ALL NOVEL 1
Preface
Yeah, I’m not sure where this came from either. Long story short, there was a Campione/Multicross quest that I used to run. It died because the quality was really meh. I wouldn’t say the quest is worth reading, but this omake series became its own thing.
The premise is that this OC Campione who’s obsessed with cooking like Doni’s obsessed with swords, the Jade Rabbit, got yeeted into RWBY about a hundred years after killing Rama (Campione’s big bad). Hijinks ensue.
Homeless Bunny 1
I groaned pitifully. I hadn’t been in this much pain since I got the bright idea to turn the Bull of Heaven into tartare. Definitely a case of my eyes being too big for my stomach there… Long story short, Luo Hao bailed me out and we killed it together. Inanna still had it out for me even in the Netherworld.
Maybe she’d be less murder-y if we didn’t appear every decade or so after the Bull reconstituted his divinity so we could grab another plate… Then again, she was kind of a bitch either way. And it really was great tartare.
I closed my eyes and tried to stem the throbbing headache. I’d done this enough times to know what a hangover felt like. That I could still feel the hangover despite being a godslayer meant either someone was suppressing my Authorities, or I’d consumed something distinctly divine. The first wasn’t likely since I kicked Alec’s teeth in sixty years ago, which meant the second… which meant this was most likely self-induced.
“Ugghhh,” I groaned into my hands. “Right… What do I remember…”
Last night was… Last night was the hundredth wedding anniversary between me and Luo Hao. We’d both gone all out to celebrate this “most fortuitous of days,” as my wife put it. The celebration took place in the Lunar Palace. It was the first time in literal millennia that all twenty-eight mansions had been opened to guests.
Everyone worth mentioning was invited. Hell, the guest list was effectively a list of who’s who in the world. All five other Campione, of course. Friendly gods ranging from Athena to Amaterasu to Sun Wukong, that shit-flinger. Our respective entourages from the SSIU and Holy Cult of Five Mountains. Every Paladin and Great Knight worth mentioning, a handful of superheroes too. Hell, I’d even gone out of my way to invite a few of them newfangled omnics or whatever; they seemed sentient enough. Just the list of dietary requirements could fill a small cookbook on its own.
For seven days and seven nights, I declared a grand festival in the Lunar Palace. And… And I didn’t cook a damn thing.
I wanted to. I desperately wanted to. Alas, I was overruled, and in my own house!
A strange cocktail of pride and indignation filled me as I watched Laura take charge. She’d truly come into her own as my sous chef. She insisted that she be the one to take charge of the palace kitchens, saying I ought to pay attention to my lovely wife
My two loves warred in my heart until I finally gave in. I cooked nothing for the entire duration of the festival, save for several thousand servings of douhua, a soy milk pudding dessert that was a favorite of my wife. Made with honey, agar agar, mint extract, and toasted almonds, it was a silky, rich dessert that didn’t sit too heavily in the stomach. That brief stint in the kitchen was a torturous reminder of what I wasn’t allowed to do. Fortunately, Luo Hao had her way of diverting my attention.
“Right… What else…”
Memories flashed by. Luo Hao and I spent all the first day in the throne room of the largest of seven mansions in the Vermillion Pheasant’s quarters, receiving guests, accepting congratulations and well wishes, and offering platitudes as we opened gifts and pretended we cared. Most were fancy trinkets that neither of us cared for, those would be tossed into some random vault and never seen again this millennium. Others were magical artifacts, each acquired within the guest’s means. In this, the humans naturally fell short, but we showed them equal face regardless.
The interesting gifts came from those who knew us well. I prized Annie’s gift of a freshly caught fish unique to her fae realm far more than the elaborate, enchanted greatsword forged by Dvalinn, the Slumbering One and king of the dwarves. Sun Wukong, may a sawfish crawl up his dick, got us a slingshot that magically loaded itself with seagull shit teleported from some beach in the mortal plane. Luo Hao made him eat it.
The rest of the days were a bit of a blur. There was food. There was dancing. There was a fair bit of sneaking off for sex. And duels and demonstrations of martial skill, because Luo Hao. The entire central gardens between the twenty-eight mansions had been converted into a sort of twenty-four hour bazaar where goods both mortal and divine could be found aplenty. I was pretty sure I judged a cooking contest between Ame no Uzume and Daji, though for the life of me I couldn’t remember what they fed me.
