A/N: I'm sorry I'm a little late today! ;-; One thing I really like about writing this book is the extent and detail I can go into writing about food and that never tires me because food is universal and there are tastes we can all attest to at times—tastes that are impossibly universal—tastes that bring us back to an exact moment of joy and comfort and contentment and I think that is one thing I will miss terribly once this book is finished.

Watch me write about the nuances of 7500 apple varieties without flinching because by this point, I'm already crazy. Enjoy!

===============

[Vanilla]

Admittedly, I'd once attributed the peak culinary experience of my lifetime to my travels with Uncle Al and our adventuring in every corner of the earth imaginable, tasting and understanding dishes ranging from pig's blood to pigeon hearts, deep-fried grasshoppers to century eggs. Never would I have considered the prospect of it all crumbling under the pressure of thirty baskets; baskets of whole, ripe fruit—some, the colour of pale sunshine at daybreak and others, an angry crimson dusk.

Needless to say, the pulsing adrenaline at the back of my head was no illusion in the face of a challenge like no other. The temptation to start was unbearable. I couldn't quite understand the expression on everyone else's face the moment they had the baskets of apples wheeled in—quite the look of horror, which either meant that they'd mislabeled the genre of our current situation or... mislabeled the genre of our current situation.

"All you need is to send one person from each team to name as many as they can."

At once, heads were turning and the sheer number of collective smiles I'd witnessed in a single field of vision, in a grand total of five seconds, had the dual purpose of blinding and freezing human beings like myself.

I was about to tactfully remind them that I wasn't an all-knowing, omnipresent existence when they all but reshuffled themselves to have me stand at the very front of the group; stopping short only because the judge representing L'assiette Vide was quick to reveal a critical catch—team leaders are given a choice to eliminate one person from the opposing team who must sit out for the entirety of the final round, banished to some fifty feet towards the back of the room.

"Pick wisely. Most of you at this age are fond of weeding out the weak but how well do you know the best of your enemies?"

The very first of logical instincts would have been to identify red team's leader from across the room and assess the probability of him knowing exactly who to eliminate (myself) and so already, I was scanning down the row, following the gazes of whoever it was most of them had their eyes on and in that very instant, ignoring the panic that had naturally seized my team, I met the heated gaze of a candle.

It was infuriating, how they'd done an amazing job at appointing the perfect idiot to lead and it was in situations like these that made it seem all the more incredibly obvious. Already, he was looking at me and by god, the flame was in the mood for serious play and legally speaking, it could not possibly be allowed to exist.

A single glance at the corners of his lips that were hiding the smirk of a challenge had my head shaking. I'd turned to the team with an odd inability to form any proper statement, account, sentence, word.

"Why are you smiling?" Our appointed captain was urgent for answers and most of them did appear as though they were hoping for my debut. I glanced at Chen, who had his jaw extremely tensed and looked quite as though this wasn't the kind of excitement he had in mind.

"He's going to pick me." I didn't see a point in lying, and everyone except our school's number one collapsed into chaos. The latter appeared genuinely surprised, glancing over at his culinary counterpart before turning back to me.

"Are you sure? He's just a schoolmate, though. Right? He can't know you're..." "He might let you off the hook? In the end, it's the winning school that matters." These certainly weren't poorly-made assumptions about any other participant that wasn't the idiot across the room but we were, quite unfortunately, talking about said idiot and of everyone else, only Chen came the closest to asking the clever questions.

"He'd do that to you?" The disbelief in his eyes was nearly amusing. "Even if this is your only chance to blow everyone away?"

Indeed, I'd run that by myself mere seconds ago, right after registering the look in Leroy's eyes but the answer was surprisingly short and simple. "Frankly speaking, this isn't my only chance to impress an audience. Certainly not my first and most definitely not my last. Further, I believe he's well aware of my priorities. Showing off isn't one of them. A challenge, however... is."

It was in that pause that I finally understood what exactly it was he was telling me to do, logic stemming primarily from the fact that it would've been in poor taste for a captain to pick himself as the final ace for a round as important as this one and thus severely affect his teamwork and leadership score. The only way the both of us could indulge in a sinful challenge—

"Pick him."

