The kitchen of Table 91, the table of Karnon and his mystery guest.
A crowd of salivating spectators were watching the Sanbah Swordfish's preparations. Some of them, in chef attire, were competitors who'd abandoned their entries to observe the 11-year-old prodigy at work.
A fiery whirlwind had settled upon the kitchen. Inside it, sizzling meats and greens and boiling sauces flew from appliance to appliance with the urgent, chaotic haste of two armies clashing at the moment of impact.
In the centre of the culinary battlefield, the prodigy roamed calmly amongst the flames with the poise of a mythical Chinese swordsaint. Sipping from a mug of ale, he used his dominating dominant hand to dispatch each grunt that dared challenge him with his chef's knife.
A lobster charged his front, its razor sharp claws snipping and snapping!
Shing-paching-scrip-shrip!
The lobster, flying past his blurring knife, separated into six juicy cubes of white meat that plunged into a sizzling pan of clarified butter. The creature's innards and shell landed in a compost bin.
From several directions, a pot of bubbling sauce, sprigs, mushrooms, eggs, and dried flowers - a group attack!
Right when the pot was about to strike him, the prodigy, plunging his arm into a swarm of utensils floating about him, quick-swapped his knife for a ladle.
Krip-shlop-plop-gloop-swish-swish-swish-kaplonk!
Snatching up the pot, he rapidly added the ingredients flying at him to it one by one, adjusting the quantities of each subsequent addition depending on the reaction observed by the preceding ones. Then, stirring the pot, he sent it flying to a stovetop.
A surprise lunge to his back from a salmon baring its fangs!
Shrip-shrip-shrip-shrip!
The prodigy side-stepped the attack, snatched up a fillet knife, and, taking two quick steps forward, processed the fish mid-air without interrupting its momentum. Neatly-cut fillets dove into a bowl of crushed spices, the guts and skin into the compost on top of the lobster remains.
The prodigy stopped for a breath.
Across the battlefield was the enemy commander, the swordfish. It'd been hanging upside down on a hook, untouched by the conflict so far except for microscopic holes that'd been bored in its flesh for the sampling of its meat.
The prodigy, resting his beer mug on a counter, picked up a tuna knife with a metre-long blade, its razor-sharp edge gleaming sinisterly.
"You want to contribute?" he said. "Cover me."
Up to this point, Karnon had been sitting on a kitchen counter, chewing an avocado sandwich while snickering to himself about his certain victory.
"As you request, Kitchenhand S.! Us members of Central City always help each other out, unlike the Slumdwellers, who are selfish."
Karnon coughed into his fist, and a hole opened up in the roof of the marquee tent above. Through it, a beam of moonlight blasted down onto their kitchen unit, so dense and bright that it blinded the crowd of spectators.
Within the light, Karnon grabbed two pots and clanged them together, creating a racket that masked the prodigy's voice.
"
The prodigy's body, like a flower opening its petals to the dawn, split down its centre line into four sections. From each quarter, the exposed guts burst out and reformed the missing parts of the body.
A second later, there were four clones of him, one with lengthened canines, one enveloped by whipping wind, one with hardened muscles, and one whose hair and eyelashes were flickering flames.
In unison, the clones blinked out of existence.
A fifth of a second later, they reappeared in separate areas of the kitchen, thrusting the tuna knife into the swordfish's pelvis, hammering open oysters, punching a pumpkin, flipping an egg.
Before the mortal eye could register this image on its retina, they'd vanished again.
Then, they were slamming down a chunk of swordfish on a cutting board, snapping the spine of a twig, pulverising pepper into dust, stripping the skin from a grape.
Vanished yet again.
Teleporting around the kitchen in this way, they performed the final tasks with inhuman ninja speed.
Jen's Dome of Secrecy, the air sweet with the aroma of heated sugar and butter, a tray of ordinary-looking cookies turning golden in the oven.
