CAKE FOR TWO [S/C]

Oh no, someone had heard her. August was resolved to not leaving the kitchen out of fear of causing more of a disturbance until the other player asked if she needed help. “Oh, yes! If you could pass that up back through that would be great.” She eyed the sugar with relief that it hadn’t spilled all over the floor.

“I wonder if I ruined the quality of this,” August laughed, “I have no idea if food items in this game even become lower quality from being dropped.” She hadn’t lost grip of an egg yet, thank goodness. August also wasn’t willing to sacrifice one to find out if it would spoil or disappear if she abused it.

It had been nice of him to offer to get the sugar for her. The walk out of the kitchen wasn’t a long one, but she was already in the zone and didn’t want to leave to quietly collect her mistake and sweep up whatever particles had spilled out. It didn’t look like much; hopefully the innkeeper would just fail to notice later on when he walked by the area.

She offered the other player a grin and pointed at the door a little further to his left where he could enter the kitchen. “My name’s August. I’m baking a cake, actually. If you wanna help I’d love the extra set of hands. Or the company. I’m not entirely sure what you’re cooking skill is but I can guarantee that the smell of the finished product is just as realistic as the real thing.” She had watched another player bake in here before; the aroma lit up the room with such a familiar tone that it brought back nostalgia.

She waited for him to get to the other side of the door and into the kitchen before picking the sugar off of the windowsill and placing it back on the table with the other ingredients. “Well, I don’t know if there is much you can do,” she admitted, “unless you have a cooking skill as well?” If he tried without the skill, all that might have happened would be her food getting ruined.

“If not, I could always just tell you about the real way to make a cake. You can try it when you get home,” she suggested. It was possible he wasn’t interested in that either, but August was trying to keep him around. Having company while she did the mundane steps laid out for her by the program made the entire process a lot more exciting.

Cooking here was rather boring. All she had to do was dump ingredients in and somehow the proportions worked themselves out on their own. An entire bag of sugar in a cake? She didn’t even want to imagine how bad that would taste.

“I know there isn’t a lot of room to move around in here, so maybe you could just hand me the ingredients when I ask for them?” If she didn’t want him to leave, that involved her having to reach over his shoulder to grab the things on the table as the mixing bowl and oven were on the other side of the little table. “How about handing me that sugar you picked up earlier?”

August looked up for a moment as if to gather her thoughts before answering Ruler’s question. She didn’t love to cook, per se. It was mostly baking. Cooking was different; you had room to just throw things in and it didn’t matter if you put a little too much of this or too little of that. For baking, the proportions needed to be exact. Otherwise, the goods would not turn out well.

“I like baking a lot more,” she admitted with an apologetic grin, “it’s different than cooking. Not entirely sure how to explain it, but it’s different.” What probably influenced her opinion as well was the fact that she had been baking since she could reach the table while her mother was usually the one that cooked all of their meals at home. She never really learned how to do the latter because there was no need. Unlike baking, which was the backbone of the family’s source of income.

She looked at him quizzically for a moment and repeated what Ruler had just said in her head slowly. “You baked...an egg?” She hoped he meant baking it once it was already cracked open. Baking an egg, shell and all, without the proper time limit resulted in explosions inside the oven. She couldn’t imagine how painful that would be to clean up afterwards.

August considered using sugar as a seasoning for eggs. “I’ve never tried that before,” she replied as she deposited the sugar into the bowl, “but I suppose that could work. Although, I’m not sure how much that would off-set the bitter taste of the charred parts of the egg.” He really shouldn’t have eaten it to begin with, but it clearly didn’t kill him so there was no harm done. “The wheat next please,” she asked as she pointed to the pile sitting on the table.

“Probably not, I’ve never tasted one so I can’t speak for how much different they are from a normal egg,” she really didn’t have plans to either. It didn’t sound appetizing. She nodded in understanding of his excuse, “it definitely takes practice.” Taking the wheat from him, August stared at the bowl and frowned. Did the system not require her to process it into actual flour first? She placed the wheat gently in the bowl and considered her action for a few moments before shrugging and going on with adding in the ingredients.

“So,” August asked as she reach over to grab the eggs, “want to try this cake once it’s done?” They were close enough to her that she didn’t need Ruler to hand them to her. August had been worried they’d roll away, so the eggs were placed inside another bowl.

She wasn’t sure how the flavoring would play out, but August assumed that if the recipe didn’t fail it would at least taste passable as cake. “The butter and the milk are the last two things I need,” she said as she pointed at the two dairy products sitting on the other end of the table by the fridge. “I have to put it in that oven and wait twenty minutes, but then we’ll hopefully have some cake.”