Spending a night at home [P/IO/NK] [TW]

When out and about, Keina was known for her "rough and tumble" attitude. She was willing and able to fight whenever, in whatever way, if she was capable.

At home though, you could call her much softer. She had gone out of her way to acquire a small laptop. These things were pretty rare, as far as she could tell. Hard to get, hard to use. The perfect combination for someone that wants to keep their private life secret! See, Keina was working on a story. A really bad story, with an awful premise.

This was an apt description of most of her stories.

Which is why she never shared them! Writing them down? Storing them physically? That was much too big a risk! Storing them on a computer was much safer. After all, very few people bothered to learn how to use one of these, let alone how to find the hidden folder that she had tucked away in a spot that seemed like a configuration folder for some critical service.

Today's story featured a new original character, or "OC", for short. His name is simply Cecil.

Keina was awake well into the night typing away at the story. This is what she ended up with.

_______________________________________________

Cecil stood in his kitchen, wearing a blood red apron. The room was filling with a beautiful aroma as he stood over the pot heating to a boil. Spinning upon his heel, Cecil proceeded towards the cabinet and collected a handful of ingredients. Xantham gum, to aid in thickening his creation, alongside sage and some paprika. A strong sniff filled his nose with beautiful scents, telling him the ingredients were still good.

A job to the fridge let him find the onions kept in the produce drawer and, reaching to the very back of the middle shelf, past the red bags, he grabbed out the garlic, three cloves in total, before proceeding back to the counter. Cecil, and the others living in the house, had already used up half of the onion. This just made life easier for Cecil as, after giving it a quick wash, he could make four cuts the long way across the onion's open face, then make a handful of half inch cuts from the top of the onion to the bottom, moving along the open face. Finally, he could make cuts parallel to the face, going backwards into his one each cuts. Each of these final cuts released a number of nearly perfectly evenly sized onion pieces, exactly as he was hoping for.

Cecil had originally planned to use butter for the next step, but a brilliant idea passed through his mind! With a hop and a skip, he returned to the fridge, carrying the remaining portion of the onion. After placing it carefully back into the produce drawer, he grabbed the jar of rendered duck fat from the door.

Proceeding back to the stove, Cecil gave the jar of fats a quick mix with a tiny spatula, and then poured a small amount out into his pan.

[510]

After turning on the heat, it took less than a minute for the white fats to dissolve away and leave a somewhat fragrant transparent liquid behind. Cecil dropped the onions into this liquid, and went over to crush and mince his garlic. While he sometimes chose to skin and then precicely cut garlic, like he had for the onion, today's dish felt much more deserving of the "wild chop" as he put it. One hand atop the blade, one hand on the handle, he rocked the blade back and forth, turning it around a spot near the tip. After turning back and forth once, he collected all the garlic into a pile and repeated the process, doing these steps a total of seven times until he was confident the garlic was done to his satisfaction. He added this minced garlic to the pan of duck fat and onions, giving everything a good mix, before adding in the sage. He then left the pan alone, waiting for it to become aromatic, and for a nice fond to form.

In the meantime, Cecil attended his pot. It was at a low boil now, but he needed a rapid boil. While this dish was mostly safe raw if it was fresh, he had not done the slaughtering and prep himself, to ensure safety, and had decided that cooking it was safer. Essentially, pasteurizing it, though also thickening it a bit. While he wanted it to boil enough, he dropped in a few pinches of xantham gum and started stirring. It quickly began to thicken, and it started boiling faster. He placed a plate on top of the pot and went back to checking on his onions, garlic, and sage. It was beautifully fragrant, though the onions were a bit past caramelized. Oh well, they would still be good. He turned off the heat, and then went to sit down for a few minutes to let things thicken.

At some point, Margret came down the stairs, scrunched her nose, and asked Cecil "What the fucking fuck is that fucking smell?"

Cecil turned his attention from the book to his sister. "Oh come on, you gotta remember this smell by THIS point. It's sauteed onions and garlic and boiling blood."

Margret made a hurling sound and turned around to head back up the stairs. "You're going to kill us all with that smell! Seriously!" Cecil simply shrugged and returned to his book until his boiling blood was likely thick enough.

Standing up and walking over to the pot, he removed the plate and poured it into the pan, turning the heat back on just a little. He had to scrape down the sides of the pot a bit to get most everything out.

Cecil knew what he was making was odd. He was making something he liked. It was not a traditional dish from anywhere, as far as he knew. Just a nice way to consume blood while filling the kitchen with wonderful smells.

Well, wonderful to him. None of the rest of his family liked being in the kitchen after he made this!

[519]

Cecil began stirring the mixture, letting it cool and begin to coagulate. The concoction was his favorite way to prepare blood.

