The way Midas came scurrying back to their camp with the package of produce tucked close to his chest earned a laugh from Whip. “You would suck at smuggling,” he commented when Midas and Ian reached him, Ian nudging Midas to sit down near the small fire. The rest of the escort group were also settling down around their own fires, gathering their own food and deciding who had night watch at what times. Whip already had three cups of boiled water flavored with chicken stock for a nice warm broth that was actually liquid instead of gelatin consistency, and held one out for each of them as they got settled.
“Euh, salty,” Midas complained after taking a sip of the broth, pulling a face but nevertheless drinking more after blowing on it a few more times.
“Yeah I dunno if I like this brand,” Whip agreed. They would all still drink it, but there were definitely other brands they had gotten before that were much more tolerable. “So what did they have in there?”
“Expensive stuff,” Midas responded, feeling hesitant to be the one to open the package even after Ian gestured for him to do so with a nod. He felt like he had to be careful when unwrapping the produce, so instead of tearing the paper he picked at and peeled back the sticker keeping it closed.
Whip could only laugh at the unexpected answer. “Sounds about right,” he agreed, reaching out to take one of the smaller packages when Midas held it out to him to help with opening them. “Oooo carrots,” Whip chimed, picking one of the orange vegetables up to examine before he started dividing them up as equally as he could. It wasn’t like Old Bira counted the produce to be divisible by three. As soon as they were spread out on the paper, and another package handed to him while the other two did similar with other bags, Whip popped one of the carrots in his mouth. “Mmm, yeah. These are definitely from Eutoli. Got that good old natural flavor instead of science lab sterile,” he hummed happily.
“Natural flavor?” Midas repeated, following Whip’s lead to divide up the berries he’d opened.
“Yeah. Eutoli is the only place where the earth itself is able to sustain plants. Cerah has produce too, but their farms are unsustainable outside of the labs, and it affects the flavor of what grows there,” Whip clarified, casually popping more of the food in his mouth.
“Hmmm,” Midas couldn’t help humming in contemplation at the comments, absently remembering the last time they had gotten a rare shipment of vegetables from the city instead of the usual bare minimum soylents and other heavily processed artificially nutrient dense food. Biting off a piece of cucumber, Midas had to blink in mild surprise. It tasted clean in a way. Light, crisp, juicy. Just like a cucumber should taste. Which was a confusing thought because when he tried to remember the last time he’d eaten a cucumber that tasted like this before he couldn’t. He could only remember the once produced by Cerah, which had tasted heavy and almost powdery instead of full of water. It ended up making him even more curious about the other foods, and he reached over to grab one of the strawberries and bite a piece off.
It caught him off guard. The sweet flavor touching his tongue and texture of the fruit in his mouth. It was so familiar, and yet there was also something completely missing that he remembered should have been there. This was right, but also not quite right. But not in the same way as the cucumber where it just tasted different on its own. The cucumber didn’t need anything extra. The strawberry was supposed to be eaten with something else.
Ian and Whip had both been watching Midas while enjoying their own treats, so it was easy to notice the way Midas almost froze after trying the strawberry. The way he stopped and lowered the bitten fruit to stare at it. Trying to glean some sort of answer from the hint that it had given him. The other two glanced at each other, wondering if this was one of those times where they just needed to stay quiet, or if it was one where they should ask questions to see if they could help him figure something out. Just a few more seconds of Midas blankly staring, and then his brow started to furrow and they knew he wasn’t going to figure out what was bothering him on his own.
“Is something wrong?” Ian asked, leaning slightly to be more in Midas’ field of view.
The question caused Midas’ head to snap upright, his gaze locking onto Ian as the vague missing memory thankfully didn’t flee this time. “N’no, it’s good, it’s just…” Midas assured, trying to put words to the sensation he had. “It’s… missing something,” he admitted, raising the strawberry up to try and get a better look at it in the fire light, as if that would help stir the answers from his buried mind. “There was… something. A different texture, and flavor. Something creamy- AH CREAM!” His vocalized thoughts broke off with a gasp as Midas suddenly realized what was missing based on the description of the texture, and he ended up slightly jerking forward in a half shift to his knees.
“I had these with cream before! In a bowl- it was green, like… pastel green, about this big. There was other fruit in there too. Cantaloupe and blackberries. And th- h- .. ‘d put cream over the top of them, and we’d eat them with spoons.” The memory was fuzzy, and broken, and vague to the point all Midas could remember was the little bowl of fruit and cream, and how it would fit in his hands. But while he knew someone else had been there with him he couldn’t remember anything about them. Just trying to think of a pronoun to use sent his mind in loops long enough to give him a slight headache, causing him to put a palm to his temple.
