Forcing myself back onto my Friday posting schedule, mostly because I'm trying to be a bit more reliable than this site's email alerts. Assume I will update sometime on Fridays from now on, at least until whatever's going on with the site is fixed.
Takumi's fourth week assisting Fuyumi found him waking up early to take a train back to Bologna before being packed into a black car that would have looked sleek and new at least two years prior. She barely waited for him to throw his bag in the back before they were rushing through the city streets. They stopped for just long enough to pick up coffee and pastries before Fuyumi drove them out of the city and briskly down a highway.
"Why did we have to leave so early?" Takumi asked in a grumble, yelping quietly as the movement of the car splashed coffee onto his hands.
Fuyumi steadied the car. It would have been more reassuring if she wasn't balancing the steering wheel between two fingers and half-lounged against her door. "We're going to be traveling through much of Lunigiana in the next few days, Aldini. Hopefully, we'll arrive in Pontremoli with enough time left in the morning to explore before we begin work."
"What's in Lunigiana?" Takumi asked, somewhat baffled.
All he got in return was a sly grin. "I'm sure you already know the answer to that. I don't think someone as food-oriented as you would miss this. Think about what you've heard of the region." She refused to say anything more than that afterwards.
Takumi sighed to himself before resigning himself to parsing it out himself. He still had around an hour to figure her out.
Takumi's family had gone on a trip to Lunigiana once (part of it was fairly close to Florence, after all), but it had been one of their rare non-cooking centric trips. Takumi's mother had been the one to propose going to tour the historic buildings and cultural touchstones that made the region famous. His father had still insisted on finding the best local restaurants he could, of course, but Takumi remembered the Castle of Fosdinovo far better than the flavor of the bread he'd eaten that morning.
He shook off the childhood awe at high-stretching stones and focused on the breakfast memory, feeling a bit silly about doing so. It hadn't been anything special, from what he could still remember. His father had lectured him and Isami about the bread and how it was a centuries-old recipe from a tablet or something, but they had listened with half an ear, more focused on devouring the food in front of them. It hadn't just been bread; there were confitures and jams to spread, as well as soft cheese and—
"Honey?" he mulled out loud.
"Got it in one," Fuyumi said. She'd turned on some classical piece that sounded less like music and more like the strings and the winds were in active warfare against each other. It was strangely soothing. "Lunigiana is the only place in Italy that produces DOP-grade honey. We'll be looking for samples of both the acacia and chestnut variants and deciding which is more promising for the new recipe. We're looking for something lighter and more floral to contrast with the strong fruity sweetness we already have in the house agrodolce." She sighed. "Many residents of Lunigiana produce their own honey, but it's not a reliable source for a restaurant. We're also going to have to investigate a good year-round source. But that's my concern, not yours. Your primary concern will be focusing on the flavor of the ingredients themselves so that I can be free to manage the logistics."
Takumi could hardly believe that, in all honesty. "You're trusting my palate more than yours?"
"I'm trusting that you've learned my standards by working with me and will be able to deliver something I find at least satisfactory," Fuyumi corrected. "I've developed your standards as well as I can; might as well benefit from that now."
He had to admit, what she said made sense.
"Will we be able to find what you're looking for in less than a week?" he asked. "Why does it have to be so quick, anyhow? I might be halfway through summer break, but I still have a few more weeks here."
"The dolce quality of agrodolce is much more malleable for our purposes," Fuyumi said. "There's very few agro flavors that would work besides vinegar, but the dolce has always been where chefs chose to personalize their cooking. We're going to be traveling far more in the next two weeks than we have up until now, and we cannot fall behind in our schedule. This latter half of the season is honestly why I asked you to join me this summer; as valuable as your presence has been thus far, there's nothing stopping me from dragging my whole kitchen out to Modena to visit acetaias. It's far more difficult to drive them around the country in pursuit of something that might not exist."
Her last few words stopped Takumi's flustered protests dead in his throat. He glanced over at Fuyumi, only to see her stonily staring at the middle distance as she drove.
Questions bubbled at the tip of Takumi's tongue. Was uncertainty a beast so vast that even top chefs lauded the world over found themselves confronting it? He'd seen Fuyumi dismiss her greatness with a lazy flick of her wrist; the concept that she was so resigned to possible failure seemed preposterous.
"Why wouldn't it exist?" he found himself asking.
Fuyumi's posture went stiff even as her hands remained loose on the steering wheel. She turned her head just enough that he knew she was looking at him from the corners of her eyes.
Takumi found himself floundering under her gaze, even with her attention split. Actually, maybe it was because her attention was split; wasn't she driving?
