It was evening, and Fizz was working on a few new recipes. He’d wanted to work with the meat from the Insect Dungeon for the longest time, to add something interesting to his recipes. However, insects and pastries don’t go very well together, and adventurers tend to avoid eating insects for some reason. Fizz never understood the disgust; Just be careful, cook them right, and they taste just fine.

Sometimes, Fizz would fry the bugs and toss them up in cheese. Did anyone else want to eat them unless he tricked them into it? Of course not! Did those who tried it enjoy it? Eh, sometimes. There was always that one person who ate something they thought was gross and went, ‘Hm, not bad.’

Fizz looked at the results of his work once he finished kneading: An easier-to-make dough that tastes identical to his main cake dough, but was more nutritious and might actually have the chance of filling someone up. The point of cooking or baking anything was, in Fizz’s humble opinion, to sustain both the ingredients used and the one eating.

Now that he didn’t need to rely nearly as much on those finicky suppliers that always seemed to be late, Fizz knew that his bakery was going great. And if it stopped, that was just fine with him too. Fizz loved his life. Continuing his work to see just how much kneading he could take out of the process, Fizz idly thought about the dungeon.

It was young, and could go a lot of directions; Insect dungeons tend to do all sorts of things, from swarms to snakes. To Fizz, all that meant was that there’s a high chance of more ingredients; Strange ingredients that no sane man would dare to put into a cookie or a cake of all things.

After all, why not? Why wouldn’t he eat it, if it wasn’t poisonous? Well- Fizz would never eat a person or anything particularly sentient; He’s not a monster. He just liked experimenting! Sometimes people would see what he was doing and question him. His favorite mess was the time he had cooked up something using alchemy ingredients, and got in trouble with a church for disgracing their god. He found it amusing, especially after they stopped scolding him and started actually considering if it was really wrong.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

…He might’ve used a few ingredients only available if you had a direct bond with a god, but he paid well for them. The warlock certainly didn’t seem to mind…

Regardless, Fizz loved his life, and this was just part of it. The point of his life - far as he knew - was to experiment, to test, to see what people love and make them happier. So many variations just waiting to be discovered; Some good, some so vile that it’s a poison by technicality. It hardly mattered to Fizz.

Snapped out of his recollection, Fizz noticed that the timer had started beeping and that his oven was done. Oh, and that his tea was done too, based on the high-pitched wheezing of the old and abused teapot that had borne witness to things far worse than tea.

Today Fizz was attempting to see if spider meat would taste good in a pastry or not. From his ‘testing’ - Which had forced John to call a healer from how poisoned Fizz got a week ago - he knew that spider meat from the dungeon tasted similar to chicken meat crossed with crab meat, yet without that distinct fishy taste. Taking out the meat buns from the oven, Fizz poured himself a cup of tea paired with an antidote potion that John forced him to have and gently set the meat bun on his plate, preparing himself to see if it tasted good as it cooled down.

Fizz calmly ate the meat bun in relative silence, moonlight illuminating the man as he continued to munch on something that he really shouldn’t be eating. He wiped some of the crumbs off his face, noting that it was a bit flaky. He’d be sure to fix that in the next batch, but it still tasted decent enough.

He knew it could be better, however. He’d make sure of it; Fizz ‘Silly’ Meringue would simply not allow something he thought was bad tasting in his bakery, he had standards! Sure, half the things he sold made people suspicious, but once the others in town tried it out, most of them actually liked it.

“Hm,” he hummed, idly setting a timer for 10 minutes to test if he had poisoned himself or not.

“Needs more seasoning.”