Henry had one eye closed as he recorded in his Mental Library ideas for stories he'd come up with during this brief outing from The Overdream. All the ingredients, all the evidence of the cookie's true nature, had been secreted back into his Spatial Bracelet and ring.
When a notification popped up, he went to the oven and slid out the finished cookies.
There was no miracle notification since the game only awarded them once per unique invention.
The cookies smelled identical to thousands of batches he'd baked before. To ensure there were no aberrancies, he grabbed one with a pair of tongs, gave it a 360-degree inspection, then blew on it. His breath, which contained motes of chef-knife-shaped Cooking Energy, cooled the cookie down in an instant. Taking a small bite, he nodded with unsurprised satisfaction.
The flavour was the same – perfect, unrivalled under the heavens. An Ingredient Harmony for 12th degree Sun Planar Attribute from the Celestial Plane would keep the cookies slightly warm to maintain both the softness of the dough and the sumptuous gooey consistency of the molten chocolate. The rest of the 13 Harmonies were either enhancing the mouth taste in their own way or neutral. There was a slight overexpression of one Jiantanzhe Planar Attribute, but this one was undetectable to the human tongue, generally being added to a dish to ward off insects and other pests who found it unappetizing – Henry'd included it to bump up the number of Harmonies.
Here, he could have stopped and served up the Legendary Supreme Chocolate-Chip Cookies in their present state and probably won.
However, there was still the matter of the magical buffs that a Cook could add after a dish's completion.
Most buffs were combat centred and useless for a cooking competition, things like stat bonuses or magical resistances, but some did enhance the eating experience.
Which buff would he use? The one that'd been applied to the cookies to swindle Abigail into training harder.
A few digital years ago when it'd occurred to Henry that he could use these cookies, without the poison, to incentivise his lazy friend, he'd spent an undefined amount of time considering the optimal buff for this purpose.
There were many options: infusions with an Imperial Tonic of Mindslavery, psychostimulative buffs that made meth look less adventurous than a cup of tea with one teaspoon sugar. However, he'd dismissed these more overt methods of mind control because they had a way of eroding the trust of allies. Henry would also never stoop so low - not for a 6v6 competition; trust was essential when coordinating team manoeuvres.
He checked the device maintaining the Dome of Secrecy, its display showing that one living being, himself, was within its perimeter.
Just to be sure...
-Henry Flower: Are you there? Is Karnon spying on me?
-Hannes Heikken (Helsinki, Finland): No, he hasn't even tasted the cookies. He has no clue that they're special.
Henry squinted.
What the heck? Then why would the God insist on participating in a baking competition? And why would he so confidently accept a bet?
-Hannes Heikken: No comment.
-Henry Flower: Oh well.
Beginning, he placed the tray of cookies on top of a stool, and his ring vomited out buckets of reagents and Energy Storage Stones corresponding to every class in the game.
Table 91, the crowd salivating with anticipation.
The lucky dinner guests were focused on their plates, waiting for the order to eat from the prodigy, who was controlling a barrel to fly around filling their glasses with ale.
The dish before them was visually simple. Dabbed around the plate were four coin-sized pools of sauce, and the slender slices of rose-red swordfish in the centre were garnished with merely two or three herb leaves. The guests knew, however, that into each of the sauces had been distilled the total domination of a culinary master over hundreds of ingredients.
One of table 91's diners was Duke Paulo, leader of the Duchy of Luzon, representing the most populous island in the Philippines.
Similar to Duke Jack of Australasia, Duke Paulo had on Ramiro's orders been wine-and-dining a group of VIPs today. At this Cook-Off, he was also using the exact same scheme of contrasting an inept Central Cook with one of The Slum's. Disaster had struck Duke Paulo's table much earlier, though. When the Central City Cook he'd initially arranged to make a horrifying lion adobo had vanished, he ordered the doorman to select the worst Cook waiting amongst the substitutes.
How could they have known that the random kid would be a megarich Cooking prodigy?
In the background, Karnon, watching the Duke's defeated expression, was covering his mouth.
Fun fact: despite the similarity of Duke Jack and Duke Paulo's schemes, neither were aware of the other's actions. It would only be after The Empire did a post-mortem of this debacle that it would be revealed that every Duke and Duchess from The Kingdom of Southeast Asia and Oceania was carrying out their own version if it, each of them having been approached separately by a mischievous God disguising himself as their leader and promising them promotions for their compliance. In actuality, the real Ramiro would never have given such underhanded orders to these minor Dukes. None of them were members of his inner circle, and the risk of being backstabbed by them leaking his scheming was too high.
Karnon slapped the kitchen counter.
This was advanced multi-pranking! Welcome to class, kids!
Duke Paulo received the ale poured for him with the resignation of Socrates being given hemlock.
How was he going to tell King Ramiro that he'd botched the secret mission? In these sensitive days, where the future of The Empire was at stake, he'd failed his crucial assignment...he'd failed his leader...he'd failed himself...
"Copy," commanded the prodigy at the head of the table. Taking a sip of ale, he picked up a slice of meat and dipped it into the first sauce, which was dark-red with the consistency of mayonnaise.
Duke Paulo—still clinging to the hope that the swordfish would taste disgusting and the Cook the table over could be brought in to salvage the situation—mimed the prodigy's actions along with the other guests.
The ale had a hardy, salty flavour.
The meat, strangely porous, absorbed the sauce like a paintbrush.
The Duke closed his eyes and took a bite.
At once, the youthful-sweet flavour of meat swept across his tongue, dominating his tastebuds as if they were the waters of the Joona Ocean being carved up by the speedy swordfish. The beast, in its young arrogance, leapt into the sun-kissed air, flaunting the wing of a manta ray skewered on its beak. From out of the rainbow foliage of a coral reef below, a school of Jesterfish in necklaces of poached clams and skirts of minced whelks poked out their heads and sang praise for the swordfish's mighty majesty.
Stolen story; please report.
When the Duke looked at the VIP's he'd gathered to impress, he saw in their expressions the same elation that'd taken hostage of his own face.
8 Harmonies...within a single bite...a taste that ruled over anything else to touch his lips in the 22 years of his life...
Lowering his head in defeat, he stared at the three remaining sauces...three deathblows waiting to be dealt to his already cold corpse...
How humiliating...
For sauce number two, the prodigy poured out a new ale, this one dark with the buttery-sharp scent of frying onions.
The Duke wanted to resist, but...the first one had been too delicious...
Mimicking the prodigy's instructions once more, the Duke prepared the next slice and ate.
The formerly sweet notes of the swordfish meat had been shapeshifted by this new sauce into a heavy umami-flavour like smoked pork.
Kaboom!
The Duke's cheeks exploded and his senses were torn asunder by the violent crack of thunder. In raging, storm-whipped seas, the swordfish was contending for its life with a fisherman. Over the decades that'd passed since the youth of the first sauce-combination, the swordfish's muscles had swelled and strengthened. Heaving upon the line, it managed to drag the fisherman and his mahogany boat with sautéed oysters clinging to its hull down into the seas. Deeper and deeper they sank, the noise of their struggle attracting krakens and other monsters lurking in the watery abyss.
In the crowd, the food traveller was mumbling to his audience. "...To successfully condense the 12 sauces of The King's Feast into 4 and Cross-Harmonise them with an ale, my fellow foodophiles, there is no doubt that we are in the presence of a master of the kitchen—neigh—a god..."
Duke Paulo, overhearing this last word, peeled open his eyelids, flicked his exhausted gaze from the enraptured guests, to the beer mugs, to the 11-year-old 'kid', back to the mugs, to the 'assistant' with the azure chef outfit slapping the kitchen counter...
Ah, thought the Duke, that foreboding shade of blue...so that's who they are...how could this—but what did it matter now...how unfair...he might as well have tried out blowing a typhoon...perhaps King Ramiro would forgive him then...what player could hope to topple these titans...
