Chapter Text
Near the Dawnfather Square in Whitestone, nestled between a modest house and a fabric shop, sits an old, slightly-crumbling building. The sign overtop the front door has long weathered into illegibility, obscuring its original identity; no one seems to remember what it was, beyond the fact that it was some sort of store. Apparently, it has sat abandoned since even before the reign of the Briarwoods, and no one has stepped up to reclaim or inherit it. The only reason it hasn’t yet been demolished is that not a soul has cared enough to make any sort of plans for the space.
That is, until three days ago, when Taryon, Vex’ahlia, Keyleth, and Pike had the brilliant (and very drunken) idea to start a bakery.
Pike was the one to actually propose this building, and Vex had managed to have the deed for the place signed into their names the very next day — the perks of nobility, and all that. Pike described it as a “fixer upper, with a good foundation and just a little bit of damage,” and had insisted that it was perfect for a bakery. She arranged for them to meet her here today around noon so she could give them a tour, which is how the three other members of this little business venture found themselves staring up at it from the middle of the street.
Tary, upon seeing it, is admittedly a little skeptical.
“I don’t want to sound…” He hunts around for the right word. “...ungrateful, but are we sure this place is fit for inhabitance?”
Vex tilts her head, as if seeing it from another angle will somehow replace the outside wood panelling and re-pane the windows. Keyleth makes half a dozen attempts at starting a sentence, but each one ends up abandoned with a wince.
“Alright!”
They all turn at the sound of Pike’s voice to see her walking up the road, carrying a wooden crate that’s over half her height. Tary marvels at how it does absolutely nothing to reduce her speed; it seems almost weightless when she hefts it to rest against one hip as she stops in front of them.
Her wide, freckled grin is somehow equal parts comforting and terrifying as she says, “Let’s get to work!”
Taryon absolutely does not follow. “I beg your pardon?”
Pike just grins even wider, as if she expected him to say just that. “I told you this place was a fixer-upper, right? Well, someone’s gotta fix it!”
With no further ado, Pike turns and marches towards the building; Keyleth scrambles in front of her to hold open the door.
Vex lags behind, stopping to pat him on the shoulder. “At the very least, Blondie,” she says, “we can familiarize ourselves with the building. Start making some plans.” She then takes a look up and down him, and smiles something devious. “Besides, I think the physical labor could do you some good!”
“Excuse me!” Taryon, in living with Vex’ahlia, has come to find that an offended tone is hard to maintain through suppressed laughter. He does his best regardless. “I happen to have a personalized workout regimen for maintaining this toned physique, thank you very much!”
Vex just cackles as she saunters ahead.
After Tary hammers his own thumb, Keyleth accidentally carves a hole into the road with stone-shape, and Vex drops a hefty plank of wood on Tary’s foot, Pike reluctantly admits that hiring a crew might be better.
None of them are trained in carpentry in any useful capacity, which they have had handily proven to them over the course of an afternoon. Even Pike, who has actually had some experience in renovation and construction, admits to being a bit lost on how to start. Tary is still surprised they actually entertained the idea for as long as they did.
Vex tells him later that they just really didn’t want to turn Pike down, which makes much more sense. They tend to indulge their holiest member on many of her whims — likely due to her absolutely infectious charm, along with the infrequency of time they’d been able to spend with her, according to what he’s heard of her extended quests in the name of Sarenrae.
It’s quite endearing, the strength with which they miss her — the strength of their emotion that forms from that. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. But even despite that distance, the easiness of conversation and amount of inside jokes between the three women is astounding. There are many tales of their time at their old Keep — Greystone, he thinks it was called? — and he laughs along, but finds it hard to keep up.
Ah, well. The perils of new friends, he supposes! Nothing that shouldn’t smooth over with time.
Writing his entries into his book by hand is something that Taryon is still getting used to.
Obviously his writing skills are not deterred by the medium — he started out writing everything by hand, after all, and all of his editing is done by hand as well. His mind and quill alike are both as sharp as ever, but he finds himself talking out loud to an empty room, and that often his mind is too quick for his own hand to keep up with. The rhythm of dictation is comforting, a way for him to simply narrate his thoughts as they arrive.
