prompt: Write about someone investigating a break-in at a bakery. The only thing missing? A very secret ingredient….
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Gavin wrung his soft hat between worried hands. He paced around the office, bare feet silent on the carpet, coming within an inch of running into every piece of furniture.
Kat leaned out from behind the screen she was studying. “Gavin! Knock it off!” She didn’t have the patience to deal with his fidgeting at six o’clock in the morning, especially after the stress of the previous night.
He stopped and leaned against the door, banging his head against the doorknob. “Ow! Stupid, big-people rooms!” The room was a standard human-scale room, but at just over three feet, the red-headed, freckle-faced halfling was at a constant disadvantage.
“I’m looking at the logs,” Kat said, “and it looks like the alarms were turned off at 10:50 last night. Who else has the key and the code?”
“Just me and Carlos,” he said, “and he was with me last night at the casino until after midnight. We were celebrating my birthday.”
“So, someone has a copy of the key and the code.” Kat sighed. “First thing, we’ll change all the locks and reset the code. Next thing, you need to file a police report for the stolen items.”
“We, uh, c–can’t,” he stammered, “not without, uh… never mind.”
“If you don’t file a police report, they can’t investigate,” Kat said, as she stood. “You say you want me to figure it out, but if you don’t tell me what was stolen, I can’t help you either.”
He looked up at the orc. Six and a half feet of muscle, topped with waves of messy onyx hair spilling over her warm, tawny skin, remnants of the previous night’s makeup still around her eyes, a bit of lipstick smear on her right tusk. “Swear on your tusks you won’t turn me in when I tell you?”
“I can’t do that,” she said. “If you’re going to tell me you had slaves that have been stolen, I’ll turn in whatever scraps are left after I tear you apart.”
“Nothing like that,” he said, eyes wide, “I swear, it’s not bad, it’s just not… exactly legal.”
“Fine, then. What was stolen?”
Gavin considered. After watching the video of her call out her father’s racism in front of the cameras the previous night he knew she at least had a moral compass. “Okay. It was a stone.”
“Like a diamond?”
“No, a stone. You know, a faery stone.”
“Those are illegal. The Indigenous People Protection Act bans trafficking in their cultural items. Did you steal it yourself or buy it on the black market?” she asked.
“No, that’s not it at all.” He climbed into the chair and made himself comfortable.
“Enlighten me.” Kat leaned against the desk.
“The fae used to practice a form of ritual magic that involved an altar,” he said, his hands wringing his cap again. “They would sacrifice things… flowers they grew, food they cooked, jewelry or tools they made, by crushing them on a carved altar stone, as big to them as a car is to us… well to elves and humans anyway,”
“You stole one of their ancient altars?”
“I’m getting there,” he said. Gavin took a deep breath and relaxed his hands, smoothing out his flat cap on his leg. “Halflings dealt with the fae for about two hundred years. We traded goods and gold for magic trinkets with pixies, sprites, and brownies long before IPPA was a thing.”
“So, this was a trade item from a long time ago?” Kat asked. “Those were supposed to have been returned or given to museums per the nineteen-seventy-whatever Native Rights Restoration Act.”
“Please, let me finish.” Gavin stood in the chair, almost reaching eye level with the reclining orc. “All faeries have magic, some elves do, and a very few humans… even a couple orcs, I’ve heard. Not halflings. Not a single one of us. We seem to be immune to most magic, too. The exception is magic items.”
Kat was about to interject another question but held her tongue.
“The pixies and sprites mostly traded enchanted jewelry. The brownies traded us used altars. That’s what the so-called faery stones are. Once the altar had too much history tied into it, they replaced it.” He began wringing his hat again. “That history is pure magic, stored up like a massive battery. We found out that they ‘program’ themselves, if you will, to perform certain magics, based on what happens around them for a few years.”
When he had been silent for a full minute, Kat spoke up. “You had one of these altars in the bakery?”
“Yes, it…,” he paused, “it kind of… blessed everything that came out of the ovens.”
“Doesn’t sound like a big deal.”
“My great-great grandmother kept it as a good-luck token in her kitchen. So did my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother.” He took a deep breath. “All those years of kitchen mojo, if you will, are stored in that stone. That’s why everything that comes out of the bakery reminds people of their mothers and grandmothers.”
“Your bakery’s slogan,” she said, “Just like Granny’s. But do you really need it, or is it a placebo?”
Gavin jumped down from the chair and picked up the bag he’d left by the door. He offered two identical cookies to Kat. “See if you can tell the difference.”
She took the cookies and examined them. “They look the same to me.”
“Try them.”
Kat bit into the first cookie. “Tasty.”
“Feel anything?”
“Not particularly. It’s a really good cookie, though.”
“Try the other one.”
She took a bite of the other cookie and closed her eyes, her head leaning back in bliss.
“And now?”
“Tastes the same, but it feels like being ten, at Nanna Berta’s place… at Christmas.” Kat let out a contented sigh.
