Oh, right. Water. And dishes. Both bays of the kitchen sink were filled with water, water I’d been reserving to drink, so neither of us had been able to do dishes.
And so we’d accumulated a fair amount of plates and silverware strewn messily about the surrounding counters. I supposed I could drain the sinks, but a whisper of paranoia tickled my ear.
What if the water cuts out before I can fill the sinks again?
And once that insidious voice wormed its way in I had no escape from it. Not doing the dishes didn’t seem like an option though; just because civilization had possibly ended didn’t mean I could live like a primate.
Then I finally realized I could store as much water as I wanted in my inventory.
I stuck my display under the faucet and ran the tap.
It splashed off the display's surface and poured into the sink below it, causing a slight overflow. I made a frustrated noise and went off in search of a towel. Madeline glanced my way, but I waved her off.
I ended up using a bath towel to clean up the mess, and then got to figuring out why that hadn’t worked.
I knew water could be stored in the inventory just fine, after all I’d kept mugs full of it in there, as well as bottles of tea and cans of seltzer. So was the problem simply that the tap water hadn’t been in a container? Or was the problem related to it being in a continuous flow?
I tried submerging my display in the full sink of water, but no change occurred. I moved it around, but all that did was agitate the water a bit, causing another spill.
I cleaned that up. If it had to be in a container that was going to be a bit of a problem. I could use soda cans and bottles, but that had limits, as did the number of glasses or mugs that I had access to.
I wondered if I could put ice cubes in it. I grabbed some out of Madeline’s freezer. The ice cubes went in without issue.
Well, that was one way to store water. Not the most convenient, but it was something. I refilled the ice tray and stuck it back in the freezer. I was going to have to be really on top of emptying and refilling that thing.
I did have one other Idea though, and it was probably a better one. I grabbed some gallon freezer bags from my inventory. I filled one with water, and successfully stuck it in my inventory.
The Gallon bags could hold up to a gallon of water, of course, and while I wouldn’t want to stick a loose bag full of water in my backpack for fear of it bursting, they’d do fine in my inventory.
I started filling all the bags I had with water. After my fourth or fifth one, Madeline looked over, curious as to what I was doing.
“Whatcha up to?” she asked.
“Filling ziplocks full of water.”
“Why?”
“So that I can stick ‘em in my inventory.”
“Oh, that’s smart. Can I have a couple?”
“Do you have any more ziplocks?”
“In the wicker basket on your right, underneath the junk mail.” I looked where she directed, and sure enough there was a box of sandwich size zippies. They couldn’t hold as much as a larger bag, but they’d do.
I filled them all, and called Madeline over so she could throw her pick of the lot in her inventory. With a sufficient amount of water prepped for later, I felt safe doing the dishes again.
***
After I cleaned enough dirty dishes to overfill the drying rack, I sat down at the counter. With nothing better to do, I figured now was as good a time as any to finish that model kit that I’d been working on right before the world as I knew it crashed down around me.
I retrieved the box with its many plastic runners and vitally important assembly instructions.
I flipped to the page I’d been on in the instructions, and sorted through the stack of plastic parts to find the ones I’d been working with. The various runners and stickers were labeled with English letters and Japanese katakana. I didn’t actually know my katakana all that well, but I didn’t need to. I just needed to match the symbol in the instructions with one on the plastic.
The instructions themselves were in Japanese too, of course. Thankfully there were enough pictures and visual diagrams that my illiteracy was irrelevant, for the most part.
I usually liked to put on some sort of show or background noise while I worked on a kit. Usually that would be a video essay, or the adventures of one of many motorcycle-riding, flashilly transforming super heroes.
Madeline getting her ass kicked in a lovecraft inspired action rpg would work just as well, though.
I observed as I carefully replaced the blade on my hobby knife, that Madeleine's primary problem was an incredible lack of patience. Her response to just about any in-game stimuli was to immediately attack it, and continue to attack it until she ran out of stamina and either it died or she did.
That, combined with a complete refusal to just run past any enemies she met in order to get back to the boss she was trying to beat, meant that she had repeated dying in the same stretch of the level many times before making it back to the boss, just to die to the same spider minions that the boss always spawned.
She was having a rough time of it, but that was amusing to watch in its own way. I grabbed a runner labeled “ABS-C”, and cut a part from it with my double edged nippers. I then carefully shaved off the last little bit of spruing with my knife. I scraped my knife along the little white stress marks once, leaving a fine little curl of plastic that I brushed aside. That left the surface evenly smooth, but the stress mark remained. I worked at it with my sanding sponges until the white dot left the dark surface of the plastic, and the material shone with a glossy sheen.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
I repeated this process several more times, with several more parts, fitting the parts together as I went. The only parts that I did not treat with that level of care were the polycap parts. Polycaps did not respond well to sanding, and that the parts made from it were almost always concealed inside of joints, meaning that cleaning them all that carefully was pointless.
I entered a state of zen as I trimmed, sanded, and clicked together the pieces of plastic. This went mostly uninterrupted until Madeline let out a particularly audible sound of frustration.
I looked up from the plastic arm I was assembling to see that Fry had somehow climbed up onto the counter, and had been watching me assemble the kit. He was sitting some distance away, so as to have a clear view of the television and my hands as I worked.
Mick-chicken was still fixedly staring at the TV, but he glanced my way upon noticing my gaze.
Madeline had ceased her swearing, and I saw her defeatedly drop the controller on her lap. She pulled out her phone, unlocked its screen, and then tapped a couple times before swearing again.
“I can’t fucking google anything because the internet has fucking self destructed! And I never will google anything again because it’s not coming back because the world has ended!” She took a deep deep breath. “Which means I’m never going to beat this boss, or finish this game.” she exhaled, sadly.
