SaDiablo Hall, Dhemlan, Kaeleer, Tuesday Afternoon (Fandom Time)
"When the cat's away, the mice will play," Jaenelle teased, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen. Mrs. Beale's kitchen, to be precise.
Karla started, rice flying everywhere. "See what you made me do?" she accused, reaching back into the delicate pottery container to scoop out yet another cup of rice. "And I am not playing. I am cooking."
"Cooking," Jaenelle repeated, coming inside to get a better look at what Karla was up to. "While Beale and Mrs. Beale are conveniently out for the evening in Hathaway, celebrating their anniversary. I bet Papa doesn't know you're here either."
Karla shrugged. "I don't know what you're insinuating, Jaenelle. I'm just making a casserole to bring back to school for a friend of mine while she gets back on her feet." Because being falsely accused, arrested, and kidnapped hadn't been enough for poor Hayley, apparently. "It's a simple little casserole. What could possibly go wrong?"
Jaenelle
"I got shivers down my spine as you said that," Jaenelle informed her, grinning. "Just so you know."
She looked at the cookbook Karla was following, hovering at eye level with a shield over it so it wouldn't get messy. "I don't suppose I'll be able to convince you to do something else instead, huh?" she asked. "There's a spell I've been meaning to try and it's done best by darkness."
Karla
Karla hesitated, then shook her head. "Not if I want to have something to bring Hayley when I leave tomorrow," she said regretfully. "Once they come home tomorrow, I won't be able to get my nose past the kitchen door again."
Mrs. Beale sort of had rules about Karla and Jaenelle helping in the kitchen. The rule was 'Don't.'
Jaenelle
"Pity. It's been forever since we've worked on spells together," Jaenelle said. "Ah well, there's always next time you come visit."
Karla
Karla felt guilty about that, especially since time passed so much faster for Jaenelle than it did for her. But she really wanted a chance to practice her cooking while she had the opportunity.
"Well..." Never let it be said Karla was one to let a suddenly-conceived 'brilliant idea' go by. "What if you practiced your spell down here?" she suggested. "There's plenty of space for the both of us. And you can bounce ideas and things off of me while we work. It's the best of both worlds!"
This could only end in tears.
Jaenelle
Jaenelle Angelline was many things: Witch, dreams made flesh, the most powerful member of the Blood to ever walk the Realms.... But she was also a seventeen year old girl spending time with her best friend and usually forbidden from helping out in the kitchen. Was it any real wonder that upon hearing this plan, she instantly decided it was an excellent one?
"Stay right here!" she said, as if Karla were showing signs of going anywhere else. "Let me grab my materials and I'll be right back!"
Karla
While Jaenelle was fetching her supplies, Karla was mulling over a problem. She thought she remembered Mrs. Beale once saying that a few cups of rice could serve several people, but that had to be wrong, surely. Grains of rice were awfully small.
Certain now that she was misremembering, Karla stopped scooping rice and just upended the entire container into the largest pot she could find, then added enough water to cover it all. There. That should make enough for one decent-sized casserole.
Jaenelle
Unaware of Karla's decision to cook all the rice in the house--and unlikely to see a reason to protest even if she had--Jaenelle returned scant moments later, her arms filled with books. Claiming one end of Mrs.'s Beale's scarred countertop, she called in all of the various accouterments she'd vanished from upstairs. "As long as we clean up well-enough, Mrs. Beale will never know we were experimenting in her kitchen, right?" she asked, a touch anxiously.
Karla
"We'll be fine," Karla assured her. "We'll clean up so well, she'll never even know we were here. Now stop fussing and tell me what spell you're so interested in trying," she said, drying her hands on her apron. She'd spilled a lot of water, carrying the pot back over to the stove after filling it with rice and water. "Why does it need darkness to work?"
Within moments, two blonde heads were bent over the text, absorbed in the intricacies of the spell.
Jaenelle
Noticing how quickly Karla had become engaged in the spell, Jaenelle nudged her friend with her shoulder. "Aren't you supposed to be cooking?" she teased. "You let me deal with this. Go back to your recipe while I gather up some ingredients of my own. You didn't need eggs, did you? My spell calls for ground egg shells."
Karla
"Well, the recipe doesn't call for eggs," Karla said dubiously. "But eggs are healthy. So if I decide to add a few, I'll just be making it better, right?"
So saying, she cracked a few into the casserole dish and handed the remaining shells over to Jaenelle. Then bent over the dish and began the laborious process of picking out all of the shell bits that had accidentally fallen into the dish. Well, most of them. Hayley would never notice a few of the smaller ones, would she?
