in the glow of an emotionless screen upon organic material

[sanguineroyal]

Nanashi, who was anything but a human female, smiled politely, letting a bit of her fangs show. What an interesting creature, she thought. She noticed him, sitting in the centre of the room rather quickly, but she had heard his heart beat and his breathing

[enter_aeneas]

Those telltale signs of life-the ‘heartbeat’ in particular-were just about as bizarre as the creature that created them, especially since one of them did not actually exist. That nigh constant, fluttering pulse, weak yet somehow ubiquitous within him, certainly did not come from any recognizable circulatory organ of human understanding. His lungs, on the other hand, were far more active, with the upper set going at a steady pace and the lower (yes, there was a second pair, connected and made up of several collective masses of pulmonary tubing between his back legs) passively collecting and exchanging what air was amassed, producing an underlying hum that could be detected by the unaided ear if pressed against his fur-covered abdomen.

This sense of weirdness was, however, not mutual. Certainly Aeneas could detect some bizarre pheromones (strong ones, too) emanating from her person, but this was no serious indicator of something bizarre. Even the fangs were dismissed; Aeneas had met plenty of not-quite-human crewmembers in his time

[kaya_waterwave]

There were times for Katara to be engaged in training, and those days came by faster as she spent several hours a day sharpening her senses, whether they were physical or mental. When she was not doing that, or engaging in some random mischief on the ship, she would find herself in the Media Library, looking up some more knowledge about Earth and other home worlds that would fascinate her. By now she'd gotten the hang of words being on screens instead of paper, but that didn't stop her from still using paper and ink, in case she needed to jot something down.

When she happened upon Aeneas in the place as well, she gave a smile. She hadn't seen her friend ion a little while, she'd missed him. She walked over quietly until she was by his shoulders. He seemed to be engaged in looking up animals of a sort...and it looked like fish was one of them!

She was really going to have to stop daydreaming about the food back home. It tended to make her grouchy later.

"Hey Aeneas!" she greeted. "What are you up to?"

[enter_aeneas]

Ah!-a familiar voice! A familiar voice that had still managed to sneak up behind the paranoid alien, no less, but a familiar voice regardless!

Aeneas still jumped out of his fur. The startled, high-pitched trill that followed was quick to modify itself into hesitant, translatable speech, as Katara might notice.

“-H-hello!” squeaked the alien (one of his raised hands blindly grabbed for an auricle), “I am-“

At this point he actually seemed to register who she was. “-Katara! It is nice to see you again!”

After a few awkward moments of Aeneas’s bashful grinning, it seemed that he’d forgotten Katara’s question. Not that he wasn’t content just to see her again, of course. They could just sit there all day with pictures of various aquatic vertebrates flashing over the screen in front of them for all he cared.

[kaya_waterwave]

Katara smiled and gave Aeneas a hug. she was starting to feel better already. She had always been very affectionate with Aeneas, if only because she felt like he a)deserved it and b) he would let her. She was wondering what had happened to Aeneas after all of the things he'd seen with the Nightmare King: she hoped he was okay.

"What are you looking up fish for?" Katara asked, looking over his shoulder. "Are you planning to learn different recipes to cook?"

[enter_aeneas]

Aeneas’s fuzzy torso went, as was expected, completely limp, his long neck and head draping over Katara’s shoulder. He was delightfully warm, and it was mere seconds into the embrace before his body began rumbling with a deep, happy purr.

Physical contact. That’s what he needed. The alien’s jumpy façade suddenly melted away, leaving him grinning from temple to temple. For the time that this resulting bliss flooded his brain, Aeneas remained loose and available for hugging purposes. “Hmm? Oh, I was merely-“

A pause as he realized that Katara had, predictably, hit the metaphysical nail on the head. “-Indeed. Research was required for some…”

…Ooh. Did he want to reveal this yet?

“…Long term projects.”