Chương 8: Day Eight

Dear Diary, Mondays suck, even in weird alternate realities. Okay, that's not entirely fair. Mondays might not suck here for everybody, but I apparently made mine suck, because I am a moron.

'But Tabitha,' you're asking, 'how did you make your Monday suck? You're brilliant and witty and smell nice, and you'd never do anything stupid without realizing it.' Okay, you're not asking anything, because you're a diary. Anyhow, I meant to wake up early and get breakfast today. Unfortunately 'get up early' and 'Tabitha Diaz' aren't things normally associated with one another, and today was no exception. I woke up, as I had for the past five days, to the melodious sound of Marie knocking on my door.

I stood up from my desk, wiped away the sleep-drool, and went to the door. I turned the doorknob and pulled, but the door stuck until Marie pushed it open. I wasn't completely surprised by the door sticking; it's a huge wooden monstrosity, stained black until I could barely see the grain, and the door jambs, lintel, and sill are all stone.

I'm not an A student in science or anything, but back in Camden I grew up intimately familiar with how different materials expanded at different rates to cause doors to get stuck. If anything, I suppose I was mostly surprised the door hadn't jammed previously. So once the door was open, Marie wheeled her little cart into the room, then turned to leave. That surprised me, since for the past five days she'd just handed me a covered tray and come back in an hour to pick it up.

"What's with leaving the cart here?" I asked before she got completely out the door. She half turned to face me, giving me a bit of squick as her spine twisted and her hips remained motionless.

"Devotions." she replied in her monotone way, then shocked me more than anything she'd done previously and winked at me before walking out the door, closing it behind her, leaving her cart in my room. I tried to open the door, hoping to get more of an explanation than that, but apparently I'm not as strong as a seven foot creepy albino, because it stuck fast.

For a moment I stood there, less than pleased at being stuck in my room, but before I could make up my mind about whether to bang on the door or start hollering, the smell of breakfast hit me. Now, I'm not going to complain about the previous days' breakfasts. Nobody from Camden is going to complain about a free breakfast. Okay, that's a lie, they'll complain, but they'll eat it, because free food is free.

The breakfasts at PCHA were a little bland and boring, consisting of water, bread, oatmeal, and the protein-of-the-morning, but the bread was still warm from the oven, the oatmeal was warm and thick enough to avoid being gruel while thin enough to avoid being cement. The protein varied according to the day; Wednesday's boiled eggs were still runny, Thursday's slice of ham would have been better with less sugar and more spice, Friday's bacon was perfect for plain bacon, and Saturday's beef resembled shoe leather.

Sunday's meat I didn't recognize, but while it was probably the best preparation, rivaling the oatmeal and bread in that regard, the meat itself was a little greasy and gamey. Today's breakfast tray was bigger than previous days; they'd each been the size of a decent sized plate, convenient since the tray itself doubled as the plate. Today the covered tray took up the entire top of Marie's little cart, and when I say 'little cart', I'm saying it's a comically little cart to be pushed by a seven foot tall Marie.

It came up to my waist and was about three foot long by two foot wide. So I had a breakfast tray that took up most of my desk, and when I picked it up, I immediately realized she hadn't just given me a big tray because they ran out of small ones. I shoved 'Historie of Phileo City' to the side, plonked the tray down on the desk, lifted away the domed cover, and my room immediately filled with the aromas of deliciousness.

The ubiquitous loaf of bread had a twin partner, and the oatmeal had two interwoven pools in the middle which a quick taste revealed to be melted butter and honey. I set to work on that immediately, and did not regret my choice in the slightest; whoever made the oatmeal remained fully on point, and the butter and honey added flavor I hadn't realized I'd been missing. While I scarfed down the oatmeal with a wooden spoon, I surveyed the rest of my breakfast haul. Oh, that's something I hadn't mentioned before.

Apparently PCHA isn't big on utensils. The selection started and ended with wooden spoons. Now, I'm not talking about the long handled mostly flat things you'd use to stir chili on the stove; these were carved into a fairly nice spoon shape, deep enough to scoop up a good mouthful of soup or oatmeal, but thin enough to actually fit in my mouth without showing off my impressive oral distension skills. The handles fit the décor of my room, thick enough to be toddler utensil handles.

