An enormous troll holding a rusty cleaver stood in front of the tower’s open doors. He wore a grubby chef’s had speckled with mold, and when he grinned, his mouth was full of rotten and yellow teeth. The teeth were still sharp, though.
“Look’s like dinner’s been delivered right to my door,” the troll said. “Shall we have gnome soup with a side of elf, then?”
“Get back, foul beast,” Captain Toirtap said, stepping forward. “We have come for the master of this place, and will not let—”
Nanoc grabbed the captain and pulled him back just as the troll’s cleaver whizzed past the captain’s head, scraping his helmet. The troll kicked the captain, sending him flying backward.
“Ah!” Nanoc said brightly. “I finally get to fight—”
The troll lashed out with a giant ladle, hooking it around Nanoc’s back and flinging the little gnome through the tower’s open doors and into the ground floor, which was a kitchen. He landed in a pot of tepid soup with a splash that sprayed two apprentice troll chefs wearing dirty aprons. They did not complain at all.
“It’s about time the boss sent us something good to eat! Excellent,” muttered one. “Where did I put the garlic? Is that the one that’s rotten and horrid? Good, give it here then.”
She dropped bits of garlic into the soup around Nanoc. The gnome tried to stand up, but the bottom of the soup pot was slimy and he couldn’t find his footing.
“Make the water hotter,” the second apprentice complained. “Raw gnome is too stringy, far too stringy!”
The first apprentice chef bent down and began to blow on the fire beneath the pot. The bottom of the pot became noticeably warmer. Nanoc grabbed the sides of the pot and tried to climb out, but the large troll apprentice simply shoved him back down. From outside of the kitchen came the sounds of spells being slung and curses thrown, the loud clank of metal on metal, and other sounds of fighting.
Things were looking bad for Nanoc.
“Dren! Dren!” Nanoc shouted desperately. “Dren! Don’t fight the giant chef without me! Save him for me, Dren! I’ll be right out!”
One of the apprentice chefs shook his head sadly.
“Do not waste your breath, gnome. The elf is no friend of yours. The followers of Knowledge eat people,” the troll said, licking his lips as he tipped a bag of herbs over Nanoc’s head. “They are evil creatures, the worst of the worst. Trolls would never do that.”
“What? You’re literally cooking me right now!” the gnome complained. He tried to climb out of the pot again, but one of the trolls hit him over the head with a large wooden spoon.
“Elves can’t be trusted; they only seem friendly to lure you into a false sense of security so that they can steal your kidneys,” one of the troll chefs continued as it added a bowl of chopped celery to the enormous pot. “They use the kidneys to decorate their houses, you know.”
“What? That’s –they don’t!” Nanoc shouted. “And stop putting pepper in my hair!”
The trolls added a handful of dirt (“lovely roughage, that, lovely”) and several unpeeled onions. Nanoc was more insulted than worried.
“You could at least follow a recipe, you know.”
“Ah, recipes are just a conspiracy that book publishers spread, gnome. We don’t need any fancy words!nybody can cook by just adding stuff together.”
“Well, I think – hey, what’s that smell?” Nanoc asked, frowning.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Coriander,” one of the apprentices said.
“Coriander? No!”
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Warning: You are allergic to coriander!
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“I know!” Nanoc hissed at the notification. “I know!”
Allergies were the gnomes’ racial trait: orcs were tough, elves were fast, humans were adaptable, and gnomes sneezed a lot. That was life in the world Below. Nanoc sneezed with such power that the soup pot he was in tipped over, the soup running into the fire with a hiss that filled the kitchen with steam. He burst from the pot, spilling hot water and herbs across the floor.
“No!” one of the chefs protested. “There goes the protein! Get it back and boil it until its colorless!”
But Nanoc wasn’t going to die in a soup: he slipped across the kitchen tiles, ducking under one troll and then launching himself through the air to kick the other in the chest, sending it falling backward. Nanoc gasped in pain.
“You didn’t even season me properly,” he shouted, reaching for the jar of cooking tools and pulling one out.
