Tami’s inspired and succulent chef’s sampler was something straight from heaven. She showed Joe how to plate it and then had everyone in the kitchen and the wait staff taste it. She took a chicken leg-bone and wrapped some shredded pork rib meat around it so that it looked a bit like a mini ham hock complete with a dab of marrow on top. That thing was nestled in a slaw of cucumber, jicama, and apple that was quick fried in a sauce mix of brown sugar that had been allowed to get crunchy in a butter base that she’d sprinkled a dust of freshly ground mustard seed on. Her second mouthful of heaven looked almost like a deviled egg, but it was done to this hunk of bone, its marrow resulting in this knee-loosening mousse with a sprig of thyme sticking out of the top and torched with a glazed mohawk of Himalayan salt. For the third delectable morsel, she’d done a dessert of chai-tea flavored cheesecake with a crème brûlée topping seated on the most delicately sugar-encrusted, edible, crystallized pumpkin leaf.
Joe thought about the donuts in the dressing room and knew he’d never upgrade their catering. The magic that Tami could turn out in food form was nothing short of miraculous. The whole of the AI cast filtered through the dining room that evening and they’d never need their dressing room fare with Tami around. Joe didn’t even notice his feet start to ache as he stood there and tucked that perfect thyme sprig in each one of the hundreds of those that went out that night. He didn’t notice his feet aching because it all went by in a fast forward montage that only paused to slow down to slow motion when a customer’s face reached full ecstasy. They didn’t see Jean until the dining room was about to close.
Exp +400 (Establish a Cover. Quest Complete!)
“Mark’s in the dining room,” she sidled up to Tam to say. Joe might have let it slip by him, so in the groove of kitchen duty, except that the fast forward slowed down.
“Does he look guilty?” Tam murmured out of the side of her mouth, the contrast to her kitchen persona so drastic that the kitchen didn’t even notice it happening.
“As sin,” Jean said, sliding a browned-buttered pork chop out of its cast iron bathtub and onto her own plate.
“Are we still testing him?” Tami didn’t miss a beat, replacing the pork chop with a fresh one for a new bath of buttery caramel-and-cream-soaked roasted garlic. The result was some caramel apple coating for the pork chop that would curl your toes.
“We could, but I don’t have any doubts,” Jean said, and Joe piled a scoop of the perfectly chilled slaw onto the pork chop on Jean’s plate.
“What would we be having doubts about?” Joe asked Jean, handing her a fork and knife as she lounged at the place where they’d met Mop-moper.
“You want plausible deniability or 20-to-life if we get caught?” Jean raised an eyebrow at Joe. He was jealous of the one-liner, but more jealous of how she speared the pork chop on the end of her fork and used it to scoop up a bite of slaw for every bite of pork in almost perfect proportions.
Quest: 20-to-Life
Damn the repercussions, we need more viewers!
Rewards: 400 xp
Accept Y/N?
“20-to-life sounds more fun,” Joe's beast answered Jean. He’d handed his final plating duties off to the saucier to take his break, so he was happy to take a moment to grab a stool next to Jean and get an idea of what they were really there for. “But I’m going to need something more effective than an adjustable wrench if I’m going to meet Slimer in one of these hallways.”
“Table five,” Jean pointed through the swinging doors, chuckling around a mouthful of succulence.
The main dining room had calmed down now that it was after 10pm, but there were enough people who had found out about Tam being the guest chef for the night that they had a waiting list. It was just that by this time, the kitchen was humming with the routine of it. Tami kept her eagle eye on the plates going out and juggled four cast iron skillets while their dishwasher frantically tried to keep up with the pots and pans that they could wash. The table map was posted just outside the swinging door on a bulletin-board-covered partition that separated the kitchen from the high-end patrons.
