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midi-san · 2 days ago

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Golden Cheese and Smoked Cheese and hey who that?

Soooooo I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but just never got to it. So better late than never here you go!

I also wrote a little (1,900+ words) fic to accompany this so here’s that too!

Golden Cheese stared at the crumbled remains of Burning Spice’s temple. To think, this place was once somewhere you can voice your opinion to a kind and knowing deity. It became a breeding ground for a tyrant’s rampage of destruction, and now, it’s nothing. To think, all this carnage, all the lives lost, kingdoms brought to ruin…

Was because one cookie wanted to satisfy his boredom.

She couldn’t help but grit her teeth at the thought of it.

“...My… en… My Queeeeen?! Hellloooo? Are you still there?” Leave it to Smoked Cheese Cookie’s snark to snap her out of her thoughts. Golden Cheese let out a mixture of a guffaw and a scoff.

“Yes Smoked Cheese Cookie, I am alright.” She said, staring back at the ruins, back at…

“You know…” Smoked Cheese started, “for all your posturing and provacity, you really do wear your heart on your sleeve.”

Golden Cheese raised a brow, “Where are you going with this?”

“Something is bothering you: what is it?”

———

The secret passageway Elder Kulfi showed them was as barren as ever. They should be using this to find the Kulfi but instead they are doing… something else entirely. The canyons patterned with different colored rocks looked like they touched the sky from a worm’s eye view. From a bird’s eye view however, it just made things harder to see, with all the twists and turns made by rivers long gone. Golden Cheese was looking for something. For what? Smoked Cheese didn’t know. All he knows is that it was something important that the Golden Sovereign couldn’t ignore. And knowing Golden Cheese, it’s probably something inconsequential, like always.

A few minutes of being carried by the overgrown bird later and they land, right in front of a foreign red crater that stuck out amongst the white sand like a lesion. Smoked Cheese scanned his surroundings: rubble, rubble, that giant crater Burning Spice made, even more rubble— wait where did his Radiance go? To the side he Golden Cheese near multiple piles of boulders, walking over each and every one of them. She was standing over them as if she was trying to…detect something. She eventually came across an indistinguishable pile of rubble near the crater. After a few seconds of staring at it, she begins to dismantle the heap of stone, pushing the smaller rocks away and breaking the larger ones with her spear.

The abruptness made Smoked Cheese flinch. He’s rarely seen Golden Cheese act with such haste. “Whu— My Queen! What are you doing? What is so important in this forgotten canyon that you’d waste time trying to dig it up from…!” He was going to try and convince her to stop whatever inconsequential thing she wants here. He was going to tell her to focus her energy on finding the Kulfi so they can get back home.

But then he saw her face.

Her expression was so… unreadable, yet her furrowed eyebrows gave way to this forlornness in her eyes. She mumbled, “Do you think you can help me with this?” He was alarmed by how soft her tone was. A few minutes ago she was flying high, cracking jokes and arguing with him on how the Kulfi would definitely want to join her kingdom. Now, she’s standing in an abandoned graveyard, a foot on one of the rocks she moved with her spear wedged between some boulders with this air of melancholy around her. He silently nods, sighing in his head.

And so they began shoveling heaps of stone and rock. Smoked Cheese was wheezing from heaving up a particularly heavy boulder, his hands chafed from touching their coarse surface. They made good leeway, the sun was still in the sky as the two cookies made a noticeable dip in the rubble. Throughout this endeavor, that same little question prevailed in the back of his mind: What was Golden Cheese Cookie looking for here?

He was snapped out of his thoughts when he saw Golden Cheese Cookie drag… something out of the rubble. It wasn’t a rock, it was too long to be rock. Not to mention it was too green and pale to be apart of the layered rocks that made the canyon and—

And then he felt his heart stop as he saw bits of cilantro flaking off and onto the ground.

