The Curse Breaker Series books in order: Curse Breaker Enchanted, Curse Breaker Darkens, Curse Breaker Faceted, Curse Breaker Falls, Curse Breaker: Books 1-4, Curse Breaker Sundered, and Curse Breaker Hidden, Curse Breaker Trapped. Eight books to rule them all until the ninth one comes out.
Fantasy

Some Like It Hot

Hi Readers,

We hope all the Mothers out there had a happy Mother’s Day. Our poor scribe tried to do something nice for her mom, but I think you know where this is going. 😉

Let me tell you the tale, and you can hit rely and tell me if you guessed it.

So what happened?

Well, Melinda decided to bake some complicated French cookies to test her newly fixed oven. That probably wasn’t the best idea in the world, given how many fantasy characters troop through her apartment each day.

But she was determined, so she went shopping.

I, being a fantasy character, and a child to boot, didn’t accompany her. I stayed in her apartment within sight of the portal back to my world. Papa was asleep on the other side of said portal, and I’m not supposed to go anywhere without his permission, so I stayed put and gave the oven the side-eye just to let it know who was boss.

We’ve had trouble with that oven before, and I wanted to make sure things went as smoothly as they did when we got our new pc built.

We did that this week too! The nice repairman brought all the parts, and he let a bunch of fictional characters watch while he put important things like the cooling system, the hard drive, the motherboard, etc. in the new case.

It was rather exciting for us. Not sure he felt the same way. He couldn’t see us, characters, but he felt our stares.

But I digress. The PC is fine now and happily rendering a scene while I type this.

How do I know it’s happy?

Well, it is humming. That’s a good sign, right?

It seems that way to me, so I’m just going to keep telling you the tale of our latest kitchen nightmare.

Melinda returned with the groceries, and yes, I did help her put them away. I might be fictional, but that doesn’t stop my scribe from handing me things and pointing me to where they belong on the shelves.

That’s part of our deal. I can wander around her apartment and write to you, but I have to help out sometimes too. It’s a good tradeoff.

Once the groceries were put away, she turned the oven on, and it flamed up! Maybe it really was fixed.

It even got hot, but the preheated light came on when the temperature gauge Melinda bought on Amazon said 200 degrees–a full 150 degrees less than what Melinda had set it. 😦

Thus began a game I will call Oven Roulette.

How do you play it?

You turn the temperature knob until you get the temp you want, then turn it down, so it doesn’t keep getting hotter. But wait! Then you have to watch the temperature gauge to turn up the heat again if it gets too cool.

Well, the cookies Melinda tried to make didn’t like her spinning the wheel of heat, and neither did the oven.

I’m small so I got the fun job of staring through the stained window thing to watch the gauge.

And what did I see instead?

Flames appeared out of nowhere and gobbled up the parchment paper around the sad-looking cookies, sending ash flying around the oven.

I probably should have said something immediately, but the fire was so dainty. It just ate the parchment around the cookies, then extinguished itself.

At that point, the cookies were ruined anyway, but I can’t blame the oven since they weren’t going to come right anyway. Melinda had to substitute ingredients because of food allergies, and that broke the recipe.

But the oven didn’t have to set fire to the parchment paper. That was uncalled for. The flames weren’t anywhere near the parchment paper.

I want to blame our resident dragon for that, and I did look for her, even under our Scribe’s bed (but that was later).

I didn’t find her, but that doesn’t mean the Newsletter-Dragon didn’t have a hand in this. Where’s there fire, there’s usually a dragon.

Before I could search any further, two guys from Con Ed knocked on the door.

Melinda’s neighbor smelled the burnt wreck her cookie experiment turned into and called them. We’re not sure why because the fire was smaller than my hand, and it never left the cookie sheet or the oven.

They saw the burned cookies, and they were more upset about that then someone falsely reporting a gas leak that didn’t exist.

Melinda has sensors, and they didn’t alarm once. We would have rushed her out of there if it had. We need our Scribe, whole and undamaged to write our stories.

Melinda also thinks her oven is possessed. I can see why. It’s supposed to cook things, not set fire to them.

The Con Ed guys turned the oven on and used their probe (sensor?) to check the carbon monoxide and for leaking gas. They didn’t find either. So the oven is okay, it just smells bad when it’s on.

What I don’t understand is why Melinda’s neighbor didn’t knock on her door and ask what was going on.

The door was open to get some cross ventilation going. And we, characters, are a friendly bunch. Well, not our dragon, but never did find her.

Oh well. Oven: 2, Melinda: 0

She’ll get you next time, you mechanical maniac.

(Or her characters will quietly order her a new one. I’m not sure we want her to use that oven again. We need her to write more stories, not deal with a pyromaniac oven. Am I right?)

Just a quick note, His Angelic Keeper Fallen is nearing completion. It would have been completed if not for all the craziness this week with the computer and the oven and the supporting characters of that book arguing for days about the order of their chapters.

Auntie Sovvan didn’t even referee, and it’s her book, not mine. Somehow, I found myself in the middle of their quarrel.

I do appear in like five chapters of His Angelic Keeper Fallen and I have some brand new scenes in it! So, I might have been hovering on the sidelines just to make sure my parts weren’t moved or reduced. I’m always trying to get my scenes expanded. 🙂

But it’s nearing completion. Melinda just needs to write the final showdown (for this book and story arc, not the whole series), as promised in Curse Breaker Hidden.

So we should have more info about that next week, assuming we resolve our differences. That argument might still be in progress. I should go check.

Have an awesome week.

We’ll resume our regularly scheduled program next week. This week, I just had to vent. Life’s been rather crazy.

–Ran, son of the Curse Breaker, and the best damned sidekick in all the world. 😉


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