It’s trivial, really — he’s just complaining to complain. Nothing he can’t adjust to quickly and efficiently as ever!
Starting a bakery is certainly not a venture for the faint of heart. Finding a proper venue for ensuring a prosperous business is a vital step, one that my friends and I have found ourselves at a bit of a crossroads with. We have the building; unfortunately, it is in a state of mighty disrepair. The four of us attempted our own hand at repairs, but found it beyond even our capabilities.
I couldn’t help but feel that Doty would have been a mighty help
…Hm.
I couldn’t help but feel that Doty would have been a mighty help As such, we have decided to hire a mighty fine crew that will assist us in making this place fit for the finest of bakeries! Until the repairs are finished, we shall continue to flesh out our plans.
This is going to be fun, fun, fun!
The full renovations for the bakery end up taking a little over two months. The four of them set a few loose goals for planning to get done while they wait, but everyone’s attention more or less drifts in the downtime. Keyleth has to go back to Zephrah eventually, Grog invites Pike up to Vassleheim to join him in some sort of gladiatorial competition, and Vex gets more and more involved with her new duties as nobility within Whitestone.
Tary, on the other hand, has very little to do.
Well, he supposes that’s not completely true. Many of his evenings are absorbed with the dragonscale armor he’s enchanting for himself and Vex (only five days out of the week at most — a man must have a weekend), but the further he progresses the more familiar and repetitive the work becomes. He wouldn’t trade the time with Vex for anything — he’s decently sure it’s the reason they’ve grown so close so quickly, alongside their shared fine tastes — but he misses the excitement, the challenge of crafting new ideas. He helps out Percival in his workshop from time to time, which provides a little of what he’s looking for, but Percy is almost entirely rooted in the pure, untouched mechanical; Tary chases the itch of the arcane, how it weaves into the mundane in such fascinating ways.
(He could begin working on a new… a new model for Doty, he supposes. Percival has brought it up once or twice as they’ve been working, and Vex keeps giving him these looks when she thinks he can’t see her (and, probably, when he actually can’t see her). But every time he sits down to start, he—
He just has creator’s block, is all. Nothing that a side project or two can’t fix! Besides, Whitestone doesn’t have nearly enough of the materials that he’d need anyway. It would do no good to get wrapped up in something he can’t even finish.)
The next time Pike and Keyleth are in Whitestone, Tary has half of an entire journal filled with ideas for the bakery. Names, logos, aprons, recipes, membership plans, promotional sales — anything he could possibly think of for any possible scenario. He prepares a professional, streamlined, hour-long presentation for the group, which he gets about twenty minutes through before Pike gently asks for the abridged version.
(“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She holds up her hands, smiling lopsidedly. “I’m just getting lost in all the business jargon!”
Right, of course — not everyone has a mind for business like he does! That’s not a rejection, simply a miscommunication. Perfectly understandable.)
It has been a long time since I’ve given a proper business proposal-style presentation! The rush is one that I did not know how strongly I had missed until I was in the midst of it once more. The hooks, the snappy one-liners, the back and forth of question and answer — all tied together with perfectly presented graphs and visuals!
Tary pauses to glance towards his stack of slides, still out of order from where the girls had taken them to look at on their own. Keyleth, notably, had spread them out in a semi-circle around where she’d sat on the floor, while Pike had flipped through a couple while sitting upside-down on a chair.
Baffling, truly.
He reaches over to fiddle with a damaged corner on one of the cards — an idea for a tower-inspired display case, complete with labeled diagrams — where it’d gotten caught on something during his presentation. Holding the cards while presenting had proven to be a bit of a challenge; Vex, apparently, didn’t have any reason to have any easels or music stands or anything else fitting in her house, and Doty had always held them for him in the past. The automaton is so in-sync with him that he can switch slides without command. Returning to previous slides is still a work in progress, but they’ll get there someday—
—... but he will try to tweak that when working on the newer model. Better to iron out the kinks in the beginning then let them carry on into the final stages, right? Right.
They get stuck on the name.