That had been one of countless cooking contests. The shokugeki I’d adopted took on some popularity with gods and it wasn’t uncommon to hear of one god challenging another in good fun. Or sometimes, a particularly spunky mortal would give it a go, doing their best to bridge the gap between divine ingredients and mortal fare through pure skill. I vaguely recalled Marika Nakiri, descendent of that exhibitionist I still made fun of sometimes, winning a shokugeki against Iris, the messenger goddess of rainbows. She received… something… I knew I rewarded her for the feat, how could I not, but I couldn’t recall at the moment precisely what I gave her…
More and more booze was had as the days wore on. The good shit, the divine shit, the kind that people had killed for in the past. It all flowed like water. Chang’e really outdid herself. Not only did she show off her newest starship, centuries ahead of the Chinese space program named in her honor, she had become a truly splendid brewmistress. Her product had a beautiful burn, an almost cloying sweetness that was just this side of being excessive, and a floral note that balanced the whole brew and left me thinking it was lighter than it was in truth. Thor himself could find no fault with her and I thought I remembered more than one bumbling attempt at flirting.
And then… Then Susanoo busted out his own stash of sake. It was the sake he’d used to get the legendary Yamata no Orochi drunk. But the story didn’t end there. It wasn’t unheard of for snakes to be used in wine production. He’d taken cues from habushu, Okinawan snake sake, which was exactly what it sounded like. Typically, in mortal production, the snake was soaked in a 59% alcohol mixture for forty days to preserve the body and begin dissolving the venom. Then, a 35% awamori mix was added to make it more palatable for consumption.
Susanoo, as if to prove he was born with none of Izanagi’s divine wisdom, rolled up the legendary serpent into a ball, stuffed the corpse inside a barrel the size of a small mountain, then filled it with alcohol. The dumbass forgot the “rice” in “rice wine.” And he kept it that way for… a while… because he forgot where he put it. Of fucking course he did.
Still, the dumbass did have his fans. Plenty of gods didn’t care how toxic the brew was, considering we were all immortal and all. Most didn’t mind a way to get drunk even faster and war gods like Hachiman liked to prove how “manly” they were by chugging it off a stein, because a shot glass wasn’t nearly big enough for them.
Chang’e and Susanoo got into an argument about whose drink was better. Of course, that inevitably meant I got dragged into it. Chang’e won for, you know, actually knowing what the fuck she was doing, and Susanoo challenged my decision with a drinking contest.
And then… There was a portal…? Something about the fey roads and Odysseus promising me an adventure…?
“Oh… That explains why I don’t remember shit… Lesson learned. Divine constitution or not, don’t mix baiju and habushu, especially when the latter was made using the fucking Yamata no Orochi by the biggest idiot in the Shinto pantheon.”
I slowly opened my senses. My list of Authorities wasn’t the only thing that had grown in the past century. The grass beneath me tickled my ears as the world opened itself to me. I heard everything, the flowing of a tranquil creek six miles away, the deer that gently lapped at its surface, the owlets rustling in their nest as they shed their plumage… I’d long since grown past the point of needing eyes.
Then there was the magic. It felt strange. I extended my senses deep into the earth and sought out the nearest dragon vein. It accepted my divine mana with the eagerness of a parched man in the desert. There was something abnormal about this situation, but I wasn’t sure I could describe it as sickly. Mana, magic, was absorbed by the earth and then… crystallized?
It felt as though this world naturally created crystalline deposits of mana within the earth. Each crystal was attuned to an element, filtered and grown from the world’s ambient mana while leaving only the barest remnant for life. I laid there on the forest floor and watched as the world took in a trickle of my divine mana and generated enough of these crystals to fill a small house. It probably took thousands of years for the world to gather this much naturally, but well, Campione.
I sat up and slowly opened my eyes. There was a small rabbit that grazed near me. It was even smaller than Don Fluffles, who’d refused all offers of an enlargement blessing. The smug shit was probably bullying some of Luo Hao’s newer acolytes.
I smiled and reached down, stroking the bunny between the ears. If I sat still long enough, woodland creatures tended to gather at my location, part of the Authority I got from Johnny Appleseed. That, and free apples. Forever. Wasn’t exactly the strongest Authority or anything, but the guy was a fallen god who migrated to the new world to start a different legend. I probably would’ve left him alone had he not started messing with mundane agriculture on such a large scale.
“How peaceful,” I muttered softly. “I might just hang out for a bit. Sober up and see where my feet take me before I go back to the moo…”
I trailed off as my gaze flickered to the night sky. A century of life fighting gods and divine ancestors, and just generally being married to Luo Hao, had given me a stiff upper lip. Bunny or not, I didn’t spook easily. Typically, I was the one who left others speechless. But this… This was beyond the pale.
I looked up and saw the moon, its soft light illuminating the night. It was utterly shattered, like an egg. Fury like I’d never felt boiled to the surface and every single living thing for miles felt the oppressive pressure of an enraged godslayer.
“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO MY HOUSE???”
Author's Note
Thank you for reading. Believe it or not, this is the seventh website I've crossposted to. I want to make sure this site catches up with the others, but it's slow, tedious work. Until then, other sites will have a much more updated library of my works. If you want to read ahead, or check out other stories I've written, you can find them all on my Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/fabled.webs.