I had expected the double takes. "What?" "You sure?"

"Pick him too," I repeated, turning to the leader of our team. A senior from L'assiette. "Unless you know someone else with a culinary background better than his. He's had an understanding of ingredient varieties since he was five or perhaps ever younger. I'm pretty sure thirty apples aren't going to be a problem for him."

"Yeah but..." he seemed hesitant. "Just because you've been a chef for long doesn't mean you know there's more than five kinds of apples in the world."

We noticed the silence that the rest of the room had fallen into and hastily returned to our former positions to avoid further conflict. Chef Allan had long covered the list of instructions he had to be giving and all three judges had paused to regain the attention the room.

"So... red team." They turned to first. "Your pick?"

No sentence; no phrase; not even a single word but the hint of a smirk on his lips, hands behind his back—likely clasped in fearless confidence—flames of a candle lit as they turned on a single target across the room. N-naturally, I was just. I. I give up.

"He means me."

I said to relieve the room of awful seconds, moments, centuries of silence and tension, a deliberate, intended effect he had hoped to enjoy, all whilst knowing I was the only one in the room who knew exactly what he'd meant by that look and and and just criminally, illegally using that to his advantage.

Not quite keen on wasting anyone's time, I made my way over to the far end of the room where a facilitator had marked out my position to stand and took my place.

"Ah." Chef Allan seemed momentarily stunned, turning to red team on his left for confirmation before moving on to the team on his right. "And blue?"

Mountainous embarrassed thoughts and much internal head burying later, I noticed the root cause of my concerns making his way over and resembling, for some reason, an advancing predator right out of the grand savannahs featured in National Geographic. The initial instinct had been to avert my gaze and spare myself the embarrassment inevitable blushing but I'd gathered every remaining once of courage to stand my ground, unblinking in the face of an illegal existence.

At some point in his leisure stroll before arriving at the banished square of participants, both Leroy and myself had given in to the irresistible urge—smiling to hide the uncontrollable laughter threatening to break the surface. Personally, I'd made it a point to not look like a fool in front of an audience. Naturally, my companion wasn't one to care very much about things like that. Neither of us said a word to the other.

11

Both teams had picked out replacements but barely a second's rest was given before the first number was drawn and the corresponding basket of apples projected on the screen for both participants and members of the audience.

The shade of rubies, dipped in a cauldron of simmering crimson blood and polished to jeweled perfection—"It's a Jonathan." "Jonathan."

I had to pause. Turning to the grand idiot standing an arm's length away with candles for eyes—still, lit with an awful intensity—I resisted a heinous smile and brushed aside the heat he practically radiated in a single glance. The flames were playful. Gaze flickering once; slightly downwards and then back up to meet mine.

Somewhere in the distance, Chef Allan's voice presented us with an awaited answer. "Unfortunately, it is neither a Fuji nor an Empire. This is a Jonathan apple."

A... a shockingly disarming smirk crossed the idiot's features and I was at once severely impaired. "One all."

It took me a moment to register that we were now very apparently counting scores and since sinful challenges were exactly what I had been expecting and Leroy had not the history of disappointing, I was quite honestly electric.

19

"Braeburn." "Well I think it's a Pacific Rose." And it is! I'd hummed in glee as soon as the judges removed the label to reveal the name of the apple, adding a point to the fingers behind my back. Yes, we were counting scores with fingers by this point and though it would seem, to any passing outsider, an extreme version of insanity, I was feeling the adrenaline in the very heels of my feet.

10 was the shade of pale sunshine and honeyed goodness; a summer breeze weaving through cornfield shades.

"Opal," I'd named almost at once, delightfully confident. The very next second had Leroy turning to me with a look in his eyes that, in a single glance, had my mind re-wiring itself in an instant, coming to the frightening realization that I was wrong.

"Ginger Gold," he'd corrected. Eyes alit. And moments later, burning even brighter at the sound of Chef Allan giving blue team the point for identifying the Ginger Gold. Though I was glad that the team had managed to pull through with a couple of apples ahead, I had admittedly lost all sense of vocabulary at my mistake until a certain idiot had the gall to reach behind my back to increase the finger count on the hand that I used to keep his score.

