January by the Numbers 25: poffertjes (a ficlet)

January by the numbers continues (We’re in February now but hey)

From kunama_wolf‘s prompt poffertjes: a ficlet.

It was said of the humans that there were certain things they would always bring with them.

(To be fair, it was said of the Yonra that they always brought everything with them, and of the Pish’teck that they never took anything, never needed anything, and never kept anything. There were sterotypes about all of the space-faring races, and about the three non-space-faring but space-capable races who populated the same region of the galaxy as the others.)

It was said that as soon as there were five humans anywhere, one of them would start selling food to the other four. As soon as there were ten, one of them would start selling art to the other nine. And as soon as there were twenty, one of them would start making laws for the other nineteen.

And one of the things every single space-faring human group brought was food carts.

The Ella Fritzi was a human-run ship out of Luna, carrying a full-time complement of crew and staff, as well as passengers and crew. It wasn’t a luxury liner, not by a long shot, but it was safe, and comfortable, and it got where it was going in decent time.

Decent time was a leisurely ride compared to some of the new ships — it might take a week between stops, or it might be a month, depending on the distance and the spacing of the wormholes. SInce that meant its crew and staff were on the ship most of their lives, and since the Pish’teck crew members, especially, got kind of loopy if their chronobiological rhythms got messed with, the ship had artificial seasons as well as artificial day and night. “Summer” got a little warmer, the light a little brighter. “Winter” got downright chilly, but the Ordalian down blankets packed up tiny and puffed up warm for each cabin.

In the “summer”, Fervin the assistant chef brought a food cart full of hotdogs and hamburgers and gyros around the socialization decks. It always surprised the alien passengers when humans — who had three meals a day included in their passage — would pay extra credits for this strange sausage-inna-bun sort of food.

In the “winter,” Fervin’s cart carried poffertjes and hot cocoa, and the aliens and humans alike ate them up. Once, the elected ship’s-mayor (a civilian position, not related to the running of the chip, the navigating it, or anything except how people spent their off time) tried to regulate what Fervin could put in his poffertjes.

The riot lasted three days and threatened to destroy the Ella Fritzi. After that, the new mayor declared that, as long as Fervin’s foods consisted of things edible to at least humans, no regulations could be made about it.

After all, humans might have a need to govern each other — but their need to be sold food to seemed to trump that.

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