It was a potato masher nearly as tall as the gnome himself. It was not a conventional weapon, but he slammed it into the nearest troll and knocked him clean off its feet.
“That’s impossible!” the troll protested. “That should have broken! It can’t be used as a club, it—”
Nanoc hit him again. The troll was right, of course, the masher should never have worked as a weapon, but Nanoc had a skill for that.
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Makeshift weaponry skill engaged!
New weapon: Masher!
The potato masher is normally used to turn boiled potatoes into mash, but today, its going to have a whole lot more fun!
Does 100000% magic damage against potatoes
Weak against: Almost everything else.
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“This works for me,” Nanoc said, facing the second troll. “Prepare to be… mashed!”
Nanoc hit it again and again, driving it backward with the sheer fury of his attack. The troll retreated across the kitchen, standing behind a tower of chocolate icing topped with whole raw cabbage. Nanoc stared at it, his rage held back by sheer disbelief.
“What is this monstrosity, troll?” Nanoc demanded.
“Dessert.”
“What?”
“It’s a chocolate and berry cake,” the troll explained. “It’s my specialty.”
“Those are cabbages!”
“Cabbages are a type of berry," the troll said cheerfully (this isn't true at all). “We add it to the cake as a decoration. It is…”
The troll held up its fingers to its mouth to make a chef’s kiss.
“That makes me… so very…so very… achoo!”
“And I add a good deal of pepper, too,” the apprentice chef said proudly. “It really brings out the berries’ bitterness.”
“I—gnome smash!” Nanoc shouted, deciding that the words were too hard.
He leaped into the air and slammed his whole body into the cake, sending chocolate and cabbage everywhere. Nanoc went berserk: he smashed that cake, mashed it, and turned it into crumbs and icing dust. The troll apprentices stared at the gnome briefly, then pulled their aprons off and ran for the door. The gnome looked up from his slaughter of the cake just in time to see the trolls heading out.
"Come back here and fight!” he demanded. “Come back and fight, you cowards!”
But they didn’t. They had seen what Nanoc had done to the cabbage cake and rightly assumed he’d do the same to them if he could. The little gnome cursed loudly, stepping off the table that had held the cake and walking out of the kitchen.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Whatever. I didn’t even want to fight you. I’ll just go fight the boss chef, then.”
But Nanoc was too late for that, too: the giant troll chef was already face down and unmoving on the ground. A single tear of frustration rolled down Nanoc’s cheek.
“All I want to do is punch something in the face,” he complained. “Is that really too much to ask? Come on, Rotcel, couldn’t you have waited?”
“He insulted my mother,” Rotcel ‘Loc explained guiltily.
“Do you know, I think you still could have waited,” Dren suggested. “You know how Nanoc can be.”
“My mother, elf. He accused her of planting turnips! Yuck! I had to put him down before anyone heard his terrible words.”
“And he was trying to kill us, too,” Captain Toirtap said. The captain considered this a winning point, but Dren quickly pointed out what it wasn’t.
“Do you know, most people do try and kill us, eventually,” Dren explained. “Nanoc has that effect on people. My own opinion of this is that—”
“We need to go,” Rotcel ‘Loc said. “We need to go right now!”
Their fights had not gone unnoticed. Trolls were climbing out of their pits and looking around. Nanoc smiled.
“Do you know, there are too many of them,” Dren said, grabbing the gnome’s arm. “We’ll be here all day if you want to fight them all.”
“So?”
“So we’ll miss dinner. Let’s find the boss and beat him first, okay?”
“Yeah,” Rotcel ‘Loc said, “Let’s go inside the tower and lock the door. Quickly now!”
They dragged the protesting gnome inside.
“What in the seven layers of heaven happened in here?” Captain Toirtap asked, looking at the ruins of the kitchen and the food sprayed across the roof and walls.
“The trolls were cooking,” Nanoc explained.
“What were they cooking?”
“Me,” Nanoc said grimly, twirling his masher in his fingers. “And I wasn’t very happy about it, either. Let’s go find their boss, I have a few complaints to make to the manager.”