The Kingdom of Southeast Asia and Oceania Grand Cook-Off.
At the door, the competing Cooks were having their nails checked for dirt as they entered the venue one by one for the start of the competition. Each was warned sternly by the doorman to be on their best behaviour for the evening's VIPs. That meant no cheating, no sabotaging rival Villages, no profanity. Failure to uphold the moral standards of The Slums, whatever those were, would be punished with heavy Slum Point penalties.
Karnon and Henry were standing around, waiting to be called up.
The trickster God had transformed into an 11 year-old-kid with azure eyebrows, Henry into a flabby woman in her 60s with high-waisted shorts and tattooed arms. Nerin was with them, too, but Rose had entered as a guest to avoid The Empire linking Karnon to Henry through her.
Henry's disguise was based off a real player, one JenniferMoran1986 from Melbourne, Australia. Earlier, there'd been a wild card tournament held for Central City Cooks to enter The Grand Cook-Off. Karnon had taken over the spots of any players who'd logged off part way, the God boasting to have submitted twenty dishes simultaneously. Of those, this millennial grandma had been chosen as a winner for her avocado sandwich.
Henry'd been given Memory Spheres of the woman by Karnon to study her mannerisms. The body language, he'd been able to pick up quite fast after his practice imitating subjects for Nilkan Freerunning. The personality, he stole from an Australian friend of his grandmother's. As for the sound of her voice, Karnon had casually taught him a forbidden voice mimicry technique to shape the air around his vocal cords with
Karnon cast an admiring gaze over the Cooks. "Doesn't the enthusiasm of the students expand your soul, Master Chef T.? It's a shame that we'll have to scramble their chances of victory."
"Did you bring the Spelltomes?"
"Scramble their chances of victory."
"HAHAHAHAHA!"
The God, nodding, shiftily pried open the front pocket of his baking apron like a back-alley drug dealer. Inside was a tome with a cover depicting a market littered with unconscious bodies – the Tier-8 Arcanist spell,
"How'd I acquire them, you ask? Stealing from The Library."
Nerin flipped the page of the book she was reading. "He's going to be mad."
"No, he won't. Nangha owed me a favour, although I did neglect to..." Karnon muttered the end of the sentence indecipherably. "What of my craftsmen, Master Chef T.?"
Henry held out a Communication Stone, from which Alex's voice rang. "Clear to go!"
Karnon, nodding again, swapped a passing Cook's jar of Noholese Brown Honey with one of Venlayan Walnut Honey. "You're up next, by the way. After that genius guy."
The God pointed at a hairy-armed Cook approaching the entrance with a large train of assistant chefs. A Thai-Indian player by the name of Ampoland, this was The Kingdom's most talented chef. He specialised in improving local Suchi cuisine through high-tech Molecular Mechanogastronomy.
"The Duke," Karnon sliced open the base of someone's rice bag, "has fiddled with the layout to have this prodigy's table placed adjacent to yours. You, JenniferMoran1986, maker of avocado sandwiches, was to be the foil demonstrating through your incompetence the superiority of The Slum's chefs over Central's."
"How petty," replied Henry. "How unnecessary..."
The Empire had no cause to fear Central City's Cooks yet. Central's best would be unwilling to visit The Slums after barely a day of easing the strained political relations between the two parties – assassination continued to be a threat. However, in the face of an inevitable loss, sometimes the defeated resorted to this kind of futile retaliation.
Karnon tossed sawdust into someone's soup. "Alas, if only these Slumbags had predicted the intervention of a pair of Mischievous Friends of The Earth."
"Stop lumping me in with you."
The doorman called to Henry. "Mrs Moran! You've been assigned to table 48!"
"Slumbering swordfish!" Karnon slapped his forehead. "I almost forgot a crucial ingredient!"
The trickster God sprinted away.
Henry and Nerin, showing no signs of surprise, entered the venue to begin the cooking battle.
Inside. Table 48.
While the remnants of the previous course were being absorbed into a waiter's Spatial Bracelet, the dinner guests at table 48 were observing the entering competitors and their exotic ingredients with fascination.
A toddler of three, standing on his chair, saw a baby antelope cowering in its cage. His little heart stinging with the realisation of its fate, he began to wail.
"Mom, they finna cook that deer!"
Beside the boy, Duke Jack, leader of The Duchy of Australasia, once the most powerful, ruthless gangster boss in Oceania, forced a smile as his eardrums were scratched by the hitch-pitched cry.
