Cho's open log for October (and September, if desired)

[tenuefarfalla]

WHO: Cho, with a few starters for specific people. Also open prompts for anyone else.
WHAT: meal prep/serving/clean-up, walking various random animals through the city, morning five mile runs, reflection on just how flipping weird life is now, and misc.
WHERE: all over, really
WHEN: I'm fine backdating anything into the month of September, as I kind of vanished, and also doing anything through October. Basically, it's a two month spanning open log.

NOTES: I can't stand writing in action spam (takes my head right out of the writing), but I don't mind reading it. (Just please don't use tiny text for your brackets.) So if you only write brackets, and don't mind our styles not matching, you can write brackets and I'll write prose and we can still have some awesome CR.


A - mess hall kitchen
Being a cafeteria cook on an alien planet had never been any part of her ten year plan, but life has a funny way of turning tables on you. Cho has had the rug pulled out from under her often enough to know that the only way to survive it is to adapt. In that regard, her family has done her a huge favour with their neglect and disregard. She knows how to adapt. It's not always easy, mind you, but she can do it.

Making food for her fellow displaced refugees, it gives her a very concrete and tangible purpose. People are hungry, she feeds them. It's simple. It's easy. It's also yielding far more immediate and gratifying results than her work in the fish hatchery and bio-lad with Annie and Finnick, which is incredibly slow going, getting the place even functional.

This work is also putting her in the path of new people. Even if it's only to greet them in the mornings and evenings and ask them which of the hot food selections they'd like. She's learning to put names to faces, and feeling accomplished and appreciated, and it's wonderful. Doubly so when someone offers their time to hep her out, and triply so when they don't just want to clean and chop and fetch and carry, but are interested in learning. She loves teaching. She misses it. And while cooking is a far cry from biology, it's still some form of wisdom that she can impart.

[[OOC: If you want to assume that your character and Cho have seen each other enough to know names and bare basics about one another, feel free. If you would like to assume that they've already been helping her with meal prep and stuff, also feel free to do that. Or have them meet for the first time. Whatever works.]]

B - walkways - exercising animals or running (mornings only)
Cho's various trips to the upper levels while the power was out and her subsequent experiments have not netted her much useful information. What she has ended up with is a menagerie of various random animals who have all become far too comfortable with the idea of being brought their food and kept safe from predators for her to ever feel anything but guilty about releasing them back into the upper levels.

So they are her responsibility now, and while some of them are perfectly content to just stay in their little makeshift enclosures, some of them get fed up with her room, and want space. Which she provides in the form of walks. She really wishes that she had a dog. It would at least be something vaguely normal. Instead, she can be found at random hours of the day with varying combinations of cat, hedgehogs, sugar glider, chinchilla, lizard, and quite a few random bits of fur and fluff that don't quite match up with anything she's used to. High energy, though, hence the excursions at random times of the day, when they seem particularly restless.

---

The animals are not the only ones that need exercising. This place wears and grates and it ends up driving Cho kind of nuts sometimes. She's made a promise to not wander off without a buddy, but that doesn't mean she can't go anywhere.

So, sometimes, there are on animals with her while she goes wandering around the walkways on the safe levels. Instead, it's just her and her earphones, her feet eating up the miles as she hurtles herself through the concrete maze that's becoming depressingly familiar. While she might prefer to work out her excess energy someplace a little more private, she won't break her word, and so her morning runs end up taking her back and forth along the residential walkway, as she racks up the miles by retracing her footsteps over and over again in front of the common areas. At least, this early in the morning, it's fairly deserted.

Of course, if she does ever come across someone doing the same thing, well, they would qualify as not going anywhere alone, and would open up a lot of the rest of Anchor as an option for her workouts.

C - spa
It's not a patch on the ocean, but having a functional and clean large body of water to swim in is still doing wonders for Cho's sense of well-being. Not to mention, getting her hair properly cleaned, and the occasional mani-pedi when she allows herself that much time. She favors the area that looks like a Japanese hot spring, doing a lot of floating silently in the large communal area, her hair fanning out around her, floating on the surface of the water like an oil slick. it almost feels like being home, which usually ends up with a tight prickling in her chest and a lump in her throat, but she fights through that. It's good to miss something. It's far better than having nothing you care about.

