2025-02-19 - The Last Thing You Want In a Kitchen

It starts with someone shrieking. Loud noises aren't uncommon in kitchens, so the whirr of a blender or the banging together of pots is to be expected, but screaming? It's never a good sign.

For a moment, just a brief split-second, everyone freezes. Because the thing is, at the Château, strange sounds are to be expected. Cedric's pretty sure they pipe them in through hidden speakers in the ceiling, for the ambience, but so far he hasn't gotten a straight answer about it. But that scream sounded close. He has just enough time to exchange a glance with his garde manger, Pratik, before everything goes to hell.

As it becomes readily obvious, it was Helena who screamed. She comes barreling out of the produce walk-in. "There's a rat!" she bellows. Well, what she actually says is, "Il y a un rat!" and Cedric's the only one with enough French under his belt in the kitchen currently to understand her, so no one panics. Aside for Helena, of course, who is panicking so hard that she's slipped into her native tongue.

But then a strange, pinkish blur darts past Helena's feet from behind her and goes underneath Pratik's station, and that sets off a chain reaction of noise and chaos. People yell. Someone gets a nasty burn as they back against the grill, hand out to catch themselves. Someone else drops an entire container of bone broth on the ground, and it splatters everywhere, trailing like a river of delicious soup towards the central drain.

Things are thrown into the air. Knives clatter to the floor, but thankfully everyone in this kitchen knows that a falling knife has no handle, so at least there's no further injury-related catastrophes. Someone down the line flails as the rat scampers across their feet, and half a pile of prepped onion ends up on the floor.

Cedric takes in a breath. He wipes off his knife and sets it aside, then grabs hold of the edge of the counter. "Alright," he says to himself, and then does a thing he hates to do:

He yells.

"STOP!"

Everyone stops. One by one they turn to look at him, a herd of deer caught in the headlights, and Cedric smiles cheekily at the lot of them. "Sorry about that. Let's all calm down a bit, yeah? Pratik, would you please take Matthew to the back and deal with that burn? Thanks, lads. Everyone else, take a look around and find this thing. Deep breaths, no screaming please."

And thus begins the least fun and-or exciting game of hide and seek ever had, in the history of the park. The entire kitchen shuts down, more or less, so that appliances can be pulled away from walls and counters can be checked under. The floor has gone from remarkably spotless to filthy in the space of fifteen seconds, so no one is particularly enjoying crawling around on it to find this thing, but that's what they have to do.

As they search, Cedric gets the story out of Helena, her in anixety-riddled French and him in patient English (in deference to her distaste for his French accent): she'd been taking inventory when she opened up a box of potatoes and seen fur, and that had been enough. She'd screamed, the rat had screamed, and she thought she'd boxed it back up safely but apparently not, given their current circumstances.

Eventually they find the rat cowering under the handwashing sink in the corner. Except, "Uh, chef? That's–that's not a rat."

Cedric goes down on his knees so he can peer under the sink, and sure enough… "That's not a rat," he says, dumbfounded. Because what is it? For one, it's pink, which had somehow mostly escaped everyone's notice up until this very moment. It's also… fluffy. Big ears. Thumpy sort of back feet.

"It's a rabbit?"

Five minutes later, after another mad dash across the kitchen, they corner it and it's actually Helena who manages to reach down and grab the thing, holding on as it scrambles and flops about in her hands just long enough for Cedric to produce the very same potato box it had been discovered in. And thus it is indeed determined to be a bunny rabbit. The general consensus is nobody is sure how a rabbit came to be in their kitchen, but now that the situation is as contained as it's ever going to be, Cedric has a look around.

"Well, this place is a proper mess. I'll deal with this," he holds up the sealed box of golden fingerling potatoes, having carefully made some air holes in the sides that he hopes aren't big enough for the critter to squeeze through, "And you all get on with cleaning. I'll see if I can't call a few extra hands in to help out. Helena, go back to inventory and figure out what all this wee lad managed to eat before you found him."

The next step is for Cedric to head out to catch the ferry, not quite sure of his destination but with the understanding that he somehow has to make sure this rabbit is taken care of, despite a tiny voice in his head suggesting he just let it loose outside somewhere. Somewhere far away. But that wouldn't be right, and he sighs in the general direction of the box as he pulls the clothes he'd arrived in from his locker in the back.

Meanwhile: "I can't actually find anything missing," Helena says, frowning down at the clipboard in her hands. "It didn't even touch the carrots! Isn't that what rabbits eat?"

"I think that's just in cartoons."

She looks up as Matthew comes around the corner, nearly colliding with someone in his haste. "Corner!" he says, too late, and then he waves his arms in the air, hand freshly bandaged. His voice rises in pitch as he asks, "Where are the meringues for tonight's dessert?" He looks accusingly down the line. "Seriously, who ate my meringues?!"