He decided not to linger on that. "Well— all of the work we've been putting into the recipe— you said something about figuring out the border around what you're missing in order to narrow in? The fact that you can still feel that missing sense means that you'll know what the solution is when presented with enough options." He nervously rubbed his hands against his legs; was he really helping at all? "All we can do is commit to finding more and more options until a recipe presents itself."
Fuyumi watched him for another couple of seconds before turning back to the road. "That's reassuring," she said. Takumi blinked. She somehow saw. "I know you're only repeating what I've told you, at least in your mind, but I appreciate hearing that. It's one thing to say something, it's another to have it told to you." Her shoulders relaxed slightly. "All we can do is focus on finding a honey that we find satisfactory, and we'll see if it helps us create the recipe I'm seeking later. Sounds simple enough, hearing it like that."
"Um." Takumi wondered if it was too late to retreat to his phone.
The corner of her mouth quirked at his sudden shyness. "We'll be there in around an hour. I hope you can keep yourself busy." She turned the music up without waiting for a response. Takumi watched her drive for a few minutes longer before tapping his phone back to life.
He hadn't had much reason to reach out to his classmates up until now; he'd been forced to add them all on whatever social media sites he had an account for (and sign up for others he didn't), but summer was so busy that he hadn't had much time to post or check anything. Despite this, Takumi quickly found that the only person who had posted anything of interest online was Momo, who had apparently decided to spend her spare vacation time working at a wagashi store near her family home in Kyoto. Plates of beautifully decorated sweets filled her main page, interrupted only by occasional brand deal selfies (Takumi snickered over an image of Momo drowning in dozens of slime-shaped plushes, hugging a particularly large one like she usually held Bucchi. Fuyumi just gave him a confused glance before shrugging him off). After scattering a few likes across the photos from the past week, he looked at the half-finished conversations in his inbox. One of the other first-year students at Polar Star had made a groupchat (he suspected either Shōji or Yūki) that had promptly been filled with hundreds of messages that Takumi refused to back-read. The latest debate seemed to be around the chore chart when everyone got back to campus; Shun had been tasked with sweeping the entryway by someone but had apparently been deleting the messages telling him to do so whenever someone brought it up.
92nd GENERATION POLAR STAR (๑•̀ㅁ•́๑)✧
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: IBUSAKI I DON'T CARE IF THERE'S NO EVIDENCE YOU STILL HAVE TO DO YOUR CHORES
fire hazard: i dont know what youre talking about
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: i have PROOF that you're doing it!
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: [deleted image]
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: I BU SAKI
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: WHO LET YOU DELETE MESSAGES ANYWAYS
sa-sake: You did, Yoshino. You said he was more responsible than the other boys.
fire hazard: im touched
cool guy: SINCE WHEN IS IBUSAKI MORE RESPONSIBLE THAN ME OR SATO?
big shrimp: AT LEAST WE DON'T SET OFF THE FIRE ALARM TWICE A WEEK
sa-sake: You do, though. Fumio just blames it on Ibusaki.
fire hazard: oh does she now
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: NO NO THIS ISN'T ABOUT THROWING IBUSAKI UNDER THE BUS
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: THIS IS ABOUT IBUSAKI PULLING HIS WEIGHT IN THE DORM!
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: ALDINI TELL HIM TELL HIM HE HAS TO DO HIS WORK
Takumi grimaced at the call-out. Apparently, Yūki could see when he was looking at the messaging app.
giorno (˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧: Please leave me out of this.
He stared at his assigned name.
giorno (˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧: That's not my name. Who's Giorno?
sa-sake: Oh no.
zombie nerd: I'm so sorry.
fire hazard: ill cater your funeral
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: ALDINI. HAVE YOU NOT READ JOJO?
big shrimp: NO WAY
cool guy: HOW HAVE YOU GOTTEN THIS FAR IN LIFE WITHOUT READING JOJO
giorno (˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧: I have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
The chat began to scroll faster than Takumi could keep up. He stared at the barely comprehensible messages, somehow more confused by Yūki, Daigo, and Shōji's explanation than he'd been before asking. Shun's dry asides seemingly meant to annoy the three of them didn't particularly help.
"Mizuhara, what's a 'Jojo'?" he asked.
"A fairly popular shōnen-slash-seinen manga that started in the 1980s," she replied. "Some of my classmates followed it. I think it's still going. I've never been much of a manga reader."
Takumi hummed in acknowledgement and decided to just cut his losses and close out of the groupchat.