Most of the time, she's silent, and anyone else arriving might not notice her for a while. Especially if she's tucked herself away in some corner, sitting in water that's shallow enough for it, but deep enough to leave only her nose and above out of the water. She can definitely see the appeal of this place for fun and relaxation, but most of the time, she's either steaming herself in slightly too hot water for homesickness, or swimming laps with the setting as cold as it will go... not that lukewarm is particularly cold.

D - observation deck
The more random detritus from random worlds that shows up to populate the landscape, the more Cho finds herself inexplicably drawn to the observation decks that look out over the desert. She doesn't have a desire to go and see most of it up close, and not just because she'd be on her own in a dangerous place, but viewing it from this distance is strangely compelling.

So she does, settling herself on a bench, or on the floor with her back leaning against a bench, almost always with the animal carrier containing a cat and a giant caterpillar. Sometimes she lets them out to wander, though the most the caterpillar ever seems to do is hang from the edge of her seat, viewing the world from his strange upside down vantage point.

! WILDCARD

Wandering around in general, hanging out in her room, any other location or activity that you're interested in that I haven't talked about. Feel free to either come poke me to plan something, or to just go for it here and we'll make it work on the fly.

Comments

A ❄ just after breakfast

[scowlish]

Without the regular routine of being in the military, Onni has started to go back to a few habits from his childhood and adolescence - in this case, it's that when he's left to his own devices, Onni likes to sleep. A lot. Since arriving in Anchor, his sleep schedule has slowly shifted, night by night, until he's gone from his usual military 21:00 to 05:00 sleep schedule to something much more obscenely late, in both the going to bed and getting out of it sense. Usually he can't drag himself out of his room before noon, even if he wakes up earlier, and so he misses seeing anyone who comes by for breakfast. Not that it bothers him, he's not particularly a social person.

This day, he's out of his room surprisingly early, mostly because of a bad dream about Lalli that had left him tossing and turning too much to get back to sleep. So it's only around 10:00 when he shows up at the kitchen with breakfast on his mind.

At first, he intends to just have some oatmeal porridge with whatever he can find to sweeten it up, but once he's actually facing down the ingredients cupboard, with thoughts of Lalli still in the back of his mind, he decides on something else. By the time he realizes there's someone else in and out of the kitchen, he's warming milk and sugar together and humming under his breath, just some old Finnish folk tune, and when he does realize that there's someone else present, tidying up after breakfast still, he jumps a bit, looking over his shoulder.

It's probably a very strange image - a man in a fur cape with the hood up, humming to himself surrounded by baking ingredients, peering wide-eyed over his shoulder as if he's had a troll come up behind him.

"Ah."

That's all he manages to get out.

[tenuefarfalla]

Onni slips in while Cho is replenishing the packed lunches for the stragglers. Well, the stragglers and Kabal. He doesn’t seem to like just asking for them, so she tries to guess when he’ll be back for a restock and have a container full of boxes waiting for him to grab while she’s occupied elsewhere. Writing “if found, please return to dining hall” on the bottom has netted her some mild success in getting the containers back, at least. So it’s after spending ten minutes hiding behind a counter until said container vanishes that she finds Onni.

Cho assumes that he sees her long before he actually does. She’s small and quiet, yes, but she’s not really trying to sneak around. So when he jumps at the sight of her, serving dish of frittata in one hand, and container to store the leftovers in the other, she just smiles at him. Must be really absorbed in what he’s doing.

“Ah?” Is it a greeting? She repeats it like it might be. Complete with a little wave of her hand once she sets down the space age Tupperware. Then she holds up the pan of eggs. “Would you like some? It’s vegetarian. Do you eat eggs?”

[scowlish]

Usually, Onni would've heard her the moment she moved, or sensed her presence much earlier than he does, but he's still groggy and tired, and so he doesn't. As he registers what the person behind him looks like, gets the sense of her, and she holds out a serving container full of what looks like scrambled eggs to offer her some, he lifts a hand to his chest unconsciously. His heart is racing from being startled so thoroughly and the uncomfortable realization that he'd allowed himself to be that startled.

It's because he's still groggy and sleepy, he knows, but it's still...concerning. Noting it away in the back of his mind, he sighs and shrugs.