He'd closed the distance to do so; an intimate gesture that had us side by side and needless to say, I was, if possible, rendered even more speechless than before. My companion's reaction to this was an after-laugh of amusement, visibly enjoying himself though admittedly, I, too, seemed to be having time of my life identifying... well, identifying apples. With him.

At present, both our teams were tied at three points to three while thrilled fingers behind our backs kept score at eight to Leroy and nine to myself.

"Twenty varieties to go," I counted, mildly upset. "Unfortunately, the difficult ones are out of the way but I suppose it was incredibly exciting while it lasted." The words slipped free before I could rein them in and catching the brief look of amusement courtesy of a flickering, hungry flame, I took to correcting myself at once. "I-I mean, this is. Moderately. Entertaining. A decent challenge—activity. That, um. I'm glad you didn't... oh, that one's a Rome. I'm glad you didn't consider abandoning your team by allowing myself to play. That said, I suppose we are playing. Now, I mean. Us."

I chanced a glimpse in his direction, peering up at him. "Which is a reasonable decision. We should be playing for our teams. Not our schools."

There was something else reflected in his eyes that did not seem quite characteristic of flames. It felt like waves; or ripples in the surface of a summer lake that he was in the middle of, in a boat, resisting the tempting invitation to skim his fingers across the waters. "Leroy?"

He seemed awfully serious. At least until English decided to give him away.

"I'm playing for you."

I struggled to comprehend the thickness of an idiot's skin and the sheer lack of proper sentence structure or meaning in his every word. "Y—that is, I don't... the grammar...? Clearly, you don't... ah, and it is a Rome. I'm at ten now. You best be catching up soon. Oh and that one's a Cortland apple."

"Snap Dragon." He leaned in to whisper, as though this was a fatal mistake and he was somehow obliged to correct me, his currently blanked out, apple-red opponent, without letting the rest of the world know. Unfortunately, the heat on my cheeks intensified as soon as the answer was made clear.

"Cortland's... darker," he had the gall to run a finger u-under my earlobe as as as though it was an apple and he was observing it! "On the underside."

My hands had instinctively reached for the lavalier microphone attached to my collar, covering up the near-gasp I'd let slip in surprise. Needless to say, I had to take a step away from him after shivering at the sudden physical contact, sending a chilling glare in his direction as a firm warning. "Leroy Jeremy Cox. I... I do not appreciate the intimacy—the physical contact you are so willingly engaging in the middle of a very serious competition!"

"So..." He frowned in grave consideration, reaching over while I was distracted to raise his finger count behind my back. "After the competition? At yours?"

Immediately, I was lunging at the mic attached to his collar instead of mine, accidentally drawing the unwarranted attention of several onlookers in the gallery above. It was upon noticing this that I removed myself and resumed an arm's length's distance from the world's greatest idiot.

Said idiot had the audacity to be amused. "Was that a hug? Are we going public now?"

"No! No, you idiot," I hid my face in utter embarrassment. "I was reaching for your mic! Do you not realize that each and every one of our words are being transmitted to a facilitator transcribing everything for the judges to assess? You're being highly inappropriate and... and I'd be dizzy if I were listening to someone like yourself saying such... such criminal..."

I was halfway through reciting a compilated version of illegal activities listed under his name when all of a sudden, Leroy Cox (professional criminal, vocabulary terrorist, fire-starter, provoker, player of snow) had in him the nerve to pick up his mic and bring it closer to his lips before whispering, slowly, all whilst holding my gaze in an undisguised challenge: "Vanilla Julian White has the sexiest—"

*

Chen was perhaps the fourth person who had openly went up to me with a genuine disappointment regarding my individual score for the bonus round, which was, unsurprisingly, a mere point higher than Leroy who had placed last.