A notification pinged on one of the social media sites. Startled, Takumi opened it to find a message from Momo.
momomomo. sparkle: oh, you're still alive, i see.
takuuumi: ?
momomomo. sparkle: no activity for weeks and then you're all of my notifs
momomomo. sparkle: desperate much, aldi-nyan?
takuuumi: Is that not how this site works? Am I not supposed to interact with your posts?
momomomo. sparkle: /ᐠ. .ᐟ\
momomomo. sparkle: you don't know ANYTHING about socmed, do you
takuuumi: My brother made me make this account. I don't really use it for much.
momomomo. sparkle: sigh
momomomo. sparkle: well if you're going to impose your cute self on me, you're going to have to get better about using it
momomomo. sparkle: it's the 21st century this is a life skill at this point.
takuuumi: How so?
What followed was a long, detailed diatribe about how popularity was key in an industry like theirs and how cultivating a social media presence was the best way to get actual data on how present you were in the cultural zeitgeist. Momo sent links to accounts with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers (he dutifully ignored her own impressive following) that posted content related to food and cooking and began to dissect exactly why certain posts were seen as more favorable and why others were less successful. He tried his best to keep up, but when it became clear that he had little to no idea what she was saying, she cut herself off with a huff and a "just meet me before classes start up again and i'll get your sorry account up to par. this counts as part of your training, by the way."
He sent back a "Fair enough" before checking in on his other friends. His latest message from Ikumi was from six days prior and had just been a picture of herself with a particularly adorable calf captioned "Doesn't she look good enough to eat? :P" Takumi sighed before opening the conversation in full.
arigatoni: Am I too late to save her?
long tamago: He lives!
long tamago: You've still got more than a year; she was born four months ago :)
arigatoni: I forgot how young cattle are harvested.
long tamago: Somehow, calling it "harvesting cattle" puts more chills up my spine than just saying slaughter.
arigatoni: That feels like a personal problem.
Ikumi retaliated by sending a photo of her dinner from that night, which appeared to be the leftover barbecue her family had prepared earlier in the week, along with the words "Guess how old he was, then." Takumi huffed out a laugh.
The Polar Star chat pinged him more insistently. He opened it with a quiet sigh.
92nd GENERATION POLAR STAR (๑•̀ㅁ•́๑)✧
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: well aldini, if you don't read jojo what DO you read?
giorno (˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧: Um. Books? Light novels, I guess?If you mean manga, my brother sends me a lot of slice of life titles to read.
zombie nerd: Ooh, which ones? I've been reading TenSura lately.
sa-sake: I never took you to be an isekai enjoyer, Marui.
zombie nerd: I'm usually not, but it hooked me.
giorno (˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧: I haven't read that one, but Isami and I've been keeping up with Tondemo Skill for a little bit. He keeps wanting to try making some of the recipes in there.
cool guy: ooooooh just looked it up. this looks SICK he has a BIG DOG
sa-sake: Aww, the slime is cute ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶
jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و: do you ever think about things besides cooking lololol
Takumi actually had to think about that, which probably meant that he had to find a new hobby.
At a quick glance, Sōmei hadn't sent him anything recently, due to them both having no time to really chat and the time zone difference currently between them. Takumi ended up sending him a picture he found of a shrimp cracker delicately balanced on prepared sumeshi, complete with a ribbon of nori to hold the whole thing together. He added "New recipe concept" on before glancing back at the Polar Star chat, which was still flying by somehow.
Time had flown by while chatting with his friends, and soon enough they were barely twenty minutes away from Lunigiana. Takumi closed out of the messaging app he used to stay connected across oceans and opened his actual texts. Most of them were defunct from lack of use, but there was one with a blinking unread dot. For once, he was up in time to talk to Isami.
Isami: thanks for the wine bro :) i didn't think you'd actually get it
Takumi: That's fair, seeing as I wasn't planning on going originally.
Isami: :( well you didn't have to tell me THAT
Takumi: You had to have known that. I literally won't believe you if you say you didn't.
Isami: well maybe i THOUGHT that but i'm always happy to be proven wrong about your shortcomings
Takumi: Ouch, but fair.
Takumi: How's the trattoria?
Isami: same old same old. old man romeo was asking after your risotto pescatore recipe again
Takumi: Didn't we take that off the menu like three years ago?
Isami: to him it was only yesterday
Takumi: Ah. Did you tell him it's still a secret?
Isami: nah i told him that you measure like a nonna and that nothing's written down
Isami: also i don't remember the recipe so like. no reason to ask me
Takumi: Your forgetfulness was actually helpful, for once?