They oiled the thing well, too, which implied a level of care most people didn't put into their wooden kitchen cooking utensils, even back in Camden, where you could pick up a new one at the dollar store. So, excellent wooden spoon aside, I mostly had to eat with my hands. So far I hadn't burned my fingers, but I'd gotten pretty good at sucking every bit of juice off my fingers. Grease stains are a pain in the ass to get out of linen, and I didn't want to give Marie any more trouble than I had.

So, back to Monday breakfast. Three boiled eggs, three links of sausage, three strips of bacon, one piece of shoe-leather beef, one piece of greasy mystery meat, one slice of ham, and two slices of scrapple. Quick note: if you don't know what scrapple is, you're not from Philly or the surrounding area. Scrapple is made mostly from pig. Once you take away the ham and the bacon, and you cut away everything that might be sausage, you take whatever's left and run it through a mincer.

Sounds like an abomination, and it probably is, but when it's made right it is absolutely the food of the gods. So long as you can avoid thinking about what you're eating, it's great. I ate my way through my breakfast lottery win like a machine; as I worked my way through the good meats I figured I'd be too full to take more than a token bite out of the beef and mystery meat.

When I got around to them, my belly didn't feel anything like full, so I tried a little experiment, taking a half-bite out of the mystery meat and a half-bite out of the beef. Amazingly, the beef soaked up all the extra grease from the mystery meat, improving the latter enormously, but still leaving the beef a little dry. I finished the mystery meat with small bites of beef, then used the beef like a sponge to soak up all the grease that had leaked out of the bacon, sausage, scrapple, and ham.

Still a little dry, but way better than Saturday's beef. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. I leaned back, amazed that I didn't feel bloated from this morning's breakfast, and noticed some different smells coming from Marie's cart. It looked to have a lower shelf covered by a pair of doors on the side. I leaned over from my chair and opened those, revealing two more trays and releasing a wave of warmth.

A quick check showed one held a whole cooked chicken similar to what I'd devoured on my first day here; a lunchtime favorite here at PCHA, apparently. The other took me a second to identify by sight, but after a second I placed it; pork chops, although they'd been cooked to brown on the outside. While I hadn't satiated myself yet, I wasn't exactly hungry, and the fact that Marie had dropped off lunch and dinner set off inner alarm bells. I closed the cart's doors and pushed it over next to my armoire.

I considered changing into a clean uniform, but figured I might be getting sweaty with what I intended, so I left yesterday's stuff on. I grabbed the door handle and pulled. Complete lack of motion. I twisted the handle back and forth, and it rotated freely; I even heard the bolt sliding out of the jamb. I set one foot on the wall beside the door and pulled as hard as I could; if I couldn't pull the door open I might at least yank the doorknob off.

No such luck; I pulled until my shoulders ached a bit, and the door just stood there unmoved, mocking me with its indestructible solidity. I was a prisoner in my room, apparently. After a second, while I stood there working my shoulders until they stopped cramping up, I remembered what Marie said.

'Devotions'. Apparently, while I had the day off, PCHA expected me to waste the whole day praying or some shit. My inner alarm bells ratcheted up a notch; this seemed a little ominous for a kid from a town where 'fundie' and 'racist asshole' were often synonymous. Sure, I had food for the day, thanks to Marie, but I remembered that wink and realized that the powers-that-be might expect me to spend the day fasting as well as praying.

My new body didn't have the comfortable padding of my old one, which meant I wasn't about to start experimenting with how long I could go without food. So thanks to Marie I had food. Thanks to my visit to the Library, I had something to read. This didn't seem all that bad, until I remembered that food normally had consequences.

Have you ever done something so ubiquitously that you didn't really think about doing it, you just kind of did it, and then you stopped doing it, and you didn't realize you'd stopped until something actively reminded you? Yeah, let me tell you, when the thing in question is a major bodily function, that kind of shit will blow your mind like nothing else. I hadn't taken a crap or piss since I arrived here.

