The world of Torched may be finished, but the sacrifices of those who lived to tell the tales will not be forgotten.
The seeds of a new world have been planted.
Remember Aten.
Remember Jim Onion.
Glory to Mankind.
@RubixRaptor
mamdani may not be able to arrest him legally with the NYPD, but he could perhaps use loyal paramilitary.
perhaps... paramilitary from new york, domestically.
i think i know a guy.
People keep saying we’re in Idiocracy but President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho at his core wanted what was best for his people and when evidence presented itself he listened to experts to solve the problem. By all accounts a better leader than this.
In America, a warehouse store. A fully roasted chicken costs five dollars, the raw chicken beside it costs seven, and I stood between them like a man between two truths.
Golden. Hot. Seasoned. Spinning in glory under the lights, in a line of its brothers. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents.
I checked the raw birds. Seven dollars. Pale. Cold. You must do everything yourself.
This is not commerce. Commerce does not move backward. Somewhere in this building, mathematics lies defeated.
I asked the man at the counter. "How is the cooked bird cheaper than the raw bird?"
"Been five bucks forever. They keep it that way."
"But the store loses."
"Yep. On purpose."
On purpose. I held my receipt with both hands.
In my land, a lord who lowered the price of rice in a hard winter was remembered for generations. They built him a small shrine. This store does it every day, with chicken, and tells no one.
A woman behind me grew tired of my reverence. "It's just a chicken, sir."
It is not just a chicken. It is a wound the merchant takes on purpose, so that anyone, on any day, with five dollars, eats like a lord. The bird is the message. The price is the vow.
I will confess: I bought two. I did not need two. The second was not hunger. It was gratitude, and it was delicious.
Some prices are not prices. They are promises.
I return every week now. I take one bird. I bow toward the deli, briefly, so as not to alarm the staff. They have begun nodding back.
The vow holds. The bird turns. Five dollars.
Long may it spin.
USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen.
I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify.
In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather.
"Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully.
"Honey, that's what it looks like."
The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it."
I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it.
I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South.
It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent.
"Well?" the waitress asked.
"I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed."
"Everybody does, hon."
Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it.
Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating.
I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden.
It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.
Yesterday was so surreal. Had the craziest day on twitch ever with 651 subs in a 10 hour stream. All the while I won 15 games and only lost 2 in which we played 4v5(they surrendered 3-1).
Chat was competing with subs and I couldn't figure out how to order food through a Korean app so I ended up fasting until morning.
Currently top 1500 on the ladder on the 7th day, still work to be done but we are definitely on pace and somehow Vel'Koz seems to be working.
See you in an hour or two on stream again, no starving this time(now stocked up in 7 eleven).