Ok, that was a complete lie. There were plenty of better ways to prepare blood.

This was his favorite way to enjoy blood as blood, not as an ingredient in some other dish. The iron taste was simply wonderful. Cecil recognized that most people truly disliked the taste of blood. It was almost a defense mechanism.

And people who regularly consumed blood, well, they got accustomed to it.

Cecil was different though, ever since his first taste, he was hooked. Though this was perhaps not surprising, all things considered.

Having stirred the mixture for few minutes, Cecil grabbed a spoon. Lifting a small, semi-liquid chunk out, he taste tested it, determined he should have used more salt, and also that it was cool enough. He would grab a container out of the cabinet and pour the concoction into said container, except for a meal sized portion that he would have for lunch.

Cecil placed a lid on top of the container and stuck is in the back of the fridge, near the garlic. It was then a leisurely stroll back to the couch, where he dropped onto the cushions and began enjoying his meal.

Or rather, he would have had there not started being a thumping in the garage.

Cecil sighed and stood up, walking towards the door, which was just down the hall. The thumping continued.

"Hello?" Cecil called out from the door.

"Cecil? It's Mary," came a reply from the other side. Cecil knew by this point the thudding was not knocking, so he had a guess what was happening on the other side. He twisted the knob and pushed just a little, then grabbed the spoon in his bowl and started to raise some of the blood to begin eating.

The scene on the other side of the door was more or less what he had expected. Mary had been down by the lake earlier today, and had apparently caught something nice and plump and was getting ready to butcher it. She was a bit of a sicko, enjoying the helpless struggles of a still living dinner, but the struggles would stop soon enough. But whatever, it was the natural order of things. If some regular animal predator had found it, the death would have been equally horrific. Cecil knew there was that whole "humane execution" thing when it came to food, and honestly he followed that creed. Struggling was too much for him, rather just get it over with, do breakdowns, and get to cooking.

Well either ways, Mary started with the bony bits that nobody liked bothering to pick out the meat from as Cecil took a bite of his concoction.

"MMMM" filled the garage, at a quiet level, as Mary discarded a piece that was fat, bones, and tendons. There was a little meat in there if you really tried for it, but nothing work writing home about.

[505]

Mary took the cleaver to the other end of the thing that was quickly approaching being a corpse. Even if its current situation was not enough to kill it, which was certainly the case, it would die to shock sooner than later. The cleaver chopped down as Cecil took another bite of his con-



Keina stared at the computer for several long minutes. She had written a significant amount more than was listed above.

But she was bothered by it. She disliked it. At an instinctive level.

She had a beautifully crafted sequence, which would slowly reveal to the reader that something was amiss. "Wait, fish breast?" would have been something the reader likely thought while reading the story.

Until the final reveal, where all the little oddities suddenly make sense. Mary would say "His name was George. We flirted, he said he wanted to take me out tonight. I suggested my place, since it wasn't far. He was cute. I should have considered having some fun first."

"You know what dad says, Mary, Never-"

"Yeah, yeah, never play with your foot."

The slow build up. The hints. All to find out the fish was actually a person! And Keina had had plans for this story. The family was all vampires, vampires that enjoyed meat even if they could technically subsist off of blood alone. Then another reveal: the horrid smell that the rest of Cecil's family hated? The garlic. Cecil had a rare condition as a human: his body could not process garlic (as well as other things). As a vampire, this condition persisted. So he was completely immune to garlic. Hence why it was stuck in the back of the fridge in a sealed compartment, so that none of his family had to deal with it.

This condition also meant that Cecil was the primary defender of the family! Keina was looking forwards to writing an epic battle scene involving Cecil pretending to fall to some garlic, only to stand back up, behind the hunter, and take her out.

But... Keina just could not do it. What she had written bothered her extremely. Had it been written on paper, she would have crumpled it up and tossed it into a fire.

As it stood, she had a strong desire to destroy the laptop. Luckily, she was about to resist that urge. She had not saved in awhile, and could erase most of the evidence simply by power cycling the laptop now.

She choose to do such.

Many of her stories were embarrassing. This one was just... disturbing. The amount of details she had managed to fill the pages with felt... wrong. She felt wrong. She felt sick. Why had she been able to write this? Why had the wrongness only occurred to her after all the horrifying details hidden away as standard craft were written? Was it just a symptom of humanity? Did everyone have periods of... Morbidity? Was this just a one off event?

Keina hoped so.

[500]

It had been a simple question. Did everyone have moments of intense morbidity? Did everyone occasionally go very dark? Was it normal to be afraid of the power of your brain to imagine scenarios?

It... it actually was. There was a phrase for it. "L'appel du Vide" or "Call of the Void".

Keina was very happy to remember that she was not, in fact, going insane.

(exit)

2100 words in topic

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