It is practically impossible to ruin a salad.

And yet, the kitchen is strewn with the corpses of salads past, like the aftermath of a particularly leafy battlefield. This one was too sweet. That one had too much salt. Too much oil. Not enough oil. Wrong kind of leaves. Grabbed the salt instead of the sugar. Croutons didn't complement the texture of the kale. Wrong dressing. Tomatoes chopped too large. Tomatoes chopped too small? She's never had to think what "bite-size" is for a god, and this has to be [i]perfect.[/i]

Once more, she inspects it, scrutinizing it from every angle. If you make everything small, you sidestep the size issue, so in theory this salad [i]should[/i] be perfect. Apples and grapes from the gardens, some nuts she's ground to fragments in her palm, and most curious of all, chunks of celery.

She pokes the celery suspiciously. Sweet, sweet, savory... water. And bitter water, at that. The acrid plant seems almost traitorous mixed in with its brethren, but the cookbook insisted it was part of the recipe.

The salad seems so lonely sitting in front of Apollo's altar. Should she have tried to make juice? Something to clear the palette after all that sweet?

"Apollo, god of servitors," she starts, "please accept this humble offering."

She's prepared for this. Thought what she wanted to say, how she wanted to phrase it. Written it all down on a card, memorized it, practiced the words in front of a mirror.

But now that she's here, at the temple, the words stick in her throat. 

"I hope you like it," she blurts out. "I do not know whether you enjoy sweets as much as I do. Because…"

She sighs. "I do not know what I am. What I should be. What I want to be."

Can she even make that decision? Even asking the question imagines that it's possible to be more than what she was made as. But… So is everyone else in this ship, right? The Coherents were not created to be guards. Dolce's creators never imagined a chef as a captain. 

"As we travel among the Azure skies, we will be among nothing but servitors. An entire civilization, divorced from humanity. They… They must have different ideas. Different ways of thinking.

"Please... help me to find a new way to think of myself."