“That cookie’s from yesterday, when the stone was still there,” Gavin said. “The other is from this morning, before we figured out it was gone. Without it, we’ll lose all our business to the chain bakery downtown.”
“I said I won’t turn you in,” Kat said, “and I’ll hold to that. You’re not getting the stone back, though. It belongs with the brownies. You can’t steal cultural items for your own gain, even if you think it was a ‘fair trade.’ How would you feel if elves started buying your grain goddess statues from your shrines as decorations for their kitchen?”
“Actually,” Gavin said, “I wouldn’t care. My husband, though….” Gavin’s face dropped. “Carlos is devout, and a true believer. He would be livid… and hurt.”
“Right. So, I need to review the video from the security cameras, and we need to figure out who has it,” she said. Kat sat back at her desk and began calling up the security videos from the cloud. “Once we know that, we need to let the police know what they have. They won’t get picked up for theft, but they’ll still do time, and the altar will go back to where it belongs.”
“I wonder if it’s the same people that broke our windows with stones last month,” Gavin said.
“I didn’t hear about that.”
“Your father didn’t think it was anything to worry about,” he said. “Probably just kids or something. They were small stones, one every Friday in the same small pane of the side window.”
“Do you have any of those?” Kat asked.
“No, your father threw them out.”
She growled, and then stopped. “Invisible… bypassing locks and alarms… sounds like brownies. Yep. I think you’d like to see this,” she said.
Gavin came around to the back of the desk. “I can’t see the screen from here.”
Kat stood, and offered her chair. Gavin climbed into it, and she acted as though she was leaning on it to keep it from swiveling without being obvious. He stood in the chair and said, “Thanks for not picking me up, or offering to.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” she said. She played back the video from the camera just inside the rear door of the bakery.
In the video, the door opened and closed without anything else showing. The alarm keypad lit up and then went dark. The faery stone rose into the air and floated to the door. Three tiny figures appeared, and one of them floated up to the camera, holding a small card with fae writing.
Kat took a screenshot. “It looks like the brownies took their altar back all on their own.”
“It does look that way,” Gavin said. He looked as though he might be sick at any minute. “I’m finished.”
“Can you read the card?” Kat asked.
“No, can you?”
“I can’t, but I bet my girlfriend can,” she said.
Kat pulled out her cell phone and called. Gwen’s pale pink face, violet eyes, and pure white hair filled the screen. “Hey, Grumpy, we’re having dinner with my folks tonight. Did you get everything squared away?”
“Not yet,” she said. She turned the phone toward the monitor. “Can you read that?”
“It’s a brownie! What’s he doing in the city?” she asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
“It says, you owe four month’s payment for the altar, at the trading creek. Turn me back around, Grumpy.”
Kat turned the phone back around. “I assume the last bit wasn’t on there.”
“No,” Gwen said, “but if your halfling friend has a faery stone, he could be in big trouble. Especially if the brownies take it to the Indigenous Court.”
“Did it say anything about how to get in touch with them?”
“That’s all it said. Is he there?”
Kat moved closer to the chair so that Gavin was in frame, and he waved with a sheepish grin. “Hi.”
“Does the trading creek mean anything to you?” Gwen asked. “Because if you don’t know where to go or what to pay, you can say goodbye to your bakery. Brownies will burn that bitch down before you know it.”
“I know where it is,” he said. “I haven’t been there in over fifty years, but I know it.”
“What happened four months ago?” Kat asked.
“My mother passed four and half months ago,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Carlos, I don’t think I’d have kept it together.”
“Hey, Grumpy, you look like hell. You get cleaned up, and I’ll meet you both at the bakery in an hour,” Gwen said.
“Wow, taking charge, Squeaky?”
“You’ll need an interpreter,” she said, “and we should settle this while Mr. Gavin still has a bakery.”
“See you there,” Kat said, blowing a kiss before hanging up. “I assume that works for you?”
“It does,” he said. “Could you give a hand down? This chair is pretty high.”
Kat offered a hand for him to hold on to and lowered it slowly as he dangled from a firm grip around two of her fingers. “I’ll run home and clean up and see you there.”
#
Kat arrived to see Gwen and Gavin in an animated conversation in front of the bakery. They kept being interrupted for an autograph, but neither of them let it slow down the chatter.
Kat poked her head inside the bakery. Everything in front of the counter was human scale, the floor a couple feet lower than the floor behind, where everything was set up for someone Gavin and Carlos’ size. “Hey, Carlos. We’re going to get your situation sorted today.”
“Thanks!” Carlos was maintaining a cheerful demeanor, pulling an espresso, but the customers all seemed to be disheartened. “You hear that, everyone? She’s going to get our secret ingredient back!”
There were a few cheers, and an “I hope so!” from the customers, but Kat had to fight from releasing a growl. She went back out front and said, “Let’s get this over with.”
