Cecil Gershwin Palmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lasthumanvoice) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ph_logs2024-10-13 02:12 pm
lasthumanvoice) wrote in ph_logs2024-10-13 02:12 pm
[OPEN, Mingle] Yamsgiving
Who: Cecil and EVERYONE
What: Another Harvest Celebration
When: Beginning of Pumpkinfest
Where: Center of town
Warning(s): Discussion of the Gala and its attendant CWs may come up
1. Yes, we're happy as fish [Food Prep, Oak and Iron kitchen]
Cecil's made a point of seeking out the best known chefs in town to help him put everything together for this meal. While sweet potato dishes are the star, at least one available with every course, he's hoping to hit a broad variety so everyone can find something they like. He, of course, is peeling and chopping his eternal sweet potato to make sure there's enough to go around.
(Of course you don't need to worry about him with a knife! He's fine! Don't you know he was once a boy scout?)
If someone needs an extra hand for their dishes, though, he's happy to lend one. There's an attitude of camaraderie and cheer in the room, with Cecil even breaking out singing at one or two points in the evening.
2. And gorgeous as geese [The Meal; Festival Green]
Everyone's invited to the feast. That is, in fact, the whole point. Cecil's always been pointedly neutral in the town's tensions, working as the most unbiased media monkey he can. He's the Voice of Pumpkin Hollow, and that means not taking sides between Dahlia and Neil and the Temple and whoever else. But after the gala, he's made a choice to act, to try to foster goodwill and warm feelings. This isn't the stone stew he offered during January's famine, this is a Redwall-style feast.
So, between glasses of mead from Kasprak Farm and dandelion wine, everyone is invited to fill their plate with candied yams and zucchini bread, roast chicken and venison donated by one of the Enforcers. There's a homemade cranberry sauce with citrus wedges and dandelion-leaf salad with an apple cider vinaigrette and toasted acorns for garnish. There's pasta with a homemade pesto sauce and cheese. Desserts, too, are plentiful, some even flavored with...chocolate. But many are not, and feature sweet potatoes. Muffins, pies, etc.
Find a table with a friend or a stranger, and indulge. This is a warm-fuzzy type thing--feel free to use it as a mingle.
3. And wonderfully clean in the morning [Cleanup; Also Festival Green]
Cecil is, quite honestly, expecting to be the only person to stay and clean up. He's been up since about five in the morning and he's dragging a bit at this point. Oh, he did take the time to eat, so he's not starving, but like. He could use help putting the Green back to rights.
4. We've got everything, we're growing everything [Cecil Wildcards]
[You know how to find me to plot.]
What: Another Harvest Celebration
When: Beginning of Pumpkinfest
Where: Center of town
Warning(s): Discussion of the Gala and its attendant CWs may come up
1. Yes, we're happy as fish [Food Prep, Oak and Iron kitchen]
Cecil's made a point of seeking out the best known chefs in town to help him put everything together for this meal. While sweet potato dishes are the star, at least one available with every course, he's hoping to hit a broad variety so everyone can find something they like. He, of course, is peeling and chopping his eternal sweet potato to make sure there's enough to go around.
(Of course you don't need to worry about him with a knife! He's fine! Don't you know he was once a boy scout?)
If someone needs an extra hand for their dishes, though, he's happy to lend one. There's an attitude of camaraderie and cheer in the room, with Cecil even breaking out singing at one or two points in the evening.
2. And gorgeous as geese [The Meal; Festival Green]
Everyone's invited to the feast. That is, in fact, the whole point. Cecil's always been pointedly neutral in the town's tensions, working as the most unbiased media monkey he can. He's the Voice of Pumpkin Hollow, and that means not taking sides between Dahlia and Neil and the Temple and whoever else. But after the gala, he's made a choice to act, to try to foster goodwill and warm feelings. This isn't the stone stew he offered during January's famine, this is a Redwall-style feast.
So, between glasses of mead from Kasprak Farm and dandelion wine, everyone is invited to fill their plate with candied yams and zucchini bread, roast chicken and venison donated by one of the Enforcers. There's a homemade cranberry sauce with citrus wedges and dandelion-leaf salad with an apple cider vinaigrette and toasted acorns for garnish. There's pasta with a homemade pesto sauce and cheese. Desserts, too, are plentiful, some even flavored with...chocolate. But many are not, and feature sweet potatoes. Muffins, pies, etc.
Find a table with a friend or a stranger, and indulge. This is a warm-fuzzy type thing--feel free to use it as a mingle.
3. And wonderfully clean in the morning [Cleanup; Also Festival Green]
Cecil is, quite honestly, expecting to be the only person to stay and clean up. He's been up since about five in the morning and he's dragging a bit at this point. Oh, he did take the time to eat, so he's not starving, but like. He could use help putting the Green back to rights.
4. We've got everything, we're growing everything [Cecil Wildcards]
[You know how to find me to plot.]
no subject
Anzu spots Artemy lingering near the table; loathe as he is to make snap judgements about the body language of a stranger, Anzu can't help but think that Artemy looks not so much ill at ease as expecting the rug to be pulled out from under him any second. He decides to introduce himself half in the spirit of neighbourliness, and half because Artemy looks rather like half of Anzu's more distant in-laws (and thus might be from somewhere uncannily familiar, if not from back home).