Jaenelle
At first, the girls were good, keeping their dishes on the opposite sides of the workspace, making certain their ingredients remained apart, and not bothering one another beyond the murmur of conversation. As time passed, however, they became rather lax.
First, Karla needed help browning the chicken, which stubbornly remained white no matter how long she cooked it for. Until, of course, it turned black and she needed more chicken. Then Jaenelle needed Karla's help chopping up several bunches of herbs--some of which smelled so good, Karla added a few handfuls to her casserole. They moved closer and closer together, until they were working side-by-side together in the center of the counter, chatting and gossiping about boys and girls and Fandom and Jaenelle's upcoming eighteenth birthday.
"Now I need to--Hell's fire," Jaenelle said, frowning at her book. "I need to put all this into another bowl, but I don't have another one here."
Karla
Karla laughed and rolled her eyes. "Jaenelle. We're in a kitchen. I'm almost positive that Mrs. Beale has another bowl you can use. In fact..." She bent down and grabbed another casserole dish, identical to the one she was already using. "Ta-daa! Here. Pour away."
The pot of rice on the stove, ignored since Karla had turned it on, began to quietly bubble over.
Jaenelle
Jaenelle poured the spell components into the offered casserole dish. "Your casserole is almost done, yes? As soon as it goes into the oven, we'll be able to take this outside and see if it works. Perfect timing!"
Karla
"It is!" Karla said, looking proudly at the brownish-gray lumpy soup in her casserole dish. "I'm just waiting for the rice--"
As if her words carried the force of command, the giant pot of rice let Karla know it was done--by blowing off the lid and releasing a torrent of swollen rice and sludgy, starch-filled water high into the air. Most of the sludge simply poured over the side of the pot, oozing over the stovetop and towards the workspace Karla and Jaenelle were sharing. Both girls shrieked and ducked away, avoiding the burning rice that fell like confetti throughout the kitchen.
Jaenelle
Rather than wait for the tidal wave of superheated sludge to reach the spell and the casserole that they'd been working so hard on, Jaenelle whisked both dishes away with Craft, setting them aside on another counter. "What did you do?" she cried, hissing as a few grains of rice hit her arm.
Karla
"I don't know!" Karla wailed, putting a shield around the pot and floating it over to the deep sink. There it could continue to seethe and burble in peace. "I just tried to make some rice!"
Many, many cups of rice. In less water than is really wise. And then ignored.
She looked around in despair at the kitchen. It was like a whirlwind had gone through it. Even if rice wasn't merrily decorating every available surface, the floor and counter around where they'd been working was covered in detritus and--
--and not the casserole dishes.
"Jaenelle?" she asked quietly. "Where'd our dishes go?"
Jaenelle
"Oh, I moved them," Jaenelle replied, also eying the disaster. She waved absently over towards where she'd put them. "I didn't want them to get all sludgey, why?"
Karla
"Did you remember to keep track of which was which?"
Janelle
Jaenelle finally turned away from the mess to look at Karla. "No, why? Does it matter?"
Karla
There was a sinking feeling in her gut as Karla went over to look at the dishes. "Erm...it might?" she said, "I...kind of can't tell the difference between the two of them."
When she'd handed over the identical dish to Jaenelle, she hadn't really been worried about telling the two apart. After all, she'd been making a casserole and Jaenelle had been casting a spell. But now, staring at the two dishes resting side by side, Karla honestly had no clue which was which.
Both were a brownish-gray; Jaenelle's because of the mixture of spell components, Karla's because she'd attempted to make gravy from animal fat and flour. Both were liberally speckled with crushed and cut herbs, both had the occasional eggshell fragment, and both now had several grains of rice floating along the surface. "This is a bad sign," Karla decided.
Jaenelle
From the expression on Jaenelle's face, she agreed. "Yours will look better when it's cooked," she offered encouragingly.
Karla
"But which do we cook?" Karla asked, looking from one to the other and back again.
Janelle
It was a question for the ages--or, at least, it took them ages to answer it. They argued back and forth, trying to convince the other of which dish held the casserole, even though neither could be certain.
"It's that one," Jaenelle said finally, pointing. "I'm sure of it. That stuff looks like shredded chicken."
Karla
Karla was less convinced. "That could also be the hair we added to yours," she said, peering closely. "I can't tell."
Janelle
"I can," Jaenelle replied firmly. "You put that one in the oven and I'll bring this one out to the kitchen garden." She gave Karla her best unsure-but-game smile. "Don't worry. I'm sure of it."
