Colby’s month of terror may have ended on paper, but its effects remained.

The students filed into the kitchen several minutes early—Colby had taught them that to be on time was to be late. They organized their setups and wiped down the already-clean surfaces—Colby had taught them that a Chef that didn’t have complete control of their station was no Chef at all. They stood at attention, legs locked, backs rigid, ready for action, waiting for their orders—Colby had taught them that the first duty of a lesser Chef was to be ready for orders from their betters.

The finest militaries could take inspiration from the students’ orderliness. The young Chefs stood like the most diligent soldiers, waiting for orders and ready to give it all in culinary war. A tornado would fail to lift them from their posts. A fire would do nothing to deter them—they would die making sure their food didn’t get overcooked in the blaze.

”He really did a number on you guys, didn’t he?”

Pomona hopped up to sit on a counter, her casualness sending discordant ripples through the stiff, formal air. She realized that the buttons of her red jacket weren’t lined up and redid them.

No one answered Pomona. The silence in the air had grown too thick. They knew better than to break it unless absolutely necessary. Sticking your head out in Colby’s class just exposed your neck.

Archie moved his head as little as possible as he looked around at the other students. He knew Pomona didn’t possess Colby’s codified wrath, but after a month in Colby’s kitchen, Archie struggled to relax.

Pomona finished her buttons and looked up with a smile. “Hi Blanche. You excited?”

The entire class could hear Blanche swallow.

”Ye—yes,” she mustered. Her arms turned to petrified wood against her sides. A light breeze would topple her like a plank.

”Hm.” Pomona pursed her lips in disappointment. “You don’t sound excited. Are you excited?”

”Yes.” Blanche spoke solidly, but unconvincingly. “Yes Chef.”

Pomona added a coy look to her smile. Everyone could see it, but it was undoubtedly for Blanche. It was a smile between friends.

”Are you excited?” Pomona asked softly.

Blanche relaxed and returned the smile. “Very.”

The word set Pomona off like a firework. She leapt off the counter, clapped her hands, and almost yelled in her excitement.

”Alright, everyone! Loosen up. We’re going to have some fun, and what’s more fun than working with a partner? Everyone grab one and then we’ll start.”

The students’ uniformity broke into absolute chaos as they battled for partners. Yarrow moved first, knocking over the first domino as he dashed to claim Julienne before Mindy could do more than look at him. Mindy shrugged and turned to Blanche, but Benedict had already moved between them. Cress saw Mindy’s struggle and walked over to her station, leaving Oliver just a couple of steps too slow. He turned to Barley, but Barley had already joined Akando to form the quietest duo in The Platter. Juniper and Hyssop paired up, leaving Oliver with Archie, Nori, and Sutton.

Oliver and Sutton both sighed and met at an empty station.

No one considered for even a moment that Archie and Nori weren’t already paired up. Archie smiled at the thought as Nori walked over to his station.

“There’s the energy I was looking for!” Pomona cheered. She motioned at the giant wicker baskets on the counter behind her. “Now each group send someone up to get your ingredients for today.”

Nori glanced down at Archie’s leg. The wound had closed, leaving yellow blisters that were finally flattening into discolored skin—Sutton had tracked the entire process with detailed drawings and a dozen questions per day. The physical pain of the wound was almost entirely gone, but Nori still acted like Archie’s caretaker. Without saying a word, she volunteered herself to grab a basket to save him from having to walk.

“We’re keeping things simple,” Pomona said as the students scooped bowls of berries from the baskets. “Just get one type. Today isn’t about cooking. It’s about essence and ingredients.”

Nori returned with a grin. She tipped the bowl to show Archie the blueberries within. “It’s been a while since we’ve had a blueberry day,” she said.

Pomona waited for everyone to get settled before she started her lecture. Her teaching voice was hardly different from her normal voice—still full of warmth and excitement, just with a little added projection. It sounded more like an invitation than instruction.

“So hopefully everyone feels confident about their cooking skills after Colby’s class.”

The students produced a chorus of coughs and groans.

“Okay, that’s fair. He doesn’t teach confidence. Hopefully everyone feels like they learned a lot, at least.”

That got some nods.

“But you’re not at the Academy of Ambrosia just because you can cook. You’re here because you can manipulate essence. One day, you’ll be able to produce amazing effects with your cooking. You’ll cook food into unique experiences and amazing flavors. You might learn how to feed the masses from a single field, or you might learn to make a dish worthy of kings. The essence in ingredients is your clay with which to sculpt masterpieces. But no one creates a statue their first time sitting at the pottery wheel. They make a cup. Today is cup day.”