"Yes indeed. There is absolutely no explanation for our poor performance except that Leroy and I are a grave disappointment to the school. I s i m p l y cannot imagine how terrible the facilitators transcribing our words must have felt about our a w f u l behaviour." I'd made clear to the idiot seated across me at lunch, sending quite the murderous glare his way, only to receive an infuriatingly attractive wink in return. "W-well... at least Si Yin placed second with the red team's overall victory and that is worth some celebration."

I turned to the starving girl seated to my left on the very floor of the examination hall, where all twenty-four students who had participated in the bonus round were gathered and handed pre-ordered lunch packs. Most of us had sought the relative comfort of familiar faces; which meant that sitting in groups of eight, according to our schools, became the unspoken rule as soon as lunch was announced.

"I got lucky." Si Yin waved my compliment aside, stabbing her fork into a chunk of sweet and sour pork. "They don't tell you how you're graded, right? I mean. All I did was talk to people."

"Okay but L'assiette landed the top individual scorer anyway, so." Chen was unusually uptight, dismissing optimistic remarks before stressing the bottom line he had been intending to put across. "The bonus goes to them."

"Why are you so worried?" Lee Jungwoo, seated across Chen and visibly proud of his team's victory, voiced an apparent distaste for our overall captain's increasing edge. "The bonus is only applicable to round two and the info isn't even out yet till after lunch. Could be some lame-ass extra time, for all we know. Oh hey, isn't that Birchwood?"

The first-year pastry chef had several additional lunch packs stacked atop one another in her arms and was making her way around the room asking if anyone else was up for seconds. She soon arrived at where we were seated, and instead of offering the last couple of lunch packs to everyone, pulled up a chair between Si Yin and Lee before casually inviting herself to lunch. The rest of us remained seated on the floor.

"Aren't you guys supposed to be having lunch at the commons?" Another senior by the name of Jean Mercier posed, staring up at Birchwood.

"I can have my lunch wherever I like. And you," she snapped my way, eyes ablaze. "What is with that stupid score? Are you actually trying to lower my expectations for you?"

I'd flashed her an apologetic smile and was about to admit that lowering her expectations of me would've been a superb long-term solution to avoiding disappointment when Chen came to my defense.

"I mean, he was rattling every answer aloud even when it wasn't his turn and they could obviously hear him, so they would've known he was correct eighty-percent of the time... but I guess that doesn't really count unless you perform exactly the same way when it's your turn to identify, so. According to the rules, we're graded by initiative and teamwork. They... probably think you're a bad leader or something."

Never in a million years would I find myself foolish enough to reveal the true reasoning behind my apparently shocking performance; and though Chen wasn't entirely wrong about my non-existent leadership skills and poor team spirit, that wouldn't have accounted for Leroy's ghastly score either since, well, since he wasn't as incompetent in that field of knowledge as myself.

The nine of us were nurturing private conversations to the side of the room, not particularly inviting anything out of the ordinary when several students from across the hall, having emptied their lunch packs, decided to leave by taking the oddly longer route to the side entrance several feet behind us. While one of the leading members—whom I could identify as the winning participant of the bonus round from L'assiette—was distracted by a conversation of apparent humorous quality among themselves, he'd walked into Si Yin's shoulder and nearly caused her to drop her fork. By some miracle, I'd managed to catch it in mid-air before handing it back to her.

All nine of us had turned at once to glare but the student himself had not appeared to notice, strolling past the side entrance before anyone could call out to him and disappearing down the stairs with his group of friends.

"I'm actually concerned?" Birchwood scoffed, eyes following his back. "Like if someone's calves were so fat they couldn't help but shove into a seated person's shoulder, I mean... there's space? Everywhere else?"

This cascaded into a group conversation about general L'assiette behaviour and while Birchwood was thoroughly invested in the gossip (providing multiple accounts of her own), Leroy seemed surprisingly interested himself. He'd kept his eyes on her throughout the entire subject, which Birchwood appeared to notice and moments after describing several familiar characteristics of someone with pink hair, she re-directed her attention to Si Yin and asked if she was okay.