Tami, like an elegantly choreographed gazelle, did something like a Bourrée across the kitchen to glance out and around the partition. Joe followed much less gracefully, but together they probably looked like a couple of kids peeking into the adult’s room after bedtime. At table five sat a man and woman dressed up appropriately for the fine dining room. The woman wore a long-sleeved and high-necked black dress with a peekaboo window in the back that emphasized her long, slender limbs and tense shoulders. The man wore a tailored black suit that matched the pepper in his salt-and-pepper hair with the billionaire haircut. He held out the chair for her as she sat down, and Joe would have thought they were a happy upper-class couple if she hadn’t flinched at the caress he laid across her shoulders. That, followed by his smirk as his caress tightened made Joe want to smack the guy and save the woman.
“What a slimeball,” Joe whispered as Tam and he re-entered the kitchen itself.
“We think so,” Tam nodded with raised eyebrows. Tam and Jean exchanged a look that probably spoke volumes between the two of them.
“What am I missing?” Joe asked Jean, who was still eating her gourmet dinner like a cavewoman.
“You don’t want to get involved,” Jean warned him, not meeting his eyes. As she had a dozen times, Tam was sneaking another handful of raw slaw ingredients to the ferrets, who were otherwise sleeping through the day on the hook.
“She’s a famous opera singer,” Tam put in, rearranging the sugar shards in the nearby chai cheesecakes ready to go out. “I heard she sings like an angel. She was on Broadway before she married that guy.”
Okay, yeah, Joe was dense. He still didn’t know what was going on. He just knew that 400 xp was riding on going along for whatever ride Tam and Jean had planned for the couple. Joe's mind whirled with plans to use Kodo and Podo to sneak into their rooms and steal their jewels from the safe. The woman hadn’t been wearing much more than a gawdy wedding ring and drops of diamond earrings. Then again, Joe was a beginner-thief so maybe they were about his level. He could practice shaking hands while he slid off that ring. Still, Joe felt a little dirty thinking of letting the poor woman take the fall with that nasty of a husband if she “lost” her rock of a wedding ring.
“Ah, come on,” Joe wheedled, snagging a slice of the cheesecake and a fork for himself.
“I’m telling you, you’re not ready,” Jean said, stealing Joe's cheesecake onto the plate that used to have amazing food on it.
“I’m telling you, I’m in, whatever you need,” Joe professed, full of bravado, snagging another piece of cheesecake and keeping it out of Jean’s reach as he took a bite.
“I’ll tell you what,” Jean pointed her empty fork at Joe with a stern look. “You go set the men’s bathroom up as closed for cleaning. You can be my lookout. Do the job right and we might trust you.”
Leave it to unrealistic television that they trusted Joe so quickly, but he wasn’t arguing because he was only a few points from having an even smarter World AI, which was… probably stupid considering the World AI hadn’t liked him for long. Still, Joe was doing it. Had it happened yet? He resisted the urge to see if he’d levelled again yet.
Those were the thoughts Joe was thinking as he set up the closed for cleaning sign, complete with kitchen mop. He then stood near the door eating his chai cheesecake brûlée, points and levels more prevalent in his mind than what was happening onscreen. He slipped Hex a bit of the creamy cheesecake center on the end of his fork. She’d rested contently on his neck for most of the day, only chasing a mouse here or there behind the dumpster once in a while before showing back up to be regally lifted back into the sling of his collar. Hex was licking cream off his fork for a super-cute camera moment that was framed by Joe's nonchalant stance as guard at the door and Jean slipping into the bathroom.
“If the mark comes, let him in, but no one else,” Jean told Joe as she strolled by him like she owned the hotel. Either that or like she was a mobster who worked for the guy who owned the hotel. Yeah, more like the second than the first.
“You got it.” Joe gave her a thumbs up and kicked the bucket on wheels into the way of the door.
“And if the mark is coming, make some noise before letting him in,” Jean poked her head out to say.
Quest: Guard the Door
This can’t go wrong, right? She’s only cleaning the bathroom, right? Wrong! You’re the lookout!
Rewards: 200 xp (bonus 150xp if you make enough noise)
Accept Y/N?
“Got it, boss,” Joe mugged with what he hoped sounded like a gangster accent.
“And don’t do that accent,” Jean frowned at him on a pause before she closed the bathroom door.