Golden Cheese heaved the body of Cilantro Cobra Cookie a ways away from boulders. The snake woman’s body has certainly seen better days, chips and cracks littered all over her dough. Her snake half had quite a few places where it bent abnormally. Her leafy, cilantro hair was torn and damaged in multiple places. But the real kicker came when Golden Cheese gently flipped her over on her stomach, careful as to not agitate any loose crumbs on her dough. What he saw made him visibly lurch.

The dress she used to wear was in tatters, revealing the nasty wound on her back that was akin to the crater that crushed her. She must have gotten hit from the fallen debris before being buried by the rocks. Instinctively, Smoked Cheese reached for her wrist, checking for a pulse he knows isn’t there: it wasn’t possible. There’s no way someone could survive being buried under an avalanche for so long, let alone after sustaining a serious injury like that. But then he heard a thump, and a few seconds later, another thump. It was weak, it was slow but cheeses, it was there. She was alive.

But his hope was instantly dashed when he thought about it. There was no way she’d survive long without medical treatment. Even if by some miracle her warriors were able to her, she would surely crumble during the long arduous journey back to the tribe. His face shifted to that of pity, there was nothing they could do.

He sighed, “Her pulse is present but it’s weak, too weak. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do.”

“Correction Smoked Cheese Cookie: there is nothing you can do,” she said, picking up and holding the snake’s body, her chin perched on the golden queen’s shoulder with her back exposed to the open spicy air, “But there is something I can do.” Before Smoked Cheese Cookie could say anything, she lifted her free hand and focused her magic. Soon, bits of sand and rock began forming around her palm. But knowing what he knows now, it wasn’t just sand and rock.

Smoked Cheese never considered His Radiance a magic user. The most he ever saw her use magic was from creating her spears from the earth. Any other time she was using her strength, smarts, flight, and… ‘charming personality’ to get by in the world. No, Smoked Cheese never saw Golden Cheese as a magic user.

But then the Dark Flour War happened.

Smoked Cheese was the first to wake up. Why him and not Mozzarella? He’ll never know (she was in fact the last to be awakened in the virtual world). Golden Cheese showed him the ropes, how the virtual world worked, her plans for this virtual world, its systems…

And more importantly, how she did this in the first place. He saw her focus her energy, her magic, and meticulously sorted every crumb of cookie that had a part of a soul into a soulcheese. The soulcheeses would then be stored in a cellar for safekeeping until she could get the server running.

It was the most innovative, yet macabre way of using magic he has ever seen. And now he’s seeing it first hand. But instead of picking out cookie crumbs and infusing them into soulcheese, it was picking out cookie crumbs and reinfusing them with a barely living body.

A golden, geometric shield formed around the three cookies, coating the snake’s wound in a thin layer of gold. Her magic placed the crumbs on the wound like a jigsaw puzzle, making sure each was in its rightful place. Naturally, it was impossible to recover every bit of crumb and dust from the earth, which is why any leftover cracks and chips were filled with gold instead.

“May the Radiance of Gold shine upon you…” Golden Cheese muttered softly, tracing the cracks with her fingers as the dome slowly faded. As the Radiant Queen set the Spice chief down, Smoked Cheese noticed Cilantro Cobra Cookie’s breathing seemed to have stabilized. Golden Cheese gently patted the snake woman’s now ruined, messy hair, “She will wake up in a couple hours. The rest will depend if anyone finds her.” She said as she stood up, dusting herself off.

Smoked Cheese stepped forward, “How do you know anyone is looking for her?” He remembered when Burning Spice crashed down, sending the weakened naga flying somewhere. He heard a few of the Cilantro Cobra tribesmen call out her name before being silenced by the destructive tyrant, scared stiff.

“Oh,” she started off, a hint of playfulness coming back to her voice, “I just know.” She leaned to the left as she looked at something from behind Smoked Cheese Cookie. Earning a confused look from the general, he whipped his head around just fast enough to notice a blur of leafy green quickly hide behind a canyon wall.

Whu— were those—when did—how’d she—HUH?!

