Sign of Problems to Come

Inside the kitchen, I opened a shared note with Ken and started writing the menu for the upcoming stream.

"First thing on the menu has to be the starry sky soup. Its rich texture will leave a very long lasting impact on the viewer. Furthermore, while making starry sky soup we also make fish soup in the process, which we can also serve up. However, the preparation time for starry sky soup is very long, so we need a type of dish that we can prepare or make while we wait. We also need one dish that is culturally important, and has red ribbon fish as one of its ingredients since we need to mention the cultural importance of the red ribbon fish. It also might be nice to make some fried dairy wings to eat before serving up the starry sky soup. That difference between the crispy texture and the rich taste will highlight both dishes. Then, preferably, I would like to make a new hybrid dish that incorporates something from Aquarius and an international food."

Writing these points down on the shared note, the two of us started the discussion.

"There is no specific food that can be made in half an hour that requires red ribbon fish which is not a soup. Since I am assuming you don't want the food items to overlap."

I nodded to Ken's point, and he started to write down his own list of dishes, then crossed out several of them while muttering.

"Piscus dishes usually don't use the meat of the red ribbon fish, since they have quite long lifespans and are usually seen as pretty intelligent. Not intelligent enough to be considered sentient by ASCI, but we still don't eat their meat. When red ribbon fish die, we usually hold a small funeral and send them back into the sea."

Ken scratched his head in deep thought and pointed out one dish on his list, the 'fried passion'.

"It involves the preparation of the fish, but after we de-parasite the fish, we fry the fish together with the red ribbon parasite. It can show how we de-parasite fish as well as show one way we use the red ribbon parasite in cooking. Two birds with one stone!"

Looking at that weirdly familiar naming sense, I asked Ken "This naming sense, don't tell me it's..."

Ken laughed.

"Yep. It's the guy who attached the word 'fry' to all his food. At least this one actually consists of frying. We can also tell the people his story so that's three birds with one stone!"

Deciding on fried passion, all we had left was to create the hybrid dish. Which was easier said than done.

While thinking, Ken suggested adding one more snack to the list.

"Although the word parasite has such negative connotations, quite a number of our dishes include parasites as ingredients. Some of the parasites are even the main ingredient! So, maybe we can add the snack 'fried egg' onto the list.

Ken pulled out a picture of the dish 'fried egg' right next to the picture of fried passion'. And although the name of the dish was 'fried egg', it strangely enough looked like a poached egg.

"Is this also..."

"Yep. Mr Fried food guy also made this one. And like the fried stars, this dish is boiled."

Looking at the fried passion, which resembled fried fish from fish n chips in my previous world, I added the dish 'fried egg' into the list as well.

"Fried egg is made from just boiling the parasite for a while so it takes only a short while to do. Furthermore, the parasite is quite easy to get. Jim would be happy for us to take some of them off his hands. They're quite malicious red ribbon fish parasites after all. They tend to latch on and try to invade the fish's body, often trying to disguise themselves as either fish organs or fish eggs to drain all the nutrients from the fish's body. You could say the reason why we know they are edible was because of revenge."

My eyes shot to Ken when he mentioned that last sentence.

"So you mean ..."

"Yep. Mr Fried once tried his hands at fish farming. And it was a hopeless dream too, since all his fish died due to parasites. Out of spite, he decided to boil some of them and discovered quite a majority of them were edible. Ironically, this dish of revenge as well as several others earned him quite a fortune. More than any fish farmer would have made at that time."

[You could say, revenge was a dish best served hot.]

"You could say, revenge was a dish best served hot."

Hearing both of their voices say that at the same time, I didn't know whether to sigh or laugh as I wrote down the origin for this dish.

With two full dishes and two snacks on the menu, we needed to start discussion about the hybrid dish or we would not have the fifth dish on the menu.

"Since most locals are quite cautious of international ingredients, there are certainly many types of combinations that work that just haven't been discovered yet. We can head down to the storeroom and see what ingredients we might be able to make this hybrid dish with."

Saying that, Ken led us to the empty space at the left side of the house, in front of the living room. Stopping near the window, Ken reached down and moved the rug to reveal a trap door. Pulling the trap door open revealed a ladder that led down to a set of steps, which then opened up to a very large underground space beneath the house.

"This is the space where we store everything. It's quite common to have these storerooms in Piscus homes since we hand-build and hand-dig all our houses."

The underground space was sectioned into many spaces using rope. Each space had the rope tied up to stationary objects like chairs and tins and even baskets, with signs that had each family member's names written on them hung on the rope.

Moving to the section directly in front of the staircase, the sign on it stated food. It seemed they also sectioned off areas for communal use. Stepping over the rope, Ken dug us several jars of different food items of all sorts of colors. Opening them up, he would smell it first to confirm it was not spoiled before he would pass those he deemed suitable into a small hand basket that he had picked up near the staircase.

Watching him pick the ingredients, I was about to go over when Sazzy messaged me on my personal terminal.

[I found something interesting here! On the top left of the area!]

Seeing that Ken was busy and would probably not notice, I walked off towards the top left area where there was a rope with the sign 'Do not touch! Poisonous!' on it.

Sazzy was past the rope and had lifted up the piece of cloth covering whatever was deemed too poisonous to touch. Crossing the rope myself, I looked under the cloth to see a wooden crate. It was quite old fashioned and seemed to be close to collapsing into itself. It had no cover, so we could immediately see that there were several food stuffs that had been placed into plastic containers. And even after so many years, the food seemed to be perfectly preserved.

"You shouldn't touch that."

Behind me came Ken's voice, a wave of sadness present in his tone.

"When Barbie passed, every one of our relatives, including us, split up the hidden stash. In a way, you could take it as us trying to tear apart whatever had caused that tragedy. Especially since we couldn't burn it, so our family just left it here in the corner. To prevent anyone else from coming into contact with it."

Taking a deep breath, Ken barely kept a smile as he spoke, his voice slightly wavering.

"You came from Mors right, so you should know how to destroy poisons, right? If not, you could ask your friends over at Mors to help you. You know, when I recognized you, my first thought was that an opportunity had come! An opportunity to get rid of this curse that we are forced to look at every time we come down here."

Ken's shoulders started shivering as big wet tears started to roll down his face. Clutching onto his basket with one hand, he used the other to wipe off his tears. And as suddenly as his crying started, it stopped.

"You should take one of the bottles back to Mors. Once you find out how to destroy them, you can message me. It's the least they could do after 120 years."

Crossing the barrier, Ken picked one of the jars and placed them into my hands. His strength was light, but the jar was extremely heavy. Then saying a soft sorry for bursting out like that, we both left the storage space. And as I climbed the stairs behind Ken, I felt his small back to be extremely large.