Alois Trancy was not, nor had he ever been, a fan of oatmeal. It was a gnarly, nasty, icky gob of yuck and stickiness and ew. It was known throughout the Trancy Manor that he hated anything that wasn't delicious and candy-coated. Why Claude felt the need to feed him plain, generic oatmeal every morning was anyone's guess. It could have been for the health of his young master, or just to see him squirm at the large bowls he brought, but that wasn't what mattered. What mattered was that Alois despised it with the burning passion of one hundred thousand suns, and that all he could think about was how he could dispose of the cheap breakfast. The answer came in the form of the triplets, who entered his study one morning while he was unhappily picking up the spoon and dropping it back into the bowl, with the most bored and appalled expression plastered across his face. When he saw the triplets enter, an ingenious plan appeared in his twisted little mind.

"Hey, you three. Yes, you. Come over here. I've got a job for you," he watched Thompson, Timber, and Cantebury walk closer to the desk, and when they stopped he pointed to the bowl of yuck.

"Dispose of this for me."

They took the bowl and left without thinking of exactly how they would go about ridding the manor of the "food". The simplest solution came from Thompson, who gestured to the shovels that belonged in the garden. They dug a hole in a small corner of the garden where no one ever walked, and hid the oatmeal, bowl and all, in the ground. They buried it, and nonchalantly walked back into the manor.

Alois very much appreciated their ability to make the nastiness disappear, and the next day when Claude brought him a bowl of oatmeal, he knew immediately what to do. This went on for two and a half months before Claude noticed that his dishes were vanishing without a trace. He began investigating the missing tableware around the same time that Thompson noticed a rather interesting problem with how they were disposing of the oatmeal.

There was a small tree growing from the spot they'd been burying the bowls.

At first, it didn't seem all that bad. The sapling growing from the mound wasn't all that big, and could be removed in the next few days with no harm done to the gardens. After the first day, things started getting worse. The second day, when he'd come outside it was nearly twice the size as it had been not twelve hours before. This was disconcerting, but he worked under a demon in a household where the head sold his soul to the devil, and they were demons themselves. Thompson had seen stranger things than a tree growing from oatmeal in his lifetime, though not much. He tended around it for another day, and hoped that no one would notice the recently sprouted tree. By the third day, it was almost up to his waist. The fourth, under his chest, and by the fifth it was looking him in the eye. The sixth day was when Claude noticed the tree, and it was well over Thompson's head by then.

Claude attempted to uproot the tree, and it didn't go so well. Apparently an oatmeal-tree had many natural defenses, one of which being the ability to squirt oatmeal in the face of it's assailant. Claude learned that the hard way, and Thompson did all he could to hold back his laughter. The butler was not happy to get a face full of cold oatmeal, and spent the next three days in the garden, attempting to battle the tree.

By the end of the fourth day of Claude's battle, the score was 4 to 0, with Tree in the lead. At that point Alois had discovered where his butler was hiding, and found no better joy then watching Claude get his just desserts as he battled the tree with every gardening tool imaginable, and lost every single time. His favorite part would be when he called to his butler, who would come running as any faithful butler did, and he was coated in oatmeal from head to toe.

Eventually, Claude admitted defeat. It was the first time any of the servants had heard of such a thing happening, but it seemed impossible to kill the tree. Nothing that he'd tried, not even fire, could take it out, and Claude had declared that he'd had enough. That was when Alois mentioned that he had the solution, which was ridiculously simple and yet amazingly genius. He was sitting at his desk, head propped on his hands, when he nonchalantly grumbled

"Hey Claude. Why don't you just eat the tree? It's made of oatmeal, after all."

Claude was almost immediately outside, contemplating the make-up of the tree. It seemed to be made of oatmeal, and that would make it edible. He stuck a spoon into the surface, and found that it was, in fact, made entirely from the breakfast food.

This discovery led to the single largest oatmeal buffet ever to be held in London, as by the time they'd beaten it, it had grown to be the size of a normal tree. The Trancy household was happy to host the event, at least, if you asked the family's butler. When the head of he house had agreed to the event, he hadn't realized that he would be roped into eating bowls and bowls and bowls full of oatmeal.

Luckily for Alois, by the time it was done, all of the servants of the house agreed. None of them ever wanted to see that breakfast food again, ever, in any of their immortal lives. It would be banned from the manor's kitchen, and they refused to acknowledge its existence any longer.

Author's Notes:

This was written because of a 'just for fun' activity held by the Triplets fan club on DA. I wrote a paragraph long mini fic, and then ended up writing a longer, even more twisted piece. My original ending on the mini piece was that Claude went looking for the bowls that went missing, but here we get a tree and an oatmeal buffet. Why? I don't know. This is really the essence of crack on paper.

What is this I don't even,

~Ali.

The idea of Oatmeal-spewing trees belongs to Poochy2479 on DA.

The characters and places (and tree) are not mine. i only own the situation.