23 February 2011

That hammer is terrifying

I had made it through the first few rounds of a cooking/serving competition. I was feeling great about my chances for winning when the next round of patrons was announced. I would be serving Thor and his hundreds of workers/family members. I spent all the time between finding out I would be cooking for/waiting on Thor and arriving at the competition that night trying to convince myself that it was okay, "he is only a god", and other such nonsense. I was meeting Thor. Not only that, but I had to impress him to win this competition that I'd been working so very hard to win.

When the time came for the competition, he and his servants were all busy working on whatever it is the people the work for Thor do (some seemed to be designing cars, others hunting with him, and still others were just mining/landscaping). There were hundreds of them. I decided to begin with Thor and his hunting buddies and with my back to the forest that they were all staring into, I introduced myself and tried to get a feel for what he might enjoy.

After talking for a few minutes, I relaxed: Thor was a pretty cool guy and I was fairly certain I could make it out of this alive (and possibly even win!). I turned and glanced at the forest while I was heading back to the kitchen; they were hunting Impundulu, lightning birds in the South African mythos that are man sized and can summon lightning/thunder. I was overtaken with how powerful these people were and how easily they could kill me.... how little I mean to these people.

The first few courses went fine, and I slowly got used to being in charge of hoards of people in a kitchen while cooking for a god. It came time for coffee and Thor recommended I serve the people in the mines first, as they were working extremely hard. When I went to serve them (in their super fancy glasses of obsidian, sitting on obsidian plates) I realized the plates would make the coffee glasses much more likely to tip over into the void and began trying to decide if I should just skip the plates for everyone, or just for the miners. I didn't want points taken off because I was being cautious and my serving wasn't uniform. I didn't want to skip the plates for everyone because they really tied everything together.

I approached Thor at his desk and began babbling my problem towards him, while trying to sound like a reasonable person that didn't need to be destroyed with lightning. He laughed at my predicament, a laughter that shook everything around and made me worry for the people down in the mines. It wasn't a demeaning laugh or anything like that though, and I knew that everything was going to be okay. I was going to skip the plates for the miners (for the safety of the food) and serve everyone else with the plates.

Turns out, Thor loved the coffee so much that I won the competition.
My prize? A trip to the Yggdrasil. Victory.

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