"I eat eggs." he says, a brow raising, and he leans over to peer at what she's holding, then turns his attention back to the pan he has heating over the stove, stirring it quickly with a wooden spoon before glancing back at her.

"Maybe, I just have to keep an eye on this."

[tenuefarfalla]

"Oh, good." Cho's smile gets, if possible, even brighter. Marmalade was particularly affectionate this morning, Twee actually wanted a little cuddle, she had a good run, found a large sketch pad and some dried out pastels in one of those little shops on the way back from gathering herbs with Cole, so it's been a good day so far. "I haven't had a chance to eat yet. Been a busy morning for a lot of people, I guess. Usually there's at least one person to help me clean up." She's not upset, just making conversation. She takes down two plates, and dishes up portions of the eggs onto each one, humming a few bars of Onni's folk tune without realizing what she's doing.

If he has to stay by the pot of... stuff, then she'll bring the food to him. "Here we go. Mushroom, wild garlic, spring onion, I have white pepper now." Thank goodness for Whole Foods. "It's amazing what fresh pepper can do." She puts one plate down next to Onni's free hand, and sets the other one about a foot away from it, for herself. "What are you making?"

[scowlish]

Almost as much as he can see it out of the corner of his eye, he can feel the intensity of her smile. An obvious morning person, cheerful and bright and generally the bane of his existence before noon on any given day. Even in the military at Keuruu, he'd had coworkers like this, bubbly and cheerful and trying to convince him that the morning really was great, and it had done nothing but grate on his nerves. Still, his sleeping schedule has always been all over the place, even when he was a child, though it got noticeably worse after the move to Keuruu.

"Mm, you should eat, then, before cleaning up." he suggests, glancing over his shoulder and then picking up two eggs from the counter holding all his pre-collected supplies. Cracking them into the mixture of milk and sugar, he switches his wooden spoon for a metal whisk, and mixes the egg into the liquid. It's then that he notices she's humming the song he was singing when she came in, and he makes a small noise of consideration in his throat over it.

"Whole Foods?" he asks, glancing back at her while he turns off the burner under his milk, sugar, and egg mixture, and puts it aside, switching his attention to melting some butter while he mixes flour and spices and yeast together into a bowl.

"Oh, I'm making Voisilmapulla...butter buns, I suppose? For my cousin."

After he's mixed the dry ingredients together, he picks up a knife and starts cutting the liquid mix into it while the butter finishes melting, his tongue between his front teeth, eyes on what he's doing.

"Thanks, by the way. For the food. I'll eat in a moment."

[tenuefarfalla]

Cho is absolutely a morning person, big time. She's chipper all the time, though - even now, more than five hours into her day. Relentlessly chipper, most of the time. She understands that not everyone likes early mornings, though, so he's safe from any attempts to convert him to the ways of the early riser.

"Whole Foods is a big store full of groceries. One turned up in the desert. The perishables are gone, but lots of shelf stable stuff is left. I can show you, if you want. From the windows, I mean. We don't have to go out there." She watches him very intently as he makes his butter buns. "Voisilmapulla," she repeats the word, slowly and carefully, taking care to match the pronunciation. "Hungarian?" It gets super cold there in the winter. The furs would make sense. Or maybe... "Scandinavian?"

Cho reopens a much smaller container and spoons a little parsley sauce on top of her eggs, and then adds salt. "It smells really good so far. Do you make them for your cousin a lot?"

[scowlish]

Once he's got the mixture done and the butter is melted, he turns off the heat and goes over to the sink, washes his hands thoroughly, then goes back to the bowl and starts kneading the butter into the rest of the ingredients. At first, it just squelches, but he's made it enough times to know it will eventually all mix together, that the rest of the ingredients will eventually absorb it.

While he kneads, he glances up at the girl again looking at her with his pale eyes a little intense, his head tilted. The Whole Foods sounds interesting, and he nods with a little 'hm' in his throat.

"Sure. I'd like to see it."

Glancing back down at the dough mixture, he pushes his fingers into it and squeezes hard, working the melted butter into the rest of it a little more firmly as she guesses where he might be from.