“...berries and cream? Like… actual milk cream?” Whip repeated and questioned with a wry grin while Ian tried to smother down his own excitement about Midas having remembered something that had gotten him so excited.
“... Yeah,” Midas confirmed, though he was starting to sound a little absent minded again as that part of the memory was less vivid.
Whip could only smile wider though, narrowing his eyes as he looked to Ian. “Oh yeah, he’s definitely from Eutoli,” he commented, earning a soft chuckle from Ian in agreement.
“Def-... what makes you say that?” Midas asked, scrunching his brow in confusion.
“Milk cream is something you can only get inside Eutoli’s walls. The vulture bats around here love cow milk, and it’s impossible to mask the smell of it from them. People tried for a long time, but eventually everyone gave up trying to transport it. So the fact you regularly had fruit with cream could only be explained by you having lived in Eutoli for a while,” Whip explained, popping one of the grapes in his mouth.
It was strange to have something like that confirmed with such certainty. It should have been a more significant revelation, to be told they knew where he had lived before. Yet Midas found the almost fact to be rather unremarkable. So he was probably from Eutoli. So what? It didn’t help him remember anything, and didn’t mean anything to him since he wasn’t all that familiar with the other cities either.
The concept of where he was from did end up leading into thinking about where the others were from, and Midas absently recalled what he knew. Most of the people from the slums had traveled there from other wasteland inhabitants, or had left Cerah’s main walls for one reason or another. Whip was the odd one who was from a dead city, but that was hard to achieve these days since one had to be over a hundred years old to achieve that. And Ian was apparently from Andapos, and was yet another oddball of the group.
And thinking about oddballs, Midas’ thoughts circled back to something he’d thought about just that morning, but hadn’t had the chance to ask until now. “So I’ve been wondering,” Midas spoke up, derailing the conversation without quite noticing. “Ever since the whole thing with Benjamin. What’s up with Aina?”
It was hard for the other two to follow his thoughts, so Ian ended up lowering the food he had mid bite to look over in mild confusion. “What’s up with Aina?” Ian repeated, not quite sure what Midas meant by that.
“Yeah. Why does someone like her still live in the slums despite being an employee to C-Tech, but also seem to not even care that she works for a company like C-Tech?” Midas clarified around another strawberry tucked into his cheek. He seemed to be favoring the strawberries, but neither Ian or Whip minded. Whip was even trading the grapes on Midas’ paper for strawberries while he wasn’t looking.
“Mmm… I’m not too sure since she doesn’t seem to want to talk about it much,” Ian started thoughtfully, no longer avoiding addressing topics around his great granddaughter.
“Not like you asked either,” Whip muttered as a quiet jab as Ian’s prior avoidance of Aina. It didn’t seem he was going to let that go any time soon, and Ian could only give him a huffed and pouted glare at what he knew was a tease just to get his reaction.
Instead of answering Whip verbally though, Ian looked back to Midas. “From what I’ve gathered from hearing it from others, her parents were pretty capable scientists at C-Tech before she was born. Lucia, her mother, moved from Andapos, and met her father Jay in Cerah. They worked together on projects, but I’m not sure what ones. Aina has just mentioned before that she and her family weren’t very well liked by the rest of C-Tech.”
“Probably because they dabbled too close to cyborg related topics,” Whip interjected his own thoughts, causing Ian to give him a look of mild annoyance at being interrupted.
“What makes you think that?” Midas asked, tagging along with Whip’s mild divergence.
“Just peeking at what she does under those goggles,” Whip shrugged. “She’s a bio mechanical engineer. It’s hard not to get involved in cybernetics in that field. Not to mention she knows how to take care of us fairly well when we get hurt. That’s why I brought you to her when we first met. After I dragged you out from having your leg chewed on by a baby morrillo of course.” The explanation ended with a teasing jab at Midas this time, and Midas could only scrunch his nose in irritation before sticking his tongue out at Whip briefly.
“It’s possible that she only started getting into it after her parents passed though. She did mention before that she had some interest in cybernetics because it might make her leg easier to manage,” Ian slightly countered.
“Oh yeah. She’s totally just reading the footnotes,” Whip grinned, shaking his head slightly. He could appreciate Ian trying to play dumb, but at this point he'd seen way too much of what Aina could do to be willing to believe she was only skimming the surface when it came to human integrated cybernetics. Aina was the only one Whip trusted to help with his machinery ever since Crystal went missing after all.