Isami: (·•᷄ ∩•᷅ )
"Five minutes out," Fuyumi said, startling Takumi slightly. He nodded, sent one final text to Isami ("Being called over, tell the family I say hi"), and shoved his phone in his pocket. The world around the car had turned into forested mountains, the golden light of the summer sun filtering through branches and casting a soft halo on everything he could see. Takumi thought he could make out the sights of a somewhat rundown looking settlement tucked away between the trees.
"You said Pontremoli, right?" Takumi asked.
"I did." Fuyumi had straightened up into proper driving posture at some point, which Takumi was quietly grateful for. "Lovely little historical town. Some consortium members here that I have meetings with; I'm hoping that they have some amount of acacia honey that they're willing to sell or I'll have to set up shipping arrangements. There are a few museums to poke through, if you ever find yourself bored. Otherwise, we're going to be resting here for the night. Tomorrow, we head for Licciana Nardi."
"What's in Licciana Nardi?" He'd heard of the small village before but couldn't recall anything interesting about it.
"You'll see." Fuyumi just smirked at his unimpressed look. "Don't discount Pontremoli just because we're not technically looking for anything here professionally; it's a lovely place. Go ask around about the werewolf."
Takumi sat up in alarm. "The what?!"
Fuyumi refused to elaborate.
Licciana Nardi was a small village tucked away in Appennino Tosco-Emiliano National Park and was apparently known for its chestnuts. Takumi had vaguely known that some parts of Italy were prized for some more unusual harvests, but he didn't expect to have fresh fritters pushed into his hands at a hamlet in a park, of all places.
Fuyumi had left at some point to discuss the finer points of beekeeping with the consortium member in the area (and the fact that even a place so remote as this had someone on any sort of food consortium was still hard for Takumi to believe), leaving Takumi to amuse himself. Some part of Takumi wished that he'd chosen to stick with her and shadow her quiet negotiations for purchasing the honey they had come here for, but the part that had agreed to go to Tōtsuki held him back and persuaded him to do his own explorations.
As much as Takumi had talked about not caring about Tōtsuki politics at the start of the school year, he had however reluctantly been made to care about them through his friends and his own sense of personal pride. The part of him that demanded excellence at their training camp was equally insistent that he had to do well at the Autumn Election, that he had to win if he wanted to prove that he deserved to stand by his friends and be treated as their equal. He remembered their sharp bickering and the way they all wore words like armor, and it was almost startling now to acknowledge that he wanted to be seen as worthy of the same treatment and not coddled just because he hadn't been steeped in their fermenting toxicity for as many years.
Maybe he even wanted to join in to turn it from pointed jabs and haughty remarks to actual productive rivalry. Takumi wasn't sure. All he knew was that he had to prove himself at the upcoming Election. Fuyumi had already allowed him to use his time in Italy to develop himself more seriously, even offering herself as a source of information and advice whenever he needed it (and whenever she wasn't busy which admittedly they really weren't, most of the time).
One night over dinner, Fuyumi had explained the Election to him far better than his classmates had.
"It's the equivalent of Sports Day at a typical high school," she said. When Takumi looked even more confused at that, she just chuckled and continued. "Basically, it's the time to show yourself off to the rest of the school, but instead of physical prowess, Tōtsuki students show off their cooking skills. I've been asked to judge a few of the rounds in the past few years, but the event hasn't really changed since I was a student myself."
"How does it work?" Takumi asked. "Is it just one day?"
Fuyumi actually laughed at that. "Oh god, that would be something. No, the Autumn Election takes weeks to run, with four actual days of competition. On the first day, the students nominated for entry are split into two groups and asked to cook something according to a predetermined theme. From that pool, the top sixteen are then randomly arranged into a tournament bracket that determines who you'll be going against. The second day is two days after the first; the morning after you qualify, you're given the theme you must meet with your dish. After that, students are given a week to prepare for the next two rounds."
"When you say theme, what do you mean?"
"It depends." Fuyumi settled back in her chair. "Sometimes, a theme is an ingredient you must use in your dish. Sometimes, it's a type of cuisine. I've even seen a combination of the two used in the past, though never for the second day. My themes were 'breads and pastries,' 'grapefruit dishes,' 'Western cuisine,' and 'handheld foods.'"
Takumi blinked. "Some of those seem far too vague to work."
Fuyumi shrugged. "It's meant to test student cooking, not student knowledge. If the themes were any narrower, the judges would probably be fed repetitive flavors, and that's not fun for anyone involved."
"When was the last time you judged?"