The event had a strict no children policy to prevent such disturbances, but the Duke had made an exception because the boy's mother was a rapper whom The Empire wished to persuade to collaborate with their Performers.
From the Duke's smile, one would have never been able to guess his tone in the group chat for coordinating the event.
-Jack: Can one of you slow cunts throw a fucking blanket over table 54's baby Speckled Antelope? Also, check that they'll be using a Dome of Secrecy to hide the mess and make damn-fucking sure that there aren't gonna be any fucking recognisable parts in the final dish.
-7rip1e: Sorry. Onto it.
-Jack: Hurry the fuck up!
The rapper and her kid weren't the only figures that the Duke was trying to butter up. Around the table were the faces of several minor celebrities, athletes, and businessmen, all of whom Duke Jack had spent the whole day on Ramiro's orders wining-and-dining.
That morning, he'd taken them to Suchi's scenic south-western coast to surf and dive. In the afternoon, they'd gone on a big-game safari in one of the adjacent, higher-Tier zones, where the group found a rare species of Yellow Megahog – he'd planted it. And they were finishing the evening here, dining on The Slum's most exquisite cuisine.
The Duke gave the wailing boy a rough, vigorous pat. "Settle down, mate! No need to cry for that furry Sheila. She's just here to help that bloke out with the veggies. Speckled Antelopes, they've got molars of titanium, grind up the greens better than a blender. GORGEOUS creatures!"
The boy cried even louder.
His rapper mother knocked the Duke's hand away from her son. "Don't coddle him, bruh. We out here tryna toughen him up. Boy too soft."
Although Australian, she put on a gangsta accent for her rap career. The fakeness was extremely apparent, but her fans forgave her this flaw because she was hot.
The Duke laughed toothily. "Well, if THAT's the goal, there's nowhere better for the little man than The Slums. Leave him in the streets for a day, and he'll come back chewin' nails."
"Whatchu mean, brah?"
The Duke winced. He'd meant that the rampant crime and graphic violence would toughen the boy up quick, but stating that out loud would be counter to his aim.
He jab-jab-hooked the air. "Martial arts! Why, just yesterday, the largest duelling facility in ALL of Saana opened up on our doorsteps. Nothing straightens up the spine faster than a bit of rough and tumble in the arena sand!"
The rapper gave an incredulous look to the other VIPs. "Ay yo, this fool straight-up? Ma boy three."
The Duke laughed. "Never too young to start! I'm pullin' ya leg, love!" He slapped her shoulder. "Keith, mate, have ya spotted tonight's winner yet?"
The question to change topic had been addressed to a young man with a chiselled jaw and an uncomfortable demeanour, who'd been focused on the entering Cooks, his mouth muttering about the unique ingredients and what delicacies they might be transformed into.
"...the Cintilese Duck Sauce complements the salmon's meaty flavour by adding an unexpected..."
This young man was the Duke's most important dinner guest, a food traveller who streamed his in-game culinary adventures. His ongoing commentary wasn't directed at any of the other VIPs but rather at the sixty-four thousand fans watching a live broadcast through his eyes, along with another 3.2 million who would consume an edited version of the footage later on.
By charming this one person, the Duke could captivate the masses, whose support The Empire was going to need in the coming days.
"Keith, MATE!"
The food traveller glanced back at him without a word, his expression dark and irritable.
"Ya ears clogged with cement?" joked the Duke, not taking the reaction to heart. The young man had been in a sour mood since stepping onto the docks this morning. "Have ya picked out the prize dish yet. Who should I place me bet on?"
"How could I know that?" the food traveller replied to the question literally. "I'd need to first..." Trailing off mid-sentence, he frowned.
Duke Jack followed the young man's gaze behind him.
The toddler who'd been crying earlier was now calm and pacified, stretching out their little arms for a flask.
The one retrieving the flask was an elderly millennial woman, her shorts pulled up past her bellybutton. Her appearance was jarring in a fantasy roleplaying setting, making one feel as though their own millennial grandma had hacked into the game to tell them to come eat dinner.
The rapper mother was astonished. "Yo, I ain't ever seen him calm down that fast. Whatchu slip into that thang?"
The millennial grandma screwed the thermos's cap back with the natural dexterity that indicated a lifetime of experience. "I'm afraid that's a family Moran secret, so unless you're willing to marry my loser of a son, my lips are sealed." She whispered in the rapper mother's ear. "White Russian mixed with Oxy. Knocks them out every time."
"And whom you might be?" asked another guest hostilely, an owner of a furniture store who demanded more respect than this.