Of all of the aspects of bakery planning to agonize over — logistics, hours, pastries, whether or not to serve coffee in-house — the name of the place is what stumps them.
“We’ve been here for hours!” Vex groans. She’s draped along the length of a couch, her head resting against Percy’s legs. “How is it possible to spend this much time on a name?”
The five of them — the Bakery Crew, as Keyleth calls them, along with Percy, who they dragged into negotiations when he emerged from his workshop — have only been there for around two hours, but the sentiment remains. It’s a situation oddly similar to the night that spawned this whole idea: a late night in Vex’s sitting room, with a bottle (or two, or four, but who’s counting?) of red wine passed around the group.
“I mean,” Keyleth pipes up from where she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, “We did call ourselves the SHITs for a while.”
Taryon, who has never heard this bit of information before, chokes on his wine. Pike rather unhelpfully thumps him on the back hard enough to bruise. “I’m sorry,” he coughs, somewhat strangled, “you called yourselves the… the Shits?”
“It’s an acronym,” Pike says, as if that makes it at all better.
“You could call us The Super High Intensity Team, if you were feeling fancy,” Vex says dryly, but there’s a roguish half-grin on her face that suggests some level of fondness for the stupid name. “We changed it to Vox Machina once we started working for the Council. Percy came up with it, I forget how.”
Percy brightens, and everyone seems to brace for something — Tary leans in, excited to see the light of passion that crests over his face from up close. “It’s from an older ancestor of Common, actually. Some call it Proto-Common, but the language is so blended now that it’s hard to pinpoint an exact origin point. It’s usually found in legal codes or artifacts of royalty, implying some sort of formal and vulgar variants used based on class and setting and — and that’s not important right now.”
Vex reaches up to poke at his cheek. “I love you, but it’s not — unless you happen to know any Proto-Common words relating to bakeries.”
As Vex’s arm drops back down, Tary’s eyes drop from Percival’s jawline and catch on her shoulder — she’s wearing a sleeveless tunic, revealing the intricate cross-like scar that Tary distantly remembers to be a brand. Vax’ildan had explained everything to him at some point; there was something about a monster hunting guild and a trial, but he can’t remember the name of the place for the life of him. It’s on the tip of his tongue: something like The Hunter’s Boon, or The Killer’s Quarry — wait, no, there was an s, somewhere… The Slaughter’s… Something? Oh, this is driving him mad.
Vex, Percy, and Keyleth are all caught up in some sort of back-and-forth about languages, so he turns to Pike. “What was the name of that horribly violent hunting guild you all said you were a part of?”
“You mean this one?” Pike pushes up her sleeve, showing her own brand — identical to Vex’s, save for a newer scar that cuts through it. “That’s the Slayer’s Take, up in Vasselheim.”
And divine inspiration strikes him like lightning from the heavens.
“What about The Slayer’s Cake?”
He doesn’t particularly mean to shout, but the words simply explode out of him in his excitement. Pike startles next to him; the other three all cut off mid-sentence as they all turn to stare at him. Vex even sits up, propping herself with her arms behind her. None of them say anything immediately — obviously stunned into silence by his brilliance.
“You know,” Vex is the first to break, “I actually kinda like that.”
“Yeah!” Keyleth chirps. “It sounds, like, cool and intimidating. Which, I mean, that’s not usually what I think of when I think of a bakery, that’s usually a more warm and sweet sort of vibe — but I still really like it!”
Percy hums, bringing one hand to his chin — his blue eyes wander in thought for a moment before drifting back to lock with Tary’s. “It’ll certainly draw interest, and interest means customers. I do worry about copyright infringement, though.”
“Darling, it’s the Take, I doubt they even filed for it in the first place.”
“Fair point.”
“Good thinkin’, Tary!” Pike smacks him on the back again, and gods it smarts — he’s going to have an awful bruise in the morning, he just knows it, and he dreads the tossing and turning he knows he will face that night — but the flare of pride that swells up in his chest is so bright that he’s almost blind to anything else.
