Hello everyone!
Here is my entry for this year.
As always prompt and author’s notes will be at the end for spoiler reasons.
Replacements
It is the last week before the winter holidays and I have just let out class for lunchbreak when Makoto shows up in the door.
“Hello Akio, do you have a minute?” I gesture for her to come in, and she continues. “Have you heard about Shinichi yet?”
I shake my head. “No, has he fallen ill?”
“Not him… Apparently his mother has broken a leg, and he’s gone down to Hiroshima to care for her until the new year…” I have a bad feeling about where this is going. “…so the principal said you should fill in for him at the Christmas party.”
I groan. I thought I had managed to get around participating in the program again this year. “What was he going to do again?”
“The cooking contest.”
“Oh come on, I don’t know the first thing about cooking. Can’t you please do it? I know you can cook.”
“Sure, I can do it… But then you’d have to fill in for me with the beauty pageant. I’m not going to do both.” I grimace, and she continues. “Don’t worry. It won’t be too bad. You don’t have to do any cooking yourself, just watch out for anybody cheating, taste test the results and declare a winner at the end.”
Reluctantly I give in. Makoto’s right: How bad can it be?
It is the evening of the Christmas party and the cooking contest is about to start. We are behind the stage in the auditorium, and Mikado is handing me the forms while translating what Hakamichi is saying.
“So there will be teams of two, and there will be three teams competing.”
I check the list. The first team will be Nakai from my class and Ibarazaki from class 4. Then Kapur and Miura from my class and finally Satou from class 2 together with… Ikezawa? That is a surprise… “Well, it seems everything is in order. With just three teams we should get this over with in no…”
At this moment Miura arrives. She seems a bit out of breath. “Sorry Mr. Mutou, but we have to withdraw. Molly… Well, she seems to have caught some virus, and Nurse said she should not handle any food for the next few days…”
Okay, with one less team this should be over even…
“Unacceptable,” Mikado interrupts, probably at the behest of Hakamichi. “There are only three teams in the first place. It would not be much of a contest with only two contestants!”
Hakamichi grabs a microphone with one hand and Mikado with the other and heads out on stage. A few seconds later the auditorium is filled with the most atrocious noise imaginable as Mikado begins shouting into the microphone while standing directly before the speakers. It seems even Hakamichi felt that as she promptly takes the thing away from her again. Then Mikado addresses the audience again. Her normal voice is easily enough to reach everyone in the room – especially now that she has their undivided attention.
“Hello everyone! So we have a teeny tiny problem here! We need someone to fill in for a contestant!” No reaction in the crowd. “Nobody? Come on you don’t want the contest to be cancelled, do you?” Still no reaction. “Are you really going to leave poor Micchan here hanging?”
At the mention of Miura’s name an arm is tentatively raised in the back. “Ah, Taro-chan, I knew we could count on you! Come up here!” Arai climbs up, and Mikado drags him behind the stage.
Hakamichi looks satisfied, as Mikado translates. “See? No problem. We just have to…”
“I’m sorry Lilly, but I just can’t!” Ikezawa’s voice is full of panic.
“My, that is a problem. Are you sure? You were looking forward to it all day.”
“Yes, but I thought there would be at most a handful of people there. The auditorium is full to the last seat. I could never…”
“It is all right, Hanako. You do not have to force yourself. You should go and calm down, and I will tell Shizune that we withdraw from the contest.”
I see Hakamichi’s face getting more and more angry until she starts signing again. “Lilly, you can’t just withdraw five minutes before the show starts!”
Even Lilly jumps a bit at Mikado’s sudden exclamation, and Ikezawa takes a few steps backward and almost tears down a curtain in surprise. From behind the curtain there is a loud clatter.
Hakamichi darts forward and drags out a hunched figure that was hiding behind the curtain.
Mikado starts interpreting again. “Kecchan! What are you doing behind the stage? This area is off-limits to non-parti-ci-pants!”
Setou argues back. “Stay away from me, you feminist agent! I’m on a very important intelligence gathering mission! Those rules do not apply to me!”
“Of course the rules apply to you too, Kecchan! Rules apply to everyone! That’s what makes them rules!”
At this point Satou interferes. “I think what Kenji means is that he is volunteering to fill in for Hanako in the contest. That way he is a participant, and no rules have been broken, right?”
“I won’t volunteer for anything, you blonde…”
“Be quiet, Kenji!” Satou’s tone seems to surprise Setou so much that he actually goes quiet.
Hakamichi seems torn between enforcing a rule and ensuring a smooth cooking contest. After a few seconds she nods. She’s just about to start signing again when there is a soft know at the door.
I turn around and see Makoto there looking stressed. She is followed by Ibarazaki. The student council notices her as well. “Ah, Miyagi-sensei, I hope the beauty pageant went well?”
Makoto hesitates. “Yes… and no… Well, the pageant is over, but there was an incident afterwards. Apparently seeing Katayama in her Christmas Bunny costume was a bit too… stimulating for Nakai. He’s fine now, but Nurse insisted he follow him to his office for a checkup.”
I don’t think this day could get any crazier. What even is a Christmas Bunny?
“I’m sorry,” Ibarazaki speaks up, “I think under the circumstances I’ll have to…”
“I’ll do it!” Mikado interrupts. She turns to Hakamichi. “This is the last event, and you won’t need me to interpret until the finale, right. And we won’t find another replacement on such short notice, right? And we really, really, really, REALLY don’t want this contest to be cancelled, right?
Hakamichi sighs and gives her consent.
I’m getting a really bad feeling about this…
As the contest begins I take the mic and read out the rules. “So the challenge is the same for everyone: Chocolate chip cookies. The ingredients have been prepared according to the recipies you submitted beforehand. When you’re done I will test the cookies and declare a winner. Any leftovers will be given out to the audience.” At this point there is some applause. “Would you like to say something about the recipies you’ve chosen?” I hold the mic out to Miura.
“Well,…” she looks a bit sheepish – a look I rarely see on her. “Molly was going to do her special recipe, but since she can’t participate she told me to go for something simpler instead. We should be fine for ingredients, though.”
“We’re going to make a lot!” Arai interjects and gives a thumbs up to the audience which earns him a few laughs.
“It’s certainly best to stay with what you are comfortable, Miura, thank you. What about you, Miss Satou?”
“My mother sent me a recipe for Brown Sugar Scottish Shortbread. We have slightly adjusted it to suit the theme of chocolate cookies, but the test runs I did with Hanako turned out quite good if I may say so myself.”
There’s cheering from the audience again. Apparently the prospect of a foreign delicacy is well appreciated. I turn to Ibarazaki.
“The recipe I’ve chosen is to show that eating cookies does not have to be unhealthy. We are using whole grain flour and not too much sugar, so the calories should be quite low.”
The enthusiasm in the audience is quite muted at this declaration, but Ibarazaki’s grin still draws some cheers.
“In that case, let us begin!”
I watch the three teams working on their respective recipies. To be honest I have no idea what they are doing, so I’m not really paying attention. Some snippets of conversation reach my ears, but I tune them out thinking about an interesting physics publication I’ve read the day before.
”Don’t you think those cookies are kind of small Miki?”
“You’re right, lets make them larger. Nobody is going to get filled with such small things.”
“Kenji, I’ve finished the dough, can you please stir in the chocolate pills?”
“I protest this act of slavery at the hands of the feminist world-conspiracy!”
“Come on Emi-chan, this recipe has to be wrong. This has to be more sugar than is says here!”
“No! That is too much, Misha, too much!”
…
I glare suspiciously at the plate of cookies that Miura holds out to me. The cookies are enormous, but they all seem at most half baked. I break one in half, and the interior is mostly uncooked dough.
“I don’t think you can eat them like this, Miura. I’m sorry but I have to disqualify those.”
I push the plate back to Miura and take one of the cookies from Satou’s plate. I take a bite… and spit it back out immediately.
“What is this?” I examine the cookie. “Are those black peppers? Why are those even among the ingredients?”
Setou speaks up proudly. “You should never leave your room without them. You can scatter them behind you if you are chased to make your pursuers stumble, and you can use them to mix your own pepper spray…” He pulls a small jar from his jacket. “Did I mix those up? Damn, what am I supposed to do with those chocolate pills now?”
“Inedible. Disqualified. Next.”
Ibarazaki sheepishly holds out her plate of cookies. “They might have turned out a tiny bit too sweet…”
I hesitantly take a bite. As expected they are so sweet I immediately reach for a glass of water.
“Ineed, they are much to sweet, but…” I glance at the other two plates. “…considering they are just barely edible you win today’s contest by default. Congratulations.”
Somehow Ibarazaki’s elation is a bit muted.
Meanwhile I turn to the audience who has had quite a bit too much fun at my expense for my liking. “Anyway, it seems we have quite a bit of leftovers today, so our participants will make sure that everyone in the room will get to enjoy some of them.”
Next year I will have to make sure there is a suitable replacement for myself in time!
.....
So, Merry Christmas fortemorti!
The prompt was:
Mutou hosts a cooking show.
Short and concise, and still I took some artistic liberty to make it about baking instead of cooking… Sorry for that, but I thought this way it would be more Christmas-themed.
So my first question was “Why would Motou host a cooking show?”, and the answer was obvious: Because someone forced him to do so.
The next question was “Why would someone force Mutou of all people to host a cooking show?” And again the answer was easy: Because someone better suited to the job could not do it.
As my knowledge of cooking and baking is limited (if you are generous) I also this story could not be going that deep into cooking (not to even mention that I despise stories that spend pages worth of analyzing flavours of every possible dish…), so this story would go into comedy territory.
And when I thought about how to make the story funny I thought since I already had Mutou being a replacement for someone I’d just make that the theme of the story.
All of that took me 10 minutes at most – I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever come up with a story outline…
In fact I think I spent the most time looking up the first name of Ms. Miyagi. It seems there is not really a canon one, so I went with “Makoto”, the one I used in my notes for Katawa Kijo (even though I don’t think it ever made it into the story itself...)