"Me?" The millennial grandma leaned over the table and flicked a stand holding a card with the number 48. "I'm your chef, dear. Name's Jennifer. I prefer Jen, but you can call me Jenn, Jenna, Jenny. What does it matter, really? No one aside from the other grey bats wants to hang out with grandma. I'm sick of book clubs. There's only so much Jane Austen and homoerotic vampire romance a girl can stomach." She staggered over to the table's accompanying open kitchen and began tapping and poking the unusual Arcaneworker-engineered Cooking appliances. "Which one of these bloody contraptions is the oven?"
The question was directed to her single assistant, a four-foot tall cloaked woman who, reading her book, didn't bother replying.
"How silly," continued Jen Moran. "Breakfast to dessert, back in my day, all we needed was a phone to whip it up. Now, these Roboboomers divert the power from an entire neighbourhood just to boil an egg. Fucking ridiculous, I say. How are they going to survive—Heavens!"
One of the appliances began to whirr like a chainsaw. She tried pressing random buttons to stop it, but this merely intensified the cacophony.
Another Cook ran over to help her turn it off.
While Jen from Melbourne was struggling in the kitchen, the dinner guests searched each other's faces for answers as to how this average Australian grandma in the year 2050 had scored a place in a top-tier cooking competition.
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Duke Jack shielded his eyes in embarrassment. "Aww, crikey," he whispered, ensuring his volume was still loud enough to be overheard by the food traveller and his fans. "Sorry about this muck of a situation, mates. Central's been throwing their weight around on us small fellas lately. They twisted me arm until I let some of their terrible lot bypass the selection process. Don't worry, though, I'll sort us out."
It was all according to plan so far.
In the kitchen, Jen Moran picked up a menu from a counter of the previous courses provided for Cooks who wanted to adjust their meals to suit. "All this? What a bunch of gluttons, you've been. Very, very naughty. Your waist is going to hate you for that habit when your metabolism slows down. Trust me, I used to be a model, you know. Many a hunk. MANY. Now, the only one who'll lay pipe for me is the homeless guy who lives in a van in the Woolworth's carpark, and he had chlamydia." She sighed. "A proper meal should end on a sweet note!"
Sighing again, she summoned a basket and plopped it down on the counter.
Inside, much to the VIP's disappointment after eating so many delicacies, was an ordinary assortment of chocolate, flour, eggs, and sugar.
"Granny Moran's Supreme Chocolate Chip Cookies! I'll be expecting a 10 from each of you."
For scoring the competition, seven dinner guests from each table would give a grade from 1 to 10, which would be totalled up. Additionally, three judges would be sampling every contestant's food, and the dish each of them chose as their favourite would receive an extra 10 points. The contestant with the highest point total would be declared the winner of The Grand Cook-Off.
She brandished a wooden spatula at the VIPs. "Anyone who votes lower receives a spanking!"
There was a sudden commotion at the venue's entrance. The dinner guests turned to stare at a train of assistants hauling in crates, nets, and jugs overflowing with rare, luxury spices, veggies, meats, and fruits from all corners of the globe. At the head of the train was an 11-year-old boy whose azure eyebrows were knitted in a degree of concentration belonging to one much older.
Strangely, for anyone familiar with Karnon, there wasn't a single twinkle in the boy's eyes of mischief, tomfoolery, larrikinism - not even a morsel of hijinkery.
The boy led the crew to the kitchen of one table, not acknowledging his dinner guests, and began meting out directions for the placement of his items.
Back at table 48, the Duke began swearing at his lackeys in his group chat, demanding to know the identity of this affluent intruder.
Meanwhile, Jen Moran in the kitchen was rubbing the sagging jowls of her neck. "Mystery guest? Oh, well, I'm still going to win. Hun, could you install this dome thingamajig. We can't have these Roboboomers stealing my secrets."
She passed a rune-carved box to her height-challenged assistant, who then activated it, enclosing the kitchen in an opaque bubble. A careful observer would notice that the bubble had a peculiar hue in contrast to the others being activated around the venue. The difference reflected a stronger magic with the capacity to detect even an intruding God – another Legendary that'd been rotting unused in Jen's inventory.
A moment later, the assistant whom no one recognised as Nerin, God of Suchi, emerged from the bubble and departed, never to be seen again by the diners.
One of table 48's VIPs, whose real-life luxury kangaroo-leather gloves had become a recent fashion trend, pursed her lips in wonder, her eyes flicking from the dome to the attention-drawing kid.
"What a strange zone..."
Her husband was folding a serviette in boredom. "Reckon the cookies will be any decent?"
"They're cookies...how special could they possibly be?"
"Eureka!" Duke Jack, recomposing himself as he sensed his moment, snapped his fingers with an epiphany, pulling back the attention of his VIPs.
At the kitchen of the next table over, a Cook was using his hairy hands to calibrate the high-tech gizmos his assistants had installed. Around him was a tantalising display of healthy-leaved greens and freshly-butchered prime cuts.
The Duke called to him. "Ampoland, mate!"
"Yes," the Cook grunted, before recognising the speaker. "Yes, Duke Jack?"
The Duke flicked his head to indicate table 48's Dome of Secrecy. "Central's meddlin's gone and saddled us with a stodgy-handed Sheila. Mind helpin' us out by sparin' a plate?'
Ampoland took a moment to register that he was being asked to prepare dishes for that table as well. It would be irritating to make the last minute adjustments for a larger quantity, but he caved under the pressure of the Duke's status.
"I can."
Duke Jack punched the air with a thumb's up. "Good on ya, mate!" He then turned to the VIPs. "It's a done deal, ladies and gents! If ya already stuffed to the throat, I recommend a visit to the vomitorium, cause this Indian bloke's cookin', it's to DIE for!"
Inside Millennial Jen's Dome of Secrecy, the oven fired up for preheating, other Cooking appliances puffing Arcane smoke.
Alone, Henry summoned the supreme cookie's real ingredients.
Onto one bench, he stacked nine bags of flour, each from different wheat species. There were Suchanese Soft Durum and Tristalk Hulled Wheat, both grown down at the West Bank Autonomous Exclave, while the rest were imported from other agriculture regions around Kanaru.
Onto a second bench, he spread an equally varied assortment of eggs: a basket of mottled Hanaalese Bigquails, leathery-skinned Enuchibe Sandraptors, a single, football-sized Terrorostrich, and four others.
Next came eight types of butter, four vanilla beans, eleven chocolate beans, six salts, ten sugars—or more accurately berries and tubers which would be refined into sugar—and 120 minor reagents to be utilised in the recipe's intermediate steps.
So...so he may have told a small white lie to Cathy earlier about the nature of the cookies. Really, though, the ingredients one would kind of recognise in a normal cookie constituted over 97.182% of the cookies by mass. What was the point of mentioning the minor elements? Communication should be quick and efficient.
As the food items began telekinetically flying around the kitchen at his command, he used his hands to start on the butter.
He floated over a coarse, brown brick that'd been condensed from the fat of Saguanese Rubbernuts. Cutting off a section, he weighed it on a scale, shaved off the excess micrograms, then tossed it onto a saucepan and heated it over a gentle flame. When the butter melted, he transferred the liquid to an Extractor, using a Cooking skill to remove every last drop from the pan. Into a secondary chute of the Extractor, he sprinkled a pinch of powder that resembled nutmeg and smelled of burnt bone. Then, he clicked a button to fire the Extractor up. In 11.24 seconds, it would extrude two liquids, one the healthy golden colour of cow's butter and another with an undesired pomegranate-almond flavour.
Before it finished, though, he caught a flying brick of Thiiminese Gobligoat Butter that was harder than granite. Tossing it into a mortar, he began pulverising it into a powder, which he would blend with Nachanese Coast Salt bathed for 216 milliseconds in the sweet venom of an Inaanarese Clayworm that'd been deactivated by Hyposalodefragification.
Once the eight kinds of butter were processed, they would be blended for the final recipe, along with blends of sugars, flours, and other ingredients.
Why the blends? This was to increase the number of 'Ingredient Harmonies', a crucial concept in Saana's Cooking system.
Every object in Saana had properties beyond their physical ones called 'Planar Attributes', which included a vast variety of traits, such as affinities for different Magical Energies, certain celestial bodies, and even emotions. Physically-speaking, these Attributes corresponded to the altered form of an object as it existed in the game world's other planes – the Cosmic Plane, Infernal Plane, etc.
In Cooking, when ingredients sharing these Planar Attributes were mixed together, they produced an Ingredient Harmony. What this meant was that the corresponding Planar Attribute would be expressed with a greater intensity than it was in the constituent parts separately. This intensification could add striking effects to a dish based on the type of Planar Attribute. A bit of Fire from the Elemental Plane in a cake could keep it warm indefinitely, while too much might make it spontaneously combust.
