I don't own anything Wallace and Gromit, just this one-shot where I have my own theories about Piella's downfall.
Please let me know what you think.
Bake-O-Lite Girl.
Piella smirked smugly as she walked slowly and reverently almost as though she were a high priestess attending an important religious ceremony, or sacrifice. She approached the tall highly polished wooden dummy whose polished facade was marred only by a piece of paper where she had written the number 12 on it, and she slowly lifted the baker's hat which she had always seen as a white paper fluffy muffin.
"Here it is, Fluffy; Number 12. My Baker's dozen is almost complete!" Piella grinned, ignoring the scared look on her dog's face and body language, but then again Fluffy had never really garnered much attention. Piella knew how much the dog disliked what they were doing - or rather, what SHE was doing. Fluffy was always needing a push to encourage her to playact and make the play before the grand finale, where she committed the murder, more authentic. But she wasn't worried; when this was all over, everything would be happy at last.
Piella planted the hat on top of the dummy's polished egg-shaped head, staring at the dummy for a moment. The police would be investigating the scene by now, and in the morning there would be newspapers running the story.
Baker Bob had been a popular baker, he had his own business and a third of it was based on his bakery program which showed him baking everything from complicated pies, cakes, buns, and breads while he wrote half a dozen recipe and cookery books every year. Piella had wanted a few high profile bakers for her Baker's Dozen, and few came as close as big as Baker Bob.
Besides, the notoriety amused and delighted Piella. Indeed she saw many of the articles as great, fat jokes.
Some of the reporters had run with stories about how she was a black widow, of some kind. A woman who had gained the trust and affection of the bakers, and then killed them so she could steal something valuable. It was both laughable, and yet there was a grain of truth there since she had taken to stealing the baker's hats, but she wasn't a black widow. Other stories ran with how she was a nutter who just murdered bakers because she enjoyed it, that was the closest story to the truth of what was going on, but really Piella didn't really care what they thought; most of the theories were lies, downright guesses, or pure fantasy, but she had found the media was coming out with one theory after another about her and the motives behind the murders, by next week they would come up with a retelling of yet another idea that had already been posted.
Still, they had to admit she had a good method for killing them.
She might be killing the bakers, but she never committed any of the murders back to back, within days of committing one beforehand; the baker before she murdered Bob, she had killed within 3 months of the tenth baker because the Chief Constable had reacted to the calls for the killer to be arrested, and she hadn't met the eleventh baker until 5 months had passed. It had been a long time, too long. It had taken so much of Piella's resilience and self-control to keep herself focused, but she had wanted her Baker's dozen for so long it was an obsession.
But she had needed to wait for the right opportunity, and besides, she had needed to find another baker before she reached Baker Bob, who was the crown jewel in her collection due to his fame and status.
The cereal killer had struck yet again. Piella knew the police were likely tearing Baker Bob's shop and home apart just to find something they could use to pin down who the killer was, but they weren't going to find anything; Piella had always made certain to not leave any traces from her previous kills, she wasn't stupid enough to leave any fingerprints, any blood, or even any photographs connecting her to her previous relationships with the other bakers whom she'd seduced, manipulated, and then later murdered.
Granted, a few of them had been rather pushy, hoping to take photographs every day of the things they did, the 'romantic' activities they ran together; Piella had had no alternative but to let them do it after giving the matter a bit of thought - if she refused they would likely become suspicious and they might begin probing until they came to her home, and that was the last thing Piella wanted. Her home contained too much evidence and links between herself and the previous relationships with the deceased bakers, and since she had stolen their baker's hats and put them on dummies, well you didn't need to be Albert Einstein to work out what she'd been doing.
Piella had managed to keep the bakers she'd seduced away from her home; she had met them at their bakers' shops and homes, giving half-truths or even downright lies about how she lived in a flat or a house which was being refurbished and she didn't want anyone to come. But really some of them weren't bothered, being too overwhelmed by the force of her personality to even think of that, and really she was hoping to keep it that way.
It was time for her to get ready for bed. As she got ready after making sure Fluffy had something to eat and drink for the night, Piella mused about her plans.
A long time ago when she had been the Bake-O-Lite girl, doing those light as a feather Bake-O-Lite bread adverts for the telly, Piella had never once been the evil type. Yeah, okay, so she had a terrible temper which was one of the reasons why she had been fired. She had become so tired of the production team and their demands, the stupidity of some of the directors…. Piella remembered the days where everything was so simple; she would sit on the Bake-O-Lite balloon holding the loaf of Bake-O-Lite bread to signify how light the bread, and how light she was in weight, the cameras would roll, the director and the producer would give her a straightforward script to follow, and she would follow it. Thanks to her adverts she had given the company so many profits, which in turn made her rich.
Unfortunately, they gave her too much food to eat - a lot of it was her own fault because she had found the perfect outlet for her stress, which was increasing day by day, but they could have said no. They didn't. Cakes, rolls, sandwiches… they had given her so many things to eat, and in time she began to gain weight. Piella had once been athletic, caring a great deal about her weight, but in time she began getting tired of the near-endless regimes and so she had merely stopped.
Yoga, jogging, swimming, ballet, fencing, martial arts… Piella suddenly became sick and tired of them, and so she had given up on them. That was her downfall. Because she wasn't exercising she wasn't mitigating the worst of the weight gain, but the company didn't care at first since she could still fly on that accursed balloon. But really her contempt for the company's board of directors and the production team of the adverts began long before she was sacked.
But… in the end, her weight gain happened mostly because of her frustration and the stress caused by the idiots on the board.
Some of the board were replaced by people who came forward with the idea her adverts were no longer really appealing, and they began wanting her to do more risqué ads, just to appeal to the perverts out there. Piella had not stood for that, and she began skirting close to the line. At the same time, her conflicts with the management staff began to create friction between herself and the production team, who were being replaced. The original production team had been, well nice. They had been supportive and they had given her simple scripts to work with, nothing complicated or risqué, but the new members seemed to think she should be sexier, but Piella knew if they crossed lines then the company would be in trouble. She wondered personally if it said something of the intelligence of the human race, really; a person was smart, but some people would take a spark of an idea and blow it out of proportion.
Oh well, it didn't really matter, not anymore.
While she was arguing with the management team, Piella's weight gain increased because she became so frustrated with the constant stress she used eating as a release. Unfortunately, it had gotten out of hand, and soon she was so obese she could barely hover in the balloon, never mind carry out her usual routine during shoots. In the end, they'd had no choice but to fire her and hire somebody else, although the adverts where the Bake-O-Lite girl simply ceased to exist. Piella had slowly begun to get angry towards the management of the Bake-O-Lite company for pushing her down the steep hole of obesity, but in time she began to see the direction of her rage swing towards bakers until finally, she began plotting to kill 13 of them and create a Baker's Dozen.
Piella was so close now to her goals, but even better she had found a new baker, who had apparently turned his house into a bakery and even went to the trouble of converting the roof into a mill, of all things. The bakery was known as Top Bun, and they were rapidly becoming big in the town with their high turnouts of bread loaves, teacakes, and everything else you'd expect from a bakery. The business was being headed by a man called Wallace.
Piella had done her research, and she doubted he'd be any trouble for her.