WHAT: Chatting while making homemade potstickers WHERE: Kara's Morningside apartment WHEN: Backdated to Sunday, December 4th WARNINGS: Nah STATUS: Complete
There wasn’t much that Chloe liked more than cooking, but she was beginning to learn that she liked teaching other people how to cook quite a bit. She’d never really done it before – it wasn’t something she’d ever considered before going to the Scholomance when she was 14, and she hadn’t done any cooking at all in the Scholomance. The Scholomance didn’t have any kitchens at all, the food a magical slurry that had been charmed to taste and feel like real food (a spell her grandma had helped create) or whatever could be gotten from the vending machines.
But she’d been making up for it since she and El had left the Scholomance and found themselves in Vallo, both in terms of eating real food and making it.
She’d gone out and bought the ingredients for the potstickers before she made her way to Kara’s apartment, and had talked her through how to make the stuffing, stepping in once in a while to taste it and to instruct Kara to add this or that ingredient as needed. And once it was ready, she’d added it all to a large bowl that she brought to the table, and then showed Kara how to fill the wrappers: how much of the stuffing to add, the trick to wetting your finger tips to make sure the wrapper sealed, and how to pleat the edges.
Chloe dropped another teaspoon of filling into the wrapper, wet her fingers. “How do you like Vallo so far?” she asked as she folded the edges together. “I know you just got here a couple days ago, but any first impressions?”
Kara was working diligently on the potsticker wrapper, focusing more of her energy than was strictly necessary to delicately pleat the edges like Chloe had shown her. She had learned to be gentle a long time ago, to be delicate, but these tasks that required such tiny precise movements could still be a trial for her, even with her strength expertly controlled.
It was really the cooking that was the problem, though. The preparations she could manage, no problem. But matter how carefully she followed instructions, something always seemed to burn when it went on the stove or into the oven. She had probably inherited that from Alex, somehow; her sister had the worst luck with cooking as well, despite how amazing Eliza was in the kitchen.
“I like it so far! It reminds me a lot of Earth,” she replied, setting her fully pleated potsticker on the cookie sheet and smiling over at the younger girl. “But with a hint of something else, too. Something more magical.” She didn’t have a lot of experience with those places, but even she could feel the distinctive magical energy that hummed through the island. “What about you? You’ve been here a little while now, right?”
“About three months now?” Chloe said. “It does seem a lot like Earth though? Though, my Earth at least doesn’t have trolls and stuff. Lots of magic though. And monsters.” The monsters in Vallo, at least, weren’t nearly as persistent a threat as they were back home. She concentrated on finishing the potsticker she was currently working on before putting it aside. “It’s nice here though.” It was nice getting to walk down the streets without worrying about getting attacked by a mal as soon as she left the enclave. “We’re not staying though. Me and El. Once we gather enough mana, she’ll find a way to get us back home.”
Chloe didn’t sound entirely convinced. Chloe had absolute faith that El could do almost anything, no matter how impossible it seemed. But the longer Chloe was here, the more impossible it seemed.
Kara could sense the uncertainty in Chloe’s voice, but she chose not to comment. She was sure mana was a term she’d seen used in video games in the past, but she didn’t doubt there were worlds where it was real and in use. What she did doubt was that any amount of mana was going to let these girls leave Vallo. She’d spoken with the techs as S.T.A.R. Labs to confirm what the DOA welcoming committee had told her, and they were at a complete standstill, on a magical and scientific front.
But she’d never been the type to crush someone’s hope, so instead, she just smiled.
“Well, in the meantime, it sounds like it’s an improvement over here. Maybe your friend will warm up to it and want to stay a little longer,” she suggested.
“El’s not really the ‘warming up’ type,” Chloe said, with a bit of a smile. “Half the time, I’m not even sure if she’s warmed up to me.” She was pretty sure she had, at least, but how much of that was because of circumstances – they were stuck here in Vallo together, the only two people from their world – and how much of that was because El actually enjoyed her company… well, Chloe wasn’t entirely sure. She knew that El would have rather one of her other friends be here, Aadhya or Liu, but Chloe hoped that she did like her.