Karla
Karla did as instructed, putting the casserole into the oven--which she'd remembered to preheat!--and then joining Jaenelle out in the small garden just off the kitchen. "So, what spell is this anyway?" she asked, trying to ignore the feeling of trepidation she had.
Jaenelle
Either Jaenelle was truly confident of her choice, or she was better at hiding it than Karla was. "I found a spell that should mimic the effects of the fireworks you were telling me about," she explained. "But not only that, they'll tell a story in the sky, too. Which is why I needed to move it to a non-reactive bowl."
She set the dish in the center of the garden and stepped back. "Just a little bit of Craft and we should get a night full of color and light," she said, waving her hand.
Nothing happened.
"Maybe a little more Craft?"
Nothing happened.
"Work, dammit!"
Nothing.
Karla
A return of that familiar feeling of dread in her stomach, Karla turned and ran back into the kitchen, Jaenelle at her heels. Inside, the oven had turned a bright cherry red and was bulging--dangerously. An unsettling groaning noise came from the warped and twisted metal. "It's going to blow!" Karla shrieked, turning around and tackling Jaenelle to the ground.
She built shield upon shield upon shield. She could feel the burst of Craft from beneath her and knew that Jaenelle was also building shields--over the entirety of the Hall.
And then the kitchen exploded.
Jaenelle
It was hard to say how long the explosion lasted. There was a great light, a gout of flame that licked the sky, and an odd whumping sound that preceded the actual blast. Even through Karla's shields, the girls were bathed in light and heat; the deafening blast causing their ears to ring.
Jaenelle huddled under Karla, watching the ground on the outside of the shields darken and turn black from the withering heat. After the heat had gotten a chance to batter at the shields, flying objects took a turn; fragments burned and twisted beyond recognition pounded into the shields and the earth, becoming deadly projectiles.
Karla
Eventually the rain of deadly projectiles ceased. Karla waited another few minutes before rising and gingerly turning to face the kitchen. There was nothing left, just a blackened, gutted hole where a room had once been. She was vaguely aware of Jaenelle removing her shields from the Hall and using Craft to put out the small fires that still burned.
"We are in so much trouble," she said quietly.
[NFI, NFB, OOC is love. Just a bit of wee canon catch up (and them blowing up a kitchen beyond repair is indeed canon!) to send Karla back to the island with.]
Karla started, rice flying everywhere. "See what you made me do?" she accused, reaching back into the delicate pottery container to scoop out yet another cup of rice. "And I am not playing. I am cooking."
"Cooking," Jaenelle repeated, coming inside to get a better look at what Karla was up to. "While Beale and Mrs. Beale are conveniently out for the evening in Hathaway, celebrating their anniversary. I bet Papa doesn't know you're here either."
Karla shrugged. "I don't know what you're insinuating, Jaenelle. I'm just making a casserole to bring back to school for a friend of mine while she gets back on her feet." Because being falsely accused, arrested, and kidnapped hadn't been enough for poor Hayley, apparently. "It's a simple little casserole. What could possibly go wrong?"
Jaenelle
"I got shivers down my spine as you said that," Jaenelle informed her, grinning. "Just so you know."
She looked at the cookbook Karla was following, hovering at eye level with a shield over it so it wouldn't get messy. "I don't suppose I'll be able to convince you to do something else instead, huh?" she asked. "There's a spell I've been meaning to try and it's done best by darkness."
Karla
Karla hesitated, then shook her head. "Not if I want to have something to bring Hayley when I leave tomorrow," she said regretfully. "Once they come home tomorrow, I won't be able to get my nose past the kitchen door again."
Mrs. Beale sort of had rules about Karla and Jaenelle helping in the kitchen. The rule was 'Don't.'
Jaenelle
"Pity. It's been forever since we've worked on spells together," Jaenelle said. "Ah well, there's always next time you come visit."
Karla
Karla felt guilty about that, especially since time passed so much faster for Jaenelle than it did for her. But she really wanted a chance to practice her cooking while she had the opportunity.
"Well..." Never let it be said Karla was one to let a suddenly-conceived 'brilliant idea' go by. "What if you practiced your spell down here?" she suggested. "There's plenty of space for the both of us. And you can bounce ideas and things off of me while we work. It's the best of both worlds!"
This could only end in tears.
Jaenelle
Jaenelle Angelline was many things: Witch, dreams made flesh, the most powerful member of the Blood to ever walk the Realms.... But she was also a seventeen year old girl spending time with her best friend and usually forbidden from helping out in the kitchen. Was it any real wonder that upon hearing this plan, she instantly decided it was an excellent one?