Preparations for the bakery — or, shall I say the officially dubbed “Slayer’s Cake” Bakery, named by yours truly — are almost complete on all fronts! Only preparations, mind you; there is still much to be done before we will be ready to open our doors to the public. Vex’ahlia has already drawn up a budget for the first few months, most likely as a way to procrastinate something more official yet much more boring, but we have yet to test a single recipe! I’ve proposed multiple potential menu lineups to the group, but I doubt they’ve given them much thought.
However, I have a proposal I’ve been working on for the past week in secret. Well, that makes it sound more suspicious than it is. I simply mean for it to be a surprise, one that I’m sure will knock their socks off! I can see everything coming together in my head already. I’ve not been so excited about an idea since… well, I couldn’t possibly compare it to when I was planning Doty all those years ago, but this is at least in the top five.
As Taryon leans back to re-dip his quill, he realizes how much the entries into his book have… mellowed out, so to speak, since the start of Vox Machina’s retirement. He can’t think of anything he’s done recently that could be considered “heroic” — he did manage to cross off something from his list, but that was mostly due to a prank war that Vax blackmailed him into.
Once the ink on the new page has dried, he flips back to his meeting with Vox Machina and scans through all the chapters that followed. Doty’s neat and tidy handwriting, perfectly aligned within each line and margin, breezes past him, interspersed with his own shorthand in bright-red ink. As he skims through, he realizes how much his chapters have begun to feel… more like diary entries, honestly. The likes of which he hadn’t written since he was an adolescent.
It’s odd, but he doesn’t think he’s particularly upset about it.
By the time renovations are complete, the Slayer’s Cake Crew — newly rebranded — have almost everything else ready to go. They’ve established deals for sourcing all of their ingredients; any furniture not currently being built is already set up in the building; and they’ve got a logo, designed by Vex and drawn by Percy, hand-painted by a local artist onto a wooden sign to hang above the doorway. They’ve even got matching aprons with the logo stitched on the front, which Vex was particularly excited about.
All that’s left are the finer details of marketing, which, as Tary well knows, are the most crucial aspect of any business. The rest of the group haven’t yet given it the amount of thought that’s necessary, but he knows not all of them have received any education on business practices; he is happy to impart his wisdom onto them.
It is not, however, an easy task.
“I’m just saying,” he emphasizes, “that every successful business has some sort of theme.”
“I mean… it’s a bakery.” Keyleth is looking at him like he’s sprouted his own antlers. She’s been looking at him like that for a while. “I feel like it’s already got a theme?”
“No, no, no, you don’t get it.” Tary breathes in through his nose — this is his friend, his lovely, sweet, and powerful friend, who comes from a village of druids in the middle of nowhere. It’s not her fault. “It’s about branding, something to set us apart from other bakeries. Success is competitive, and your best weapon is how memorable you are.”
(He is ignoring the relative lack of bakeries in Whitestone for the sake of the argument.)
“No, he’s got a point,” Vex says, and Tary nearly cries in relief. Vex’ahlia, his best friend, the one who always has his back, and also has the common sense and economic know-how necessary to run a business. He could kiss her. Theoretically, of course.
“I still don’t get what this has to do with the menu?” Pike says, her voice lilting at the end.
Taryon beams at her. “I’m so glad you asked.”
He produces his journal from his satchel, and begins to explain as he flips through the pages. “Well, the name of the establishment, as we all know, is in reference to Vox Machina’s adventuring days. It is also owned and operated by actual members of Vox Machina. So…”
He turns the book to display the final draft of the list he’s been carefully curating for the past week: Angel Food Cake, Keyleth’s Almond Bark, Profiterolos, Trinket’s Bear Claws, Sun Treats, and a continued list of alternates and substitutes.
“What if the entire theme was Vox Machina?”
Vex takes the list from him to get a closer look; Pike and Keyleth crowd into her, and Vex instinctively ducks away from the antlers.
“Oooo, Almond Bark! That’s clever! I wonder if it has any actual tree bark in it.” Before Tary can step in to clarify that no, there is no tree bark, Keyleth gasps. She points to the top of the paper, her eyes creased to half-moons by her grin. “Awww, is the Angel Food Cake a reference to Pike? That’s so cute! ”
“D’awww…” