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Chapter 123: Demon Spices
🕑 Added 2023-10-29 14:46:38 +0000 UTCMatt, Derek, and Brennan ended up giving a jumbled, redundant retelling of not only what a Gollum was, but of the entire trilogy and The Hobbit. There were translation issues of a sort, brought on because none of them were natural story tellers and exacerbated by “wasteland packed with magic, ugly bad guys” was much more normal to Artemis than it was to them. It was the equivalent of someone pitching a plot of people driving cars and eating bread to the three reincarnators.
Artemis was very unsatisfied with the explanation, and further exasperated because she’d actually promised the men something in return for the story. Out here, alone in the woods and away from civilization or any other people, it was something only she could do for them.
She was making soup.
Between the four of them, it wasn’t hard to take down some wild game for meat, and both Brennan and Derek turned out to be pretty good at field-stripping animals. Matt had contributed several vegetables from his pack after explaining that he picked them up when he was wandering around, and Artemis used one of her more obscure skills to confirm they weren’t poison.
“I want you to know that you owe me. The next deal I make is going to have much tougher terms.” Artemis was scowling as she stirred the soup cooking in a kind of expandable travel pot Brennan had pulled out of his backpack somewhere. “And this is all stupid anyway. I’m not even good at making soup.”
“Don’t listen to her, Matt.” Derek was beaming, his eyes glued to the pot of soup in anticipation. “They all say that. And then the soup comes out and it’s insane.”
“I’m not lying, Derek.”
“He knows you aren’t, Artemis. I’m sure by Ra’Zorian standards, you suck at it.” Brennan said, conciliatory. “Doesn’t change the fact that this is going to be awesome.”
“What would make it actually a lot better is if I had any spices to season it with. As it stands, I don’t even have salt.”
With that, Matt suddenly remembered that this was a problem he could solve. Digging in his pack, he withdrew several small vials of spices and a fist-sized wrapping of salt. Pretty focused on the soup himself, he wordlessly tossed them to Artemis.
She added some salt, then checked the broth for taste. Her hand glowed as she did the poison check on the spices as well, then she shrugged and started sniffing the bottles, selecting a few and measuring judicious amounts of each.
“Okay, that’s done. Or at least as done as it’s going to get. Eat up.” Artemis ladled out the soup in bowls they had brought from their own packs. Worried that the vegetables or spices might have ruined the taste somehow, Matt deeply inhaled the aroma from the soup to try to get hints of what he was about to eat.
It smelled incredible. He dug in. He was, for a moment, aware of the fact that he was tasting something impossibly good, something that was remarkable beyond comprehension. Then, as if he was hit by lightning, his consciousness fled, and he knew only blackness.
When he came to, it was to the sound of voices yelling.
“Artemis, I’m telling you it’s not the soup. The soup was really, really good. Something else has happened.”
“And I’m telling you he took a bite of it then dropped like he was hit with a war hammer. I killed him!”
Through cracked eyes, Matt could see Brennan walk up and grab Artemis’ shoulders. “He’s not dead yet, okay? He has a pulse. I’m sure he will pull through this.”
Matt tried to speak to let them know he was fine and found he could only do so with great difficulty. It was like his body was still vibrating with the memory of that one incredible moment of soup.
“I’m…. oooookay. I’m fine. Awake.” He managed to get a few words out. He sounded like a drunk caveman, but he succeeded in communicating, and that was the important thing. His sight lines were immediately blocked as his three very worried companions gathered around him, checking his pulse and generally acting very excited that they hadn’t accidentally murdered him with broth.
But he couldn’t hear Lucy, anywhere. That by itself was enough to shock him fully awake. He whipped his neck around, looking for her, and eventually found her curled up in a ball on the ground, laughing so hard she had lost her breath.
“Lucy, what the hell?” Matt couldn’t spare a moment to reassure the Ra’Zorians until he got this figured out. He hoped they’d get the hint from his sudden departure from the conversation.
Lucy wheezed in a breath. It didn’t help with the tears streaming down her red, choked face, but it did give her the ability to talk, a little. “Your… your face, Matt. You looked like you… like you were getting a surprise party and all your favorite people were there. Whew. And then you passed out and had the same dumb smile the whole way down.”
“And you weren’t worried?”
“No, I was, it’s just… It’s gotta be your eating skill, right? Nobody smiles while they get poisoned. It’s like you got overloaded.”
Matt considered this. The Gaian food had seemed perfectly tasty to him, but he knew that his eating skill changed his perception of food at least a little. The Gaians had never been that into the food cubes, but he stomached them easily. Further, beside the period when he was eating their cooking, most of what he ate were either raw vegetables, unseasoned meat from creatures that didn’t actually exist, or military rations that were far, far beyond their expiration date.
