The Catastrophe

"It was the day before the graduation exam," Dante began. "It was an otherwise unremarkable day. Blue skies, warm weather, you know. That's what made it all the more shocking. There weren't any omens or anything like that. No ravens or some such. Just a gentle breeze." Dante paused, scratching his chin. "There's two factions in this 'underworld' of magical cooking. There's us, and you know that cookbook you have originates with our faction. It's the older faction at any rate, but there's another group. They're generally known as Victualists. You'll find out about that in due time, I'm sure. Anyhow," Dante sighed, "this was during one of the periods where the rivalry was more of a friendly sort. Some of our students would watch their exams and some of theirs would watch ours. Everything was proceeding just fine, but then a fire broke out in the building. Everything literally went up in flames," Dante said, chuckling melancholically. "The Victualists realized a couple of their group were missing. It turned out they'd been experimenting with a group of our students in one of the kitchens and had created some sort of magical hot sauce." Dante grinned, then frowned. "The problem with magical hot sauce is that it has a tendency to turn into magical napalm if you don't balance out the energy of the spice. None of the students knew how to put out that kind of fire, and there wasn't nearly enough milk to put it out with anyway." Dante sighed again.

"But none of your students died?" Anmarie asked.

"Our students who were in that kitchen managed to escape. They said they just happened to be closer to the door. They did have a few burns, some of them fairly severe. They said they'd assumed the Victualists would exit through the window, but the fire spread so quickly they didn't have time to make sure. Evidently, they're assumption was incorrect. Everyone in the building managed to escape before it collapsed except for those Victualists. It's understandable, then, that the Victualists have kind of held a grudge against us since then. They already saw our form of culinary arts as being more primitive than theirs, but then our school killed some of their students. They have more connections than we do, so they ran a campaign declaring our style 'unsafe' and that made it difficult to scrape together funds to rebuild. Eventually, we decided to just abandon it and go our separate ways. So, there are a few other teachers out there teaching this style, but there's no unified school anymore." Dante sighed again. "So you see," he continued after a long pause, "I didn't come find you solely out of my own curiosity. We can't have you burning down your neighborhood with out of control hot sauce, now can we?"

"No, that sounds pretty bad," Anmarie said, still in shock. "What have I gotten myself into?" she thought. People climbing out of soups, infernal hot sauce, what was next?

Marcus was cooking pasta.