fh_trips | Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine Feet Below Fandom, Saturday

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bde summer 2021: donut holes

Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine Feet Below Fandom, Saturday

It was another fine day in the Hole. At least, according to any still working clocks another day had gone by. That was about the only way of tracking them down here, other than general bodily signals like hunger.

Speaking of. Travis had decided he'd had enough sad lumping again, and was attempting to Do Something. Since he still didn't have any ideas of how to get out of this hole, he was shifting his focus to the growing crowd of people down here with him instead.

Who was up for a family style spaghetti dinner today?

[~~ocd coming~~ HELPS WHEN I DON'T FORGET TO UPDATE THE OOC NOTE FOR HOURS. Open!]

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Travis had missed cooking for large groups. Back in Seattle, the Station 19 A-shift had a regular rotation of who was going to cook dinner for everyone.

Spaghetti was practically a firefighting tradition, as far as Travis was concerned.

"Shouldn't have eaten that whole baguette," he muttered to himself as the sauce simmered and he considered sides. "I wonder if Hannibal has anything good for garlic bread. . . ."

"Do you need help?" Stark asked. He'd wandered into the kitchen because it smelled like food but maybe this was an opportunity to do something useful, at least briefly. "Or want help? Could I help? With...something? Anything?"

Travis was familiar with that whole "oh lord let me do something useful" feeling. He offered Stark a bright (slightly manic) look. "Sure! You want to make a salad?"

Oh good.

"Yes," Stark answered, far more eagerly than the suggestion warranted. "Please."

Travis pointed his wooden spoon at a pile of ~~moddable~~ vegetables. "There you go. Those suckers need to get eaten before they go off."

"Right. I can do that." Stark picked up a knife, and a pepper. It was going to be sliced very, very small. The amount of chopping on these vegetables was going to be kind of excessive.

And you know what? Travis wasn't going to say a word about that. He was pretty aggressively working on his sauce, too.

"I'm thinking we can set up a big table out there. What do you think?"

"There's more room," Stark agreed, not looking up as he reached for another pepper before the first one became totally unrecognizable. "Probably better than staying in here."

"Yeah. Who knows how many people will be down here by then."

"Not too many. I hope. I don't know. Do you think they know we're down here?"

"I think . . ." Travis said slowly. "That they know we're somewhere. I've had too much experience with search and rescue to assume they know we're here, specifically."

"That's...something. If they know we're gone, at least."

Yes, he knew that he hadn't actually noticed Travis and the entire fire station had vanished but bringing that up wasn't going to help anyone.

"We don't even know where here is, really. Just that we fell in."

“And that ‘here’ is a really big cave. But there are plenty of those that aren’t thoroughly explored out there. You know anyone in Fandom who likes spelunking?”

"No? No, I don't think so. I was in the tunnels once. Looking for my mask. But no, I don't know anyone who goes underground regularly."

"Why was your mask in a tunnel?"

"Because," Stark said, turning his attention to a cucumber that might come out of this still recognizable. "Because I lost it on Halloween when I wasn't myself and a raccoon took it and we had to look for it."

Travis blinked into his pasta sauce.

". . . Wow. I'm not sure which part of that I have more questions about. Or will hate the answers about more."

"I'm not dressing up again," Stark said, which probably didn't help at all. Of course, that assumed they were out of this hole by Halloween.

“That’s too bad. Dressing up is fun. What did you go as?”

"The Phantom," Stark said. "From the musical. It was fine at first. But then I wasn't me and I was singing and I lost the mask for two weeks."

“Weeks? Damn.” Travis shook his head. “Are you at least a good singer?” he teased, trying to lighten the mood.

That got Stark to look up from his teeny-tiny cucumber slices. "I...maybe? I don't often. Not where people can hear."

Travis nodded. “Yeah, I usually avoid singing in public too.”

Was this going to lead to campfire singalongs down here eventually?

"Don't usually want the attention. Not usually a problem, at least." Though there were more opportunities for karaoke in his life than he ever could have predicted.

It was practically a guarantee at this point.

“Yeah, my best friend could have actually gone to Broadway if her college theater hadn’t burned down.” Travis shrugged. “I know better than to compete with that.”

Re: Life in the hole

stykera - 2021-07-04 00:43 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Life in the hole

designateddadfriend - 2021-07-04 02:29 (UTC) - Expand

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