Additionally, the number and amplitude of Ingredient Harmonies affected the Quality rating of a dish, which in turn determined the dish's capacity to store magical enhancements that Cooks could cast on food, like Stat buffs.
The Supreme Chocolate Chip Cookie had 14 Harmonies, 2 of which had been too subtle for Nerin to detect.
Henry skipped ahead in the cookie recipe after finishing with the third butter. Due to the complexity of the cookies, the handling of certain ingredients required adjusting to environmental variables like the humidity of the kitchen and the ambient temperature. Since he'd baked the cookies countless times with countless variations, he was able to make most of these adjustments on the fly, but differences in the Empire's cooking apparatuses and his own remained a big potential source of anomaly. Thus, he started on one especially sensitive step early, defleshing a bunch of Chethineese Sugar Beets and mashing them into a pulp. If there were any problems, he would have to process a new bunch.
What was the significance of 14 Ingredient Harmonies? 14 was a relatively large number given that a food item as simple as a cookie normally capped out at 3 Harmonies and each additional Harmony was exponentially more demanding to add than the last.
Henry'd achieved this miraculous feat through a method called 'Microharmonisation'. Every basic Cookie ingredient was recreated from a blend of homologous ingredients in order to pack in more Planar Attributes.
This was a challenging task for several reasons: the amount of an ingredient affected the intensity of Harmonisation, Planar Attributes varied within the same ingredient depending on growing conditions, Attributes could clash or nullify each other, and some Attributes, like those from the Mucous Plane, were intrinsically unappetising and needed to be avoided. The more ingredients one used, the higher the chance of screwing up. Simultaneously, the smaller the quantities of food in a dish, the tighter the margin of error for making a Harmony work.
Luckily, though, Henry had The Overdream, allowing him to replicate Suchi's food markets hundreds of times over to discover and blend harmonies to perfection.
To the pulp, he added a couple of millitres of water. It was a very specific type of water, sourced from an oasis in the Enuchibe desert.
Why produce such a complicated cookie? He'd needed a food item capable of acting as a vector for The Poison of Mercurial Debilitation, which he didn't want to sip from the vial in public. To be infused with the supreme poison, the dish had to be equally supreme i.e. have tons of Ingredient Harmonies. Otherwise, the poison would have dissipated shortly after application due to its volatility – his skills in Alchemy were insufficient to concoct a more stable version.
Once the beets had been mashed, he poured the mix into a Sugar Refiner, dialling down the impurity-extraction knob so that the sugar would retain some of the beets' unique fruity-flavour.
And the taste? With so many ingredients being employed, the first 63,000 or so batches of his 14 Harmony recipe had been excruciatingly revolting. By the 176,480th batch, however, he'd created the most delicious cookie to have ever existed.
Outside the Dome, the culinary war raging on, the air ringing with the clangour of knives and reeking of the clashing scents of competing cuisines.
At table 48, Duke Jack was staring across the room at the mysterious 11-year-old. Since the competition's start, they'd been doing nothing but nibbling on their own ingredients, much to the irritation of their table.
The Duke didn't trust the look of them.
-KangarooButcher420: Boss, I spoke to the doorman who admitted the kid. Apparently, the original contestant was eaten by a Many-Toothed Lion, and they never returned from the spawning zone, so the kid was selected at random to fill out the table. Could be a troll?
-Jack: Bull-fucking-shit! How's a fucking troll to shell out for such expensive shit? Keep searching!
-KangarooButcher420: Yes, boss.
-Uchiha No Borei: The viewers are singing their praise.
-Jack: Fucking excellent!
While Duke Jack was focused on solving the mystery of the inexplicably rich kid, his other scheme was going according to plan, the VIPs at table 48 being enchanted by the culinary magic of Ampoland next door.
Presently, the Cook was demonstrating the Hyperboreocinodimunition of a Tako Decopus tentacle using a machine that sounded like the inside of a car wash. Sample plates of the tentacles pre- and post-processing were being handed out by assistants to the guests of both his table and Duke Jack's.
Ampoland's dish of choice for the competition was a Kozosseg Stew, a local Ibanmothe speciality for parties. This stew's claim to fame was that it had no Harmonies itself but produced multiple different ones when combined with other foods.
The flexible aspect of the Kozosseg stew was important to the Slumdwelling Ibanmothe. Most of them were immigrants or descendants from immigrants, and the typical arrangement was for the hosting Shackwife to prepare the stew while the guests brought staples from their ancestral homelands: Maranyan Plantain Bread, Hembami Reindeer Steaks, Suchanese Millet Cake, and more.
