Cara was wandering through the park with a box full of apples. The market had got the new delivery in, and the old ones had to go. They weren’t bad, just slightly less glossy than the new ones. Cara couldn’t
stand that much waste, so instead of the box being thrown away in the dumpster,
she had offered to take it around to give the apples away for free. Not only
did it save the massive waste of valuable food, but she would also be giving
precious vitamins and minerals from fresh fruit to people free of charge. It
was a win-win.

Several children had accepted (one had screamed ‘stranger
danger!’ and fled, which she could accept), some older people wandering through
admiring the gardens were grateful for the fresh sweet apples and a few dog
walkers had taken the apples with a smile. She had even convinced a homeless
man (‘I don’t take charity from no-one!’) to take three, to lighten her load
and help the environment.

There were a few other people around, but her current target
was a boy sitting on a bench drawing. She plopped down next to him and held the
apple box out towards him.

 “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

She smiled. Free stuff was everyone’s favourite thing,
right?

It was hard to draw feathers. Or, more specifically, it was hard to draw wings; Persi could draw individual feathers just fine, but drawing wings was much more complicated. Entirely apart from the shape (which was a pain, but he'd practiced that enough he was better at it) the level of detail was always a mess that never got better. Sure, Persi could draw every feather, but that took an insane amount of time. Which he could do (with some effort), but then it demanded either equal or better detail on the rest of the drawing, or a good reason for the wings to be the focal point. That was harder to do. And toning down the detail of the wings was complicated in its own way; determining exactly how much detail to include, and showing that there were feathers on the wing required drawing some, but deciding and justifying which to draw was always a pain. Persi rolled his eyes every time he saw wings that mysteriously had wind ruffling select feathers, even if he understood why it was so common. Of course, he had yet to find a perfect solution himself, but he'd managed to learn how to shape him, if he kept drawing he could--

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away."

"...What?" Persi looked up and over at the--woman? Probably, but barely--who'd sat next to him with what might be the most bewildered look he's ever had. It took some effort to wrench his thoughts away from feathers and to apples. "Doct--what does that have to do with anything?"

Oops, she had startled him. He looked at her as if she had three heads. Actually, scratch that, she had been there when a tri-headed mutant had boarded the subway and the look she was receiving wasn’t quite that bad. Pretty close though. He seemed to be sorting through his thoughts so she set the box of fruit down on the bench and chose out an apple and began polishing it against her jacket, the denim buffed it up into a nice shine. She would give him a second to organise his thoughts before she tried again.

What did it have to do with anything?

“Well, nothing really, but there’s no way I could eat all these-”

She indicated the box, now half full.

“So I’m giving them away to anyone who wants one. Want one?”

She crunched into her own apple and looked at him curiously. He was reacting far differently to all the other people she had appled today, with the possible exception of stranger-danger kid. She glanced at his paper, maybe she had disturbed his deep, drawing thoughts. There were shapes there, that looked like wings, in different positions and degrees of being opened or closed. So he was sketching, practicing. If he had been trying to draw a perfect replica of the scene in front of him she might have felt bad for disturbing him, the park and its occupants changed constantly, and if she distracted him for a few moments the scene could have changed entirely. Seeing as it was coming out of his head though, it was not so bad.

“What ‘cha drawing?”

"Uh.... Sure." Persi wasn't overly fond of apples, really, but he didn't dislike them either, so he set the sketchbook down to accept one. It wasn't bad; not the best apple ever, but then, there probably was no best apple ever. That tended to be the result of not overly liking a food. But it wasn't bad, and Persi did have the still too recent memory of not eating, so that helped.

Of course, she had to ask a question as he was taking a bite of apple. He automatically inhaled, coughed, managed to actually chew and swallow the bite, then answered. "Angels." Falling angels, technically, which were going to turn into animal demons (why should snakes and bats have all the blame? Snakes were pretty, and bats killed mosquitoes), but that detail didn't need to be added, in case she was religious.

That did require a distraction, though. Fortunately there was an obvious one, which Persi was even vaguely curious about. "...Why do you have a box of apples?"

Ooooh, breathing in apple juice, that would be unpleasant. She grimaced in sympathy, tinged with a hint of guilt for asking him right when his mouth was otherwise occupied. He managed to pull himself together, though, and answer her question with far less eye-watering than she would have with half a lung full of juice.

“Cool.”

She imagined that would be one of the harder things to draw, people and feathers. She was a passable scribbler, if what she was drawing stayed still and had proportions somewhat like a stick-figure, but she knew that getting people right was really hard. Especially the hard bits, like hands and feet and joints. They were hard.

