Review – Voracious
Voracious grew out of a Star Trek fanfiction idea to not only give Lili O’Day a little more backstory and fill in a blank in her life, but also as a response to a prompt about making a good impression.
Needs
Chef William Slocum has been charged by Captain Archer to replace three people – a sous-chef, a pastry chef and a saucier. Plus, for his own preferences, Will doesn’t want to be fetching and carrying. He’d rather not be cleaning off tables or serving food. His current steward, Preston Jennings (seen in More, More, More!) had been the replacement for Daniels and has been moved over to Navigation. Furthermore, Will can’t just ask Preston to drop everything and serve food all the time, as the Xindi war has just started.
Impressive
Will has a free evening on Earth and takes a cab to a new fusion place that had received a good review prior to the attack on Earth. Voracious is in San Mateo. The meal begins with Will asking the server what’s good. She recommends two of Lili’s specialties – the Harvest Salad and the Duck Burger. The Harvest Salad is mentioned in both Reversal and Fortune. The Duck Burger gets a shout-out in Together. Will decides to have both, plus a glass of the house Shiraz.
He ends up loving the salad and its orange vinaigrette dressing (a reference to the later importance of oranges in Reversal and Fortune) and asks to meet the chef. The server arranges it and Will heads to the kitchen.
A Whirling Dervish
Lili not only has to do the cooking, chopping and making sauces, but also the cleaning up. She barely notices him as he comes in. Lili even puts him to work, asking him put a carton of blueberries away (blueberries will become important in the E2 stories. I’m so happy they are also important on Star Trek: Discovery). And so already Will is able to check off two of his requirements – saucier and sous-chef, and probably also table-cleaner. She offers him some of the New York-style cheesecake she made that day – and complains about having to also balance the books on top of everything else. He is sold. At the end of the story, all they have to work out are the details.
Story Postings
- Voracious on Fanfiction.net
- Voracious on Fictionpad
- also, Voracious on Wattpad
- Voracious on the G & T Show forums
- Voracious in context
Rating
The story has a K rating.
Upshot
I like the way it turned out and I think it provides a decent introduction to In Between Days. For a while there, it was the first story in that series because it fully takes place in 2153, as opposed to Paving Stones, which has a flashback to 2109 but mainly takes place later. I also like how Lili, who is a major character in the series, is barely present. She’s the ghost of later, seen through the eyes of Chef.
