The Secret Ingredient Is Love

It was getting to be around dinner time, and some of the chefs from the household had been well at work cooking an incredibly wonderful smelling meal for us. We caught the scent all the way in the dressing room.

“Madam Wellington,” Cynthia surprised us at the door. “Dinner is proceeding well, however our dessert selection has not been selected yet.”

Dessert selection? Oh my goodness. How many desserts did they plan to make?

“Why don't y'all make those mighty tasty cookies? Oh, and make enough for the party coming up too!”

Cynthia smiled and nodded at those orders.

“As you wish, Madam Wellington. I'll need to get some ingredients first, if I may be pardoned to collect them.”

“What a lovely idea!” Adalyn rose to her feet and happily pushed Yamin and I toward the door. “We can all go out and get a little pre-dinner exercise in! We ladies need to earn those calories, am I right?”

Calories don't mean much to me, since my body just breaks everything down into subatomic particles. Not that she could have known that.

“Do we have to go to the market?” Yamin asked.

Adalyn snickered, telling her that the answer would be a lot more adventurous.

“How special are these cookies?” I asked, wondering what sort of cookie ingredients would require an adventure.

“Darlin’ Cynthia, why don't you give lil’ Yalda and lil’ Yamy a taste of what you can make? How about it?”

Cynthia kindly bowed, taking me by the hand and leading all of us to the big household kitchen.

~☆☆☆~

This mansion had no shortage of oversized decorations and exaggerated proportions, and the kitchen was no exception. This looked like a place a 5 star hotel would use to cater to their guests, not that I've ever been to one of those.

There were a dozen chefs, all working on their own gourmet dish to please our apatites. Some spun ladles around in giant pots of soup, while others chopped up meat and vegetables for a savory dish that I could practically taste already.

But we weren’t here to sample the dinner we’d soon be partaking of. Our true objective sat upon a tray; a dwindling batch of red velvety cookies.

Embedded into the crust of the red treats were heart shaped chips, glowing a hot pink colour. The imagery made me think about Valentine's day, but that holiday wasn’t for a while.

I picked the topmost cookie, giving it a sniff and taking in the sweetness through my nose. Would the taste match its promising scent?

*Crunch!*

-…-

-…-

The perfectly baked surface of the cookie gave my teeth a satisfying crunch. The further they sank in, my mouth was met with a moist interior, spelling the perfect balance of structure. The heart chips were chocolaty and gooey, but they had a hint of extra flavour that enhanced the bitterness of the chocolate to make it all the more palatable.

I was smitten beyond belief. So much that I just couldn’t speak the proper words to praise this. It surpassed the cookie I’d had at the cafe, leaving it in the dust. If this was what love tasted like, Cynthia must have been cupid.

“These cookies are awesome!” I cheered. “More! I need more!”

“I’ll make you as many as you like,” Cynthia snickered with flattery. “But first, we’ll need to go out and pick a very special ingredient.”

The ingredient she was talking about needed to be freshly gathered from the massive garden in their backyard. Just from one of the kitchen windows we received a very promising look of the flora we’d get to explore to find it.

~☆☆☆~

Half a kilometer of land had been sectioned off for the Wellington family to keep as a garden, and nearly thirty different hired servants were instructed to tend to all the different plants from many different regions of the world. Trees, flowers, fruits and vegetables, among many other different things were gracefully taken care of here.

Slabs of stone had been placed as a path through it all. At the very center of the garden was a circular area with a big fountain. We were currently standing next to that.

“I almost forgot how gorgeous this backyard is,” Yamin commented.

“That’s because you hardly ever come to play anymore…” Adalyn started fake crying to express her discontent. “Boo hoo…lil’ Yamy doesn't love me anymore…”

“Adalyn, I’m not ten anymore,” Yamin laughed. “Me and Riley used to play back here all the time back then, but he just got busy. Then mom’s job kept her away too.” she took a deep sigh, clutching her backpack tightly in her arms.

Adalyn caught wind of Yamin’s minor melancholy feelings, wrapping arms around her and pulling her in for a hug.