His stunned dumbfoundedness was quickly interrupted as the Golden Goddess scooped him up bridal style, “Now my dear general, let us go find the Kulfi for their aid!” She announced, flapping her magnificent wings as she laughed. All Smoke Cheese could do was sputter about as Golden Cheese flew up and out of the canyon. He also couldn’t help but steal a glance of the two cobras still hiding behind the rock wall, slowly coming out to approach their alive, but still incapacitated leader.

“I must ask this once again, are you sure leaving her here was a good idea?” Smoked Cheese finally managed to say.

“Did you not hear me earlier? She’ll be fine, probably won’t remember any of this happened. She’ll be back to her merry little destructive life in no time.”

“But why? Why help her? The last time we saw her, she was threatening our most —and only— beneficial allies with blackmail! How could you possibly have sympathy for someone like that?!”

Her ever gleaming eyes dimmed just a smidge, “A life, a bright gleaming, shimmering light. And just as it’s about to reach its pinnacle, it’s cruelly snuffed out by the power-hungry. I have seen too much of that happen already.”

Oh.

…Oh.

“…I see.” Was all he could say

The silence that permeated the skies after that was deafening. It left the vizer to ruminate on his thoughts. For all her self-absorbed arrogance, she was surprisingly empathetic, almost to her detriment. She was an amazing ally if she found you as someone important to her. Golden Cheese was also, however, a cookie absorbed in nostalgia. So the real question was: Why did she save the leader of the Cilantro Cobras? Was it out of the goodness of her heart, or out of some peculiar way of self soothing the part of her that wishes she could’ve been there for her subjects sooner?

Whichever it was, he didn’t have the time to ponder, for he was snapped out of his thoughts by the golden queen carrying him. Apparently she thought the mood was much too dreary and continued on with her essay-long speech as to why the Kulfi would and should join her kingdom.

All Smoked Cheese could do was roll his eyes with a sigh as an exasperated smile formed on his face. He was already mentally preparing his rebuttal as the two of them flew out of the canyon and towards the sunset (which is hopefully the direction the Kulfi went).

Fin.

#Cookie run #cookie run kingdom #golden cheese cookie #smoked cheese cookie #cilantro cobra cookie #This took me a month to finish.#And another month to actually post it.#My procrastination knows no bounds

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leverage-ot3 · 1 year ago

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I’ve talked about this before but imagine what it’s like for someone in a country/place where eliot is Top Most Wanted and then your tech guy finds a breakout star baseball player on their visual scanner that looks EXACTLY like spencer. but…there’s no way that’s him, right???

and then the next year it happens again but this time it’s some one hit wonder country singer kenneth crane that has like 78 tween-run fangirl blogs dedicated to him. you see a grainy video of him being chased by a horde of screaming teenage girls and ??? no way Eliot Last Thing You’ll Ever See Spencer is a country singer star just. signing pictures of his face right…?

a few months later your intern shows you footage of an eliot lookalike who is in san lorenzo talking about how there is dog fighting in the presidential palace and you just. sigh. because of course. a scant few days later the political geography of the country changes drastically and damien moreau is imprisoned. …interesting

and then a year of silence goes by. he still shows up as blips on the radar but he must have a good hacker working for him because his tracks on the internet are expertly erased.

every time you ask through interagency channels some random interpol guy talks in (condescending?) riddles at you and it also somehow feels like he’s threatening you

and then your friend who recently got into foreign hockey teams sends you a dropyourgloves video of someone called jacques the bear. you immediately get a headache (and watch some more videos because even you can admit this guy is a good hockey player)

and you know he’s a Bad Guy but it’s been admittedly a bit entertaining seeing what claim to fame he will come upon next. and his most recent actions over the few years make you wonder.

a few months later your phone pings because multiple heads of state evacuated from DC. the reason? eliot spencer was in town. you hear two days later a bioterrorist was taken down by… the report was redacted. your hacker tells you spencer and two teammates were behind the successful operation. which, huh.

not even a full year later it is released that spencer is dead and… you don’t know how to feel.