"Uh, there are probably a bunch? Opium, tobacco, cocaine, cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, off the top of my head. Lots of cultivation materials are psychoactive as well. Wait, does caffeine count? We drink a lot of tea and coffee. So lots of things, I guess."

"I think people mostly won't offer you things which aren't well-known to have effects without advertising them to you? The effects are like, the point. But you're right that wine wasn't marked as such, because nearly everyone drinks it at least occasionally. I can keep an eye out and warn you, if I notice something?"

Psilocybin mushrooms??? Aren't those one of the ones that cause fatal brain damage sometimes????

...she guesses it would make sense if cultivators' souls can handle even non-magical disruptions better.

"Thanks." She gives a wry smile externally and laughs a little internally. "I suppose it *would* be in your own interest too, for that matter."

"Indeed. For reference, the food will probably have some unspecified magical effects but - not ones I'd describe as psychoactive, probably." 

She nods.

"That makes sense, for an exhibition of food magic."

"What *was* your favourite fruit juice ever?"

"Mango! It's not - always profoundly good but it's reliably good and when it's good it's very good." 

"I don't think I've ever had mango juice! I'll have to try that sometime. I've had dried mangoes occasionally and those were good, so that's a promising sign."

"It's much better fresh than it is dried, I think. Dried, it loses something important about the texture and the aroma."

"A lot of fruits do. But we didn't have the right climate to grow mangoes where I lived."

Jasmine goes to reply, and then -

- their attendant is trying to get their attention, to explain to them the meal.

Kedri will set the matter aside for the time being, then. She's definitely interested in learning what to expect from the feast.

The feast will be a series of five courses, served in a 'chef's choice' style, each dish personalised for the one it's served to. The exact content of each course will be described as it is served. The final course is something very special, and will be an excellent opportunity for them as new students.  

(She's nervous about not having options or even advance notices, but she resolves to do her best to take things in a spirit of adventure. And maybe the food-magic(!) will help.)

"Personalised?"

"A chef's intuition for these things must be finely honed - they know the food better than you could, but they must also know you. It would be wasteful to present to you fine food that you'd dislike. So it is for all artists." 

(They met, like, a couple of minutes ago, though. And profiling only goes so far, especially with aliens. Presumably this is a magically-enhanced sense of what they'd like.

She tucks this away next to "Orichalch's apparent inability to communicate with her telepathically" in her threat model.)

"I guess we're making things extra interesting for you, having to balance a shared tongue and diverging tastes. I..."

She was about to say 'I hope it's the good kind of challenge', but there are a lot of cultural contexts where that would put pressure on them to pretend that everything's fine even while they quietly resent her for making their jobs more difficult, and she's not remotely confident this isn't one of those contexts. She manages to restrain herself.

"...I look forward to experiencing it," she says instead. Hopefully that constitutes a good thing to say.

(She is, in fact, looking forward to experiencing it, even with her nervousness.)

"You are not the hardest people to serve today, or even the hardest people running on normal human sensory hardware. The short notice is a troublesome factor, but we are confident in our skills. The first course should be ready momentarily." 

And indeed it is! The first course for Jasmine and Kedri is a set of three skewers each on its own plate, one of venison, one of duck, and one of eel, all wild-caught from different parts of the province and lightly grilled over charcoal, and each served with a sauce and side of pickled vegetables tailored to pair with that skewer. 

(That's a good point. What do you serve a cyborg spider? Or an amulet?)

It tastes like something you'd have at an autumn festival, people cooking meat over a fire right then and there.

The smokiness goes very well with the meats' inherent flavours.

The pickling is...intense, but not quite too intense.

To Jasmine, it's like the sort of thing you can get on any street corner (not that she has been on many street corners in her life), but executed perfectly - it tastes of freedom and woodsmoke. The savoury sauces and the pickles are very much to her taste, unsurprisingly.

(The Ship-Icon'd noble to their left is enjoying instead, small balls of rice topped with slices of raw fish, and the sheepskin-wearing man to their right is enjoying similar skewers, though he has four and none of them are eel.)

Huh. She had a coworker once, long ago, who got fired for safety violations because she kept eating raw fish and trying to get other people to do it too. (Kedri had refused, of course.) She supposes food-magic lets you actually pull that off.

It's odd for a moment to see that someone else got more skewers, but upon reflection he probably has a higher metabolism. They'll need to save room for the other four dishes.

Indeed! The next dish is the same for everyone - a large bowl of savoury broth, rich with collagen and pale and clear, filled with finely sliced strands of meat and vegetables. Eating it fills the body with strength, warmth and anticipation.