“Let’s not be so sad on such a happy day! Lift those spirits, lovely lil Yamy!”

“Gah!” grunted a suffocating Yamin.

The bear hug thing must run in the family.

Once Yamin was released from the overly loving arms of her cousin, Miss Cynthia took us to the eastern part of the garden where rolling hills were clothed in flowers, dazzling the eye. It reminded me a lot of the flower fields back home, but these multi coloured blossoms had a tinge of crystal shine in their petals.

“We need to pick as many pink flowers as possible,” Miss Cynthia said. “It'll probably be best for everyone to split up so we can cover more ground.”

Out of sheer numbers, you'd think that there'd be a lot of pink here, but I didn’t spot any within a few meters. There was a lot of green, orange, and white, with a splendor of other shades mixed in. But no pink.

“Why is pink so important?” I asked.

“The pink flowers represent love, figuratively and magically,” Cynthia answered. “An extract from them is the core part of many of the products we produce here on the Wellington estate.”

So, they really did put love into whatever they made. I thought it was a joke, but I guess not.

“Miss Adalyn, you sew love into your clothing. This is where it comes from?”

She playfully stuck out her tongue in response. That pretty much confirmed it.

Everyone went their own way after that. Cynthia and I went further east, keeping within earshot of each other. But Adalyn and Yamin kept to the western part of the flower hills. You could say we were working in pairs, but for all intents and purposes, we'd split up.

I wanted to work fast so we could get those cookies baking. I needed more of them as soon as possible! With a little ingenuity, this might be easy as cake…or pie…or cookies.

Could they make cake or pie out of the love flowers? My mind kinda lazily latched onto that question.

Anyways, I looked over my MAP to see if there were any visible pink flowers in the area…

Bupkis.

The map wasn’t really set up to give me that sort of fine detail, at least not yet. Maybe if I upgraded it that would be possible later on. Regardless, that meant I was going to have to do this the old fashioned way; look around until I find one.

Just kidding! I had another way of searching for the right flowers, which involved syncing up my eyes and nose.

-Activating Advanced Olfactory Sensors-

Because there was pollen in the air from these flowers, I could sample each of the different colours and isolate the chemicals that made them unique.

Doing that would allow me to detect each of the different pollen variants and properly match them with the flower they came from. The pollen would pretty much be represented by a gas-like cloud, matching the colour of the flower it came from, in my vision.

If I knew what molecules went into making the pink flower possible, then I'd be able to isolate traces of that in the air and follow it. But because I didn't know, that flower's pollen would appear as an unknown substance in the air.

See where I'm going with this? Once I detect an unknown type of pollen, I could easily follow that trail all the way to a pink flower!

My vision went grayscale, only seeing various colourful mists of pollen rising up from the flowers. It was a little bit of a rainbow overload at first, but eventually I did pick up on an unknown type of pollen.

“Bingo!” I cheered, following the trail.

It was a faint trace, but enough to tell me that I was on the right track. I climbed one of the hills…

…and behold! A pink flower peeked up from its multi-hued sisters!

At last… After about five minutes of searching, I'd found the prize, ready to pluck it from the soil and…

Hey! It moved when I made a snatch for it!

“What the…?” I uttered in shock, trying to grab it again, but only missing once more. “Stop it, silly flower. I need you to make delicious cookies!”

Did flowers have feelings? They sure gave us feelings when we looked at them. Maybe this one was scared of being eaten.

Mmm… My bio scanners weren't detecting these flowers as sentient, so there must have been another reason why this flower was moving.

Now I saw it quickly move away on its own, heading north east toward a forest.

I chased after the fleeing flower, making several snatches for it until finally catching the stem.

“Gotcha!”

As I pulled it up, a tiny girl with butterfly wings was clinging onto it. We both shared a blank gaze of curiosity.

“Are you a fairy?” I smiled.

“Pffft!” She blew raspberries in my face and then flew away with the flower!

“Hey, that's mine!” I shouted, taking flight on my wings and following her. “Give that back!”