Drake had opened a hidden cabinet and revealed shelves of food and drinks. He took out a plate and grabbed several things. A metallic sculpture in the shape of the plant, a slab of meat that seemed to radiate heat, slices of what looked like toast, and two bottles of what Vegis guessed was a type of liquor. The liquid inside the bottles glowed with an auspicious light blue light and had red specks floating inside of it. They moved without being shaken, carried by unseen currents in the bottle. “Hey Drake, what is this called?” asked Vegis while Drake placed the items on the table. He was grabbing cups and utensils when he answered the question.
“Ohh, they are some of the food I ordered from the homeland. The meat is from a domesticated animal that lives around the edge of lava pools, the sculpture is actually a rare plant that is capable of being grown at the depth of the oceans near geologically active areas. This drink I got here is something truly special though. It was made way back in the day, when the Sunkin and Drakkin were still living together. It is made from several now extinct plants, animals, and something that was called the “Blood of Huitzlios”. The closest thing we have to it is a liquid substance that came from in the rift.” Mitra said, “You must really like it if you know this much about it” as she took a slice of meat Drake just finished cutting. He let out a small chuckle before replying with, “Ah, sorry about that. I don’t usually get to tell folks about it since it is so rare. It only recently had a company reverse engineer clones of the original ingredients.”
Vegis spent some time thinking about it before saying something. “I really hope they can do that with that cocaine drink.” Drake tilted his head in confusion before asking, “Isn’t cocaine a restricted drug for humans?” Vegis acknowledged this and answered the question. “It is, but also it is not. It has some medical uses but recreational use isn’t allowed. Anyways, the thing I was talking about is a drink that had a secret recipe but the company went defunct and the vault they kept it blew up, destroying it. The only thing that most people remembered about it is that in its early days, the recipe had cocaine in it.” Vegis took a bite out of the slice of meat he grabbed. It was juicy and tasted like a mix of chicken and beef. It was warm and a bit spicy.
He then ate a bit of the plant. It had a strong bitter taste before turning sweet. It was chewy and constantly changed flavor. After a while, the plant dissolved and left a minty taste and smell. It was quite a strange experience for Vegis. He grabbed a slice of the bread thing and took a bite out of it. It was a bit hard and very crunchy. It just tasted like bread but Vegis felt energized after that bite. The more of it he ate, the more energetic he felt. “What is in this bread? I feel like I could run a mile.”(Vegis) “Ah, it's an energy loaf. It was originally made for war, it is now a favorite among my kind’s office workers. From what I researched, it is filled with a cocktail of vitamins, stimulants, and mana.”(Drake) “Does it have any side effects?”(Vegis) “Not to my knowledge. Just don’t feed it to the young.”(Drake) Mitra ate one as Vegis and Drake talked but immediately spat it out.
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Boreal giggled at this before returning to the plants it was morphing like toys. Boreal could mostly act like a normal kid other than the fact that it could still not talk yet. They still haven’t figured out why but Vegis guessed that when Boreal passed 50%, they would gain the coordination to speak. Boreal didn’t like to be near other people who weren’t Vegis and Mitra. They tolerated Drake since it was exposed to him a lot and got a couple of plants from him. Boreal mainly eats dirt and does a kind of photosynthesis. They could eat other things but it didn’t really have the kind of tastebuds Mitra or Vegis has. It doesn’t taste the physical matter, but it could tell what is in it. What it got out of eating dirt, they didn’t know. Drake wasn’t as much of a scholar of the old text as Doel and Doel had to stay in the south to overlook the place since the north wasn’t the only place with anomalous animal activity.
After an hour of talking, Drake cracked open one of the bottles and poured out a cup for each of them. The cups released the smell like kerosene and almonds with a small hint of copper. Vegis looked up at Drake after the drinks were poured and asked, “Are you sure these are still good?” to which Drake replied with, “Yeah. The sorctech they used to preserve this was incredible. In fact, we used the vault to keep other rare foods for the last couple centuries and not a single one of them even started to rot”. He then down the drink in one go and started to emit lifeforce like the trees in Vegis’s eyes. It started to then condense into a beating heart above him and release streams of red into drake.
Vegis stared at this in astonishment and Boreal looked at this in bewilderment. Mitra asks them in confusion as to why they are staring in empty space. Drake’s face was filled with bliss and when the red flow stopped, his face was filled with a deep blush. After a while, Drake sobbers up and sees that Boreal and Vegis have concerned looks on their faces. He asked why they are like that but they couldn’t answer. Vegis decided to steel himself and take a drink while Mitra just drank it since she didn’t know what just happened.