He changed the subject to the box of apples, and she took a bite of her own (taking care to chew and swallow properly, she didn’t want to repeat his coughing fit) before replying.

“Leftovers, from the fruitshop where I work. We had to clear these ready for new stock. They were just going to throw these away, perfectly good apples.”

Her indignance at such a waste was clear. As it should be, thousands of homeless people in the big apple, who would be grateful for even a single little apple, and the shop wanted to throw a whole box away. Seriously.

Persi wrinked his nose at her answer. Not that he would ever call it that, but that was what the face he made mostly consisted of. "Why? There are like... fifteen thousand soup kitchens in the city. And probably three times that many food pantries." And Persi had been made to volunteer at three what very much felt like every single one of them at one point or another. Well, that was one good thing among the many miserable ones; he no longer had to volunteer anywhere he didn't want to. Including protests. Especially protests.

Actually... that made him feel slightly bad about the apple. It could have gone to one of those soup kitchens, and while Persi might be unwilling to actually work there, that didn't mean he had to take food away from one. Not that it seemed to be heading there anyway... but maybe it would have, if he (and other people, but it wasn't like he could control them, so he) had refused it.

Well, he couldn't exactly send them a half-eaten apple. Persi stopped frowning at it and took another bite. He'd figure out some way to make up for it later.

For a second she thought he was protesting her giving away the not-yet out of date apples. That he was judging her for handing him something less than fresh. She was on the verge of defending the fruit (it was fine! Hardly a single bruise in the whole batch!) when she realised he was protesting the waste. Her ruffled feathers slightly smoothed she joined him in frowning.

“I don’t know… Well, I do know; they won’t come and collect under a certain weight category outside a certain distance from their location, and my boss doesn’t have the time to go around and deliver leftovers to all the kitchens. So I usually take what I can to where I can when I can. I don’t have a car though, so y’know, I just give it to whoever I come across, maybe they’ll pay it forward next time they can.”

It was a fair assumption. Even with New Yorkers being New Yorkers, there was always the chance that having their day improved a little by a random fruiting would sway them towards dropping a few coins in a beggar’s bucket, or signing some petition for locally-sourced ingredients.

“Besides, not just the homeless are lacking in fresh foods. You know how many kids don’t even know that strawberries grow from plants, not in the pop-tart flavour-making factory?”

Not that she didn’t enjoy the occasional pop-tart, it was the principle of the matter.

"That's stupid," too, might have been an appropriate addition, but Persi didn't bother it. "They all run on volunteers, mostly, why not get another volunteer to drive around and pick stuff up? I bet a bunch of people would rather do that." Persi certainly would, if he had a car. And any idea where he was going. "I guess that's as good as it'll be without someone being smart about it, though... someone else." That might be an important clarification.

"No." Persi made the face that was not a nose wrinkle again. He'd never really cared where food came from, but his mother had had one of those weird bee pots with strawberries growing out of the sides, so he'd known where they came from. And anyway, the food pyramid had been pretty clear, even if the lesson was years old and forgotten apart from the most generic details possible. "Don't they go to school? Like, half of elementary school was about that. That and math." Really, compared to the math, all the vegetables-are-good-! lectures had been almost tolerable.

She sighed, it seemed to make so much sense when put simply: we have leftovers, you want fresh stuff, someone come and get it, but once red tape and politics and the whole ‘we don’t want to seem to be supporting one place over another’ nonsense got in the way it just got stupid. Stupid was the perfect way to describe it. Stupid and wasteful.

“Yeah, I don’t have the pull to make calls like that.”

He protested the lack of knowledge by children and she rolled her eyes.

“And yet they still answer ‘the store’ when asked where fresh food comes from. You’d think between school and ‘educational’ programs on the t.v they’d know better.”

Hell, even Farmville showed that you had to pick/harvest/collect fruit and vegies. She blamed kids shows like Yo Gabba Gabba and the like.

"Well, whoever does should." Not that Persi had the slightest clue why they didn't, or who could do that, but that was beside the point. Someone could; they ought to.

It took a moment to think through what she'd said, and why it seemed wrong. Persi was pretty sure that kids--at least, more kids--knew where food came from. He used the time to eat more of the apple. "Maybe they just don't understand the question? The store's where they get food, that's a sort of 'comes from' too. I mean, if I asked someone where a book came from, I want to know which store, not where the trees grew or the factory is." He couldn't go to the forest or the factory, and even if he could, it'd be pretty useless. The store was where things came from, in the ways that were of any significance to his or other kids' lives.