"Close but not quite." he says, when she guesses Scandinavia, "Finland. And yes, I do. He won't eat much that isn't sweets, bread, or meat, and this has a lot of butter. Maybe it will put some fat on him."

[tenuefarfalla]

Well, she got the region right. She'll take that as a partial win. "I've never been to Finland, but I've seen photos on travel sites. It looks like a beautiful place. My name is Cho." She doesn't offer him her hand to shake, because his hands are otherwise occupied, but she smiles warmly.

He's obviously in the middle of what he's doing, and ordinarily she would wait for him before eating, but he did tell her that she should go ahead. So she does, cutting off a very small piece with her fork so that she can still talk to him without being rude about it. "Does your cousin like chocolate? I picked up some Dutch cocoa. Maybe he'd eat brownies?"

[scowlish]

"Travel sites?" he asks, raising a brow a little as he keeps kneading. It's sticky work, with the liquid butter squelching between his fingers, over his knuckles. In a way, it feels good, to do manual labour with a good intention, and he's starting to feel better, a little more awake, a little less angry about that fact.

Glancing over his shoulder at the woman, he sees her starting to eat the eggs she offered, though she doesn't go overboard with it, seeming to still want to wait to some extent. It's alright, though, he knows he'll be done with this soon and it'll be an hour of the dough rising before he can finish the buns.

"I'm Onni. And yes, he would eat brownies. He loves chocolate."

[tenuefarfalla]

"On the internet. With pictures and stories and people who have taken the trip talking about what they enjoyed." The clothing isn't much to go on, maybe he's from a time before the internet? "It's just a way of sharing information with a large number of people all at once. Travel sites help people to decide on places they'd enjoy visiting and what they should see while they're there. Helsinki looks like a wonderful city. Very energetic."

If he's from the past, he might still come from a time when the churches are already built. "I also really want to see the churches. Uspenski Cathedral in particular looked very beautiful. Those amazing spires. Also the orthodox church in Tampere. Oh, and the harbour in Helsinki. The... Kauppatori?" Her pronunciation on everything will be slightly off, but she's taking care and doing her best. She doesn't give the impression of speaking any Finnish, just of having good recall on these specific words. "Oh, and Rovaniemi, I've never been to a place where it stays light all day in the summer and dark all day in the winter. The Aurora Borealis in that area look unbelievable, and I know that photographs never really do justice to things like that. I can't imagine how gorgeous it must be in person. The whole country just looks so colourful and vibrant, and the people seem so welcoming." When she's finished, she takes another very small bite of her eggs.

[scowlish]

Onni has done a lot of reading about the Old World, but mostly the focus was on religions and folklore and the old gods. He knows of computers, and when she says something about internet and pictures and stories, it sounds like a computer sort of thing. But he wouldn't exactly consider himself familiar with it, and he has no clue what she means by a travel site, even if the concept of people sharing stories and pictures of beautiful places makes sense.

What does catch him off guard is the fact she mentions Helsinki, and then goes on to talk about the churches there, listing some of them off along with what was beautiful or interesting about them. Their spires and architecture. He knows of them, of course, has seen pictures in some of the Old World books that the scholars and skalds had in Keuruu, but only a few photos. Not nearly enough to match what she seems to know. For a moment, as he finishes kneading the dough for the buns, he feels a little surge of jealousy.

"I've never been to Helsinki." he says, his tone even, as he splits the kneaded dough in two and rolls them into rough balls, placing them in two different bowls to prove and covering those bowls, "It would have been too dangerous. I stayed in Keuruu for a long time, but before that I was in Saimaa."

Turning, he leans his hip against the counter and picks at some dough stuck to one of his thumbs, "I've seen the Aurora though, many times. It doesn't stop being beautiful."

[tenuefarfalla]

Cho knows nothing at all about Keuruu, but she perks up noticeably at the mention of Saimaa. "Have you seen the ringed seals? Or, no, wait. Saimaannorppa." She says the word very carefully, and again with the pronunciation of someone who does not speak the language, just slightly off. "I've always been so fascinated by niche species, and they're one of the most interesting, I think. The way they're so thoroughly split off from the next closest subspecies, and no one has been able to figure out the reason for it." Oh, or maybe? "Have they? When you're from?" Because that would just be amazing. "Or even just the reason for the patterns in the mottled colouring, because as far as I can tell there really shouldn't be any reason why that one specific lake needs such a specific patterning of camouflage? I would love to go diving there. See if looking at the world the way they do sheds any light on the question."

