Faceless

Period 8: Food preperation and nutrition

Children are not chefs, I mean, it is important for them to learn how to cook, but expecting every dish to be perfect is completely unreasonable. Nevertheless, this was expectation for slaves. I was eternally grateful that my mother had taught me how to cook many dishes and had been for years. Thanks to that, teaching cooking was no challenge, but I saw a tinge of panic in the body language of many other saves. Mum thought it was important to learn it overtime and start young, like maths and languages. I miss you mum, may you rest in peace.

Funnily, I was nowhere near as upset as I should have been about the death of my family. I was thinking about them constantly, every thought that developed in my mind was a mix of escaping, murder and my family, but although I was thinking of them at all times, I felt little to no emotion over it. At first I was devastated, and of course over time you get over grief, but it had only been a week or so, that was too fast. Perhaps my mind had too much going on to have room for emotion, and it would all hit me later and I would spend the next month and a half crying until I was uncontrollably shaking and my eyes bled.

I still saw them behind my eyelids.

And they were all inside out, bleeding all over the place dead. Suffering.

I stood in front of the classroom of divines, all pale-faced from fear still. I sure was glad stage fright wasn't a thing I felt often. I started lecturing them about the importance of a balanced diet and the names of the different nutrients and all that jazz. Then, I handed them the recipes and got to the actual cooking...

The actual cooking...?

We all stared at the food provided by the school. Usually the students are expected to bring their own food, but seemingly the school finally decided to stop being cheap... But did this food cost money at all, or was it recycling? Where did this food come from. I saw at least one divine trying to hold back tears out of longing to not prepare this food, they were terrified of this food, and frankly I was too.

Despite the horror, we had to keep cooking the meat. The classroom was completely silent, both from obedience and mourning. The smell was something to remember, it wasn't especially awful, but the smell of human meat is not something you forget easily, and it hangs in your nostrils for a long time. It made me so curious... what did it taste like?

No, I must fight that urge.

A few minutes into the lesson, a divine started having something similar to a panic attack after the full truth had sunk in. She was screaming and crying, throwing the things near her and pushing the bowl full of meat and almost rotten vegetables to the ground. Nobody but her moved, everyone else just watched in horror, as they knew they were watching a dead woman. The girl fell to her knees, and I rushed to her aid. I didn't know what to do, so I tried to hold her shoulder to console her.

"Don't fucking touch me!" She yelled at me before curling into a ball, still cursing everything, she was visibly shaking. It was too late, she was inconsolable. The school would take this as an act of rebellion, and send her to detention, the 4th floor, to be punished. Everyone in the room knew it, and most of all she knew it, after making that mistake she had accepted her fate. A teacher swiftly entered the room and left just as quickly, the only difference in the room being that the girl was no longer there.

I had seen yet another persons last moments on earth.

And by god it was the most horrible punishment. Which one's worse, emotional or physical pain? I pondered as I unfortunately had to clean up the mess. Perhaps the punishment of detention would actually be more forgiving than the emotional pain of being a slave and watching people die.

Then I remembered, I had already been punished with physical pain. I had had my own face torn off, and that was when I realised emotional pain could never be worse than physical pain when it comes to extremes. There was no match.

And even if that was not the case, I couldn't give up. Not with the glimmer of hope I had that I just might be able to destroy this school if I can just get my hands on those chemicals. I just have to be patient... Surely at some point I will gather the courage to talk to someone like Thea, or I will simply have a lesson in the chemistry lab and have enough luck to need access to them for it.