Warforged don’t need to breathe

Late one night, Ragu received a wrapped still-hot turkey dinner, with an attached invitation from the King of the Elephants, instructing to find a patch of clear skies and a rapidly depleting countdown. The 4 of us gather just outside town, with a cart full of rations and supplies of course. Feeling a strange electrical poofing, we find ourselves in a nicely carpeted waiting room. Without having any time to catch our bearings, a waiter wearing a headset rushes into the room and declares we’re late and must follow him to the stage without delay. We find a very well dressed halfling with a nice hat, speaking some fancy sounding foreign tongue into… an apparatus of crystal balls and gadgets, with subtitles (??) somehow explaining that he’s a former adventurer who’s dedicating their vast wealth to advancing the culinary performance arts! Ragu selects that he wants to face off against the Warforged Iron Chef:

‘I declare your cooking style: uninspired. Mechanical!’

Today’s Judges to impress

• Half Elf Food Critic & Flavour Master
• Half Ork Entertainer
• Abraxis himself
• Culinary Historian Gnome

Today’s Portals

• Dragon Turtle Beach
• The Sunken Reef
• The Forest of Oils

Scored on

• How storied the meals are
• How well they’re cooked
• How exotic the ingredients are

Motzu: my attack speciality [poisons] may be poorly suited to this task

Portal 1: Crab Beach

Stepping through the first portal, we find ourselves on a beach of the Water Plane, covered in very large crabs, who are having a feast day as very large baby dragon turtle heads poke out of the sand. The mission thus becomes: get a not-too-mangled (or poisoned) baby dragon turtle with intact pretty shell through the portal, along with a few crab legs for appies. Duggon runs circles around the crabs, slapping them away and onto their backs, including an excellent bowling maneuver slapping an irridescent crab straight through an oncoming pack. Flint spidermans webbing all around the next turtle head to pop up, to keep it contained and safe, along with a few stuck crabs. Duggon gets swarmed and blinded by the crabs, with 2 of the giant crabs grappling him with eventually both of their claws for a q-q-q-quad grapple. Poor furbolg cryptid. Fumbled spells and a few revenge grapples later, we cleared enough of a path to unweb the baby turtle, and present it with an attractive route via an illusion of ocean in front of the portal, while we loot as many crab legs as we can carry. Ragu coaxes the turtle to frollic faster with some well whispered animal handling. Realizing some fresh seaweed might be nice umami, Flint flings yee old Crawling Claw Familiar (“which murderer’s hand did we use for that one again?”) towards the sea and commands it to bring back some seaweed through the portal, and summons more webbing to keep the fresh oncoming crabs away from the turtle.

‘Lets reduce the Baby Dragon Turtle size, it’ll be easier to carry and its like a flavour reduction to concentrate the flavours’

Portal 3: Forest of Oils

After the party (plus baby dragon turtle) escapes, Flint and Ragu begins preparing the Crab Claws as the appetizer, and the Dragon Turtle as main, with Motzu and Duggon (with their better lung capacity) diving into the Second Portal’s underwater Forest of Oils portal. It appears to have a collection of kelp-like baubles each filled with a wide variety of oils and liquids. There’s a rather large… electric eel like creature in the vicinity they’re keen to avoid.

Critical Swimming Stealth check

Keeping hidden away from the snake, Motzu harvests a bauble of Whale Oil, another of Nautical Poison, and a bauble of Sea Acid, while deftly negociating a retreat from a curious puffer fish. Flint and Ragu begin preparing the crab claws as an appetizer, and the turtle-in-shell as the entree, but the poor Crawling Claw was never seen again.

Motzu offer’s Flint a Flash of Genius on using Dentistry Tools to nicely prepare crab claws

Portal 2: Sunken Reef

Realizing the dishes need a little something extra, the crew tries the 2nd portal to the Sunken Reef, emerging on a high rock jutting out from the sea, with the pair of robot sous chefs far below, carrying nets of their spoils.

There’s a robot chef standing in front of King Kong, what does he do – well he tries to run, but gets donkey kong slapped into the ground

The resulting mêlée is ridiculous: the clankers try to climb up the rope to return with their spoils, but get slapped down by Duggon’s unreasonable reach like the Donkey Kong barrel game. Flint uses a seen servant to grab one of their nets of fresh seafood, and it gets halfway up the rope with it before getting smashed out of existance by a bot, who then knocks a climbing Ragu down too, before himself getting knocked down by Motzu, allowing Flint to yoink the bag after all and escape with it back to the kitchen. Flint nods at a 3rd sous chef bot as they both cross paths in the portal, but one wouldn’t be so uncouth as to fight on the stage, so the bot runs up to tackle Motzu off the cliff as well. Since we weren’t actually trying to kill them, everyone disengages into the sea, with Motzu able to sneak poison onto the bot’s remaining bag of fish. Buuut the sea is full of very angry fishmen, so they nope back to the kitchen.

Realizing we really need a nice fruit for the dessert, we return to Crab Beach and search the jungle. After an exhausting dip in quicksand, we make polite company with a supernatural colourful frog, who accepts one of our durians as tribute for his favour. Sniper Motzu nails a blowdart into the bot’s baby dragon turtle as they drag it through the portal, marking the second set of meat we’ve tainted of theirs.

Exotic Ingredients

• Fancy Sand (decoration)
• Seaweeds / Kelps
• Whale Oil
• Nautical Poison
• Sea Acid (HCl?)
• Alchemist Fire bauble
• Durians

The heat is on

• First dish: Extremely fresh Crab Claws, with a nice dip made from the Sea Acid and Whale Oil. Flint’s sales pitch for it was going poorly (yay 4th natural 1 of the night!!) before he remembered the poison frog’s aura of encouragement, which turned it around.
• Second dish: Baby Dragon Turtle in its shell, with shark fin soup. Duggon tried to distract the iron chefs to make an opening for more dish poisoning attempts, but ended up lighting himself on fire. Head chef Ragu presented this one with panache.
• Third dish: Agar Agar from the seaweed, to make Durian Jello, which Duggon delivered with a cartwheel, but he was clumsy, so Motzu tried to magic up some nice sea breeze smells and sounds, which were a bit sulphury, so Flint added a tequila sunrise illusion, that wasn’t well synced so…

“It might all come down to Ragu, are you doing anything to help land this cartwheeling jello delivery performance?”
“Well, I’m making jello noises.”

Following some of the judges suffering from food poisoning from poorly prepared Team Iron Chef dishes, their lead Chef commits seppaku, and Ragu wins the crown of Adamantine Chef!

Prizes: a shiny red ruby chicken statue, an Alchemy Jug, a ring of extra healing potions, and a cracked gold coin.

– From the Memoirs of Flint Stone
Archwizard of the definitely-real Invention School/Jungle Dojo

Previous Chapter: Vialchasing

Next Chapter: Malic’s Big Chicken

Dramatis Personae

• B - Flint Stone, amnesiac wizard, Wizard/Monk School Headmaster and Head Mayor of Greenstone
• T - Dr. Motzu, “naturopathic” poisons doctor, RHSBH Graduate
• N - Ragu, sage Lizard Chef, winner of Adamantine Chef 2026
• D - Duggon, somewhat-legendary cryptid chewbacca, slaps goblins (and robots) like Donkey Kong