Resigned to defeat, Duke Paulo offered himself back to the fish, sinking ever deeper into the ocean depths. Down there, he was buffeted about in the stirring waters by the battling of monsters far surpassing his feeble self. He waited, incapable of moving a muscle until the next sauce hauled him up onto the boat's deck and the final one carried him back to Suchi where he was served on a plate with light greens.
Jen's Kitchen.
Emotion Infusion (Method – A Thousand Memories #106) activated.
Mode: Automated
Starting set up...
From out of a couple of the buckets, strings of enlivened salt erupted and snaked around Henry and the cookies. They automatically arranged themselves into a pattern he'd designed earlier, some strings forming intricate runic patterns on the ground, others enclosing him in a 3D lattice cage of densely interwoven strings. The Energy Stones, meanwhile, fixed themselves into various positions around the building structure. As they were inserted, the salt strings began to hum like live electrical wires.
Generally, Cooks would avoid using Emotional Infusion in fine dining because the skill had a reputation for being cheap and tacky, like sweetening up a steak with ketchup. Henry's version, though, had fixed this problem, along with several others.
His choice of emotion was 'cosiness'. He felt this was the positive emotion most organic to the cookie-eating experience, and who could ever begrudge someone for merely making them feel cosy? Was this not a form of kindness? Isn't this what friends do for friends? Surely, the cosier we make each other feel, the better? Also, it was all perfectly legal.
One salt string entered his mouth and, through the nerves of his tastebuds, connected his brain to the ritual formation.
Insert First Item - Personal.
He recollected a precious childhood memory, lying in bed with his mother reading him to sleep. When he would press his ear to her chest, he could hear the lively rhythms of the exaggerated voices she gave the characters dancing across her heartbeat. The world out there to his undeveloped mind was a constant source of confusion. At all times, he would be grasping for a category or an identification or an explanation to superimpose onto the disorder of sights and sounds and sort them into something tameable. No sooner would he succeed in this, though, one of the other structures that'd been guiding him thus far would mutate or split apart. He 'hears' the heartbeat, but in the sound of it, there is not just the noise but the touch and the warmth. Again and again, thrown back out there into the bewilderment, yet the younger heart can endure in the assurance that it will eventually be swooped out of the turbulence by this regular thumping in the chest, deposited here in the quiet warmth, the secure warmth, the sing-song warmth, the drowsy warmth...
From his mouth, riding the salt string like a gondola car, a pearl-sized bead emerged, propelled by motes of scale-shaped Peopleworker energy. With the bead having been produced through a similar magic to Memory Spheres, on its surface was etched a visualisation of his childhood memory. As it moved away from him, a feminine voice emanating from it became fainter and fainter, and then it stopped at the juncture between six crossing salt strings.
The standard
Second Item - The Shadow of Annapurna.
However, there was a problem with the standard Method that'd annoyed Henry when he'd been applying it. Infused emotions had an unsettlingly alien quality, similar to returning home to find that the furniture had been knocked a few centimetres ajar by an intruder. This was because the emotions of a single moment tended to be tainted by others. Accompanying cosiness could be sadness, joy, anxiety, love, or any combination thereof depending on the circumstances. These subtleties, too specific to the moment or the individual Cook, didn't map well onto foods, generating the unsettling sensation.
The solution to this issue was to correlate multiple memories containing the desired emotion. By dampening their differences and amplifying their commonalities, one could refine the emotion and nothing but the emotion.
To subtract his personal input, he thought now of the 2046 autobiographical novel The Shadow of Annapurna, written by a Nepalese Sherpa. The story followed the author's first summit of Annapurna, the tenth highest mountain in the real world and far more deadly than Everest. The book was filled with adventure, adrenaline, and death, yet the closing passage had been the most moving of all despite the mundane focus. While the Sherpa was driving back to his village, on the last stretch, he'd been delayed by a team of construction workers installing a section of new road.