Needless to say, there was only one pink-haired person I was acquainted with and they'd coincidentally matched the physical description Miss Birchwood had so kindly provided us with. I was instantly reminded of Williams and what she'd heard of Maple, though she hadn't really spoken much about him ever since she found out about Leroy and myself. In fact, Birchwood seemed as though she had been on the verge of revealing some scandalous information... which unfortunately left me quite anxious.

The lot of us had re-joined with the rest of the remaining school participants after lunch to attend the briefing for round two of the W-interschool. This, unfortunately, was held once again on plaza grounds whilst wind speeds were at a grand twenty kilometres per hour. Thanks to the sixty eliminated in the previous round, there was overall less body heat going around and we were left to huddle in the square before the makeshift stage, where Chef Yamazaki himself ended up shivering into the mic.

"H-hello students. It is very cold and I am not enjoying this very much so h-how about we cooperate and make this quick? I am Yamazashin. Yamazaki Shin, sorry. Your guest judge for round two. Elimination style. I mean, elimination... maybe you can just read the slides." My godfather's ex-student directed our attention to the instructions projected on the screen, which, too, wobbled in the wind.

Community Service New Year's Party

Type: Elimination

Style: Team

Participants: 30 x 3 = 90

Scoring: Point per rating (out of ten), Judge's grading

Without a doubt, we were all very excited about having culinary legend Chef Yamazaki as a guest judge. He was also apparently in the midst of shooting a TV series under a well-known production company keen on documenting the various aspects of his life, which meant that there were cameras left right centre and, well, generally all around us.

Yet, what truly rattled the nerves and sent waves of chatter cruising among us participants were the three food baskets displayed on a table at the side of the stage, which seemed to have everything to do with our guests for the evening.

"So, each school will be organizing a belated, uh... new year's buffet dinner at either an elderly home, an orphanage, or a homeless shelter with your primary ideas stemming from key ingredients we've prepared for you in these three food baskets," managed Chef Yamazaki without chattering teeth. "New year's is an important occasion across all cultures and yes, we celebrate it with our friends and families but sometimes we take it all for granted, not knowing or forgetting that... well, that there are people who do not have the luxury of going to parties or... buying nice food and drinks, or even spending it with the people they love."

Angels like my godfather would have been extremely moved by the collaborative attempt of our schools at spreading kindness with culinary warmth and love but immediately, I was narrowing in on strategy. Organizing a new year's party for a specific profile we were assigned to would explain the rationale behind the contents of the food baskets; healthy and soft foods followed by hearty carbohydrates, and finally some... multi-coloured... extremely vibrant-looking basket containing packaging that were suspiciously similar to the kind of food I'd detested as a child.

"Can we have the top-scoring participant of the bonus round up on stage please?" A facilitator said into the microphone and at the same time, nodded at the school representatives waiting at the sides to take their places in the centre. Turns out, instead of drawing lots to decide our guests for the night, the top-scoring participant not only had first pick but also the choice to assign a basket to each of the remaining two schools.

I was not surprised by the basket they went for at once; the one that catered to the homeless shelter, filled with delightful, hearty ingredients for complex dishes that could both showcase their technical abilities and impress their guests without a doubt. As for the rest of the participants having a hard time deciding if L'assiette had given us or CSS the better hell of the two, the answer was never clear-cut.

Up on stage, Chen was staring down at the rainbow-coloured basket he'd received whilst turning increasing pale thanks to the cold or, well, the panic. He was looking for his team of consultants (and by that, I mean everyone on the ranking board) as soon as he got off stage and Chef Allan took our guest judge's place to announce the timing of our bus arrivals. Each team had their buffet held at a different location that was about a fifteen-minute drive apart from one another.

"Alright we've got less than thirty minutes to come up with a menu," stressed our school's number one with a piece of chalk in his hands, ushering all thirty of us into an empty classroom as he spoke. "The ingredients in the basket are listed on the board and we need to somehow incorporate all of it. Adding extra stuff not in the list is apparently okay but only according to stock availability.

"We need two proteins, two mains, two vege-incorporated sides and two desserts as baseline for judging. Everything else is up to us." Chen had someone lay out the contents of our basket on the instructor's table for easy viewing but I was beginning to realize just how awfully out of my comfort zone I was at present.

