Live by the Sword, Die by the Baguette

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Here is my new story. I just wrote it tonight because i had a sudden urge to write something.
This is good because it can act as a stand alone short story or a prolouge.
So if you like it tell me and i will write more, if you don't tell me and it can just get lost in the vaults of SP for the rest of eternity!

The hallway was dark. So dark that even the shadows were scared to hang around for too long. In case they were mugged
It wasn’t pitch black, Farrick could just about make out where he was going, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Cold sweat trickled across his freckled forehead as his spindly frame hurried across the paving stones. His purple cloak flapped in an unnecessarily dramatic fashion behind him and the gold hem sparkled despite the lack of light.
Farrick increased his speed a little. He didn’t want any unwanted attention from the imaginary monsters that lurked menacingly behind each pillar.
Pale moonlight struggled through the dusty panes, every one positioned between two pillars and orientated perfectly to shine on it’s individual portrait.
The portraits themselves lined the length of the hall, which was no small thing. This was the great guildhall, impressively, and rather annoyingly large. In fact it was almost half a mile long. Yet there were enough portraits to fill the walls with some of the less liked characters left over and having to be stored in the janitors room.
All of them looked alike. Great silver-grey beards, venerable squinting eyes and huge purple velvet hats. They were those disgusting sort of pictures in which the eyes followed you around, an incredibly aggravating discovery, which probably brought great amusement to the artist at the time.
Little could he know about the poor souls who would have to live with it. The child whose parents insist on having a picture of the grandmother in the little guy’s bedroom and then failing to realise why he still wets the bed at 14. The hundreds of innocent people who have been stuck in a perfectly normal house at night and then are frightened to death by a particularly unoriginal and un-extraordinary painting of Henry VIII, staring back at them in a perverted fashion through the darkness.
Farrick was the latest victim of this physiological horror. His eyes transfixed on those of Rupert XXXXVII. Wondering why he had to drop his papers at that moment. Pondering why, for the sake of all that is decent, he was so petrified of a dead guy named Rupert. Was this all he was working for? To become another picture on the wall? To join a line of forgotten relics? No! He would be different. A fresh start!
He would be the greatest High-Manager the school would ever have. He would be respected and feared by his opponents. Historians would write of his prowess for years to come and Bards would tell his great tale all over the face of Toril.
He would become a Legacy!

A light shone at the end of the Hall.
‘Last call for young Master Ferrick Woozel!’ The voice was harsh and broken. Like a set of un-manicured fingernails on a blackboard. ‘Last call for Master Woozel!’
‘Yes yes! I’m here! Ready to go Mr Berk. Ready for the test! Happy to be here. Yeah! Go me!’
Farrick’s forced enthusiasm trailed off when he caught a glimpse of the old man’s face. Mr Berk had a large round face, which contained almost every different shade of bright red imaginable. He was short and fat and when looked at for a long time, it gave you the impression that he didn’t so much as put his clothes on but was trying to squeeze out of them. His teeth were huge yellow tombstones on which, when seen in the right light, the words ‘I eat small boys’ could sometimes be seen.
Mr Berk was the sort of person who looked like he enjoyed a good laugh with a glass of port and some quality stilton. And he was. As long as the humour was at your expense.
‘Just get in Woozel and take your seat before I an forced to eat your face’
The room was brightly lit. Hot, sticky and full of other keen young 17-year-old boys, eager to pass the exam and leave the college for a life full of fun, laughter, women and the remainder of puberty.
There were 14 other boys in total. Farrick’s best mate, Lozangle. Fisamire, Glamandos, Ferdinand, Marcos, Fredrick, Christof, Kizar, Mustof, Yerril, Firestorm, Gandalf, Julio and Bob. All were present and all had a purple cape on, as was traditional for the final test. Apart from Gandalf… He was a postgraduate and had chosen a ruff grey number complete with **** looking hat.
Each stood behind their worktops. The flour was sieved, the furnaces were white hot and the rolling pins had been professionally oiled in preparation. You could cut the atmosphere with a pastry knife.
This was it. The final test. Ferrick just had to cook one more dish and he would be a free and upstanding Baker of the Realm.
Did he have everything? He had requested all the ingredients for his speciality. ‘Orange ala moose in de pie zi’. Frantically he checked through the list of ingredients:
2 oranges, half a melon, 2 ounces of duck meat, half a turnip, 2 pounds of raw dough, blackberries, moose meat, chocolate sprinkles and half a cranberry.
Sudden fear overcame Ferrick’s face. The sort of fear that is actually quite embarrassed to be in you as the effects are so ugly and disfiguring. The cranberry was missing. A sad empty square half-inch of well-floured tabletop stared up at the student. In the same fashion as Rupert XXXXVII did through the dark recesses of the Guildhall. Those eyes pressed on the back of Ferrick’s neck. He could feel the hundreds of portraits all staring at him with mocking smiles and deadly, sinister noses. They were wanting him to fail. The school must have taken the cranberry in a hope to make him the laughing stock of the entire college. It must have been Berk. Only he could be so cruel. But even this was a little extreme.

