"Frankly you could feed me my own cat and I'd eat it. Are those even endangered though?"

"Cats? Not at all. Bluefin yes! I don't even have to get them on the black market, though, the regulators and the environmentalists aren't the same folks."

"Could you bring them back with clones if you wanted to? Also wait hold on, that'd be a lot easier with tuna because they have bones, you'd need DNA from a bunch of different specimens or else they'd probably all die of inbreeding."

"It's not super hard to fix the inbreeding problem, you just need a lot more volume - you jiggle 'em till they're all mutants and the ones who live can establish from there."

"I see." Crunch goes the final cracker.

"The farm's got bluefins, though, they're not gonna die out, just get thinned out in the wild."

"Good to know."

"I wouldn't've guessed you worried about endangered critters."

"I don't know, I like... I dislike it when something interesting is lost. It's no different than losing the last copy of an old rare book. Except you can't digitize animals. Well, you can digitize their DNA, but doing that and then re-synthesizing it is probably harder than just storing a bone in a safe place."

"It's actually not, you can distribute redundant digital files more easily than you can find multiple secure places to store bone specimens such that you'll be able to get DNA out of them later."

"Ok, yeah, that's true. In any case, preserving unique things good."

"Maybe I should digitize you, so I can clone you if I ever need to."

"Wouldn't get my memories though. Presumably wouldn't even speak English. Might not even want to have sex with you."

"I mean, none of those things are necessary for growing pearls but perhaps they'd be a less charming dining companion."

"Yeah. You should probably keep my DNA on file, just, y'know, don't take that as an excuse to play fast and loose with my safety unless you want the pearl synthesis process to be a lot less fun."

"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.