“Check, sorry,” Joe muttered, stifling a smile.
Hex and Joe ate their cheesecake, though he saved her from the sugary bits that she didn’t seem to like. There was quiet shuffling from the bathroom, but Joe ignored it, imagining his xp rolling up halfway into the next level. It took a few minutes, but the mark did indeed turn the corner into the hallway with the bathroom, staring down at his tie and crisp white shirt that he was brushing at with a dining room napkin. Joe slid his empty plate into the bucket of not-clear water, then had an evil thought. Well, it was evil for old him. He took the rag off the back of the bucket, a rag that was discolored and ratty as it was used to get to into corners of the kitchen floor that the mop didn’t reach.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Sorry, sir,” Joe apologized like he was a nobody, swinging his nasty rag back and forth, “but the bathroom is being cleaned right now.”
“Unbelievable,” the man said in that way that truly arrogant men can say it. It was how they stressed the wrong syllable and spaced out those syllables like some crime against their humanity was happening to them.
“It’ll just be a moment,” Joe told him in that polite tone that can only be mastered by introverts who have been cornered into having a conversation they don’t want to have.
“It might take less time if you were inside the bathroom,” he waved toward the door with his napkin, “instead of out here lollygagging.”
Lollygagging? They needed another upgrade or four. That’s when Joe saw the sloppy blur of what could only have been a glop of the mousse that was sorely wasted as a stain for this man’s attire. “That’s going to stain,” Joe said, pressing his lips together with a sympathetic cluck of his tongue.
“My idiot wife,” the man snarled out, with a vicious slur that spoke of a little wine on his breath. “She has got to be the clumsiest woman I’ve ever met.”
Something got cold in Joe. “That so?” he asked, begging him to dig himself in deeper, as he bent to wet the rag in the dirty mop water.
“If she wasn’t so beautiful, I’d have buried her in the back yard by now,” he joked with a sly smile as he looked down at Joe.
“I can help with that stain,” Joe offered, his eyes gone a bit flat.
“No need,” the man scrunched his nose up at Joe as he rose from the place he was sure the man thought he belonged, kneeling at his feet. “I’ll just wet it in the sink and let my wife get the stain out tomorrow.”
“Are you sure she can do that if she’s so clumsy?” Joe said, his rag dripping, not that the man noticed as he was back to scowling at the bathroom door.
“She’d better or there’ll be hell to pay,” the man growled, his eyes glinting with yuck, just yuck, just want to smash the rag in his face kind of yuck.
Joe was kind of stuck there. He wanted to shove the dirty rag in the man’s face, but the jerk was already kicking Joe's bucket into Joe's shins and pushing into the bathroom despite the sign. It’s not like Joe hadn’t met guys like him. They didn’t see people like Joe. He’d met the lower-class kind that came home drunk and had too much to apologize for in the morning. As Joe stood there thinking all that, the door was shutting on his lost opportunity to say something that would have cut the man down to size.
Then Joe thought about plastic and duct tape. He thought about Jean in that bathroom alone with the jerk. Joe moved his hand to push the door open only to find it locked. And he heard noises. Joe stood at that door and reminded himself of Independence Day, Earl, Gunpowder and Lead, Sleeping with the Enemy, and the fact that this was a VR show and not real. And Joe thought about plastic, shovels, and duct tape and realized that he wasn’t going to be up against Slimer in the hallways. He thought about Broadway and Sweeney Todd and was relieved that Tami hadn’t brought her own meat. Joe thought about what he should have understood 20-to-Life to mean.
Postproduction would be highlighting the dawning comprehension on Joe's face as they played the orchestral version of “The Point of No Return” from Phantom of the Opera. It was interspersed with scenes from inside the bathroom that Joe didn’t watch on the rerun later in the dressing room. It was just all too real and immediate to Joe to put it in the context of fiction. Joe's beast took hold of him at that point and shut real-Joe back up in the box as it reminded him of the woman’s flinch and the man’s tone as he’d called her clumsy. In a perfect world, that guy ended up in VR world sentenced to 20-to-Life as the victim of a very large spider, Joe's beast decided for him.
