Experimental Toast // The Bar

[halftwinkly]

THEN: Arthur made a brilliant discovery.

AND THEN: Arthur had tried to make toast. Literally, produce toast, on a plate. No matter how hard he tried, screwing up his face like someone trying to remember an answer in Trivial Pursuit, he couldn't even create a crumb. However, he could put bread in the toaster and have it come out as perfect toast, even after he noticed the toaster wasn't plugged in.

NOW: Arthur is in the Bar. Well, sort of. The Bar, on the basis that she isn't stupid, has put him in a little side room with tiled walls and floor. There are a number of objects in the room. Right now, Arthur is looking at a piece of bread very hard.

"Abracadabra!"

The bread explodes into croutons.

"...Oh dear."

There's a pile of similarly dispatched bread in a bowl next to him. The squid might like it, later on.

Comments

[halftwinkly]

Arthur beckons over some eggs and cracks them into the flour. Then he gets a fork and stirs it together. What results does not look like pancake mix. Well, if there aren't any rules, it should just make everything else come together, shouldn't it?

"Expecto patronum!" He points at the mix. It disappears, leaving a clean plate. "I wonder where it's all going."

[missnicegirl]

"Maybe disappearing stuff goes to the same place appearing stuff comes from," Matilda suggests.

[halftwinkly]

"Well then, at least there's pancake mix there. Sort of. I bet you could call it back cooked." Arthur looks at his hand and the clean plate. "Do you want to try it?"

[missnicegirl]

"Huh," says Matilda. "Sure."

She abandons her pile of flour and looks at Arthur's empty plate instead.

And suddenly, pancakes!

[halftwinkly]

Arthur looks delighted.

"Brilliant! Oh, well done. What do they taste like?"

[missnicegirl]

"Only one way to find out," says Matilda.

But as it happens, they taste like pancakes.

[halftwinkly]

Arthur tries one as well.

"Do you think you could do that again? Because maybe where ever it is knows what pancake mix is like, it knows how to make it for itself."

[missnicegirl]

As usual with Matilda's magic, there's no magic word or elaborate gesture or flash of light. She just looks at Arthur's plate, and it has another pancake on it.

Then she looks at hers, and it also has a pancake on it. On top of the flour, alas, which responds to this indignity by foofing out all over the place.



Matilda giggles.

[halftwinkly]

"Let me try..." Arthur stares at his plate. "Expecto patronum!"

A pancake appears. He picks it up and tries it. "...I think it got confused. This is a strawberry that looks like a pancake."

[missnicegirl]

"Try abracadabra again," she says, more to see what will happen than because she expects it to work right.

[halftwinkly]

Arthur waves his hands.

"Abracadabra!"

An apple appears.

"I think it's the apple from earlier..." Arthur bites it. "Well, it tastes like an apple, at any rate. I wasn't sure what it was going to do this time, so I think it got confused."

[missnicegirl]

"Maybe if you do pancakes with abracadabra now, you'll get an apple pancake. Those are tasty."

[halftwinkly]

"Abracadabra pancakes!" Pancakes appear. "That's enough thank you." Pancakes stop appearing. Upon testing, these pancakes taste like pancakes with apple in.

"So if we disappear lots of things, we can make lots of things appear!" Arthur concludes, triumphantly.

[missnicegirl]

"But it looks like it doesn't matter how much stuff disappears, just what kinds," Matilda notes.

[halftwinkly]

"Well, that does make sense if you think about it. We wanted it to make something, now it knows how to make it, it can make it as often as we want." Arthur thinks hard (this may be more thinking than he's done since the last round of Mornington Crescent).

"It's like... It's like when you learn how to play with a yo-yo. Once you've learnt the fiddly bit you can do it over and over again."

[missnicegirl]

"Exactly!" she agrees, brightening.

[halftwinkly]

"So what if we sent everything in the room?" Arthur says, warming to his subject. "Then you could get all this stuff whenever you needed it."

He raises his arms.

[missnicegirl]

"One at a time," Matilda says quickly. "Or we'll forget what we disappeared and we won't remember what it is when we're trying to get it back."

[halftwinkly]

Arthur drops his arms.

"Should we make a list?"

[missnicegirl]

"Good idea!"

She unearths a small notebook and even smaller pencil from a pocket and starts writing things down. "Plate - flour - bowl - bread - donut - raspberry..."

[halftwinkly]

"Shall I disappear them when you write them down? Then you won't get confused and try and write down things twice." If this sounds like something that happens to Arthur a lot, that's because it is.

[missnicegirl]

"Sure," she says agreeably, because while that isn't a problem she's ever had, it's still a sensible way to do things.

[halftwinkly]

Arthur starts gleefully disappearing things as Matilda calls it.

"Do you think it's all going to the same place? What if there's a... Stuff storm, and it gets diverted to a different place?"

[missnicegirl]

"I'm not sure there's even a place," says Matilda. "It might just be the idea of a place."

She looks down at her list. "Okay, now I'll try bringing some of this back."

The plate works. So does a second, identical plate, a moment later. And a small pile of flour on top. And a bowl, helpfully upside-down, on top of that. Because it's convenient, she completes the stack with a slice of bread, a donut, and finally a very large raspberry, which she is interested to note appears in its non-nibbled state.

[halftwinkly]

Arthur is thinking again. Steam comes off his head.

"So if it's only the idea of a place, does that mean we can send ideas of things too it and bring the real thing back? Since it's only a real place if you think about it, you see, when you send the thing over..."

He trails off, looking confused. The Arthur Shappey vocabulary was not made to unravel knotty arcane problems.