Book 3: Chapter 6
Book 3: Chapter 6
Tafel swallowed and stared at the cookie in her hand. It was larger than her face, and the chocolate chips embedded inside were as big as her eyes, but she didn’t have any issues with eating it. She was already on her third one. With every cookie she ate, her mana pool increased and she swore her body became a bit sturdier. “What are these made out of?” Tafel asked, raising her head towards Vur’s grandmother. “They’re really good.”
Vur shoveled pawful after pawful of cookies into his mouth nonstop, eating five to seven at a time. The annoying trio were staring at him with their eyes wide open, their lower jaws hanging to the ground. They exchanged glances with each other before bowing down towards Vur. “Cousin Vur’s the greatest! We can’t compete with his bottomless stomach!”
Alora rolled her eyes as she nudged Vur’s shoulder. “You should slow down.” She bit her lower lip as she stared at the mountain of cookies that didn’t seem to diminish no matter how many Vur and Tafel took. Her paw stretched towards the tray, but it trembled in the air as she hesitated, recalling her sister’s earlier words. “Aren’t you afraid of getting fat, Vur?”
Vur shook his head and swallowed, rinsing his mouth out with a jar of liquid that happened to be nearby. “If I get fat, I’ll polymorph myself into a skinnier version.” Vur nodded and shoveled another pawful of cookies into his mouth.
Alora’s eyes widened. “That’s cheating! You can eat however much you want and use mana to make yourself look skinny again!” Her eyes narrowed into slits as she raised her neck to look down on Vur. “Teach me.”
Vur paused his paws and swallowed again. “Okay,” he said. “To make yourself skinnier, all you have to do is gragh, rrrrr, and zwoop.”
“…I have to what?”
“Gragh, rrrrr, and zwoop,” Vur said. “You make your mana go gragh, then rrrrr, and then zwoop. See?” His ocean-blue scales shrank as his torso slimmed by a noticeable amount. “And if it’s too skinny, then you fix it with gurgle, mzmzm, and ploop.”
Alora’s head tilted and continued to tilt until her chin faced the ceiling of the cavern. “Uh, what? Is this some kind of ancient magical language that I haven’t learned yet?”
Vur sighed and shook his head before grabbing another few cookies off the pile. “Someday, someone will understand.”
“You make it sound like you gave up on teaching me,” Alora said, furrowing her brow.
“He did,” Tafel said. She waved at Vur’s grandmother. “Can you teach me how to make these?”
“Hmm?” Vur’s grandmother raised an eyebrow. “Well,” she said as she climbed to her feet. She plucked Tafel off the ground and lumbered into the kitchen. “It’s simple, really. It’ll be good for Vur to have someone able to make these for him when I’m not around.”
Tafel swallowed her fear by taking in a deep breath and focused on her surroundings. Surprisingly, there was actually an area designated as a kitchen. She had never seen one of those back at Vur’s place. Sera and the rest would fly outside and hunt bears when they were in the mood for a snack; she hadn’t seen any of them cook a meal before. Vur’s grandmother’s kitchen was filled to the brim with counters and cabinets, each adorned with lumpy knobs that were easy for a dragon to grasp to pull open. There was a magnificent orichalcum box adorned with magical symbols and lines that Tafel recognized as a chilling spell formation. There was another orichalcum box with magical symbols that were the basis of a heating spell formation. A floating spout that was attached to a ball of white light had a few switches that could be flicked on and off, emitting cold or hot water depending on the combination.
“Impressed?” Vur’s grandmother asked, her eyes lighting up. “A lot of dragons don’t cook. My husband didn’t like cooking either, choosing to use his time to paint instead.” She shrugged as she placed Tafel onto a nearby table. “But everyone’s free to have their own hobbies, and this is mine.” She stretched her sky-blue-scaled paw towards one of the cabinets and pulled it open. She swiped her paw across one of the shelves, dumping large quantities of miscellaneous ingredients onto the countertop. “Now watch closely. First, we warm up the oven to five thousand degrees by pressing this button.”
“Five thousand degrees…?”
Vur’s grandmother ignored Tafel’s tiny voice. “Then you take golden sugar, rainbow sugar, and silver sugar and mix them all together in a bowl like this.”
Tafel bit her lower lip. “Um, where am I supposed to obtain this sugar?”
“From the cabinet.” Vur’s grandmother nodded. “Moving on, after you’ve mixed the sugars, you take some minotaur butter and breathe some fire onto it to soften it up. Once it’s nice and gooey, you throw it inside the bowl and give it a good swirl until it’s nice and clumpy.”
“Minotaurs produce milk?”
“After that, take some phoenix eggs and—”
“Wait! Wait, wait, wait!” Tafel shouted. “Don’t kill phoenixes like that!”
“Hmm?” Vur’s grandmother tilted her head. “Oh! Don’t be silly; these eggs are unfertilized.” She cracked the red egg over the bowl and dumped the reddish yolk inside before Tafel could reply. “Give it a good whisk, and if you think the texture isn’t good enough, add another egg—like this.”
“…I’m a cannibal.”
“Did you say something, dearie?” Vur’s grandmother blinked at Tafel, who was muttering to herself. “The oven waits for no one—I’m going to continue; try to keep up. After the texture is how you want it to be, add some genie bean extract and purified sea salt obtained from the bottom of the ocean. Give it a taste to see….” Vur’s grandmother dipped her claw into the mixture and gave it a lick. “And perfect.”
“Genie bean extract…? And purified sea salt from the bottom of the ocean?”
“They’re in the refrigerator, bottom shelf, near the tomato sauce.” Vur’s grandmother reached underneath a countertop and pulled out a bag. “Add some flour made from wizened mandrake wheat until the batter is nice and thick. At this point, you can add whatever you want: raisins, chocolate chips, oats, dried squid, fresh tuna, anything at all. I have some excess fruit from a Tree of Knowledge, so I’ll use these for now.”
“…”
“Once the batter is ready, just take out the mithril trays and scoop some generous helpings onto it. Place it into the oven for three seconds … and we’re done! Transfer the cookies onto a different tray and cook the rest of the batter.”
Tafel stared at Vur’s grandmother, who was using her bare paws to place and retrieve the trays from the five-thousand-degree oven. Like a machine, she repeated her motions, piling up a mountain of cookies within a minute. Tafel bit her lower lip as the sky-blue dragon finished baking the last batch of batter and shut off the oven. “I never thought baking cookies would be so difficult…. Maybe I’m not cut out for cooking.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” Vur’s grandmother said. “You helped out a lot! In time, I’m sure you’ll be just as good of a baker as me. Now help me bring this tray to the young ones in the living room.”
Tafel sighed and muttered to herself as she carried a tray, “Why are dragons so good at everything?”