Ambrose: Earthen Foods for the Keplerian Palate

Link to article: Ambrose: Earthen Foods for the Keplerian Palate.

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[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/altitudes-hub Return to Hub]
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+ The St. 2b21 Times
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//"Chercher une rancune comme midi à quatorze heures"//
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Primidi, Ventôse 1, Early Edition | 2.00 K (Cheap!)
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**Society and Gossip** - P8
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+ Restaurant Critique: An Earthen Import Squanders Its Potential
//By [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/chaos-theory-ii 4cc7]// ⭐★★★★

My loyal readers may express panic and confusion to see my byline in this section. Why, they may ask, am I not covering stories of social relevance, such as the ill-advised romance between the [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/SCP-6118 lab experiment] the masses call a savior and the [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-049 unstable alien "doctor"]?

Worry not. My career is far from over, and soon I will be back on page one. This sojourn in the restaurant critique section is a mere... strategic move on the part of the editorial staff. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the vacation more, perhaps, than I should.

You see, food has always been a secret passion of mine. It's the greatest symbol of the difference between us natural-born Ones and the lab-grown Twos, who get their nutrition from intravenous tubes.

I was in my kitchen making white cabbage when I got a tip from one of my old informants: a restaurant whose letterwork on the logo was in Earthen script had opened a few blocks away from the intergalactic docks. I gave it the usual payment (a cheat code for //Goldeneye 007// on the N64) and immediately gathered my overcoat and my notepad. My stomach rumbled for the white cabbage, but I controlled myself for the moment. If this story were as juicy as it sounded, it would pay for a whole lot more white cabbage when I was through.

I walked to the low-income end of the city, where the air smells of ozone and smoke from the proximity to the air-and-spaceport, and once every two days the wise and the fortunate will put on their sound-cancelling earmuffs before the rockets launch. There, from which the cream of the arriving human cultural products leave quickly; there where the dregs stay. From one window I heard the telltale sounds of a child playing Atari's //E.T.//; from another, the //Star Wars Holiday Special.//

There I arrived to a shiny, clean storefront amongst the boarded up buildings and detritus of Earth culture decades past, a place whose color palette was all in tasteful shades of blue and grey. The sign above the entrance read, "Ambrose."

I walked in and was immediately struck by the surprising lack of decor. Earthlings covered all their spaces in such a mess of objects, I would have thought the walls would all be covered in human movie posters and sports jerseys, exotic knicknacks from the faraway planet everywhere you looked. Instead, the place was nigh-empty; very Keplerian in design.

The walls were all blank, smooth grey slates, and the corners were rounded so that it was hard to tell where one wall ended and another began. The chamber was full of a dim, sourceless light. All the decoration the room had was a podium in the center, at which a bored-looking One was standing. It was clothed in Ambrose restaurant uniform, but clearly negligent of its duties at the moment in favor of a holo-projected game of Snake.

"One or Two?" it said without looking away from the game.

"What?" I asked, taken aback.

"You want the menu for the Ones or for the Twos?" it asked.

Now I was curious. Twos do not eat. What could possibly be on their menu?

And frankly, who would even bother making a menu for the Twos even if they could eat? They're synthetic beings, government-made meat robots. It doesn't matter that they stand upright, that they bleed as blue as Ones; they don't have the emotional capacity to appreciate the finer things. Even the most famous of them, their frail lab experiment, did nothing active to gain its status as so-called savior; if the rebel narrative is to be believed, all it did was submit to genetic experimentation by hardworking One doctors.

But I digress. In the moment, I knew I was no true journalist if I did not get my hands on such a menu.

"Twos, please," I said.

"And how many are in your party?" it asked.

"Just one."

"Two, party of one. Got it," it said.

It kept one hand on the keyboard and withdrew a menu with the other. "Attempts to harass other parties will be strictly penalized; we've hired Valravn's finest culinary security for the purpose. There's a booth open for you, third on your left."

And a door opened in the wall behind it.

I took the menu from its hand and walked through the door, into a similarly-walled hallspace, and walked into the indicated door.

Immediately after I closed it behind me, I felt something had changed.

The first thing that registered was the pressure. I still can't describe it fully now, but though I was breathing air, I felt a contact buoyancy and pressure against my skin. It was like being submerged in water, except... well, it had a different tactile sensation. As I floated there, perfectly weightless, my skin felt like it was rubbing against a warm, fuzzy blanket with a sky-high threadcount. Once the novelty wore off, it was... quite comforting.

The second thing I noticed was the total lack of sensory input. I could see the walls, grey and curved as ever, but that was it. The smoke scent from outside was completely gone. And my ears registered nothing but a faint buzzing that I suspected was mild tinnitus.

As I looked around, I saw a series of switches on the wall which gave me options for musical and olfactory ambience. I settled on the scent of peach blossoms and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and that calmed me a bit.