And that whole time, his PER stat had been climbing. Recently, he had been eating horrifying monsters and demons, but his cooking skills were so bad and the base materials were so gross that he guessed the eating skill would have made them more palatable by making them have less flavor.
“Guys, I think it’s alright. I just need a second. The soup caught me by surprise.”
Artemis looked oddly panicked over this.
“No, no.” Matt waved his hands in front of him. “It’s good, I promise. It’s just probably too good. I’ve been on… tight rations, I guess? For a while. This might be the first normal food I’ve had that prepared by someone who knew what they were doing since my PER started to climb.”
All three of the Ra’Zorians stopped to consider this.
“I guess that makes sense. My tastes have changed a little bit since I started to grow my stats, again. Food tasted a lot different when I came back.” Derek said, thoughtfully. “And I’ve had the weirdest stat growth of anyone here. I can’t imagine what those changes would be like, all at once.”
“So your weakness is… food? Tasty food?” Brennan asked. “Everything that tastes good is mind-poison. Bummer.”
Matt wasn’t giving up that easily. He walked up to the soup pot, scooped a very small amount into his bowl, then dipped his finger in the liquid, trying to withdraw the minimum possible amount of broth. He let it drip off until he had a single drop just on the tip of his finger, then let it drop on his tongue.
He was almost knocked out again. It was, by far, the best food he ever had. None of the tastes seemed possible. It was like he could feel every nerve in his body cheering for the flavor that he had just put it in his mouth. He reeled, but stayed up right.
Artemis stood off the side, worried. Matt put two and two together and realized she was still horrified to have knocked him out, and still attributing it to the soup.
“Artemis, you haven’t had the soup yet, have you?” She couldn’t have. Matt refused to believe she didn’t think this soup was bad, cultural differences be damned.
“I haven’t.”
“Just eat some. Now, if you can.”
Artemis walked over to the soup, gingerly picking up the ladle and scooping a portion of broth into it. Slowly and cautiously, she tasted the broth. Her eyebrows immediately arched.
“Oh, wow, this is good.” Artemis said. Matt nodded at her, encouragingly, and she tried it again. “Too good.”
“Artemis, you are fine at soup. Even by Ra’Zorian standards.” Brennan walked over and patted her on the back. “I’ve always liked it, anyway.”
“This isn’t modesty, Brennan. This soup is better than I can make. I’ve made enough to know.” She glazed over at Matt, suspiciously. “What did you give me?”
“Spices?” Matt said, helplessly. He had long since forgotten the demonic names for them.
“I get that. Where did you get them?”
“I bought them, at the demon market. They were expensive, I think? I’m not sure how money works here, but I was flush from killing everyone in a bar.”
Matt watched everyone mentally put aside the idea of killing an entire bar full of demons for a moment, somehow doing this in favor of grocery shopping. It wasn’t what he expected. They stared at him, shocked.
“You have demon spices? Multiple vials? And you gave me some for camp soup?” Artemis was aghast, and as Matt nodded in indication that this was in fact exactly what he had done, she stormed off in a huff.
“What’s that all about?”
Brennan moved beside him, watching Artemis rant and rave as she left. “Demon spices are rare. They don’t sell them to us, obviously. And they are very, very good at creating spices for some reason. Every now and again, someone finds a vial of them on a dead one, but you can imagine how often that happens. Not very many demons carrying cooking supplies into a fight, you see.”
“And? I don’t get it. They are good spices. Big whoop.”
“Well, yeah, big whoop. But to Ra’Zorians? Much bigger deal. There are guys who will spend a lot on those spices, and you have whole vials of it. More than I’ve seen in one place at one time before.”
“How much are we talking here?”
“You know how much Artemis put into that soup?”
Matt did. It was a generous pinch, but not incredibly big, maybe a quarter of a teaspoon at most. He nodded.
“You could have bought a house with that. Not a mansion, but a pretty good house right in the capital.” As Matt started to object, Brennan held up his hand. “I might be exaggerating, but not by much. They take their food seriously here.”
—
It was the better part of a half-hour before Matt had built up enough soup resistance to actually eat a bowl. For a few minutes, he hit a sweet spot where the food was still maximally delicious, but wasn’t threatening to kill him over it. By the end of the meal, the experience had dulled significantly. He committed the meal to memory. He doubted he would ever have another bowl of soup quite as good, ever again. The mechanics of the universe probably didn’t allow for it now that his taste buds had adjusted to the new flavor.
He also distributed a few vials of the spices to all the others, keeping only one for himself. When they tried to argue, he explained that he could not cook, and reminded them he probably wouldn't be on Ra’Zor permanently anyway. He couldn’t use them, and he’d feel bad trying.
Artemis protested the most, but Matt smiled when he saw that her words didn’t stop her from making sure she got first pick among the vials once everyone relented.
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Jake Holland
FOOD