Among the twenty-or-so ingredients, I could barely name four—and only because they were asparagus, swiss brown mushrooms, cream cheese and pre-packaged buttercream frosting. The frosting had nearly slipped under my radar if not for the obvious bubble letters splayed across the packaging but everything else? Good heavens was I stunned to realize the existence of something by the name of marshmallow fluff. The red-capped, transparent jar with only one word on its label to describe itself (F-L-U-F-F) had been staring me straight in the face from the entrance to my seat and needless to say, I was rendered utterly speechless.

"... I agree. Mains should be done finger food style so that it's easy for the kids to pick up and go without a mess. So what do we have? Tacos. Fish tacos. Uh... yeah you. Pizza. Okay... I mean, kids like that but remember, we're working with a kitchen we don't know much about. I'm not sure if pizza's the right choice and it might be a little on the boring side."

Ideas were coming in left right centre and nearly everyone had something to pitch. I'd turned to Si Yin seated beside me. "This is it. This is my elimination. I have absolutely no idea what children like to eat."

"Okay but you think you're alone?" She whispered in return, sliding a thumb across her neck. "Because you're not. At least you have godbrothers and sisters. I have a dog. And Sebastian. And now that I think about it, I don't even know if Sebastian eats because I've never seen him do it."

At once, I was running through distant memories in an attempt to recall Miki's all-time favourite and Rory's go-to comfort food but all that surfaced was Chip's strawberry shortcake which did not exactly match the occasion or the menu. Interestingly, I never once thought of consulting distant memories of myself when I was a child because really, was I ever keen on adopting the diet of an ordinary five-year-old?

Well, no.

"Do pizza pockets with a waffle iron," Leroy was standing before the blackboard, alongside his fellow peers up on the ladder. He'd given the ingredients in the basket a brief scan before instantly coming up with something. "Panko-crusted for the fish in the tacos so you cheat them into thinking its not all veg. Then fried chicken three ways for the protein. Thigh chunks so they don't have to deal with bones."

Needless to say, he was... exceling. And though I had, myself, never been familiar with his personal tastes as a child, I had been certain of his exceptional culinary skills and knowledge, adopted from his father at a young age. The possibility of his personal tastes and skills being entirely different or belonging to a completely separate culinary realm had never really crossed my mind and now that I'd thought of it, Leroy had never once made something overly fancy for me or himself. When he was in a private space.

I spent most of the discussion listening in and avoiding the prying gaze of Chen, who'd more often than so looked to me for an opinion which I was unfortunately not versed enough in the subject to provide. Even Birchwood herself had raised several suggestions about a chocolate fountain only to be rejected by number one after deeming most of it 'too unhealthy' for extra points since they would not be able to balance out the heavy richness of the fried and salty mains.

"You okay?"

I'd set my eyes on an empty double seat on the bus after Rosi had waved Si Yin to join her at the back when a certain idiot decided to slide in after myself, casually handing me a bottle of mineral water after drinking from it.

"Aren't you going to sit up front?" I'd posed to him, quietly happy regardless. "I did the triple checking of the ingredients before they were loaded onto the truck but I'm sure Chen would like to run the list by you before showtime."

"They're kids," he turned to me with an after-laugh on his lips. "We have it easy."

"Well I guess we know who's taking care of the children ten years down the road," I put forth lightly, not quite expecting him to respond with an expression of surprise. "I-I mean. This isn't... that was not a... I meant hypothetically and figuratively. I'm glad you were more of a child than I ever was. Not that I never thought of you as a child, back then. You were, but. Of course, that's with you being different from all the kids I've ever met."

He reached over as the bus turned out of its lot and started down the hill towards the front gate of the school, brushing the side of my cheek. "They'll like you." He said. "I mean, I did."  

=====================

A/N: I'm jumping right into the second round on the coming Thursday so it's back to back plot updates for you! ^0^/ I'm starting to think I'll just do purely Vanilla until August arrives so that I can double my speed and finish the book before school starts. Also because I'm quite excited for the ending myself! ^^

I hope you are too. 

-Cuppie