A human with a fascination with the history and preparation of toxic plants for food is caught in a survival situation, on a death world filled with toxic plants, with a group of havenworlders who require simple sugars. With a scanner, personal knowledge of ancient human techniques for purging toxins from potential foodstuffs to make them edible, and a time limit based on the amount of prepackaged food that survived the crash, this scholar has to find a way to process certain death into edibility.
Bonus points if the human has to or chooses to eat incompletely prepared food in order to give more packaged safety to the havenworlders and winds up sick enough to be miserable, but not too sick to gather, pound, dry, crush, soak, and boil things. -- Anon Guest
There are three Havenworlders and me. Stuck on this planet with little in the way of stored food, and a molecular disassembler/printer that is beyond anyone's ability to repair. My fuzzies are doing their best, but I know it's a lost cause. Good news, there's scanners that still work. Bad news, the batteries are fifty percent borked and they take five-ever to charge. I have a rotating system that will do.
Should have sprung for an extreme livesuit. That one would have had its own molecular disassembler/printer and none of this would have been an issue. But I didn't because it would have put me in debt, so now we're stuck.
Hi. I'm an idiot, and I have to science the living flakk out of a landing zone that's mostly toxic and mostly broken tools. Good news - the emergency beacon works. Bad news - it's still going to be months before help arrives. We've all got enough ration packs to last maybe three weeks if we try to stretch it. That means I have three weeks to sort something out. No Last Lie Bee Ess. Actual all survive situation.
That's a pretty steep slope since just about everything near the landing zone seems to be a carbon copy of the Manchineel or Gympie-Gympie tree. Lots of mostly-poisonous stuff. My priorities were finding the stuff that was the least preparation time as soon as possible. Likewise, to start such preparations as quickly as I could.
Consider the cashew. It's a highly toxic nut that is actually part of a fruit. The fruit is far easier to eat than the cashew, but it is very delicate and spoils easily. The cashew nut, on the other hand, has to be burned before it's even safe to touch. Bet you didn't know that there's no such thing as a raw cashew.
I was not lucky enough to have a cashew-pear. Nope. I got a tuber I called wood-tatoes. Sort of a yam, sort of a potato. One hundred percent tough as nails and involves as many steps to prepare as the moreton-bay chestnut[1]. The calories I'd get out of it wouldn't entirely match the calories spent processing it, but my little fluffies sitting tight in their sealed lab environment could handle the processing with waldoes and so forth. I just had to do the gathering.
"Just" the gathering. Like going out with two of the five scanners, one in case the other one died, with a sharp stick and repeatedly whacking at the ground until it gave way isn't hard work. There were also some leaves and seeds that scanned as potentially edible, so I grabbed them on the way back.
I'm footsore, I'm hungry, I'm not getting all of my nutritional needs met, but I can make it.
I'm a flakkin' Deathworlder. I have bodily reserves. I can split the effort of gathering and preparing reserve foods. There's one still for extracting clean water, and another for extracting ascetic acid. Why ascetic acid? Because one of the multiple steps for preparing wood-tatoes is pickling thin slices of that stuff. For an entire week.
I'm doing what I can, but the rinsing takes two more days before the boiling and finally the third cooking by frying. I'm stretching the ration supplies by only having one meal a day. That can stretch out the stock even further. I have Medik Jans monitoring me to make sure I don't wind up in a spiral.
None of the animals here are edible at all. Different biochemistry plus they spend literally their entire lives eating the toxic flora.
I'm gonna make it. Even if I make it to rescue, held together by spit and determination.
My fluffies need me. I need to make the supplies happen. We all need each other.
I'm gonna make it.
I'm not gonna be happy, but I'm gonna make it.
So are they, and that's the important bit.
[1] For those interested: remove 'chestnuts' from pod, burn, smash, sit in flowing water for two days, mash, press into patties, and then finally fry on a hot rock.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / rodrigues]
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