The table was absolutely covered with food, more food than they could ever possibly hope to eat in one al with ten of them there, much less only the five of them— and Janus’s parents were still scurrying through the kitchen with the last few dishes. It slled heavenly. “Oh!” Janus’s mother spotted the two of them, then waved at Janus with a very recognizably co hither sort of gesture. “Help with the roast duck, I need another pair of hands…”
Giving him a helpless look, Janus allowed himself to be dragged over to… whatever that was, leaving him alone for a mont in the whirling ss of things. Only for a mont though— it didn’t take long for his father to drift by and place a plate of dumplings on the table and strike up a conversation. “I haven’t t you yet. Mingtian, no?” He nodded, but the older man had already continued on without even glancing up at him. “You’ve a nice na. aning… sothing, sothing, luminous sky if I had to guess? It’s hard to tell, what with how often the language changes and then changes back on the whims of cultivators…”
“Bright sky,” he murmured in response, very deliberately leaving out the daoist part of the title. “It ans bright sky.”
“A nice na indeed.” He gave him a shallow bow in belated greeting. “ I’m Starr, nice to et you.”
“You too. If you don’t mind my curiosity, what do you do? So sort of linguistics related thing?”
“No, that’s…” he sighed. “That’s just a hobby. There’s little place for Beixian-style linguistics study in East Saffron, these days…” for a long mont, he was quiet. “It was my grandfather’s great passion, to study the language of Beixian Port of Stars. We had— have— one of the most interesting languages on Aurelia, before…” the city had been utterly razed. “What with all the off-planet connections, you know? But! That’s too grim a topic for a festival day like today! Co, help set the last little bit of stuff for the table and then we can talk on happier matters over a very happy feast.”
“Of course.” It didn’t take all that long— only a few amusing minutes, as Janus got pulled along by his mother and then his father fussed over the last few, smallest details. Then they called Aimi down and sat, and in silence for a mont looked out at the spread of delicious food before them, auras stained with an almost lancholy feel— if only just for a mont. Aimi didn’t understand, clearly, but Janus’s parents… clearly, they knew exactly what was going on.
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A brief mont for mory. Then, with a smile, Starr waved his hand towards the feast and bid everyone— “dig in! Food’s not going to eat itself!” Mingtian didn’t need to be told twice— everything looked incredible.
Janus picked out so sort of… breaded seafood dish, so dumplings, so… really just a whole bunch of food that Mingtian hadn’t seen in the city before. A bunch of really unhealthy looking food at that. It was a feast though, so Mingtian supposed he could cut him so slack.
Tentatively, he reached out and grabbed so of the… calamari? It looked like calamari, which was pretty interesting. The last ti he’d had that kind of food was back when he’d helped move the Order of the Fathomless Codex’s vault world when it’d co under attack from those squid things encroaching out of the Crystal Exclusion Zone…
In retrospect those couldn’t by any mortal standard be counted calamari, even if they had ended up eating a bunch of them. Fun tis, though, even if it’d gotten a bit dicey once or twice.
This stuff was good, though. A perfect dichotomy between crunchy and chewy and buttery that he couldn’t help but appreciate. “What is this?” Maybe Lily would appreciate sothing like this co the end of the sester…
Janus grinned. “Beixian food! A bit of a pain to get seafood in East Saffron, but it’s totally worth it— this is the best stuff.” Even Aimi seed to be loving the food, though she very particularly gave the mussels and clams a wide berth. Even Janus didn’t dare try and eat the raw oysters, which was a sha, because Mingtian thought they were rather high quality for seafood this far from the actual sea.
“I’m glad you like the food— you should have seen Janus earlier!” Starr laughed, and Janus blushed furiously. “He was so worried that you wouldn’t like seafood that he had us cook the duck— though maybe that was just an excuse to have one of his favorite foods, no?”
“It’s not that!” His mother raised an eyebrow his way, and he wilted. “Okay, well, it’s not totally that, alright? I just wanted to make sure that our guest would enjoy his night with us,” he transparently and obviously lied. Everyone else just laughed. Even Aimi, though Mingtian got the impression she didn’t really know what she was laughing at.
So it went.
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