“You okay?” Jean stuck her head out to ask Joe.
“You okay?” Joe asked back more carefully, shocked at the fact that she looked perfectly normal.
“Yeah,” she nodded in her short-cut way of saying shit. “Anyone come by?”
“No,” Joe answered.
“Great,” she said, with a glance over her shoulder. “Move the sign to the end of the hallway and make sure no one comes around the corner for two minutes tops.”
“Okay,” Joe said, and used the mop to steer the bucket on wheels to the end of the corridor.
The sign did all the work because Joe was staring at Jean lugging a body over her shoulder and over to a back employee elevator. There wasn’t any blood, and he didn’t quite look dead. Joe looked up and down the hallway and then sneaked a peek into the bathroom. There wasn’t any of the plastic or duct tape that Joe had imagined. Once Jean’s figure disappeared behind the closing doors of the elevator, Joe wheeled his little mop back to the kitchen where he belonged.
Exp +350 (Guard the Door. Quest Complete!)
Tam took in Joe's shocked look and puttered over to the dessert tray, a bottle of dark chocolate sauce in her hand. “You okay?” Tam patted at Joe and then used her chocolate sauce on a piece of cheesecake.
“Is someone going to explain all this to me at some point?” Joe asked her, soothing himself with some scritches for Hex who was knitting through his apron strings and into his shoulder. She didn’t use claws, so it felt like a mini-neck rub of sorts with fur and a purr.
“Well, yeah,” Tami gave Joe a beaming smile as she finished a flourish of chocolate sauce and handed him a plate. “For now, go out there and hand this to the opera singer. If you can, you could ask for her autograph in a spectacular way that the reporter at table nine notices?”
Quest: Autograph Hound
Go get that autograph and make as much noise as you can doing it.
Rewards: 100 xp for the autograph (bonus 50xp/person you inspire to notice Sara)
Accept Y/N?
“Sure?” Joe took the plate from her and headed out the doors to the dining room, Hex disappearing back into his coat collar.
Not sure what he was doing, Joe followed directions. He was the new kid on the crew. That was his job. Could he be prosecuted for committing a crime in the VR world he was already incarcerated in? In which case, could he use the fact that the World AI told him to do it as a defense? The mind boggled at the possibilities. Did the chocolate syrup sauce spell out “Exit stage left?” Every time Joe thought he was getting a handle on all this, he got some whacked out –. Wait, was this the World AI getting back at him for messing up its plans? Was this a product of its upgrade? Joe wondered if he could keep up with it at this point. What had he done?!
Joe laid the chai cheesecake in front of the nervous woman, careful to put the message part where only she could see it. He watched her read the message and smear it out with a bite of cheesecake on her fork that she then swallowed like it was a bug on Survivor. Startled eyes flicked up to his. They shared this moment that was enhanced by special effects or post-production magic. He went from shocked to reassuring her shocked look. Her face went from fear to shock to a relief that was shadowed with a tinge of grief. Joe didn’t know what all that meant, but someone thought it was good television, so he just blinked and read the next line.
“Aren’t you the famous opera singer?” Joe asked too loudly, reaching out a hand to shake hers.
“Sara Brightman,” she said, nervously at first but with her tone firming. She took Joe's hand graciously with a smile that belied her nervous flutter of a few seconds earlier.
“I knew it,” Joe said in a loud stage whisper that could easily be heard from the few tables away that table nine was. “I’m not supposed to do this, but could I have your autograph?”
“Sure,” she answered, her eyes flitting around for a pen and paper.
Joe patted his pockets, but there was only a monkey wrench and a pocketknife in there. He’d obviously misused his four seconds of prep time this morning and brought the wrong tools. Giving her a shrug, Joe scooted over to table nine where he kindly asked for a pen so he could get Sara Brightman’s autograph. The reporter gave it up without protest, so Joe figured he was on a roll. He stole a pad of paper from a passing waiter as several pairs of eyes slid to table five, where Sara Brightman blushed, ever so prettily.
