Welcome to Gaia! ::

Most of the time people tried to keep Rep off of the kitchen schedule, not for his sake, he deserved the work, but for the sake of every poor ******** who was stuck eating the contaminated and abused food that he got his hands on. Today someone had made a grievous error and placed Rep on actual food preparation duty. He'd come enthusiastically equipped for his task, clad in a pink frilly apron - because it would probably be a shame if he got some of the things he intended to make on his clothes.

He didn't even notice Melvin glumly potato peeling at first, too engrossed in actually getting to make food for a change, setting a large pot on the stove and emptying in a tin of beans before giving it a thoughtful stir and turning the heat up.

Then just for good measure, he emptied in a can of tinned peaches.

Rep managed to turn the heat up full and then simply turned and walked away from the cooker and started systematically taking every single pot he could reach out and setting them messily along the counter.

It was only when he noticed Melvin that the attitude of cheerful mess and destruction seemed to flutter away and his expression dropped. It wasn't even a look of anger but a flicker of anxious fear and upset instead.

"Oh." he said.

Rep eyed the pot which was already bubbling over messily onto the cooker sidelong. For a second he deliberated not even replying to Melvin at all in case he set him off again, the blonde lifer had already stung him several times with information he'd given him before in good faith, he wasn't going to prod him into doing it again.

"Have you ever tried it? If not, how do you even know?" he replied, his tone not its usual abrasive self. There was no hard and fast guide anyone had ever given him detailing what did or did not go together, he just approached cooking with the same enthusiasm he approached most things.

Wandering over to the pot, he mixed it up with the spoon and licked the resulting concoction.

"No the worst ******** thing I've ever tasted."

He stuck the spoon he'd just licked back into the pot.

Rep took Melvin's silence and refusal to comment as a statement that he had been firmly put in his place by the palatable nature of the food and triumphantly slapped the lid on the pot -got food everywhere - took the spoon out - and then slapped the lid back on the pot.

Job one was apparently done.

He headed to the cupboards and looked through them for appealing objects to combine, deciding that sugar, flour and salt looked alike, so emptied most of each into a pot, before adding icing to the mix, followed by a lot of the prepared powdered milk. He decided that like-coloured food items had to taste the same really.

Stopping to eye the other shelves, he picked up a bag of rice and mixed that in too. The results got poured into a blender which he ran for a few moments before setting it proudly beside the cereal.

Only with this accomplished and the worktops and floors covered in his various ingredients did he look back to Melvin. "You no done with those tauties yet?"

The concoction on the cooker slowly but patiently started to belch black smoke that hugged the ceiling. "I'm a cook here." he said patiently. "It said so on the schedule."

He eyed the mess left behind and didn't see a mess. If people didn't want to use a worktop with flour on it, they were ******** pansies, he made sandwiches on the same table he'd skinned a bear on and he was just fine.

He emptied a bag of bananas into the bin because those were no good for anything.

When Melvin stepped in and unsubtly pissed all over his efforts by decrying them as unsuitable, something in Rep's expression changed. He'd been vaguely hopeful and excited but it crystallized into something icier. His smile filed its edges into his usual predatory smirk and he headed towards the other pots.

This time he grabbed a large bottle of vinegar and a box of baking soda with intent, and emptied them both into the pot, which started hissing and fizzing and spilled over onto the worktop. He turned his back on it and started rummaging in the pantry.

"No. It's my ******** job. " he snarled from in there.

Rep stood up straight as a board as he heard the door click shut, and his immediate reaction was that of panic, like a creature caught in a trap, everything about his posture shifted into coiled energy. He couldn't ******** believe Melvin had dared shut him in the pantry and giving him the initial benefit of the doubt, he tried the handle.

When he felt it blocked, his patience ran out.

There was silence for a second.

And then in a flying leap, the pantry door exploded in a hail of flying splinters as Rep hurled himself bodily straight through it in sheer rage, landing on his hands and knees like an animal.

The glare he turned on Melvin was not a pleasant one.

"Like I didn't already ******** know that. It doesn't mean I won't ******** TRY." he stood up. "I don't ******** shy away like SOME people. I don't ******** HIDE."