She snorted out a laugh. "Two years ago, actually. Director Nakiri let Dōjima-senpai make an unorthodox ruling that resulted in a three-way final round, and he asked for me to join the judging panel for it."
Takumi stared at her openly. "Can he do that?"
"Nakiri-dono let him." Her expression quirked into a barely noticeable smile. "It was an interesting year. Saiba-kun, Tsukasa-kun, and Kurokiba-kun all did their best."
Even if one of those names was unfamiliar to him, Takumi could still remember a wide grin crowned with red hair and a carefully arranged boredom that fiddled with a bandana around an arm. "Who won?"
Fuyumi tapped her chin. "Kurokiba-kun, if I remember correctly."
Takumi blinked. It's not that he couldn't imagine Ryō winning his year's Autumn Election; the boy had been undaunted in the face of the wilder personalities of Sōma and Alice, and he acted like he was used to being efficient over friendly. And yet, the part of him that mulled over status and numbers and data remembered where he sat in the Elite Ten.
Fuyumi caught the look in his eyes. "Powerful chefs are made by themselves, not by public perception," she warned. "I graduated Second Seat, but I held First for a long while before that. The 90th generation are a volatile group, and whatever peace you perceive between them is still being fought over, I guarantee you. All of them could be First Seat, if they wish. The only problem is that, as one might expect, only one person can hold that Seat at a time."
"If everyone's at the same level, how do you set yourself apart?" Takumi asked.
The smile strengthened. "That's where your knowledge and your choice to join me come in." She waved an errant hand. "Watch a professional. Learn a new technique. Pick up a strange, esoteric ingredient. Arm yourself with all of these things that they don't have, and guard them jealously until you want them to know about them. Understand that once you use those tools, the others will know you have them and be wary of them again in the future. If you do go Gold, know that part of it will be creating your own tools from your preexisting knowledge rather than searching for something new and esoteric every time you need to. Synthesize your own solutions, and keep your sights set on your goals rather than your reputation."
Takumi had drunk her words in and mulled them over constantly after they retired for that night, which eventually led him to beg off of her company and investigate whatever else Licciana Nardi offered than the honey Fuyumi was so intent on acquiring.
She found him a few hours later, engrossed in a local's cheerful instructions on the proper ratio of chestnut to wheat flour to cook with. Takumi could only be thankful that Fuyumi had the patience to wait for him to wrap up; his hands were covered in sticky dough that he'd been about to throw into a fryer.
The chat-fic sections were initially written as exercises for me to figure out relationships between these characters, but then I ended up writing close to 1k and decided to sprinkle them in. The sections in this chapter obviously aren't all of them, but maybe I'll find a way to slide the others in later. Apologies if the formatting is hard to read; I wrestled with it for around five minutes before calling it a loss.
The properties that the Polar Star kids discuss are JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime/Tensei Shitara Suraimu Datta Ken, and Campfire Cooking in Another World with my Absurd Skill/Tondemo Sukiru de Isekai Horo Meshi.
Nickname notes: jester (•̀ᴗ•́ )و is for Yūki's propensity to use -cchi as a suffix (phonetically, yu-chi is the pronunciation for a kanji for an 'entertainer with large audiences', and 'jester' seemed like the best word for that). fire hazard is for Shun's tendency to smoke his ingredients indoors. sa-sake is for Ryōko's brewing (Sakaki + sake). cool guy is because the kanji for Daigo's name means "incredible me". big shrimp is literally just because the only thing Shōji 's ever cooked in canon is apparently fried shrimp? giorno (˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧ is for Giorno Giovanna, the protagonist of the fifth arc of JJBA and the only other popular Italian manga/anime character I could think of. zombie nerd is because I love to make fun of Zenji wherever I can. Momo's Instagram handle is from canon, but I changed it so that it looked like an actual Instagram handle (momomomo-sparkle to momomomo. sparkle; had to put a space in for this site, lmao). Takumi and Ikumi's are the punchlines to Japanese-Italian and Japanese-English pun-based jokes, depending on the person; arigatoni to "How does an Italian person say thank you to a Japanese person?" and long tamago for "Have I told you the joke about the egg?"
Food notes: sumeshi is sushi rice. Lunigiana is known for producing DOP quality acacia and chestnut honey; the former is known for being light and sweet and the latter for being a bit bitter, though still as sweet as you expect honey to be.
Thank you all for your fic recommendations! I'll be sure to check out the ones I don't recognize. If you feel like answering another question, throw some speculation on what other light novels and manga Isami might recommend to Takumi, haha.