Bakers throughout time have always been competitive. This was why martial arts training and steroid rations had become a part of the college syllabus. Bakers had been known to kill each other over the quality of a pie. There were some who wandered the realm, offering their services to any village they passed through and then exposing the entire population to a particularly nasty strain of salmonella, just for the hell of it. There were bakers who knew 1001 uses for the common baguette, and only one of these was remotely tasty.
But a Baker would never steal another’s ingredients. That was like breaking a secret code among all manufacturers of pastry-based products. It just simply was not done.

‘Master Farrick! Are we ready?’ The young student looked up, tears streaming from his bloodshot eyes. His voice was trembling and it was obvious that inside his heart was slowly breaking. ‘I have no cranberry!’
There was a sudden silence in the room. The examiners were always careful to never make a mistake in preparation… especially with ingredients. All the students gasped in shocked horror. (Apart from one, who just sat on his worktop, humming tuneless songs and blowing smoke rings)
Surely this meant only one thing. Someone must have stolen it. Panic ensued. Frantic hands searched through ingredients as distraught minds mentally counted up everything they had. Screams emanated from a couple, who fainted under the pressure.
‘WAIT!’ Mr berk screamed. He surveyed the room. 12 embarrassed faces peered back. There was a succession of coughs and dustings down and general murmuring.
‘It appears, Woozel, that you have dropped your cranberry on the floor. There it is.’
A great cry of relief was heard from all around the room.
Farrick chuckled to himself. He peered down. ‘Oh! So it is! SORRY EVERYONE! Sorry sir. Ha ha ha, well that solves the mystery of the missing cranberry eh?’
Unnecessary winking and general elbow nudging followed. Ending un ceremoniously with a traditional embarrassed clearing of the throat.
No response.
‘Yes, well, I better get back to my worktop and pick up the cranberry!’ He pointed at the fruit ‘Naughty cranberry! Hahaha bad fruit! This fruit has gone bad!’ Ferrick looked up for comic approval. But Berk was gone.
He bent down. He could feel tension all over his body. His stomach was feeling awful, his head felt like his stomach. The result was inevitable. As he bent over the methane let rip. The cloak yet again billowed dramatically.
No big deal. Chefs fart all the time. The smell of the food nearly always overpowers the gas.
It is a different story however if your gas happens to billow your cape into the nearest furnace.
It took about ten seconds for Ferrick to realise he was on fire. In fact just about the same time as Mr. Berk said ‘go!’. Ferrick leapt about like a squirrel in an exceptionally uncomfortable bag,
He took a pastry knife and tried to cut himself free. This didn’t work. Instead he managed to cut his belt and stumbled over his trousers, which had quickly descended to his ankle area. Ferrick’s desperate hands grabbed hold of Lozangle’s worktop and pulled it over. As a result a pigs head was sent on a clear trajectory towards Mr. Berks’s forehead. The two made contact with a satisfying ‘crinch’.
Ferrick slid across the room on the fresh coating of pig fat which had now graced the flooring. His feet tipped Bob’s worktop, which toppled over and in true domino effect, every other worktop in the room soon followed.
An entire carcass of a sheep somehow made it’s way into a furnace. When dead animals get hot they explode. And the explosion from this sheep was loud enough to blow the balls off a donkey. Other animals blew up in chain reaction until the room was just a disgusting mess of entrails and exotic fruit.
11 students lay unconscious or injured on the floor under their worktops. A recently doused Ferrick and a much-aggrieved Lozangle realised that being the only remotely alive people in the room they may be in the blame. And thus, with true Baker’s pride. The turn the heads up high… and legged it out the door.
Farrick could hear the voice of Berk in the distance as they ran. ‘You boy! Are for the wholemeal baguette this time!’
The two students ran faster and faster, 1 and a half purple capes billowing behind them down the dark hall and out, eventually into the cold night air. A thousand pairs of eyes watching their flight with 2 dimensional interest.

Back in the examination room, the dust and blood settled. The groaning ceased. A single cranberry landed with a soft ‘plop’ on a clean-floured work surface. It was gently picked up by a old hand. The old, grey post grad stared at it for a bit, then carefully placed it back down. Lighting up his pipe once more he chuckled to himself. ‘Herm herm herm… funny little hobbits.’

Poodle

 

I like it, rly descriptive & funny as hell. Classic

 

Hmm... It is intriguing to say the least. A brand new take on the life of a baker very unique... I love it!

 

YES POODLE!!!

You don't know how long I've waited for you to start this thing... I need your kind of humour!

 

Love it poodle. I killed myself with laughter at the farting bit, oh and the Gandalf piss takes rock too.

 

Very nicely done. Never thought they would be hobbits. I am starting to think hoobit weed is marijuana, gandalf is just to calm.