Chapter 73: Breakfast Showdown

Author's note: Second chapter today!

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“Mind if I ask you a personal question?” Arthur asked.

“That’s the only kind for this kind of trip. But I already know what you’re gonna ask. The romances I’ve had were mostly short. Sometimes just a single trip. After a while, I learned that it’s real hard to hold something like that together if you only get to be where they are a few days out of every hundred.”

“And that’s okay?”

“Maybe some day I’ll meet someone who can deal with only seeing me every so often, or even someone who can live this life out here with me. I don’t know.” Talca drained his tea glass and motioned for Arthur to get him another. “Pepped this time, if you can.”

Arthur went to the back of the wagon, and was lost enough in thought over what Talca had said that it took him a few moments to realize what Spiky and Milo were up to. When he did, he shot across the wagon to stop them before they could actually get the heat element activated.

“Are you guys insane?” Arthur said. “Because that’s actually a crazy thing to do. Not in a great, fun way, either.”

Milo and Spiky had pulled a pile of metal from one of the sparrow-demon’s packs and were just now in the process of getting a large fragment inside what appeared to be a tubular heating element. To their credit, they seemed to almost immediately realize what a bad idea it was to try full-on forging in a high-speed wagon. Milo’s hand came back from the heating element like he had burned it on a hot iron, which luckily happened in time to keep the burn metaphoric rather than actual.

“Oh, huh. Yeah, I guess we should have asked permission first,” Milo said.

“No. I know you are a good smith, Milo. But it doesn’t matter how good you are. I’m not going to let you burn down this wagon.” Arthur turned to the side. “And you. Librarian. Scholar. What kind of learned man gets so excited over an idea like this that he goes on to almost burn down the conveyance he’s actually in?”

Milo and Spiky glanced at each other.

“All of them?” Spiky said. “It’s like you’ve never met a practical academic.”

“Yeah. Not that you are wrong about the smithing-in-a-cart thing, but pretty much every librarian is like that,” Milo said. “There’s actually a program in the city to make sure some of the better ones remember to eat.”

“Exactly. You know that botanist? Zingli?” Spiky asked.

Milo screwed up his face, trying to remember.

“The old Metal Elemental?”

“That’s the one. He’s not allowed to actually leave the city on his own anymore. He kept getting lost. He wasn’t even going that far out. He just couldn’t keep track of where he was at all. They assigned him a scout before giving up. ”

Suddenly, the whole pile of metal and the heating element lurched forward to the front of the cart as Littal ground his feet into the dirt and snow, and then took a hard right down a path that hardly qualified as a road.

“Oh, gods, of course. Good watching out, Littal.” Talca laughed uproariously as the wagon careened wildly down the road. “I promised you boys breakfast, and then I forgot. Luckily, Littal never does. He has a girlfriend down that way.”

—

Littal’s destination turned out to be a small town several miles off their normal course. It was a town in the sense that there was a square and several buildings lining the sides, but that was where the close-together nature of the settlement stopped. The actual business of the town took place entirely outside its walls, in the massive fields of crops and livestock that surrounded it on all sides.

As soon as Talca got the tackle off Littal, he bounded off for parts unseen, leaving a cloud of snow and mud in his wake as he made his way to goat-beast relationships.

“Is he going to be okay? Just running around?”

“Oh sure. He scared the hell out of the farmer the first time. But over the years, the farmer’s managed to just about double the average size of his Hings thanks to Littal. He doesn’t complain about the visits much anymore.”

“This town is crazy,” Milo said. “The wall is so small. They can defend this?”

“For small waves, it’s enough. And a lot of the big waves just miss them. But any time something big is aimed at them, they have to evacuate, or get help from a city nearby. Most towns this size have to rebuild every couple of years. Doesn’t matter much. The soil is amazing and it doesn’t move before, during, or after a wave. So they grow the best vegetables. Raise the best livestock. And this old ass cooks it all up better than anyone else.”

The old ass in question was a ridiculously ragged looking raccoon demon. Arthur couldn’t estimate most demon ages very well, but with this particular elder, there was no question that he was old. Ancient, even.

The ringed tail and spectacles made it perfectly clear what species Arthur was dealing with. If it wasn’t for those, Arthur would have thought he was dealing with some kind of half-starved rat demon. The old man was thin, weathered, and fragile-looking to the point that for the first time in his life, Arthur found himself worrying that someone might die of old age in front of him.

“I might be an old ass, but at least I don’t get caught in the mud to the point where the whole town has to come dig me out, crying the whole time like a baby.”

“I wasn’t crying. And that was fifteen years ago, you thrice-divorced bathless fry cook.”

