So you’re on death row for a crime you may or may not have committed, things aren’t looking good: you’ve exhausted all your appeals, the prison has a full supply of the needed drugs, and your lawyer’s gone skiing. The one good bit of news is that RhymerInc has the prison catering contract, and our chefs have access to continua skippers. Thus you can get any fictional food, or any food from Earth’s history, for your last meal.
What do you want? And yes, your grandmother’s chicken casserole counts as a historical food, if she’s not available to make it any more.
I want unicorn steak. From a universe in which there is only one surviving unicorn. Medium-rare, please. (For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee, and so on.)
Unicorns are avatars of Christ. Killing the last unicorn in any given universe is just begging for Aslan or Tulkas or Metatron or some such to come after you with murderous, chastening, or otherwise violent intent. Add to that the fact that I have no virgins on staff, and my fundamental cowardice…
Sorry, not happening. I can get you a Kentaur steak though.
What, you think the warden’s never read a book? You can order such a meal, but the prison administration will never let it be served. And even if they would, supplying ambrosia will endanger my contract. RhymerInc is in this strictly for the benjamins. In sum, you, silenus, and **alphaboi **are all too clever for your own good and will end up eating something from the prison cafeteria.
Shall I set y’all up with some lembas instead? Mabe with a nice raktajino to start you off?
You seem to want us to choose a meal that will do little or nothing to prolong or preserve our lives. I assume if I mentioned a dish laced with a fast acting poison so that I could cheat my executioners, you would disqualify that too.
Leaving out those options, if you are about to kill me, I’ll skip the meal and get it over with.
Actually, I’m just predicting that the guards won’t allow you to eat a meal that will let you escape execution. They’re not going to let a cake with a file in it through either.
:: shrug ::
Can’t see why I’d care about that. Though since you’ve been sentenced to death by lethal injection, I don’t see what good cheating does you.
Fine. Order the ambrosia. And this is what happens. As soon as the caterers arrives at the prison with your food, the warden, being no fool, asks what it is. The caterer replies, “Ambrosia!” The warden then says, “Oh, hell no. Does Sam think I’m an idiot? I’m taking that for myself. Here, give him these grapes I brought from home. By the time he knows he’s been screwed, it’ll be too late.”
So not only do you break your own rules and refuse to give me the meal I ordered, but you replace it with grapes and expect me to think they’re ambrosia? Pffft.
Anyway, I’ll be out of jail straight away - I’m not a he, so you must have imprisoned the wrong person. Hah!
It would be the warden keeping the ambrosia back, not RhymerInc. And he’s not going to let anything through that would make his job impossible. You couldn’t order a light sabre, claiming you meant to eat t, either.
Yeah, I’ll concede ordering ambrosia is worth a shot. I’d just want some nice quiche too, so at least I’d have a chance of getting something good to eat before I got the needle.
[There’s a famous beef in aspic – boeuf en gele’e – in his main novel. Their cook Franc,oise was pretty proud of it, IIRC, so it can’t have been half bad. Excuse the accenting – no time].