She's gone off on a little tangent, asking questions but not actually pausing long enough for him to answer them, working up a good head of steam. Which is why it takes her a moment to roll back the rest of what he's said. "Why is Helsinki dangerous? I thought the crime rate was super low."

[scowlish]

When she mentions Saimaaorppa, Onni raises both his brows, feels a distinct little burst of sadness at the excited way she speaks about them. She goes on and on talking about them - their relationship with the next species, their colouration and why they might have it, about wanting to go diving in Saimaa to see if it explains their particular fur patterns.

Without really meaning to, he ducks his head, frowning, looking down at his hands for a moment before pushing away from the counter and walking over to the sink, where he wets his hands and washes the melted butter and drying dough from them. Scraping a bit of the dough off with a dull thumbnail, he frowns and scrubs at the skin until he feels clean.

"That would be nice, to find out why they were coloured like that. But I don't think there are many Saimaannorppa left in the lakes, if any at all. At least none that would give you any insight into that sort of thing."

Shaking the water off his hands, he reaches for a towel and dries them, hangs it back up and then turns to look at her, "It's for the same reason that Helsinki is dangerous. There was a deadly outbreak, in the world I came from. A disease that wiped out most of the population of every type of mammal except cats. Even humans."

[tenuefarfalla]

Oh dear. Cho has a brief moment of déjà vu, the look on Ben's face as she stuffed her entire foot into her mouth, metaphorically speaking. Her enthusiasm carries her away, gets her all swept up and allows her excitement to override her common sense.

"Oh no... I've done it again. I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have--" What? Spoken? Maybe. There's not exactly an easy or natural way of asking someone if their world has been ravaged by war or disease or some sort of supernatural catastrophe. No way to know until she's said something insensitive and stupid. "I didn't-- I can go, if you want me to."

[scowlish]

The look of horror on her face is a little surprising, and at first he misinterprets the reason for it, thinking it's because of the extinction of the seals. But when she says she shouldn't have done something and asks if he wants her to go, he blinks, shakes his head.

"Why would I want you to go?" he asks, a bit confused. She had no way of knowing that his world was like that, so the idea of her needing to leave seems strange.

[tenuefarfalla]

"I-- because I made you think of something sad. I've been doing it this whole time. Talking about things that-- they don't exist any more, do they?" Or if they do, they aren't safe, not places you can go and things you can see. Except the lights. He still has the lights. "It must have hurt to hear, and I just... kept going." She hadn't known, yes, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt to be reminded of things that have been lost. "I'm sorry. For what happened, and for bringing it up."

She doesn't leave, though, because he didn't ask her to, seemed surprised that she would. So maybe having her there doesn't bother him. Maybe he's so far removed from it that he doesn't think about the loss. Or maybe he's found an inner calm, where things wash over him, where he lets go of painful things as soon as they touch him. Cho has always envied people who can do that.

[scowlish]

When Cho says that she made him think of something sad, that she'd been doing it this whole time talking about things that don't exist anymore for him, or that are in places he can't go, and how it must have hurt to hear it. Pursing his mouth a little, brows still furrowed, he shrugs and shakes his head again.

"I think of something sad almost all the time, every day. It doesn't matter if you mention it or not, I'll still think it. Anyway, you had no way of knowing."

It comes out very serious, a little flat, but genuine. It isn't a sense of inner calm, it isn't a sense of being removed from it, it's just that it's a drop in a very large bucket. It's hard to hold a grudge over talk of Finnish seals when he can barely go an hour or two without thinking of his dead sister, or the loss of his parents, or the trip out into Saimaa that he'll be finishing once he gets home from this place.

"Don't apologize. You didn't do anything wrong."

[tenuefarfalla]

Don't apologize. That's a little tougher, but she's been working on it. She's better at it now than she used to be, when it felt like she was apologizing on a daily basis just for existing. Not so far removed from today. Still, yes, working on it.

So she doesn't apologize again. Instead, she reaches for the second plate of eggs, and holds it out to him with a hopeful little smile on her face. "Breakfast, then?"