“It is. I mean, it’s an improvement to where we came from, at least. But we were supposed to go home, not here.” She faltered in her folding. “I miss my parents. And my grandma.”
Kara’s expression softened even further, and she looked down at Chloe with concern in her eyes. It was easy to forget, given their flipped student-teacher relationship right now, that she was a child. A teenager, technically, likely in her later high school years, but she was still a kid. Kara remembered how much she’d struggled at that age, still adjusting to her life on a new planet, having these incredible powers that she couldn’t use, and missing her home – her family, her friends, her entire world then destroyed.
“I’m sure they miss you, too,” she assured Chloe, reaching out to lay a comforting hand across her upper back. “One day, you’ll find your way back to them, I’m sure of it. Maybe not now, maybe not for a little while yet, but I believe you will.”
Chloe tried not to sniffle, didn’t quite succeed, but at least once she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, the tears didn’t come. “I hope so. It’s been four years, and I just know that grandma would plan some great feast once I got home.” Her grandmother wouldn’t have had the feast ready for Chloe – they could have been fairly confident that Chloe would survive the Scholomance, the children of enclaves usually did, but there was no guarantee for that.
“Sorry, that’s really depressing,” she said after a minute, and hit Kara with a smile, all teeth and dimples and sunshine. “You had a sister that was here before you, didn’t you?”
That smile reminded Kara of her own – sunshine personified, Alex would tell her – and the connection she felt to this girl solidified. Even through that smile, she knew there was sadness lurking underneath, and Rao, she related to that so much. There was always an aching hurt beneath the surface, no matter how much she beamed and preached hope and did everything in her power to be a symbol of goodness, a protector of her adoptive planet.
She wanted to prod further on those four years, but she answered Chloe’s answer first, her lips curled into a fond smile. “Yeah,” she confirmed. “Alex. I missed her by a couple of months, I guess. I miss her like crazy, but she’s happy back home.” She said that firmly because it gave her comfort. But she couldn’t say seeds of doubt hadn’t been planted when she’d learned about Alex and Lena’s relationship; maybe Kelly wasn’t the one for Alex, but selfishly, Kara hoped Lena wasn’t either.
“Do we think these are ready to go in the oven?” They had a full platter of nicely plated potstickers before them, and although she’d have no qualms about eating them raw, cooking them so she could share them with Chloe was likely the better choice.
“At least you know she’s happy,” Chloe said, and her smile took on a mischievous glint. “And oh no, these don’t go in the oven. You’re going to fry them!”
Chloe would help her, if she needed it, but she wanted to see how Kara would do it herself, first. Maybe that would help shed some light on why she always burned her food when she tried to cook.
Kara blinked. “Oh!” She hadn’t expected that. She had the worst time with the over as it was – somehow, no matter how strictly she paid attention, something was always off. The stove was…a bad time. She really didn’t want to make herself look that inept in front of Chloe if she could help it. “Could they go in the oven? I feel like that might be the safer choice.”
Chloe thought about it for a moment, and then shook her head. “I’m afraid not,” she said, with a little extra cheer in her voice. “Half the reason they taste so good is because they’re fried. If they were baked, they’d lose some flavour and would likely be a little dry. But don’t worry! I’ll be here to help if you need it.”
Kara adjusted her glasses, pressed her lips together, and let out a reluctant sigh. “Okay,” she agreed, “if you insist.” If she was Alex, she’d have made a more morose comment, knowing this was bound for failure, but she gave in without much more protest. Thankfully, Morningside provided their residents with proper kitchenware, so she pulled out a pan and lit the stove.
Chloe reached across the stove and turned down the burner. “The trick to frying something without burning it is that you don’t want to turn it up all the way. And you need to keep an eye on it; wandering off and getting distracted by something else is a pretty good way to burn what you’re cooking.”