Pomona grabbed a handful of raspberries and closed her fist. When she opened it, a single raspberry remained.

“The first task of the day is combination. Everyone grab a berry in each hand.”

The class followed her instruction.

“Feel the essence in each of them. Feel the way they are the same. Feel the way they are different.”

Archie took a blueberry in each hand and closed his eyes in meditation. He visualized the sensation of essence in each blueberry. The left one’s essence swirled tumultuously, left to right and right to left and up and down. The right one’s moved back and forth and rose and fell like a sloshing liquid. He had assumed they had come from the same bush, but holding them, he knew the left one was a rabbiteye and the right was a lowbush.

“Can you feel a difference?” Sutton whispered behind them.

“Not with you talking,” Oliver hissed back. “Why’d you grab strawberries?”

Archie’s long weekends spent picking blueberries had put him ahead of the curve.

“To combine the berries, you’ll need to resolve their differences,” Pomona explained. “Mold the essence with your own. Make them compatible. And then…”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Pomona took a raspberry in each hand and pushed them together into a single berry. “Just a little bit of essence from you to glue them together.”

Archie visualized his essence surrounding the left blueberry and closing in to shape the essence within. He matched its rhythm to the bouncing waves of the other blueberry and moved them into each other. The blueberries merged without resistance, seeming to slide together.

He looked over at Nori just as she performed the merge with similar ease. In the row in front of them, Blanche managed to create a single, lumpy abomination of a raspberry from her two. Julienne, bored with the rudimentary lesson, combined a third blackberry.

“Now, if you can’t do it yet, don’t worry,” Pomona said. “We’ll get you there by the end of the day, I’m sure. For those of you that were successful, you’ll notice that although you’ve combined two berries into one, that one berry does not have double its usual essence. Some of the essence gets used in the process of combining, and there is a matter of learned efficiency, but you should notice that the berry does have increased essence. For a beginner, even getting a twenty percent increase in essence is an accomplishment.”

Archie took another blueberry and compared the essence between it and his combined product. He couldn’t be sure of the number, but it certainly felt like he had improved it by more than twenty percent.

“With this method of consolidation, you’ll have more essence to work with in your dish. You can keep merging more berries, but you’ll find that there is a diminishing return that can only be overcome with experience and expertise. For now, combining base ingredients should be manageable, and as you get better, you’ll be able to consolidate complex blends of cooked flavors.”

Nori flicked her blueberry across the counter at Archie. He grabbed it and combined it with his. The essence inside of it seemed to push at the seams of the blueberry, threatening to explode with essence.

“So let’s make this a game. Together with your partner, I want you to take turns consolidating into a single berry.”

Archie didn’t understand how that was a game, but he played anyway. He rolled the blueberry back across the counter to Nori. She scooped it up along with a blueberry from their bowl, put them together, and—

Pop!

The blueberry burst, covering Nori’s hands with juice and launching big blue chunks that dirtied her orange jacket.

Pomona laughed and gestured at Nori, drawing the class’s attention to her blunder. “As you can see, the more essence in an ingredient, the harder it is to control. The essence needs to be structured together properly, and as Chefs, you’ll need to learn how to manipulate large quantities of essence. Otherwise…You’ll lose the game.”

Nori glared at Archie. He smiled back, but knew he’d pay for her public defeat.

“I only lost because you did a bad job combining them,” she whispered. “And I didn’t know the game.”

“Still lost,” Archie chirped.

Pomona cleared her throat.

“But the real winner is the pair that manages to produce a berry with three times the usual essence. Whichever team manages to do that gets to pick our afternoon recipe.”

While most of the teams looked at each other and grinned and made snide remarks, Julienne and Yarrow set to work. Archie watched as they passed a blackberry back and forth, merging it three times before Archie’s competitive spirit kicked in.

He rushed to combine a pair of blueberries and placed it in front of Nori.

Nori took it and frowned. “Go slower. Do it right.”

She demonstrated with another blueberry, slow and deliberate.

“Yeah, yeah.” He nodded at Yarrow and Julienne. “They’re gonna finish before you’ve gone twice.”

“They’ll mess it up.”

The universe couldn’t stand for Nori to be wrong twice, so of course, at that exact moment, the blackberry exploded in Yarrow’s hands. Archie didn’t need to look at Nori to feel her smug stare. He just accepted defeat, grabbed another blueberry, closed his eyes, and synced up its essence with their combined blueberry. He put them together with his best efficiency yet, but his triumph was watered down by knowing it came from Nori’s instruction.

