Chapter Four Hundred and Seventy-Three - Recipe for Success

"One, two, three, four... nine, ten, eleven, and twelve," Amaryllis said as she flipped through the loose pages she held. I was always secretly impressed by how dextrous Amaryllis could be with her talons. They were sharp, pointy, and made of... talon stuff?

Bone? Were talons bones? Or were they like nails?

Were nails bones?

No, that didn't make sense. In any case, talons didn't have pads, or little grooves like fingerprints, so it was impressive to see Amaryllis able to handle something like loose paper without any trouble. I supposed that she had a lifetime of practice. Or maybe she was using a bit of magic to help?

"Is that enough?" Caprica asked.

"Twelve pages is hardly a cookbook, I daresay," Desiree said. "Is that not the goal of this floor? To collect the disparate and lost pages of a book?"

"Not an entire book," Amaryllis replied. She folded the pages and slipped them into a pocket within her coat before pulling out the dungeon manual. "This says that the answer usually requires between ten and twenty pages. So we're on the lower end of that."

"But we haven't reached the end of the floor yet," Calamity said. "'Till we do, we'll be gettin' a few more pages, right?"

I nodded along. So far we'd been navigating the dungeon maze for what felt like a solid twenty minutes or so. Not enough to tire anyone out, but still a decent walk, especially with the frequent imp ambushes to keep us on our toes.

I didn't think we'd actually gotten all that far. For one thing, we were walking at a very slow, careful pace. For another, every time there was an ambush, we stopped to fight off the imps, and even if the fights only lasted a few seconds each, they were still enough to have us taking a short pause right after.

I suspected that if we were to backtrace our route, we'd discover that we really weren't as far from the entrance as we thought.

"I just wanted to see where we were in terms of collecting these," Amaryllis said. "We should keep going. I don't think we want to spend the day in here."

That was a fair point. "I don't even know what time it is," I admitted.

"Huh, that's not the kind of issue I'd ever considered," Booksie said. "But I suppose that the passage of time in a place like this is a little strange. You can't see the sun to gauge what time of day it is. It reminds me a little of this one library I used to spend time in."

"How does a dungeon remind you of a library?" Caprica asked.

"It had a fantastic reading room, with sofas, and cushions, and a set of cooling charms that kept the room just cool enough that you'd have a valid excuse to use the blankets laying around. But it had no windows showing the outside. You'd step in in the morning, then finish a book and leave to pick another only to discover that the sun had set."

"Awa, I don't know if it's exactly the same in a dungeon," Awen said. "But, ah, I do have this?" So saying, Awen fished into the pockets of her jacket and pulled out a small pocket watch with a little chain. She flicked it open, showing the time.

"Two hours since we've entered, already?" Desiree asked. "You are undoubtedly correct, Lady Booksie. This place plays tricks on the mind."

With that more or less settled, we continued down the maze, always keeping the rightmost wall close. It didn't take long for us to be ambushed by more imps, this time a trio of them launched themselves at us the moment we came around a corner with little squeaks and weapons raised.

Well, weapons of a sort. They had cutlery in hand, butter knives and salad forks, but it was still kind of intimidating to have a little red monster fly towards your face with a pair of forks and a lot of temper.

Fortunately, even armed, the imps weren't able to handle more than a single heavy bonk to the noggin or fireball to the chest.

"Another page," I said as the imps poofed away. Only about half of them dropped a page on death, so the drop-rate for these was pretty good.

As usual, we took a moment after the fight to check that everything was fine, then moved on.

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The only resources we were burning were mana and time, and I was pretty sure that the more spell-focused members of our group had a much faster mana-regeneration rate than the rest of us, so it was probably a non-issue.

It took a solid half-hour of trudging along, going down one end of a passage, then coming back through it, and discovering countless dead ends, before we finally rounded a corner into a large room.

There was a door here, a big double door, made of ancient wood and wrought iron that clashed with the rest of the floors' more restaurant-y decor.

Next to it was a table with a few random items on it, and the far wall had a few smaller doors, like those cool waist-high saloon doors that don't cover the top or bottom of their entrance. The rooms beyond them looked like pantries. Rooms with shelves filled with containers and cans and baskets full of stuff.

"So, I'm guessing that's the door to the next floor," I said. "And... this is the puzzle?"

"It's supposed to be relatively easy," Amaryllis said as she took out the folded pages and walked over to the table next to the doorway. There was a book there, opened up, with a ribbon marking the opened page. "This book is missing pages, and one of those pages will match the content of one of the pages we collected. We need to identify the matching page, then bring all the ingredients listed on that page and set them on this table."

"I suppose we can find those missing ingredients in that pantry?" Caprica asked.

"I think so," Amaryllis said. "The instructions in the dungeon book were a little vague. Ah, but there is a note to be on the lookout for imps the entire time."

"Right," I said. Calamity, Awen, and I moved over to the pantry and carefully looked into the first one. I reached up with Weedbane and shifted a few boxes around, then squeaked as an imp came flying out from behind one.

Calamity pinned it to the ceiling with an arrow. "Guess the note was right, huh?" he said.

"Guess so," I said.

We made short work of clearing the other pantries, just moving things around and making sure there weren't any imps hiding away, ready to jump out and nibble at us when we were least expecting it.

In the meantime, Amaryllis worked on the recipe book, comparing each page one at a time to the existing recipe and setting them aside into two piles when she was done with each. In the end, it looked like she was down to three possible fits. "I think it's this one," she said. "Booksie, you have a better grasp of books and such than I do, can you take a look?"

Booksie nodded and came over, then compared the shortlist to the recipe book. I came closer, enough to see that the recipe book had a few pages ripped out of it, but it was done in such a way that we couldn't just match the ripped edges.

"I think it's this one," Booksie said. "Which means, if I understood, that we're missing... two cups of flour, half a cup of olive oil, red pepper flakes, six cloves of garlic..." Booksie continued to list ingredients while the rest of us went into the pantry and started rooting around for what she was listing. It wasn't all that simple, since nothing was labelled and we had to look in every box and bin to figure out what was what.

Still, in the space of a few minutes we'd grabbed what we needed and moved it to the table, with Booksie checking through it all to make sure it was all there.

"I think that's it?" she asked as she set down a small block of cheese.

The moment it touched the table there was a loud clunk and all of the ingredients, the book, the pages, and everything in the pantry, vanished.

The door shuddered, then slowly squeaked open on a loud, rusty hinge.

"I guess that means we can go on?" I asked.

"I think so," Amaryllis replied. "Let me take one last look at my dungeon book before we move on."

"Man, you're really in love with that thing, huh?" Calamity asked.

"That thing is saving us a lot of headaches. Would you rather stumble around blindly through this entire dungeon?" she said before adding a last 'I think not' huff as final punctuation.

***