"Stay right here!" she said, as if Karla were showing signs of going anywhere else. "Let me grab my materials and I'll be right back!"
Karla
While Jaenelle was fetching her supplies, Karla was mulling over a problem. She thought she remembered Mrs. Beale once saying that a few cups of rice could serve several people, but that had to be wrong, surely. Grains of rice were awfully small.
Certain now that she was misremembering, Karla stopped scooping rice and just upended the entire container into the largest pot she could find, then added enough water to cover it all. There. That should make enough for one decent-sized casserole.
Jaenelle
Unaware of Karla's decision to cook all the rice in the house--and unlikely to see a reason to protest even if she had--Jaenelle returned scant moments later, her arms filled with books. Claiming one end of Mrs.'s Beale's scarred countertop, she called in all of the various accouterments she'd vanished from upstairs. "As long as we clean up well-enough, Mrs. Beale will never know we were experimenting in her kitchen, right?" she asked, a touch anxiously.
Karla
"We'll be fine," Karla assured her. "We'll clean up so well, she'll never even know we were here. Now stop fussing and tell me what spell you're so interested in trying," she said, drying her hands on her apron. She'd spilled a lot of water, carrying the pot back over to the stove after filling it with rice and water. "Why does it need darkness to work?"
Within moments, two blonde heads were bent over the text, absorbed in the intricacies of the spell.
Jaenelle
Noticing how quickly Karla had become engaged in the spell, Jaenelle nudged her friend with her shoulder. "Aren't you supposed to be cooking?" she teased. "You let me deal with this. Go back to your recipe while I gather up some ingredients of my own. You didn't need eggs, did you? My spell calls for ground egg shells."
Karla
"Well, the recipe doesn't call for eggs," Karla said dubiously. "But eggs are healthy. So if I decide to add a few, I'll just be making it better, right?"
So saying, she cracked a few into the casserole dish and handed the remaining shells over to Jaenelle. Then bent over the dish and began the laborious process of picking out all of the shell bits that had accidentally fallen into the dish. Well, most of them. Hayley would never notice a few of the smaller ones, would she?
Jaenelle
At first, the girls were good, keeping their dishes on the opposite sides of the workspace, making certain their ingredients remained apart, and not bothering one another beyond the murmur of conversation. As time passed, however, they became rather lax.
First, Karla needed help browning the chicken, which stubbornly remained white no matter how long she cooked it for. Until, of course, it turned black and she needed more chicken. Then Jaenelle needed Karla's help chopping up several bunches of herbs--some of which smelled so good, Karla added a few handfuls to her casserole. They moved closer and closer together, until they were working side-by-side together in the center of the counter, chatting and gossiping about boys and girls and Fandom and Jaenelle's upcoming eighteenth birthday.
"Now I need to--Hell's fire," Jaenelle said, frowning at her book. "I need to put all this into another bowl, but I don't have another one here."
Karla
Karla laughed and rolled her eyes. "Jaenelle. We're in a kitchen. I'm almost positive that Mrs. Beale has another bowl you can use. In fact..." She bent down and grabbed another casserole dish, identical to the one she was already using. "Ta-daa! Here. Pour away."
The pot of rice on the stove, ignored since Karla had turned it on, began to quietly bubble over.
Jaenelle
Jaenelle poured the spell components into the offered casserole dish. "Your casserole is almost done, yes? As soon as it goes into the oven, we'll be able to take this outside and see if it works. Perfect timing!"
Karla
"It is!" Karla said, looking proudly at the brownish-gray lumpy soup in her casserole dish. "I'm just waiting for the rice--"
As if her words carried the force of command, the giant pot of rice let Karla know it was done--by blowing off the lid and releasing a torrent of swollen rice and sludgy, starch-filled water high into the air. Most of the sludge simply poured over the side of the pot, oozing over the stovetop and towards the workspace Karla and Jaenelle were sharing. Both girls shrieked and ducked away, avoiding the burning rice that fell like confetti throughout the kitchen.
Jaenelle
Rather than wait for the tidal wave of superheated sludge to reach the spell and the casserole that they'd been working so hard on, Jaenelle whisked both dishes away with Craft, setting them aside on another counter. "What did you do?" she cried, hissing as a few grains of rice hit her arm.
Karla
"I don't know!" Karla wailed, putting a shield around the pot and floating it over to the deep sink. There it could continue to seethe and burble in peace. "I just tried to make some rice!"