The insults went back and forth for a minute or so. By the time the old man put a stop to everything by calling Talca a high velocity granite hobo, Arthur, Milo, and Spiky were all but sitting in the dirt from the laughter.

“And who are these?” The raccoon sat back down on his crate, pulled a pipe from a nearby table and lit it. “Young to be taking a trip out this way.”

“This is Arthur, Milo, and Spiky. They’re going out on a visit to the frontier. Arthur’s a cooking class. I thought it might do him some good to see what you do. His class is almost as specific as yours.”

“Oh? Whatcha got, young man?”

“I make Boba Tea. Sort of a milked tea with chewy bits. I can do some fun things with majicka to it, if you want extra pep or something to help with your health.”

“My health? Son, I only look this way. I’d beat you in a footrace nine times out of ten.” The old raccoon winked. “As long as you don’t know about where the race leads.”

“Despite how he looks, this old man is a legend,” Talca said. “Lived in the capital for decades, making a name for himself and then making a fortune. And now he lives out here, in the middle of nowhere, and somehow still does business. People come find him.”

“Out here?” Arthur asked.

“Out here. Old man, I want the works,” Talca said.

“You have the coin for that?”

“I do, but you aren’t getting it. Because I got you this. From the capital.”

Talca tossed the old man a sack of something the old man almost immediately cracked open.

“This is what I think it is?”

“Yup. Best smoke they make in the capitol. I told the farm who it was for and they wouldn’t let me pay. There’s a new pipe in there too. That I paid for.”

“Well, that’s a breakfast, then. I’ll get started.”

The old man walked over to a large oven that sat under a huge flat plate of iron and started hefting wood into it, working up a strong flame that almost immediately started pushing a healthy smell of burning grease from the cooking surface.

“He’s not going to take our orders?”

“Nope. I ordered the works.”

“Which is?” Milo asked. “We’ve never eaten here before.”

“The works, Milo, is the works. This man is the world’s only breakfast-specific cook. It’s all he does. It’s all he can do but he’s damn good at it. And the works is him sitting above that grill and cooking until he runs out of food to cook. If you survive this, you’re never going to forget it.”

The old man, it turned out, was not entirely kidding about his speed. Once he was behind the grill, he moved like a magician. Eggs seemed to crack themselves, folding around cheese and meat like they had a mind of their own. Dough was fried in so many different shapes and forms that a solid half of the huge fry-plate looked like an edible geometry class. There were pounds of food cooking at any given moment, yet the old man never missed a beat or singed a single atom more than it needed.

“He only buys so much food any given day. You can beat him if you just keep eating, they say. I’ve never heard of anyone actually doing it, but it’s possible.”

“Yes, but why? Is there a prize?” Spiky asked.

“Glory.” Talca’s eyes glittered with traveling-man food-greed as he eyed the golden-brown cakes on the pan. “The prize is breakfast glory.”

It was late morning breakfast after a long day’s travel. All four of the old man’s customers were starving. As the hash slung and the cakes flipped, they all tucked in, eating and eating while the old man effortlessly kept up with them, piling food on plates with unbelievable judgement of what each one of them wanted at that moment. Somehow he managed to find spare time in his cooking to materialize fruit juice and milk next to their plates.

And they kept on eating. Arthur was glad Mizu wasn’t there to see it. Facing down the old man’s sardonic grin, Arthur felt like he almost had to keep eating just to show him that he wasn’t weak. Worse, all the food was perfect. It was beyond perfect. It would have been impossible to prefer any part of the meal to any other part. And it seemed to Arthur like it was all suffused through-and-through with the concept of breakfast itself, like the old man had caught the platonic ideal of hearty morning meals and pulled it down to grease the pan.

For a while, the city boys and the driver kept up. It was Milo that faltered first, laying his head down on the table and moaning in over-fullness. Arthur fell next, his stomach bursting at the seams and refusing to accommodate even a single extra bite. Talca and Spiky kept going. And the old man’s supplies were starting to wear thin. First, he ran out of batter. And then the eggs gave out. There were still a couple sets of them being cooked, but the end was in sight. It was possible.

Disaster struck suddenly as Talca ate another plate of eggs and bread, and then lost the will to continue. He loosened his belt buckle to accommodate his swollen stomach, climbed down from the stool, and sat in the snow. He was defeated. It was all over.

Or it should have been. Somehow, impossibly, Spiky kept eating. The old man looked over, a hint of fear in his aged eyes for the first time. He slung another three eggs onto Spiky’s plate. Spiky ate them rebelliously. The old man threw a couple spice-coated lumps of dough at him, and he sucked them down. Arthur could see that Spiky was sweating, but the old man was down to a single egg, a few lumps of meat, and a small pile of shredded tubers fried in grease.

It was a breakfast showdown, and the old man drew first.