After a few minutes of panicked poking at my belly, I'd confirmed that nothing had distended, nothing hurt or felt like a blockage. Somehow, despite eating three big meals a day plus the monster breakfast I'd just downed, I wasn't a giant shit-balloon waiting to pop. I spent a little bit of time sitting on my bed, knees drawn up with my arms around them, head down, doing my best not to go completely catatonic.

After a little bit the cool stone against my back got uncomfortable, which gently pulled me back to reality. My muscles ached when I pushed them. My butt hurt when I sat too still on my uncomfy chair. My body's check engine lights seemed to be working. If I needed to drop a load, my body would let me know.

"God damned fucking weird world. God damned fucking weird body. This shit..." I stopped mid-sentence for two reasons. First, my inner alarm bells, which had gone completely offline while I debated my need to find PCHA's psych ward, came back online and ratcheted up a notch. Second, I realized that while my body was definitely freaking me out, I wasn't the kind of freak who got off on pissing and pooping. If my body didn't need to do those things, that freed up a lot of time.

Not only that, but it meant I could get a lot more free time from class by asking to use the facilities, since I wouldn't ever actually have to, y'know, use them. Sighing, I resigned myself to a day reading instead of carefully scoping out the social scene like I'd planned. This time I tried 'Law and Custom of Heroic, Phileo City Edition'. This one made the others look positively well organized and written.

I plowed through, and over the course of the day managed to pluck several bits of maybe-pertinent information from all the bullshit. Pertinent to my current predicament, every person in Phileo City was guaranteed complete religious freedom, although after rereading that section a few times I got the impression that just like back home, the folks writing this book seemed completely oblivious to the idea that 'religious freedom' might include atheism.

I mean, hell, there was a section on interactions between religions that included rules and regulations for 'resolution of religious disputes via martial contest', and another spelling out in great detail the required confirmation and documentation for 'consenting to the role of gift to one or more Gods'. Rules for a holy war? Sure. Bureaucratic requirements for goddamned human sacrifice? Right there, of course. Acknowledgement of atheists? No idea what you're talking about, what does that word even mean?

I almost threw the book across the room, but stopped myself when I had my arm cocked back to throw. The spine of the book creaked a little, and I realized I was about to demolish a poor innocent book just because it had been filled with insanity by some goddamned fundie assholes. It didn't deserve that. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, gently lowered the book back to my desk, and kept reading.

While reading through the convoluted grammar and weird stylistic choices made my soul ache, two other 'laws and customs' stood out. First, Phileo City Law explicitly stated that no person in the city was to be in any way prejudiced against due to their race or origin. It even went to great lengths to spell out what defined a 'person', although that left me wanting to throw something again.

If a being could communicate with others via any known language or translation device, identified itself as an individual with Agency separate from any other individuals, and had a Soul and thus a connection to the Gods, it would be considered a person and not a 'beast of the field or wild'.

It even had a subsection talking about group minds and 'mindless minions'; the former were considered a single person, and the latter weren't considered people but were assumed to be under the control of a person for legal purposes. More anti-atheist malarkey; my inner alarms ratcheted up another notch. The one last thing that I pulled from the book wasn't bad, per se, but managed to plant some butterflies in my stomach, maybe even a few a little lower.

Regarding lawmaking and enforcement, the laws in Phileo City were made and enforced by a democratic council. That council included the Mayor, who was elected by 'all the people in the City', although his term in office seemed a little iffy. Each 'religion of each God, with independent practitioners taken to be a single religion' had one seat on the council. Each 'Guild previously recognized by the council' had a single seat.

The commander of the City's defenses had a seat, and apparently had two extra seats 'during declared wars'. The Headmaster of Phileo City Heroic Academy had a seat, which surprised me a little. Jurisdiction seemed to be based on what council member had a vested interest in the situation, although the Mayor was pretty much a given for any situation, since, y'know, he's the Mayor of the whole City.

All of that seemed pretty sensible and straightforward, although just like back home, rich people and religious nuts both had way more power than I'd like. Each and every Hero, whether trained at PCHA or elsewhere, held a seat on the council, with jurisdiction on any and all cases that might involve or interest them. I'd never actually gotten giddy at the thought of graduating before.