I could of course tell that the source of her frustration wasn’t the videogame, but given that I couldn’t do anything about the underlying cause I decided to at least try and help alleviate the present symptom.
“Is it alright if I backseat game a bit for you, Miss Madeline?”
“Sure.” She looked down from examining the ceiling and picked back up her controller.
“So you're fighting the vacuum spider right?”
“Yeah.” she replied. I went on to explain its weakness to electric attacks, and that she’d missed a bit of a shortcut that’d make it easier to actually get to the boss.
As she played, I offered more advice here and there, and she fixed a couple of her worse playing habits. We pleasantly passed the rest of the morning that way. With my diminished focus upon the kit, I made less progress, but that was alright. Considering that it was possibly the last kit I’d ever build, I was happy to make it last.
Overall I finished the head and both arms before I stopped to prepare us both a late lunch. We considered whether or not to eat the last reserved ration we both had, but decided against it.
Instead, I was going to make biscuits and gravy. It was more of a breakfast food, but I was an adult and nobody could stop me from having breakfast twice.
Except for possibly Madeline, but she didn’t mind.
First step, preheat the oven to °350, and get your can of premade biscuits out and arranged on a cookie sheet.
Next, start browning some caseless breakfast sausage in a pan. For said pan, don’t use anything nonstick, so cast iron, carbon steel, or stainless steel, preferably.
Personally, I’d inherited this massive heavy bottom stainless pan that was my favorite for anything that would become a sauce, gravy, or just needed a really good sear.
When your sausage is nice and brown, use your spatula to break it into crumbles if you haven’t already, and sprinkle in some flour, stirring as you do so. How much flour depends on how much gravy you're making, and I can’t tell you how much is going to be appropriate for you. Plus, I hate using precise measurements in cooking, so I never measure myself.
An entirely hubristic practice, but what can you do?
Once you’ve got enough flour in there that there is no liquid fat visible in the pan, and the sausage crumbles gain a noticeably different textural appearance, stop adding flour. Stir the sausage consistently on medium to medium high heat until you get a noticeable build up of browned fond on your pan. Have a sniff, and if you can detect some nutty notes alongside the smell of breakfast sausage, then you're good to go for the next step.
If your nose doesn’t work, just make sure that the stuff on the bottom of the pan is pretty dark before continuing.
Start pouring your milk of choice into the pan slowly, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom of the pan as you do. The pan may have gotten really hot during the previous step, so be careful not to burn the crap out of your hand from the steam that’ll come off when you first pour in the milk.
Keep pouring and stirring. You should start forming a gluey mash, keep adding milk slowly to that mash to break it up and dilute it into a thickened gravy.
At some point, your oven will beep at you. Don’t panic if you're in the middle of something, the oven can wait. When you do get a chance, throw your pan full of biscuits in the oven, and don’t forget to set a timer.
If you already threw away/destroyed the baking instructions on your biscuits, just set a timer for 14 minutes. You might want to check on them at the thirteen minute mark, but you should be fine.
Season your gravy to taste with salt, plenty of black pepper, and optionally, paprika or red pepper flakes. Set temperature to low. Once your biscuits are out of the oven, plate your desired number of biscuits by breaking them in half and pouring a hearty amount of sausage gravy over them.
Enjoy.
So long as you don’t fuck up the rue, its a pretty easy recipe. The only other part that can go wrong is if you keep the gravy on the heat too long, it’ll curdle. Curdled sausage gravy is a bad time. This can also happen when you're reheating the leftover gravy on your stovetop if you’re not careful. Microwaving it will at least keep it from curdling, but the gravy might separate and overall it just isn’t as good as it is fresh.
That’s actually why I’d cooked it in this case, because if my inventory just kept it warm, it would curdle. If I pulled it out of my inventory and it was still warm, unseparated, and uncurdled, then I knew that the inventory could probably safely store hot food.
So in went the first portion of biscuits and gravy into my inventory. If the biscuits didn’t get soggy, that’d be another positive indicator.
After that, I served Madeline a portion of three biscuits, and two for myself.
It was quite good. I’d seasoned it with just the right amount of paprika and black pepper, and I’d elected to use spicy breakfast sausage, so I hadn’t needed to add any red pepper flakes.
Still, it was just spicy enough to stimulate the appetite and offset the mellow, fatty flavor of the gravy.
Great stuff, overall.
As a side note I used store-bought biscuits because making your own kind of missed the point, if you asked me. The whole purpose of this meal was that it was quick and easy. Now, I’m not saying some homemade cheddar-jalapeno drop biscuits wouldn’t make a great accompaniment, just that I didn’t usually find going through that level of effort to be worth it. Making your own bread or biscuits is the sort of thing I reserve for when I’m making a set-it and forget-it soup or stew.
Madeline was pleased with the offering, and so satiated she went back to her game. I debated going back to my model building, but I really wanted to make that kit last so I decided against it.
I read my light novels instead, managing to finish one of the two unread books that I had downloaded onto my phone.
Looking at the hundred plus long list of japanese isekai in my library, I was surprisingly unworried by the Idea that I would not get to see the end of many of my favorite series.
After all, most light novel series don’t ever get proper endings outside of cancellation. While I love them unashamedly, the modern light novel is the literary equivalent of a live-service videogame. They continue indefinitely, franchising themselves until they get the ax, the author burns out, or they just die. There are exceptions, but proper, planned endings aren't generally in the cards.
Much like life itself actually.
I guess I felt a bit melancholy about it, but I loved isekai series because they weren’t about endings.
They were about new beginnings, and the never ending adventures that followed.