NOVEL NEXT Cycle 23 (10)
Dear Diary,
The kobolds let us through without fighting now, as they promised. And we’re getting pretty fast at going through the shark and slime levels.
I miss the days when sharks were all I had to worry about. Now I have to worry about swarms of fist-sized flying ants.
Being eaten by a shark is painful. Being dissolved by a slime is painful. Being stabbed to death by a kobold is painful. But none of that is nearly as painful as being eaten by flying ants is.
They bite in, and rip out tiny pieces of skin, over and over again. Until you die.
I think I’m going to end up with a severe fear of bugs before this level is over.
Oh! And if that wasn’t good enough, there are these giant worms that… remember the robot shark thing from the James and the Giant Peach movie? Just row upon row of whirring teeth? Yeah that, in a worm that’s about fifty feet long. They pop out of solid rock and freakin’ fly towards their prey. So, us.
I now know what hamburger meat feels like when it’s being ground up.
There are also giant spiders! And by giant I mean like three feet tall.
We decided that once was quite enough for that, so I’m going to be spending the rest of the cycle practicing teleportation.
I’ll also be spending it cooking with Nat, the grandmother kobold. She’s super cool, and knows an insane amount of stuff about cooking. With my restaurant’s inventory and her basic kobold inventory, we can make a whole bunch of stuff that neither of us could before.
One of the things kobolds have to cook with is… pause for effect …eggs. Eggs! You know how much I’ve wanted to get my hands on a bunch of eggs. So now I don’t have to put cheese in literally everything, I can mix it up! I can make omelettes and quiches! And she taught me how to make calzone, which I hadn’t really considered before. She didn’t have an oven, but when she heard I had all the ingredients to make pizza she immediately asked a group of kobolds to make her an oven, and now she has the most beautiful brick oven outside her house. It’s seriously a work of art, and I’m jealous.
Or I would be, if I didn’t get to use it whenever I want.
We both lamented that I have pizza dough instead of the ingredients to make pizza dough. Well, pizza bread dough. And it just… It feels so good to have someone understand. Like, the girls are all very polite and listen when I complain about not having access to something like fresh basil or something, but they, in their heart of hearts, don’t care. They have their own things they wish they had, things I don’t really care about. But if I tell Nat that I really wish I had fresh basil, she sighs and lists a whole bunch of things we could make if we did have it.
Being understood like that is… It’s super nice.
Mika and Kimi get it. They come down with me, Mika to play music and Kimi to argue with the math guy, who just goes by Y. I think Kimi kinda likes him. This sounds weird, but I can tell because she hasn’t flirted with him. She flirts with everyone, as long as they pass the harkness test, so the fact that she just plain talks with this guy is… telling.
Anyways, I have to go check on my soufflé.
Goodnight, dungeon!