A second bead emerged from his mouth containing the mental image of the Sherpa leaping out of his car and kissing the asphalt.
This bead was much smaller than the first due to the second-hand nature of the experience. When it stopped at a juncture, wisps of light as thin and ephemeral as smoke began to stream from it and the first bead.
The wisps, working through the maze of salt strings, converged upon an open space in the middle of the lattice cage. There, they merged together to form a glowing ball smaller than a speck of dust, one which radiated a warm, comforting, secure feeling.
Third Item - Ocean of Wheat.
The conventional Method for achieving a multiplicity of memories was to perform the ritual in a group. Henry, however, operating alone, had needed to adapt the Method to input memories one by one, which in turn required a way to temporarily store the memories externally until the ritual's completion. For many reasons, the creation of a stable externalised storage structure had been quite a challenge. He'd been forced to scour the mustiest corners of his Mental Library for rare Methods from every field. The lattice cage, for example, was a simplification of a sub-component of the Imbahalala's
The next memory was from the 2029 indie film Ocean of Wheat, where the protagonist Bernie Abelson skinny dipped alone in the crystal-clear waters of Lake Tahoe.
When the bead of this scene slotted into place and contributed its own wisp to the Emotional Core, the wisps from the previous two were diminished as the components contained in both them but not this third were stripped away. Thereby, the core inched closer to the pure concept of cosiness.
Next, he added Homer's Odysseus arriving home in Ithaca after two decades away...
A winter night in his cabin, writing by the hearth while a pot of pumpkin soup slow-cooked over the fire...
Joel and Clementine lying on the frozen lake in 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...
The pace of successive memories gradually hastened until multiple beads were popping out of his mouth per second. The wisps extending to the Emotional Core were like new rays of light being pasted to a tiny star, and the star was growing.
As the ritual progressed, new strings of salt connected to his eyes and ears, and objects other than beads began to be added to the formation. There were miniature images of landscape paintings from the Romantic era, snippets of soothing songs from the semi-popular 20s music genre Comfycore, passages from Italian pastoral poems – things that were categorically not memories.
Once he'd devised a stable externalised structure, with a bit of further tinkering, he'd made it possible to input the emotions not just from memories but also pieces of art. This alteration helped to remove the final traces of taint, refining the emotion to its most purest, most universal state.
And at this degree of purity, an interesting phenomenon occurred. The buff, which previously had an alien quality to it, became intimately personal, unearthing the eater's own cosy memories.
That was one benefit of externalisation. Another was that the strength of the Emotional Infusion became easily scalable to the magical capacity of any food item, more power simply being a matter of expanding the formation and adding more items.
And The Supreme Chocolate-Chip Cookie had a huge magical capacity because 14 Harmonies within a single food was an absurd number, unmatched by anything ever created in this tier.
In this way, through years of mad research, the tacky technique of
As the Emotional Core began to emit rays of a concentrated cosiness so intense that they raised the temperature of the kitchen, Henry cackled mischievously.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
It had to be an internal cackle because his mouth was still occupied with the ritual.
Yes, this was it! Some might view the cookies as a frivolous digression, but wasn't the frivolousness itself the pleasure? For it was proof of the most luxurious freedom of—
-Hannes Heikken: Please stop...this is getting embarrassing...
-Henry Flower: No, I'm having fun.
He'd been trying to lift his arms in triumph, but the action was made slightly awkward because he had to avoid breaking any of the salt lines.
—the most luxurious freedom of all to pursue perfection in all its pointless incarnations! These cookies, their taste, their Ingredient Harmonies, their buff...if the refinement of such a simple object could yield thousands of hours of challenge, what then of everything else in this beautiful world?
All around him, the mountains were sprouting, and the air was loud with the call to climb!
After the time it takes to boil a potato. Table 48.
