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“Player,” the Ghost Chef sighs, “You… are aware this isn’t necessary, right?”
The enormous pile of ingredients buried in Player’s hands, going over their head, makes an upward jerking motion. The Ghost Chef’s mouth thins, before he shrugs. “So be it…”
The Ghost Chef moves to turn around to the counter, when they whip back to Player to find that… they’re still holding everything. Wow. Impressive.
He can practically see Player’s deadpan face behind the bottles. “I trust you, of course,” the Ghost Chef huffs, turning back around, “Not that I was checking, or any such thing.”
A scoff from behind him. “Yes, yes,” the Ghost Chef mumbles, quickly adjusting the cauldron, “You’re a reformed kitchen assistant, excellent. Okay. The scarlet bottle, please.”
A muffled sound. “What?” The Ghost Chef asks, turning around when his outstretched hand remains empty.
“I… have about seven of those,” Player says.
“Uh, you shouldn’t,” the Ghost Chef exhales, pinching their nose. “I have the scarlet, the crimson, the rose, the carmine, the falu, the chili, the maroon, and the auburn. Can’t forget the auburn. I cannot overstate that they’re all very different, and also— I should have eight, not seven.”
“You… only keep one of each?”
“Well, yes,” the Ghost Chef says, flattening out the few creases in their hat with a proud look, “I’m a very efficient chef. One bottle lasts me a whole kingdom full of robloxians. It helped, much, with…”
The withering, frosted crops of Blackrock, and the constant whines of the knights, and appeasing the roaring of hunger that tore through his gut as the guards feasted and laughed and the Ki—
The Ghost Chef claps his hands together. “Anyways!” He abruptly yells, “I’ll help you identify it.”
“…I don’t think I have it.”
Player’s voice, for the first time the Chef’s heard, is hesitant.
“Nonsense!” The Ghost Chef waves off, but the confidence wilts at Player’s rigidness. “I’m sure I have it, I… well, I suppose it’s… been a while since I restocked, but…”
A beat of quiet.
But Player, as always, cuts through. “I think I used it, instead of the rose, at Blackrock.”
“Huh. Did you?” The Ghost Chef says faintly, “I don’t… oh, you did. Apologies.”
“…You don’t have to be sorry.”
“No, no, I’m supposed to be making you food,” the Kitc— the Ghost Chef murmurs, trying to figure out what went next in the cauldron, hands fluttering; but the only thing he can think of, swallowing his consciousness, is his whole world blistering and burning into something more final than ash. “I shouldn’t be being all… silly, like this.”
Player’s voice is quiet. “It’s not silly.”
And the Ghost Chef remembers.
“I know,” he says quietly, lighting the fire under the cauldron with a striker, four long, agonizing clicks to snap out a blaze. “But it feels like a dream, to me at least. Things… went the way they did. It’s done. It just, it feels like such a joke, the way things happened.”
“…I’m sorry.”
“Player, really,” the Ghost Chef huffs, taking a teal flask from Player and popping the cork, spilling down, and down, and down. “Don’t be. You listen, you try, and Blackrock… this… it’s…”
The Ghost Chef pauses, before slowly breathing out. Regret colors the truth. “I loved the kingdom, of course, but I just couldn’t take it at the end.”
“…Why?”
The Ghost Chef turns into the cauldron, and a haze stares back. “Well, it—” the chef’s voice shakes slightly, before they cut off, and try again. “It wasn’t so bad. The King confided in me, about the… the dagger. And I did everything to help, everything, and I tried my absolute best… and it still happened. He started to banish anyone who tried to help, anyone who questioned the Sword, and I… may have been next. No food I made did anything.”
A pause.
“He was a great man,” the Ghost Chef breathes without air. “But I was a coward. I couldn’t change things.”
A large bubble in the cauldron pops, and the Ghost Chef shrieks, flinching back, before hurriedly flattening his clothes as though trying to pretend nothing happened. He turns to Player to see their reaction, but their body is still and their expression is covered by ingredients.
“Wow,” the Ghost Chef sighs, “I’m not in my right mind today. I’m sorry. Here, let me take so—”
His mouth snaps shut. For when the Ghost Chef takes some ingredients from Player in his hands, he’s startled by the wide-eyed, speechless, shadowed look in their face.
The Ghost Chef stares for a moment, before resolve builds. “Player,” he admits, “I truly admire you, you know.”
Player’s mouth opens to protest when the Ghost Chef shoves a cookie in their face.
“HGHH—?!” Player leans back, startled, wrenching the cookie out of their mouth. They shoot the chef an incredulous glare. “Don’t do that.”
“Well, it’s not my fault you aren’t eating properly,” the Ghost Chef scoffs.
“A cookie is ‘eating properly’?”
“It’s better than Bloxy Colas, of all things,” the chef scolds, “It’s like you want to have an energy crash.”
“It’s not pure sugar—”
“It quite literally is—”
“So then what do you think is good?”
“What I think is good?”
A moment passes.
“Well, perhaps the warm sawdust of wood sourced during winter,” the Ghost Chef hums.
Player stares. “No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?!” The Chef sputters, “It’s a very valid snack!”
“It’s dust.”
“So what exactly is your point?!”
“Dust sucks.”
“HOW?!”
Player and the Ghost Chef bicker, time passes, and the cauldron bubbles over a steady fire. By the time the meal rises out with a gush of steam, the Ghost Chef wonders if the undead actually can feel warm again.
“You take this,” the chef insists, a whole platter of mouth-watering different foods in outstretched hands. “As I’m sure you’ll need it.”
“Thanks, but I… I can’t eat all of this,” Player says, mouth slightly agape.
“Fine,” the Ghost Chef scoffs, “But at least have the apple pie, and the fish, and the nasi goreng, and the fried shrimp, and the lemon tea, and the mango slices. And perhaps the—”
“Thank you,” Player cuts off, but they hold the bag with care. “Really. But… if I can’t finish?”
“Well,” he muses, “Once you’ve eaten at least half, you can give the rest to someone else who may need it. There will… always be those who suffer in this world.”
The Ghost Chef turns back to the cauldron to start on dinner, before he remembers that cold. And with it, he remembers how warm it once was.
The chef nearly laughs at his own sap, before slowly finding the words for the truth.
“I’d feel… good, knowing I could help, at least a bit.”
-
The King is rather confused when Player pops into Nirvana, and just as quickly pops out, only a silvery bag plopping to the carpet remaining. The King hesitantly treads forward and reads the note, writing scrawled in red ink, messily taped to the front.
I talked to a chef. Make sure to take care of yourself. Don’t trip down the stairs. Bye.
Player
The King inhales sharply at the nerve, that brat, he doesn’t even have any stairs; before he realizes. That smell.
He’s nearly knocked over by an absolute warmth. It radiates out to the ruler for the first time in years. Like the sun, or a fireplace, or laughter as it once bubbled in his chest and spilt through eyes. Like warm, fiery apple pie, two seconds out of the oven. Buttery, achingly sweet, tanged with a hint of sourness, cinnamon piercing through into that heaven.
And the Kitchen Wizard, what happened to him?, he had shrieked panickedly. But for good reason, since the filling was probably hot enough to scald the Ice Dagger.
The King wishes it did.
So as he slowly puts down his staff, and holds the bag in two hands like it’s porcelain, his hands tremble. The King slowly brushes the lid to the food container open, and with the heat in his hands, it’s as though Blackrock Castle is still around him.
Far away, the Ghost Chef remembers to let the pie cool. The fire under the cauldron fizzles into embers.