He raises his hand in greeting as he approaches Artemy — about a metre fifty-nine in height, minus the square heels, and keeping his hat on even indoors, though he's taken off his morning jacket and is carrying it draped it over one arm. Unlike his husband, the ritual fringes of his tallis koton are tucked into his pockets, almost but not quite out of sight. His iron-grey hair's already gathered in two-strand twists, against the coming dry winter air, and the rising winds. His exact age is hard to determine — anywhere between a ragged forty and preternaturally well-preserved sixty — but in actual fact, he's been fifty-two since the late summer.
His eyes and the ocelli along his cheekbones and on his forehead glow cyan and gold, but it's easy to miss — easy to dismiss as a trick of the light.
"A gutn ovnt, a good evening to thee, darling," he says, pleasantly. "I've seen thee here only today, so I must assume thou'rt new."
While Lev/Lyubov might dither over the intimate/formal distinction, despite being in a position that entitles one to be thou-ing everyone save the mercifully late and final tzar, Anzu is quite content to make full use of a different leniency: he's gone grey, and thus everyone who's not yet gone grey just has to put up with him using the intimate second person pronoun right off the bat. Good thing he has the charm to pull it off ... at least theoretically, according to many.
"I'm Doctor Menelikov, one of the physicians in the town, though, ah, outside of work hours, I do prefer to be addressed by my civic first name. Thou may'st call me Anzu. Nyura, if, ah, thou'rt given to prefer using diminutives."
i made assumptions on timeline things, can edit if needed
Seems more thank likely to Artemy, at least.
"I am new, as you have accurately surmised. Artemy Burakh, surgeon. Good to meet you, Oynon." He says stoically, "I have a good feeling this will be far from our last meeting."
He considers bringing up Lev, and how he's already ran into them, and how their manner of speech and their dress, the bright colors, they're too much alike to be a coincidence. But Artemy figures he'll ask when the time feels right.
timeline assumptions work for me!
Anzu's handshake is soft, his wrist held limp — he seems to regard it as a social gesture of trust and amicability, not as a covert way to show off strength. He beams in recognition at the form of address.
"'Tis good to meet thee, too, Friend," he says — he uses the Yiddish term, khaver, almost but not quite the same as comrade. A complex social signal, boiling down to I believe not in cultural homogeneity, and I do believe in national self-determination. "By the term of address, darling, I must surmise thou'rt from more or less the same region as our eldest son. Or at least a region rather resembling it. Thine eyes glow not, if thou'lt forgive the blunt observation, so we were almost certainly born under different skies."
He smiles, a little apologetically.
"Leyb and I have had to learn to get our hopes up not, for seeing one from our world," he explains. "The universe is much less varied than one might've thought. Languages, at least, recur."
yay
Like two cookies from the same batch, Artemy thinks to himself. Different cookie cutters used, different frosting, decorations, but same batter.
"I do find it rather fascinating that despite obviously not being from the same place, we are familiar to each other. Like a copy. Though I doubt either of our worlds are the master, I wouldn't be as presumptuous to assume that- more that there is some grand design our worlds have been copied from. Have you thought much of this?"
no subject
Anzu smiles, crookedly, but it's good-natured.
"Know him? Feh, darling, I should hope he's not no stranger to me. We've been married half a decade."
The other matter gives him some pause; he cocks his head to one side, and bites his lower lip in contemplation, a mannerism strikingly similar to Lev's.
"Nu, I must confess I have thought on it some," he says, carefully. "I recall such things being the remit of many a rag-novel, though it seems it were something of a fad thirty years back or so, and has since ebbed. I have been thinking of grand cities what cast their shadows throughout all the universe, and fractals, and patterns what distort as they are copied." He looks up at Artemy, sharply. "And, nu. Ah, mirrors. Though it seems no mirrors here are doors."
no subject
Artemy is caught a bit off guard at that. Only for a moment. He regains himself, straightening out his posture, but it may be fun, just for a moment, to see him realize something that he has missed.
"I suppose the similarities make sense then." Artemy has vaguely heard of how married couples mimic each other after a certain amount of time together. Not intentionally. Just various amounts of small body language that end up being shared in a single third language, "My apologies, for not realizing- I suppose the two of you are more doors then, and not mirrors?" He says, trying to make a joke.
no subject
Anzu laughs at the joke all the same, and at Artemy's brief awkwardness — not like he's sneering at him, but like he's charmed and quite at ease with being frank about himself and his, nu, situation.
"Funny thou say'st so, since ... ah, I suppose we are, though maybe not in the way thou mean'st, darling," he says. "But the term's transistor, back where we were born. Those what are more sensitive to, nu ..." he pauses, considering how to put it. "Feh, we call it the Silver back home, but I suppose a more universal term is ah, spirit world. My Leyb's one of the finest conduits I've met, and, ah. Never trained not, at that."
no subject
"I am familiar with such things." Artemy says, as if he's not phased by conversations of spirit worlds, because he genuinely isn't, "Though we don't use the same terms, it all must be similar enough. It's all made of the same stuff."