The retired tennis pro lay down his fork, sat back in his seat, and rubbed his stomach with satisfaction. "Fan-TAS-tic! Wish I had this virtual stuff back during training. Would have lessened the misery of dieting."
"Marvellous!" announced the furniture store owner. "I should hire that chap as my personal chef!"
The rapper mother agreed. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could kill a bitch fo mo of dis plate, bruh. This shit fire!"
The Duke laughed. "Crikey, that's hittin' the spot for ya, is it? Why not give this ol' stew a go, too. The Indian bloke's a clever operator."
While Duke Jack had been spooning up Kossozeg stew with a finger of bread, the other VIPs at table 48 had been dining on the pesky swordfish.
A few minutes earlier, after the tumult of the 11-year-old prodigy had died down, the Duke had had Ampoland's stew distributed to this table. At that very moment, the prodigy's assistant, as if timing their arrival to maximise how much they pissed off the Duke, brought over extra servings of swordfish for table 48 out of 'respect' for the Duke. Ever since then, the VIPs, with the noble taste of The King's Dish reigning over their tongue, had left Ampoland's stew untouched.
- Jack: Where the fuck is me fucking information on these fucking little cheeky arse-cunt wankers, you fucking cunt-for-brains drongos? GIVE IT! TO ME! NOW!
At this rate, not only would he lose the fucking promotion to King, that fucking Ramiro cunt might fucking demote him!
Duke Jack, continuing to swear internally, stared across the room to a platform where three judges had been taste-testing every competitor's dishes. The prodigy, having acquired the unanimous vote from the three of them, had brazenly pulled up a chair and begun judging, too. Right now, he was holding up a noodle in disgust, screaming at a shaking Cook for bringing him 'an intestinal worm extracted from a dog's arse.' No one could counter him, nor ask him to leave, for his swordfish had been inarguably supreme.
Next to the prodigy, his assistant was staring back at the Duke with a teasing smile. They laughed.
"Crikey!"
The Duke spasmed with rage.
- Jack: This cheeky fucking cunt. Once this fucking thing's over, I want you useless dogcunts to track him down, fucking snag him, drop his trousers, and fucking hack off his fucking little cock with a rusty fucking knife.
"And, of course, a cookie for you."
"Cheers. You beauty." The Duke replied automatically, not glancing at the tattooed arm beside him or the cookie it'd placed down.
Jen Moran the millennial grandma had emerged from her Dome of Secrecy without fanfare.
While the VIPs continued to share their admiration for the swordfish, she stalked amongst them, giving a cookie to each guest manually as if she were ignorant of Cook-based telekinesis.
The first to fall was the toddler who'd been crying earlier.
He grabbed the cookie straight from the nice grandma's hands and gave it a child's chomp.
Wordlessly, he pushed away his plate of swordfish, curled up into a ball on his seat, selfishly tucked the cookie into his chest, and nibbled on it with the addicted serenity of a newborn mouse at its mother's teat.
Second was the kangaroo-leather-glove designer's husband, who'd been having a grand time sawing at a piece of this delicious swordfish. He wasn't much of a fan of fish, but this one tasted pretty darn good. The visions were very exciting!
"Aw, thanks, Jen! That looks lovely!"
"You're very welcome, hun!" The grandma put an extra cookie on the polite young man's plate.
Between two bites of his current meal, the husband rested his knife to pick up one of the cookies and gave it a quick munch.
Clang-splat!
The fork he'd been holding fell from his fingers and struck the ground.
His wife jabbed his arm, whisper-growling at him, "You! Could you try to be less of an animal? There are important people here that we need to...Mark? What's wrong?"
She poked her husband, but he didn't respond.
Leaning in to check, she discovered that his face was locked up in the blissful, fatalistic, all-senses-possessing relief of someone who, after holding in their pee for too long, finally gives themselves up to the warm flow.
Down by his feet, in a patch of red-dirt that'd been carried in on the sole of his shoe, lay the fork and the chunk of swordfish on its prongs, never to be picked up again.
"Mark?"