(Fried) Hey this wasn’t part of the plan! …anyway, someone put down a huge vat of oil for you to fry stuff in. They even provided some batter for dipping if you like a crispy crust! Just.. try to be reasonable, okay?
“Hey, strategy teacher. Does this feel kinda dangerous to you? I mean, this doesn’t look too far from the stuff they dump from the tops of castle towers.”
Golden oil froths angrily inside the sizable vat in front of them. The lingering smell from others dipping batter-covered treats inside of it is appealing, he has to admit. If he’s thinking of the ways that boiling oil can help during wartime, a trick like this could also make a lot of unappealing rations tastier. Some of the crap scrounged together in dusty catacombs still wouldn’t have been salvageable. But hey, no way of knowing unless you try, right? (No way of knowing what kinds of things your coworkers find funny unless you press, either.)
“...Anyway. This one’s for cooking food, not people, yeah?” He bends down and rips a handful of grass from the ground, then opens his palm to display it to his fellow Deer.
“Five gold if you take a bite of this after I fry it.”
Mark was no stranger to cooking methods like this, even if this was on a scale beyond what he had personally witnessed before. Dipping various foods in pots of flavored oil, melted cheese, or even chocolate was a traditional form of Ilian cooking, and something of a delicacy at that. He had to imagine the warmth provided a pleasant reprieve from the bitter cold in which they lived. It wasn't hard to imagine how it might have come about with that in mind.
This, though... it almost seemed like a perversion of that beautiful culinary art. The roiling oil was violent, angry, hissing constantly and occasionally spitting scalding droplets. One of them struck Mark's cheek as he leaned over the vat, causing him to quickly flinch backwards. Getting too close to this seemed like a recipe (pun not intended) for disaster, even if it wasn't being used quite in the way Python was suggesting.
"...That would be a bit cruel, wouldn't it? Boiling someone alive?" Not that Mark hadn't heard of such strategies being used, but he wasn't keen on enacting the same kind of violence that he'd seen Bern use against Sacaeans. It was one of the many reasons he had elected to take his leave from Bern's service.
"...Um, I have a bit of a sensitive stomach. I don't know if... b-besides, grass isn't edible. And it'll ruin your teeth. I guess frying it would probably make it softer, so that might be... less of a concern, but still..."
This seemed more like Hector's purview than his own.