Kara considered protesting that she hadn’t gotten that far just yet, but she refrained. She was willing to learn from this little mini Masterchef, and that meant listening and taking in what she was saying. The status of the stove was a silly thing to quibble over.
“That may be part of the probably,” she acknowledged. “Sitting still isn’t my strongest point.” She reached for the platter of potstickers they’d painstakingly assembled. “How many would you recommend we fry at once?”
“How hungry are you?” Chloe asked. “I think we can likely fit about a dozen in the pan at once.” She walked her through how much oil to add to the pan, and then how to fry the pot stickers – they only needed two or three minutes to become a nice, golden brown on the bottom – and while they fried, she asked, “What other kind of foods do you like?”
A dozen wasn’t even a drop in the bucket for Kara and her appetite, but it would do for a start. She’d rather focus on how many were manageable to cook at once than how many she could eat at once – those numbers were likely to be hugely different.
“I’m not picky,” she replied, arms folded as she shifted her gaze from the pan to Chloe. “I’ve always been a big eater. My sister used to joke that we needed a special bank account just to feed me.” She smiled fondly, her heart squeezing at the thought. “Potstickers are a favorite, though! Pizza, pies.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’ll try anything.”
“Same,” Chloe said. “My grandma has always loved cooking – she actually studied food sciences at Cornell – so she always had me trying a variety of foods when I was growing up. There’s some pretty good pizza at Nino’s, and Slayer’s Cakes has some pretty good pastries. But I’m happy to make whatever you want if you ever just wanted to stop by my apartment! Those are probably ready now.”
Kara stored those two names away in her head for later exploration and stepped forward to pull the pan off the burner. “My adoptive mom is a fantastic cook.” She stepped over to another plate and started plucking the potstickers free without a second thought. “Sadly, those talents didn’t pass onto her bio daughter or me. It’ll probably shock you, but I’m better now than I used to be.”
Chloe let out a startled “Oh –” with an abortive start forward as Kara started to pluck the potstickers from the pan – they could be deceptively hot, cooked as they were in boiling oil – but she stopped in confusion when Kara seemed totally unharmed, and after a couple confused moments, she managed to say, “Sometimes it skips a generation. My parents don’t cook much either. But then, I guess they never really needed to, with Grandma and now me around. Didn’t that… hurt?”
“Oh.” Kara set down the pan as she dropped the last potsticker onto the plate. She looked at her hand, flexing her fingers, then looked up at Chloe. She had a choice here – act as if she had some sort of delayed reaction or just come out with her secret. She’d been on the brink of doing that at home, revealing her secret to the whole world, but she’d been second-guessing herself.
In this world, full to the brim with superheroes from across the multiverse, half of whom were working on Defense with her, maybe there wouldn’t be any backlash.
“I actually…have superpowers,” she admitted. She turned her hand around to show it to Chloe – perfectly normal, not at all seared or damaged. “I don’t feel temperature the same way humans do. That’s part of it.”
“Seriously?” Chloe asked, bright-eyed. She’d been in Vallo long enough to know superheroes were real, but she’d never actually met anyone with superpowers. “That’s super cool! Have you always had superpowers, or was it like, one of those ‘oh no I fell into a vat of toxic waste’ things?”
Kara laughed, relief plain in the sound when Chloe had reacted so well. She really should have expected it. Teenagers were probably the best audience for her secret, especially those who seemed as kind as Chloe. She was thrilled that her reaction was awe and eagerness to know more.
“Why don’t we get this batch eaten,” she suggested. She scooped up the plate of potstickers in one hand and placed the other on Chloe’s shoulder, guiding her toward the couch. “And while we eat, I’ll tell you all about it. It’s a long story.”
“Long stories are best told over potstickers,” Chloe agreed, letting herself be led to the couch. She sat down, folding a leg under her. “But now you gotta start from the beginning.”