Part 3

Office Potluck

"This is disgusting." Ranpo muttered angrily.
"Reprehensible." Osamu nodded in agreement.
They both stuck their forks in the cake that was on Doppo's desk, they had already taken a couple of bites and they were underwhelmed to say the least.

"What's this?" Atsushi asked Doppo and pointed at the cake. It looked beautiful, fully frosted in a layer of pinkish cream, covered with sugar powder and little decorations that looked like they were carefully carved out of marble. It was the first time in Atsushi's life to see such a beautiful dessert. What could possibly be wrong with it?

"I got this as a show of gratitude for solving my last case." he said. "Unfortunately, the bakery it came from clearly values appearance more than taste.

"Well, appearance-wise, it isn't half bad..." Junko pointed out, "Maybe instead of eating it we should just use it as decoration? We can hang it in the president's office."

"Such an outrageous waste of baking powder shouldn't exist in this world, it shouldn't be put on display!" Osamu waved his arms around and groaned.
"Yeah, if we're gonna hang anything in the president's office, it should be Dazai." Doppo punched Osamu's head to make him stop moving around so much.
Osamu stuck his tongue out at him cheekily.

"But what's so bad about it?" Atsushi asked.
Instead of giving him an answer, Ranpo simply shoved a fork-full of the baked tragedy into his mouth.

Atsushi immediately got it.

He had to try really hard to swallow the sand-textured, chalk and sugar flavoured, dense and heavy substance that barely slid down his throat.
It was like old, stale, dried out rice, but it tasted like plain sugar.

Sugar and nightmares.

It was awful.

"Apprentice, this cake made me sad. Fix it." Ranpo pointed his finger at Junko. She immediately put down what she was doing and looked back at her senior.
"How?" she asked.
"Go make muffins." he commanded.
"What, right now?"
"Yeah. Right now." Ranpo took a small key out of his desk drawer and tossed it to Junko, she freaked out for half a second but managed to catch it.

She took a look at the key, then her eyes sort of drifted a bit.

Atsushi got to see that distant, distracted look in her eyes a few times already, but this time, it was targeted at his general direction.
Was she looking at him?

"Actually," she spoke after a moment, "you know what? It's been a while since we had an office potluck. How about we do lunch together?"

"That's a great idea!" Akiko jumped out of her chair with stars in her eyes, "we haven't had one of those in ages!" then she turned to look at Osamu.

And so did everyone else.

Except for Atsushi, who was looking at everyone looking at Osamu, and was very confused by that.

"Oh, well, it's such a short notice, I couldn't possibly... oh, who am I kidding. I can't let you guys down when you're all counting on me to save the day. I am the only one capable of achieving such a feat, after all." Osamu placed his hands on his hips and stroke a prideful dramatic pose.

Instead of mocking him, everyone just clapped.

What was going on? Did Atsushi just stumbled across a parallel universe where everyone actually liked Osamu?