>>5239137You laugh at Cylia stomping her foot and yelling at the ceiling.
But as that laugh turns to a cough which you cover with your hand, you taste blood in your mouth.
Examining your hand, there are definitely some small spatters of blood there.
Can't be the cuts, since Sanig already took a look at them and cleared you. Must be from when Javan slammed into you, then. Those were actually some pretty hard blows.
Either way, you don't feel any internal damage right now, so if you take it easy for a while after this, you should be good to go. Assuming it's anything at all, that is.
Moving on, you get to work cutting more dough to shape and pull a bowl of filling out of the fridge, unwrapping it.
You had to make this while everyone was in bed, because the ingredients are... well, not exactly appetizing, even to you.
However, it's a new, overlooked source of protein that you discovered while on Thekia.
Mites. Dandaran Mites, which occasionally enter a station hidden in shipments of blue milk. Apparently they're a common pest found on the underbellies of the buggalos who produce said milk.
On stations though, they just end up eating trash or sucking blood from sleeping people and animals. Each one is about the size of your thumb, but what really got your attention was their appearance.
Somewhere inbetween a shrimp and a grasshopper, they have big, meaty bodies with large, powerful-looking legs, and a proboscis that sticks out from between their mandibles when they drink blood.
More than anything though, they definitely look like a shrimp.
You can't blame a desperate man for trying, can you?
But you're glad you did, because they actually taste pretty great. Not only that, but they basically have no exoskeleton whatsoever, except for on their legs. Pop those off and you don't even get a crunch, just a juicy morsel.
Still, a bug looks like a bug at the end of the day, so you ground them up into mince and mixed it with some toasted bread crumbs to fill it out.
After forming the filling into balls, you fold the dough up over them and press it closed, forming a bulb-shaped wonton dumpling which you place into a basket to steam for a while.
"Hey, what are those you're making?" Cylia finally asks, after she's done yelling at SHODAN.
"...Want to try? I've got one or two left over from the other day. Should still be good to eat... probably."
"What, you've made these before? How come i didn't get any...?"
Cylia pouts, but that quickly changes as you grab a small plate with the last two dumplings from your test-batch on them and toss them into the microwave.
Well, you call it a microwave, but honestly you have no idea what this thing is or how it works. It seems to heat anything you put in it evenly, from the surface all the way to the center at once. It's what a kind and caring god would have made a normal microwave to be.
Regardless, the dumplings come out steaming within seconds, and you quickly pluck one off the plate for yourself.