They piled into Gwen’s sports car, Gavin fitting comfortably in the abbreviated back seat. He gave Gwen the address and she plugged it into the GPS. The drive was less than five minutes.
“We probably could’ve walked it,” she said.
“Nobody walks in L.A.,” Gavin replied with a laugh.
They parked on the side of the road near a wooded park. “This is really where the brownies are living?” Kat asked. “In that tiny little patch of trees?”
“If you were ten inches tall,” Gavin said, “how big would that be to you? That’s what, an acre of park land? That’s like miles to them.”
“True,” she said. “How far in is the creek? I don’t want to step on anyone.”
“It’s just inside the trees,” Gavin said. “Still, watch your step.”
Signs posted around the trees declared that they were entering the Yuet Chekka Reservation, an autonomous, indigenous nation under the NRRA and IPPA in association with the US Bureau of Indigenous Affairs. The text was repeated below in Anglicized Fae, and below that in fae script.
They walked in slowly, careful about every footfall. Gavin stopped them just a couple of yards in. A tiny trickle of water in a small clearing, with a ring of stones around it lay in front of them. “This is it,” he said.
Four brownies appeared, sitting on the stones. Less than a foot tall, with swarthy brown skin and curly brown hair, all dressed in garish colored robes. One stood and spoke in Fae.
“Her name is Utlik Chuin,” Gwen said, “which means ‘apple flower bud,’ by the way, and she’s the law speaker. She wants to know if we have their payment.”
Gavin swallowed hard. “Can you ask her what is owed? I assume my mother handled this before.”
“Where is she?” Gwen asked.
“She… passed,” he said, “four months ago.”
Gwen translated and the four brownies spoke among themselves for a moment, too fast for anyone to follow.
Utlik Chuin looked back to them and spoke, while Gwen translated. “We are sad that your mother has gone, but glad that she is with her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother before her. The payment for the altar is one sweet and one savory every moon. Because of your circumstance, we will let this go and you can take the altar back with you. The blessings of your ancestors have been very good to us.”
Gavin spoke, going slowly so that Gwen could translate back. “If I had known I would surely have paid. I will have someone bring compensation immediately.”
Utlik shook her head. “If it was not baked with the blessings of your ancestors it does us no good.”
“Only things baked yesterday, when the stone was still there.” He didn’t wait for a response but pulled out his cell phone instead. “Carlos, how many cakes do we have left over from yesterday? … Okay, and cookies? … How about personal quiches? … Good. Bring the cake, a dozen cookies, the quiches, and a loaf of rye. … No, only stuff that was baked yesterday. … Yes, to the park. Lily can handle the store while you’re out. Yes, see you in a few.”
The brownies were talking among themselves again, at break-neck speed. “Should I tell them it’s on the way?” Gwen asked.
“Yes, please. There’s a full cake, a dozen cookies, six personal quiches and a loaf of rye bread coming.”
When Gwen passed the message on the brownies went quiet. One of them disappeared and a moment later several dozen appeared around the speaker, all waiting silently.
The sound of a scooter carried from the road. “That’ll be the delivery,” Gavin said. He looked at Kat. “Can you help Carlos bring that in?”
Kat nodded and headed out to the road. She took the large bundle from Carlos, watching his curly black hair bounce as he ran to the trees. As she followed behind, she wondered about the stone. Should she let Gavin keep it? The brownies seemed to be okay with it, but a few baked goods every month is in no way payment for taking away a cultural artifact.
She set the bundle in the middle of the circle of stones and unwrapped it. The brownies’ eyes went wide, and Utlik chattered something at one of them who disappeared. The stone floated out from the trees and landed at Gavin’s feet. Kat stopped him before he could pick it up.
Kat faced Utlik and spoke slowly so Gwen could translate. “This is a treasure of your culture. Why do you give it away for a pittance? It seems he is taking advantage of you for his own gain.”
Utlik laughed. “No, we are taking advantage. Every time his ancestors brought us their food, they shared their blessings with us. We have grown healthy, strong, and numerous. This feast, though, is far too large for us, so we are inviting the nearby pixies and sprites, and you all, to join us. These blessings are all we ask in return.”
She walked down to the cake which stood taller than herself and pointed at one of the cookies. “One of these, and a bun, brings us enough love and luck to carry through the worst month. This,” she spread her arms wide, “is a blessing for a thousand.”
“It still feels wrong,” Kat said.
“When I made this deal with his ancestor,” Utlik said, “I expected food for the tribe, nothing more. After a few moons, though, that food brought us more. The magic of his people has given us far more than we could ever repay. Please, return the altar back to its rightful place above your ovens.”
Kat nodded, while Gavin and Carlos looked at each other in shock. “We have magic!?” they exclaimed.
“Yes,” Gwen said, “you do. We’d stay, but we already have a dinner engagement.” Kat and Gwen walked out of the park, holding hands, while overhead hundreds of flying fae buzzed past towards the woods.