...And it might be a little mean, but, he held up the apple. "So where did these come from?"

Cara was pretty sure that unless a whole bunch of people made a fuss about it her store (and hundreds of other, even less environmentally conscious stores) wouldn’t change their ‘if in doubt, chuck it out’ mentality.

“True, true.”

It was possible the little ones were being cheeky, trying to trick the surveyor. Or that they thought he wanted to know where he could get some, not where they came from in the first place. Speaking of cheeky, the boy indicated his semi-chewed fruit and asked where it had come from. Cheek deserved cheek in her opinion.

“A tree, on a farm, in the Western Hudson Valley, they were then trucked in to NYC, unloaded into the Basics shelves by yours truly, then from this box and (as you can see from the bite marks) now from your mouth.”

Take that, cheeky.

Back to the problem of the waste.

“I reckon, if enough people wrote in and said they’d stop shopping there unless they started donating their leftovers to charities, the boss might change his mind.”

Probably more so if people agreed to paying an extra one percent or something to ensure that anything not sold was donated to the people caring for the city’s homeless.

“We should write a petition, and get people to sign it.”

With a few neatly worded emails to the soup kitchens and other aid facilities there was bound to be someone willing to drive out to collect free food, she was pretty sure something like that already happened with the bakeries, when the day-old bread was donated once it couldn’t be sold.

[[OOC Sorry for the delay! 9hours of uni and three of work. Hope your average isn't screwed :/]]

Okay, so she did know where they'd come from, in hopefully more detail than she thought kids should be learning, because Persi did not feel like tracing the history of every fruit in existence that way. Oh well. "I'm pretty sure an apple has never come from my mouth. That seems like the sort of thing I'd notice. As long as it's not a fairy tale, anyway, but I'm pretty sure this isn't." For one thing, no one had tried to poison him, and he'd never met a fairy godmother. Of course, those things only happened to princesses, anyway.

"Is there anywhere else to shop? That doesn't throw stuff away?" It was sounding like there might not be, and that tended to make that sort of threat kind of ineffective.

"I dunno." Persi stared idly at the mostly eaten apple, since there really wasn't anything else to look at. "I'm not really good at that sort of thing." Of course, the closest he'd done to that sort of thing before was get dragged to protests and to harass random homeowners to join, or at least give money to, the church. Either way, Persi wasn't good at it, and didn't like it. That wasn't very promising for turning him into some sort of activist.

Were there places less irritatingly wound up in the politics, who were able to donate their left-overs to people without backlash? Possibly; the soup kitchens had to be getting their ingredients from somewhere, they couldn’t possibly afford to buy them all simply from donations, as well as pay their rent, insurance and any other bills such places might have.

It’s true, sometimes it did feel like she was in a story, written by some all-knowing power who forced her into situations just to see what would happen, read by other all-knowing powers controlling the other people in the world… weird.

“Yeah, I don’t think so, too many bad things happen for this to be a fairy tale… maybe a Grimm.”

She nibbled her somewhat diminished apple. She was fairly passable at writing, she could probably work out some form of petition or email or something to spread around.

“I’m Cara by the way.”

"Not enough princesses, either. Or talking animals." Persi was pretty sure there were other typical fairytale elements, but he couldn't remember them. "Well, and no fairies." At least, not that Persi had seen.

...There probably was a fairy mutant somewhere. Persi tried not to think about that.

"Oh. Right, sorry. I'm Persi." Sitting on a bench was... not a very convenient position to shake hands with the person next to you. Persi noted that in time to not attempt it, apart from a slight twitch of his hand that really wouldn't lead most people to think handshake, anyway.

True, she had seen some odd things, but she couldn’t recall any real talking animals.

“Maybe a mutant animal-shifter, but it’s not so common as it is in fairytales…”

Actually, lots of mutations probably had echos of the fairytale, or could be manipulated to fit them. Maybe that was where the fairytales had come from in the first place, someone had met an ancestor mutant, before mutation even had a name.

“Nice to meet you, Percy.”

It was nice, actually, to just have a chat, not based on gathering information for a quote in an assignment, or small talk with customers at the store, explaining what the stranger looking items were, where they had been sourced and the suchlike.

“So, other than drawing angels, are you doing anything else today?”

She was going to go and get a cup of tea, and if they passed by one of the many homeless-helping areas she might offload the remainder of the apples while there.