I spent a long moment floating there, my eyes closed, luxuriating in the ambience. This wasn't so bad.

But I had a job to do, and it outweighed my personal comfort for the moment. So I opened the menu.

And I found a surprising variety of flora and fauna options, prepared a multitude of ways. There were Kepler mainstays like blaster-cooked autru, disu-cursed eggs and roast jungle fruit. Even some of the more difficult and dangerous to prepare options were there, like alène fugu, for which chefs have to be specially certified to properly remove the deadly nitric oxide glands. But Earth foods were represented too: pizza and linguini, escargot, pulled pork, burritos, and rice served in various curries.

But were they really going to serve this stuff to Twos?

I pressed the menu buttons to order a nice autru-salad sandwich, a mainstay of my diet when I eat out at these fancy places. I figured it was the best option by which to judge the restaurant.

The door opened a half-hour later, and a One waiter brought me my tray. It pushed a button on the tray to anchor it into position in mid-air and left. I floated forward to examine my meal.

The portion size was astounding. The bread alone must have been fourteen centiStru in area, and the layers inside stacked up to a height greater than the width of my hand. It's some Earth custom, I surmise, to give you more food than you could possibly finish. Mayhaps you're supposed to sacrifice the remaining portion to some deity; I made a mental note to research this possibility later.

But in spite of its preposterous size, it smelled delicious. It had all the right hints of ground babel leaf and finely chopped zarquon nuts, mixed in with the freshest dairy smell in the mayonnaise and the steaming musk of the poultry. My mouth watered, and I wondered, briefly, if Twos had saliva.

I took my time. I looked at the sandwich from each angle, examining the cabbage leaves and the multigrain bread, taking in the scent, prodding it for the give of the bread and the viscosity of the sauce. A sandwich must be fully devoured by the senses before it is devoured by you.

And I bit into it, and it was the most delicious autru-salad sandwich I have ever tasted. My taste buds sang like choirs of asu.

I should note, though: the zarquon nuts were the stalest I have had in some time.

And so I chewed with my sharp One fangs, felt it pull apart in my mouth in the most satisfying way.

And at last it came time to swallow.

And I swallowed.

And I felt only air go down my throat and enter my stomach.

I frowned. I had definitely chewed the food. It had been in my mouth. Where had it gone?

I took another bite. And another. Each felt as solid as the first, and must have tasted as good, but as I desperately swallowed, sometimes without even chewing first, nothing went down my throat.

I //inhaled// the sandwich.

So this, I thought, is how you serve Twos at a restaurant without a digestive system.

And I began to think: to a certain extent, as long as you have all the right nutrients, your body doesn't care how fancy the preparation of a meal is. At a restaurant, you don't go to get full; you go for the gustatory experience of eating there. And at this restaurant, you can enjoy that without a stomach, esophagus or intestines.

And I thought: are Ones and Twos really so different after all?

But I came to see the folly of this. If we start eating with the government meat-robots, what's next? Deep philosophical discussions on the relationship between pronouns and identity with our toasters? Praise be to the government that creates life more perfect than that which naturally occurs, untainted by emotion or by love for white cabbage.

So I called for the check.

And as the door opened for the waiter to bring in the check, I caught a glimpse of two familiar forms leaving down the hallway. A tiny, albino Two, and a figure in black robes with a bird mask on its face.

The lab experiment and the doctor.

The interview opportunity of a lifetime!

The lab experiment had already rounded the corner and left back into the atrium, while the Doctor lagged slightly behind, when I bounded past the waiter to shout at them.

"Wait! Earthborn, 5a82! Can I have an interview?" is what I would have shouted, had I been able to speak at that moment. Instead, my tongue and mouth suddenly went dry, and my legs became so weak that I collapsed to the ground.

As the pair, blissfully unaware of my presence or predicament, left the hallway, I looked up to see [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/the-erysichthon-model an emaciated specter] appear in front of me.

"//You were warned,//" it hissed, "//Not to harass other patrons. We take that kind of thing seriously, no matter who you are.//"

I began to grow dizzy. //Wait, stop!// I wanted to say. //Don't you know who I am?//

"//You are full now,//" it hissed. "//You will be emptied.//"

And it reached for my neck, and I blacked out.

------

It's been two weeks since I went to Ambrose's. I woke up in a regen tube two days after the experience. The government patrol that found me said I was in a dumpster, unconscious and emaciated, moaning for cabbage.

Since that day, my hunger is ceaseless. Food evaporates before reaching my stomach in a way that defies all laws of physics. My white cabbage no longer brings me satisfaction. The only way I can stay alive now...

Oeso, how this pains me even to type...

Is via //Total Parenteral Nutrition//.

I have to eat like a fucking Two now.

So in conclusion:

TL/DR:

Ambrose had delicious food, but it wasn't filling and left me craving more. One star. ⭐★★★★

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Ambrose: Earthen Foods for the Keplerian Palate

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