"Healthy ego on you, isn't there."

"What, do you actually find fucking me to be a tedious chore and are only doing it because it makes the pearls grow faster and aren't telling me because it'd ruin the effect if you did?"

"Oh, no, fucking you's totally optional, but who knows if I will still feel like it next week."

The next course is puff pastry covered in a lemon ricotta concoction.

"Fair enough." Fuck. That made her heart sink. Oh well. Nothing to do about it but drown her sorrows in puff pastry.

It's really fucking good puff pastry. Clearly homemade. Or, well, lairmade.

Crabcakes!

Seasoning? Sauce? Vegetal ingredience?

The kitchen goons put pickles in them and went with the classic Old Bay spice profile and covered them with some kind of aioli-hotsauce-mustard blend.

A little spicy for Katie but otherwise wondrous. She gobbles them up eagerly.

Followed by lobsters! With clarified butter! "I was in a seafood mood," she says conversationally.

ooohggghghghghg seafoodseafoodseafoodtastytastytasty. Katie would be saying something clever right now about how that's not surprising considering we're underwater and stuff but she's too busy wolfing down the lobster.

"You too, I take it!"

"Yeah."

Next up is rainbow trout in hollandaise sauce served on a bed of rice pilaf and peas.

Katie is... considerably less enthusiastic about this course. She does her best but avoids the peas.

"Huh, I didn't think the sauce'd be eggy enough to bug you."

"It's a little that, but mostly the peas. Katie no like peas."

"What's your previous experience with peas?"

"I uuuh... don't know how to answer that? Bad?"

"Are we talking split pea soup, steamed and sitting on your plate unseasoned next to equally unseasoned chicken and rice, primavera, pasta salad..."

"I think at least the middle two of those?"

"Okay. That goes on the list with eggs, then, there are lots of ways to do peas and lots of kinds."

Katie resumes dutifully taking bites of the trout and rice.

Next is baked potatoes loaded with shrimp as the star of the dish.

Anything else on them besides shrimp? Katie isn't the biggest fan of them, but she gets them down to avoid offending the woman who is, she reminds herself, her captor.

Cheese and Cajun sauce!