Nori combined it with another blueberry and passed it over. Archie grabbed it and another blueberry and compared. Their combined blueberry easily had twice as much essence. Elsewhere in the class, some students were still trying to achieve their first clean merge.

Archie combined the blueberries. Whereas before he was getting a twenty or thirty percent bump in essence, he barely felt a difference with this merge. He only felt a rising tension inside the blueberry. He gingerly placed it down in front of Nori and offered an apology in the form of a sympathetic look.

“Oh, you…” Nori sighed. She squinted and pulled her face away as she tried to combine another blueberry.

Pop!

Nori’s jacket was as blue as it was orange. “Archie!”

“What?! That was a good one. At least double. We’ll have triple in no time.”

“Start a new one,” she said as she wiped the blue off her hands.

A fiendish idea struck Archie. He put a blueberry in each palm and cupped his hands together. The blueberries combined, their essences combining into a single circular motion within the singular blueberry. Instead of handing the blueberry over, Archie pulsed extra essence into the blueberry, its tight orbits of energy becoming erratic and bouncing around with increasing force. Rather than trying to control the essence, he just added more, encouraging the chaotic flow within. Finally, he placed it in front of Nori.

“As long as we beat—”

The blueberry exploded at Nori’s touch, covering her freshly washed hands with a new coat of blue.

“What the—”

Archie burst into laughter. Even Nori’s icy glare couldn’t curb his joy, so she went for his pride, rubbing her blue hands all over his prized orange jacket. He tried to fight her off, but his laughter left him unable to put up a defense.

“Would you focus?” she hissed once her hands were clean and his jacket was covered in juice. “It’s blueberries. We have no excuses for losing.”

“You’re right. As soon as you stop exploding our blueberries, we’ll win.”

She punched his shoulder, taking back some of the chunks of blueberry onto her knuckles. “Be serious,” she said. Then she decided to pull the string that was always ready to be tugged. “It’s not everyday that a Kent gets a chance to prove they’re better than a Julienne.”

Archie recognized the blatant manipulation.

But that didn’t stop it from working.

“Fine,” he said. He took two blueberries, and with his deepest level of concentration yet, combined them into a single blueberry with an extra fifty percent of essence. He handed it over to Nori. “For real this time.”

She rotated the blueberry around in her hand for a bit while she dug through the bowl for the right counterpart. She found it, merged them, and handed it over to Archie. They passed it back and forth again, crossing the double-essence threshold.

“Archie,” Sutton whispered from behind them. “Does your leg hurt when you hold the berry? Are you hungry?”

Archie turned. At first, the question confused him, but then he realized he had bent over to scratch his yellow-purple skin as he held the potent blueberry in his other hand.

“I, uh—”

“Not now, Sutton,” Nori commanded. She waited until Pomona had her back turned before throwing a blueberry across the kitchen. It smacked the back of Yarrow’s head, breaking his concentration and making the blackberry explode in his hands. She took the blueberry from Archie and kept her head down as Yarrow looked for the culprit.

Sutton knew not to push his luck with Nori.

She handed the blueberry back to Archie.

“I think it’s tripled,” she said.

Archie compared it to a fresh blueberry and twisted his mouth in uncertainty. “I dunno. Probably needs one more. You want to do it?”

“No, it’s your turn. Besides, I think you’re better at blueberries than me.”

Nori admitting inferiority only made it clear how seriously she was taking the contest. Archie wouldn’t let her down. He felt the essence in their combined blueberry. It moved without pattern or purpose, threatening to move just the wrong way at the wrong moment and ruin the blueberry that contained it.

Archie steered the motion within the blueberry, giving the essence a pattern to follow. He couldn’t control it completely, but he could influence it. He matched the pattern with another blueberry, pushed them together, and—

“Done!” he exclaimed for the whole class to hear. He set it on the counter so that he wouldn’t ruin it.

Julienne and Yarrow were the first to respond, their heads whipping around and their faces racked with the nervousness of potential failure. Pomona hopped over to them and grabbed the blueberry. She looked at Archie, then Nori, smiling with an instructor’s pride. She relished the tense silence for a moment. And then…

“Winner!” Pomona declared.

Julienne slapped his palms on the counter. Blanche offered a flurry of quick, small claps for Nori. Cress threw a blackberry across the room at the winners.

Archie and Nori locked eyes and grinned. As long as they were working in pairs, no one else stood a chance.