3. Spices

"Cumin… cumin… Oh, which one are you?"

As Emma frets over which pot holds the cumin, I take my own look over the spices before us. They're all different colors with different smells and held in different containers, all with no labels, so unless you had a background in cooking you were pretty much guaranteed to get it wrong.

Thankfully, I do have a background in cooking. …Or, well, some. Not much. …Just barely. I can make a mean stack of pancakes, though! Buuut the only time I think I've ever had to deal with spices when I was at a friend's house years ago, and even then I don't really remember which ones were used.

Despite that, I take my time looking over the pots on my side of the kiosk. It's an All-In, after all, so both members of the team need to be participating in the challenge. And also, the teams from flight three aren't even here yet, so there's plenty of time!

I lean forward and sniff lightly, making sure to not pull any powder up my nose. None of these spices smell very familiar, but I still go over them all…We already have cinnamon, so this pot's useless to me… this one's definitely curry, but we don't even need it for the challenge… and this one's-

Wait, this one. This one here, the golden brown stuff. I sniff once more, a bit harder this time, and the smell… well, I can't remember this smell. Maybe I used it before? I dunno. But it just smells right for some reason. And I can trust my intuition. Always have, always will.

"Hey, Emma?" I call out to her, getting her attention. "I think it's this one."

Emma begins to say something back, but we get distracted by the sounds of screeching tires. Not far down the street, the rest of the teams start pouring out of taxis and racing towards us. Dang! Guess we didn't have as much time as I thought.

"Now's not the time for guessing games, Kit!" Emma declares and goes back to her own side. Glancing over every single pot on her side, she finally huffs and guesses, "I don't know, this one?"

…Wait, what? Something's screwy with that logic.

"Hang on, let me get this straight," I say, walking over to her as she accepts the bag of mystery spice from the kiosk guy. "You can guess but I can't?"

"That's because mine's an educated guess, obviously," she says with that self-satisfying smirk of hers. Then the smirk fades and she gives me an unimpressed glare. "Can you not throw a temper tantrum right now?"

She runs off, but… What? What temper tantrum? That was… a completely normal response! Wasn't it? I mean, I'm not even kicking up a fuss! If anything, she's the one-

"Hurry up!" Emma calls out, already at our designated camel.

Still utterly confused about what I supposedly did wrong, I nonetheless make my way over to her, but can't help but break into a fit of childish giggles at her attempts to hop up on the camel. Emma is short – like, really short. If Junior wasn't here she'd probably be the shortest racer out of everyone. As such, attempting to mount an animal as tall as a camel while it's still standing up is near impossible for her.

Not letting this opportunity pass me by, I take a picture of us, me up front and her in the background trying (and failing) to climb her way up the camel's side.

She hears the click of the shutter and stops moving. "You know, it'd be absolutely wonderful if you could help me out right now instead of taking selfies."

Pocketing my phone, I walk the rest of the way to her. "Aw, I didn't think you knew how to ask for help!"

"Hardy-har-har, can we just get on with this?"

Crouching down, I lift her by the foot and help her up on the camel's back, then easily follow right after her. We sit there for a couple of moments, neither of us saying a word while Emma tries everything to get the camel to begin moving.

"How… How do you even start this thing?" she asks aloud, looking down around its sides as if looking for an 'on' switch.

"What if you kick its sides and click your tongue?" I offer helpfully, knowing fully well she'd refuse to try it. "Like a horse."

"I know you're used to doing that, but this isn't horseback riding," she says, just as I predicted. "Camels are completely different creatures that-"

I interrupt her by kicking its sides with my heels and clicking my tongue. The camel made a low grumbling noise and started moving on its own.

Emma, surprised by the sudden movement, turns back to glare at me. I could only grin.