Joe backed away with her signature and a line of fans, not the last of which was the reporter who was asking her for commentary on the cuisine and status of her tempestuous marriage. Joe stayed close to listen to the conversation and because he wanted to make sure she didn’t get overwhelmed with the attention like he would have.
“My husband just left to use the restroom,” Sara told the reporter, who then slid his eyes toward the restroom hallway suspiciously. “I don’t know what’s keeping him, but we have fully reconciled. Previous reports of his infidelity or controlling nature have been terribly exaggerated. I hope you don’t work for one of those horrible gossip rags. He likes to protect me from that sort of thing, and it can lead to sour grapes.”
“Not at all, ma’am,” the charming reporter with the small nose flushed under her attention. “I’m usually a culinary critic and heard that the famous Tam Remmington was cooking this evening. I had to come see if she was worth all the hype.”
“It seems we’re here under similar circumstances,” she smiled at him, signing another piece of paper for a patron from a nearby table. “My husband thought she was probably overrated, but I have to say I haven’t found that to be the case. Did you try the cheesecake?”
“I had the chef’s sampler, so I got a bite and I’m entranced,” he admitted. “Mine had the brûlée topping instead of the chocolate drizzle. I do find myself wondering if yours is better than mine was.”
“Do you have a fork?” Sara Brightwood turned sparkling eyes to Joe. Would the VR cameras pick up the deep spark of haunted eyes as she looked at him or was he imagining it?
Viewers – 1193
“Of course,” Joe said, trying for a reassuring smile. Of course, he’d taken to keeping a few clean forks and spoons in his pockets so that he could taste bits of everything the wizard of the kitchen was producing. He handed one to her and she traded it for the pen he’d given her. Joe handed the pen to the reporter, who tucked it in his pocket quickly so that he could take the forkful of chocolate smeared cheesecake from her hand. He waited for her to get her own bite and they tasted together, eyes mirrors of each other as they rolled to the ceiling with disturbingly sexual moans.
Joe backed away again as the conversation turned to how the chai made the chocolate feel even more deeply chocolate. Joe was headed to the kitchen to try some of that for himself when they heard a sound like a dumpster being emptied, only it had come from the front of the hotel instead of the back. Joe didn’t think much of it until it was followed by a blood curdling scream worthy of Sheryl Lee or Janet Leigh.
Exp +350 (Autograph Hound. Quest Complete!)
The crowd rushed toward the front of the hotel, and Joe followed. What else was he going to do? The lobby was lush with gold and velvet with those automatically opening front doors that let out right at the curve of valet parking. Sara edged past Joe with the restaurant critic hot on her heels, making her way to the doors that were stuck in the open position by a bellhop and a parking valet who were valiantly trying to hold back the people who’d rushed to see what had happened. The crowd made way for Sara.
Exp +100 (Quest: More Viewers!! Quest Complete!)
The black limousine that was centered right outside the doors was as luxurious as you could get. The woman who lay unconscious in the arms of another valet looked like she’d belonged in that limousine and was lucky she wasn’t still in there. The top of the limo had been dented in such a way that the windows had shattered on all sides, the glass strewn across the concrete like chandelier crystals. On the roof, with the pool of red still slowly spreading, was the guy Joe had been too chicken to smack with a dirty towel, sprawled out with one shoe dangling precariously from a toe.
Exp +400 (20-to-Life Quest Complete!)
The shoe teetered in slow motion and, on cue, as this other shoe fell to rest on the red carpet that jerk walked an hour or so before, Sara stepped forward, perfectly framed by the doors. Joe had the presence of mind to cover his ears. He’d heard her perform, or at least recordings of it. Her chest inflated. The critic’s hand gently touched her arm as his other hand covered the startled oh of his mouth. Then she screamed. If Joe wasn’t just a bit too jaded, he might not have noted that it was a perfect E5, give or take a half note. The broken pieces of glass shimmered at her feet as if her voice had shattered them anew.