Many, many cups of rice. In less water than is really wise. And then ignored.
She looked around in despair at the kitchen. It was like a whirlwind had gone through it. Even if rice wasn't merrily decorating every available surface, the floor and counter around where they'd been working was covered in detritus and--
--and not the casserole dishes.
"Jaenelle?" she asked quietly. "Where'd our dishes go?"
Jaenelle
"Oh, I moved them," Jaenelle replied, also eying the disaster. She waved absently over towards where she'd put them. "I didn't want them to get all sludgey, why?"
Karla
"Did you remember to keep track of which was which?"
Janelle
Jaenelle finally turned away from the mess to look at Karla. "No, why? Does it matter?"
Karla
There was a sinking feeling in her gut as Karla went over to look at the dishes. "Erm...it might?" she said, "I...kind of can't tell the difference between the two of them."
When she'd handed over the identical dish to Jaenelle, she hadn't really been worried about telling the two apart. After all, she'd been making a casserole and Jaenelle had been casting a spell. But now, staring at the two dishes resting side by side, Karla honestly had no clue which was which.
Both were a brownish-gray; Jaenelle's because of the mixture of spell components, Karla's because she'd attempted to make gravy from animal fat and flour. Both were liberally speckled with crushed and cut herbs, both had the occasional eggshell fragment, and both now had several grains of rice floating along the surface. "This is a bad sign," Karla decided.
Jaenelle
From the expression on Jaenelle's face, she agreed. "Yours will look better when it's cooked," she offered encouragingly.
Karla
"But which do we cook?" Karla asked, looking from one to the other and back again.
Janelle
It was a question for the ages--or, at least, it took them ages to answer it. They argued back and forth, trying to convince the other of which dish held the casserole, even though neither could be certain.
"It's that one," Jaenelle said finally, pointing. "I'm sure of it. That stuff looks like shredded chicken."
Karla
Karla was less convinced. "That could also be the hair we added to yours," she said, peering closely. "I can't tell."
Janelle
"I can," Jaenelle replied firmly. "You put that one in the oven and I'll bring this one out to the kitchen garden." She gave Karla her best unsure-but-game smile. "Don't worry. I'm sure of it."
Karla
Karla did as instructed, putting the casserole into the oven--which she'd remembered to preheat!--and then joining Jaenelle out in the small garden just off the kitchen. "So, what spell is this anyway?" she asked, trying to ignore the feeling of trepidation she had.
Jaenelle
Either Jaenelle was truly confident of her choice, or she was better at hiding it than Karla was. "I found a spell that should mimic the effects of the fireworks you were telling me about," she explained. "But not only that, they'll tell a story in the sky, too. Which is why I needed to move it to a non-reactive bowl."
She set the dish in the center of the garden and stepped back. "Just a little bit of Craft and we should get a night full of color and light," she said, waving her hand.
Nothing happened.
"Maybe a little more Craft?"
Nothing happened.
"Work, dammit!"
Nothing.
Karla
A return of that familiar feeling of dread in her stomach, Karla turned and ran back into the kitchen, Jaenelle at her heels. Inside, the oven had turned a bright cherry red and was bulging--dangerously. An unsettling groaning noise came from the warped and twisted metal. "It's going to blow!" Karla shrieked, turning around and tackling Jaenelle to the ground.
She built shield upon shield upon shield. She could feel the burst of Craft from beneath her and knew that Jaenelle was also building shields--over the entirety of the Hall.
And then the kitchen exploded.
Jaenelle
It was hard to say how long the explosion lasted. There was a great light, a gout of flame that licked the sky, and an odd whumping sound that preceded the actual blast. Even through Karla's shields, the girls were bathed in light and heat; the deafening blast causing their ears to ring.
Jaenelle huddled under Karla, watching the ground on the outside of the shields darken and turn black from the withering heat. After the heat had gotten a chance to batter at the shields, flying objects took a turn; fragments burned and twisted beyond recognition pounded into the shields and the earth, becoming deadly projectiles.
Karla
Eventually the rain of deadly projectiles ceased. Karla waited another few minutes before rising and gingerly turning to face the kitchen. There was nothing left, just a blackened, gutted hole where a room had once been. She was vaguely aware of Jaenelle removing her shields from the Hall and using Craft to put out the small fires that still burned.
"We are in so much trouble," she said quietly.
[NFI, NFB, OOC is love. Just a bit of wee canon catch up (and them blowing up a kitchen beyond repair is indeed canon!) to send Karla back to the island with.]