Cooks who'd mastered the dish would delve into the Plane of Memories and invoke Harmonies corresponding to the very life experiences of the ingredients. Thus, an immigrant from Qannonzeni, drizzling the stew over a fillet of Dry Red Trout, could taste the sprightliness of the fish leaping out of the red waters of their homeland's Blood River. In this way, they were reminded of their former home.
For these reasons, the Kozosseg Stew held a symbolic importance for the Slumdwellers. It represented their origins, their present, and the divine magic when the two were united.
5 or 6 harmonies with one Stew was considered master-level. Ampoland, through the latest Molecular Mechanogastronomical advances, had bumped that figure up to a staggering 9.
'Nine Harmonies!' thought Duke Jack, confident in the unbeatability of that number.
Nine Harmonies!
"Crikey, that's good!" The Duke tore off a chunk of tentacle with relish. "Zavier, mate, tell me that ain't the best gosh-darn octopus ya've wrapped ya tongue around?"
Across the table Duke was a retired tennis pro with his cheeks puffed out with the mushed up tentacle. "Uhds prhudhy gud."
The Duke turned to the food traveller. "Boy-oh-boy, ya can taste the waves in—"
He stopped when the food traveller abruptly rose to their feet, attempting to peer over the dinner guests in front, who were also jumping out of their seats.
One on-looker a table over gasped.
"No way!"
"How dare they..."
"A Sanbah Swordie? The lucky devil!"
"BUDDY, SEND A STEAK OUR WAY!"
The attention of The Empire's dinner guests was instantly sponged up by a fish tank carried in on the burly shoulders of ten Landworkers.
Inside was a swordfish whose baby-blue skin was streaked with fluffy white cumulus clouds. With the slender sleekness of an Italian sports car, the creature could carve through the oceans in which it dwelled. Presently, however, it was fast asleep, the water in the tank being circulated to aerate its gills.
Leading the entering party was a Waterworker in an azure rainjacket. Over his shoulder, he'd slung a comically small rod that was obviously too light-weight to have reeled in such a mighty fish.
This man glanced around the room, his gaze pausing on one Dome of Secrecy in particular, then flashed the diners staring at him a mischievous smile. "Fortune blesses us tonight, students! The sprats have swallowed the bait!"
To everyone's surprise, the swordfish was brought to none other than the 11 year-old-kid. When the fish tank was set down beside him, his look became even more concentrated and his 'nibbling' of ingredients sped up, as he hurried to imprint the Planar Attributes of the final ingredients on his palate.
Riiiiiip!
With the distinctive tear of velcro, the Waterworker removed his rainjacket, revealing an apron and a double-sized chef hat underneath. Now, he was a Cook!
"I'm ready to begin, Kitchenhand S.! Let's secure victory for Central City, of which we are both members, unlike The Slums, which suck."
A few on-lookers booed.
The kid, tonight's mystery guest, glared at Karnon. "Could you do me a favour and leave me alone while I'm cooking?"
Karnon pulled out a novelty pepper shaker the size of a bowling pin. "I'll handle the seasoning!"
The kid suddenly exploded. "KEEP! YOUR CHILDISH PRANK BULLSHIT! OUT OF MY KITCHEN! FUCK OFF, NOW! GET OUT!"
Back at table 48, the food traveller was speaking at length to his audience.
"...The Sanbah Swordfish is an unsociable, hard to track Tier-4 species, with the speed and wits in the water to easily evade inferior fishermen. The meat degrades rapidly after death, forcing the angler to preserve its life until its brought back to shore. A noble fish! Based on the presence of Kapari Leaf and the Fermented Mustardbass, the chef is going to attempt The King's Feast, an Ibangua speciality dish in which slices of the Swordfish are served raw like Sashimi with a sensuous arsenal dipping sauces." He power-walked off to join the growing crowd, his commentary continuing. "The name refers to the fact that the dish is typically reserved for royalty. The Swordfish is so rare that it's not unusual for a generation to pass without one being caught, and the challenge for the chef is creating matching sauces without any prior experience. In the Analects of Prince Orgember, the flavour of the meat was described..."
Duke Jack, watching his most valuable guest abandon the table, readjusted the mask of happiness so that it didn't slip from his face.
-Jack: You stupid fucking, mouth-breathing cunt! Find out who this kid is immediately, or I'm gonna drag every one of ya into the fucking bush meself and shove a fucking steel spear up each one of ya's fucking unwashed arseholes.