“...What happened to her leg and parents? Did she ever say? - Is that too rude to ask?” this time Midas ended up steering the conversion to a slightly different path. The mention of Aina’s prosthetic leg and parents being dead made him curious.
“Ah…Yeah, she said some things in passing,” Ian confirmed, pursing his lips in a sympathetic grimace for a moment. “There was some sort of accident in the lab while she was visiting her parents. Her mom ended up critically injured from it, and died shortly after. And Aina lost her leg from it. Then her dad ended up working himself to death a while after, trying to keep the company happy on top of making the prosthetic for Aina as easy to use as he could. It’s one of the reasons she’s so adamant about taking breaks.”
“Hmm…,” Midas gave a small hum, thinking over the data he’d been given in response to his questions. It sounded like C-Tech didn’t like Aina because she and her parents dabbled in human applicable cybernetics, and also seemed to be problem causers for the company. Considering they had a rather drastic lab accident anyway. And as Midas thought about C-Tech and their potential reason for ostracizing Aina, but still making use of her, he couldn’t help remembering something from the memory he’d recently shared with Whip. “She’s not part of the necromancy experiments, is she?” he asked bluntly, looking first at Ian, but switching his gaze to Whip when the sudden question caused Whip to slightly choke on his drink.
“The what?” Ian asked, not able to understand what Midas was asking about at all. “Necromancy experiments?” he repeated before shifting his gaze to Whip as he coughed.
“I dunno,” Whip managed to respond after he’d got his breath back. “Considering how closed off they are about them, to the point I’d never even heard of them before you, I doubt it. She’s not that secretive with us, and I’ve never seen anything about human cybernetics in her assignments from C-Tech.”
“Oh… that’s good… I guess,” Midas hummed, taking another sip of his own broth and ending up wrinkling his nose again. Maybe he should just chug it so he’d only have the more tasty food left.
It was a rather neutral response that Whip found a little surprising, but he ended up distracted by Ian still staring at him expectantly. ‘It’s what he’s calling the C-Tech experiments with trying to reanimate the dead. The thing they mistook him for being in that memory I showed you,’ Whip responded silently to Ian, earning a tiny nod of sudden understanding from the latter.
As Ian reached for another cucumber Midas caught him mildly off guard once more by making another comment. “...You should tell her Good night.”
“What?” Ian asked, yet again looking up from his meal.
“Aina. You should tell her good night too. She’s probably lonely without you two there,” Midas clarified around more food in his cheek.
It was a little surprising to hear such a comment from Midas, but it only made Ian grin as he realized it wasn’t just out of concern for Aina that Midas was requesting such a thing. Looked like he was finally admitting just a little that he was fond of the girl as well. “Alright… I can do that,” Ian agreed, quickly sending the quick message to the girl.
It naturally took some time to get any sort of response. But when he did it was sent to both Ian and Whip, and earned a sudden snort from Whip. “She says to tell her yourself and stop shutting her out all the time,” he relayed with an amused chuckle and pointed grin at Midas.
“Oi,” Midas huffed in protest, a response the other two had come to expect. What was a surprise though was Midas growing a little sheepish, his lips pouting slightly as he averted his gaze and muttered, “...I’ll think about it.”
It was an unexpected response, and took a moment for them to realize what it meant. But after he did, Ian couldn’t hold back a short, sputtered laugh. So Midas was admitting he was part of the reason Aina couldn’t directly message him like she could with the others? One more welcomed sign that Midas was feeling more comfortable with someone. “Good night, Midas,” Ian snickered, deciding not to harass him about anything for now. Their dinner was pretty much done anyway, so it was fine to start ushering all of them off to sleep.
“Mm, night,” Midas almost mumbled, setting his empty cup aside and flopping over onto one of the mats Whip had laid out for each of them. It was a stark difference from the warm, soft bed they had the night before. But it wasn’t unfamiliar, and would still be easy enough to fall asleep on. Especially with the familiar feeling of a warm fire crackling behind him. So tomorrow they would reach Eutoli, huh? At least he didn’t have to wait much longer to see if they were correct in their guess about him being from there.
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I had a holiday, so I spent it finishing up this section since I had 2 whole days to work on it instead of being dead from work =7=
And it ended up twice as long as I usually do for a post, but I have zero ideas on what to draw for it if I split it so all at once yeeey |D
next stop is Eutoli * flails hand a lil * I'm so excited, time to start info dumping about Midas