3

"Urrrrgggh," you moan, channeling your inner Draugr Jones. The undead's mighty strength fills your entire body, and you grab the nearest shelving section and thrust it between the two troublemakers.

Unfortunately, you kind of forgot that it was still covered in baking supplies. There's a clattering and smashing so loud you can't even hear yourself say "oops" as at least twenty times the mess Fondant caused is added to the floor. The cleanup takes so long that the fight's completely gone out of Fondant and Ramsayer by the time it's done.

At Least the Argument's Over

Your attempt to broker the peace didn't work out quite like you intended, but you guess it's good enough.

Situation settled, you head back out to the arena. The other contestants are already at their stations, so you don't have time to gloat about your success—you need to get back to work.

You can't have cupcakes without the cakes. You also can't have them without the cups, but luckily the baking pan already takes care of that. So with fifty percent of the cupcake equation already handled by bakeware, it's your job to get the cake started.

The queen, being an actually useful assistant, brings you a mixing bowl as you stand before your ingredients. The large bowl has a stylized human skull on the front, which is staring at you with hollow eye sockets. You throw a look at the queen.

"What?" she asks. "It came with the kitchen. But I'm definitely keeping it after the competition. No one can possibly love it more than me."

Yes, the competition…You refocus your attention.

What Are You Doing Again?

You spare a glance up at the countdown. There's 134 minutes left.

You have a few options at your disposal. First and most obvious, you can go about an honest day's work as a baker and just mix your own ingredients. If you want the job done right, right the done job, as they say. You don't know why they say it, and it seems to you there could be a better saying lying out there somewhere.

Or you can go behind enemy lines. While you do, you're sure you can trust the queen undying to mix the ingredients. She'll probably take longer, but it's unlikely she'll screw anything up. The mixing stage would be the optimal time to sabotage the competition, so even if you're not that dastardly, it should be a cakewalk…It'll get that much harder when these cakes are in ovens, safely protected on all sides by 350 degrees of heat.

Conversely, being sweet is its own reward…A friendly visit to one of your competitors could do wonders to easing the tension. Who knows, perhaps you'll discover a tip or technique that'll aid you down the road, because while being sweet is its own reward, it's even more rewarding when you get something back that isn't strictly its own reward.

And of course there's the matter of the chupacabra. You've still got to deal with it, and you have 134 minutes left to do it.

How do you proceed?

The mixing stage, where the kitchen is in its most disorganized state of disassembled dishevelment, the perfect time to sow chaos! You realize you don't have to bake the realm's best chupacake-cabra—yours just have to be better than these jackals. But you do have to bake something, imperfect or otherwise, so you only have a shot at potentially sabotaging one contestant's mix.

Who are you going to choose?

Argyle admits to be working in concert with dark forces. He's probably talking about city tax agents. Just in case those forces aren't trying to screw you out of your deductibles again and are more otherworldly in nature, you want to minimize Argyle's chances of winning.

His kitchen looks like an alchemy lab. Boilers, glass tube arrays, and other strange contraptions litter the countertop. On the floor is a giant pentagram.

"Ho, Argyle," you greet the esoteric breadcrafter.

Argyle is distracted, carefully eyeing his flour with an unflinching gaze. "Doom," he mutters quietly as he gazes.

Get His Attention

"I see you're dooming it up. Good, good." Honestly, you don't know if it's good, but the living gods it's hard to naturally segue when this man acts so unnatural.

"Get thee gone," Argyle says. Maybe to you, maybe to the flour.

Suddenly, he stops staring at the flour and cranes his neck as if he's listening to a voice no one else can hear. He turns to you. "Customers are not deductibles," he warns.

Well, this is certainly a challenge. What the heck strategy are you going to use to sabotage him?

Inserting some dark forces of your own may interrupt his dark forces. At least you won't be the only one confused.

You nod at his warning about deducting customers, just like you did last year before the tax magistrate. Meanwhile, you close your eyes and channel your fledgling necromantic power, opening a rift in the abyss. A ghost zombie pops out of the ether, a rather stout guy wearing a long overcoat and a beret.

"I was enjoying a harmonious afterlife, and now I'm in a Bake-Off hellscape! AUUGGGGH! AUUGGHHH!" the ghost finishes with loud shouts.

You notice a tag on his overcoat. It says, "Hello, My Name is Sam Kinison."

You Open Your Eyes

You only have 114 minutes left in the round.

OK, that's fine. The mixing's all done, and you're sitting here with some beautiful cupcake batter. So at least there's that. But by the seven unholy hells, no one preheated the oven!

The queen undying, catching your wild, practically rolling eyes, shrugs. "What?" she says with a smile that's as sweet as it is rotten. "You're in charge here. I'm just the assistant."

Argh!

"O departed spirits!" you intone. "O dreadful ghost bakers of yore! O ye who have gon—"

A wispy spirit in a puffy white baker's hat appears before you and closes your mouth with a ghostly stirring spoon. "Yeah, OK, OK. What do you want?"

"Uh, could you turn on the oven for me?"

"For this I gotta come back from the dead?" the spirit mutters, but it flits over and flips the switch, which turns the oven on with a cheery ding.

How Could You Forget That?