Vanilla

Forty Six

A/N: I'm sorry I'm a little late today! ;-; One thing I really like about writing this book is the extent and detail I can go into writing about food and that never tires me because food is universal and there are tastes we can all attest to at times—tastes that are impossibly universal—tastes that bring us back to an exact moment of joy and comfort and contentment and I think that is one thing I will miss terribly once this book is finished.

Watch me write about the nuances of 7500 apple varieties without flinching because by this point, I'm already crazy. Enjoy!

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[Vanilla]

Admittedly, I'd once attributed the peak culinary experience of my lifetime to my travels with Uncle Al and our adventuring in every corner of the earth imaginable, tasting and understanding dishes ranging from pig's blood to pigeon hearts, deep-fried grasshoppers to century eggs. Never would I have considered the prospect of it all crumbling under the pressure of thirty baskets; baskets of whole, ripe fruit—some, the colour of pale sunshine at daybreak and others, an angry crimson dusk.

Needless to say, the pulsing adrenaline at the back of my head was no illusion in the face of a challenge like no other. The temptation to start was unbearable. I couldn't quite understand the expression on everyone else's face the moment they had the baskets of apples wheeled in—quite the look of horror, which either meant that they'd mislabeled the genre of our current situation or... mislabeled the genre of our current situation.

"All you need is to send one person from each team to name as many as they can."

At once, heads were turning and the sheer number of collective smiles I'd witnessed in a single field of vision, in a grand total of five seconds, had the dual purpose of blinding and freezing human beings like myself.

I was about to tactfully remind them that I wasn't an all-knowing, omnipresent existence when they all but reshuffled themselves to have me stand at the very front of the group; stopping short only because the judge representing L'assiette Vide was quick to reveal a critical catch—team leaders are given a choice to eliminate one person from the opposing team who must sit out for the entirety of the final round, banished to some fifty feet towards the back of the room.

"Pick wisely. Most of you at this age are fond of weeding out the weak but how well do you know the best of your enemies?"

The very first of logical instincts would have been to identify red team's leader from across the room and assess the probability of him knowing exactly who to eliminate (myself) and so already, I was scanning down the row, following the gazes of whoever it was most of them had their eyes on and in that very instant, ignoring the panic that had naturally seized my team, I met the heated gaze of a candle.

It was infuriating, how they'd done an amazing job at appointing the perfect idiot to lead and it was in situations like these that made it seem all the more incredibly obvious. Already, he was looking at me and by god, the flame was in the mood for serious play and legally speaking, it could not possibly be allowed to exist.

A single glance at the corners of his lips that were hiding the smirk of a challenge had my head shaking. I'd turned to the team with an odd inability to form any proper statement, account, sentence, word.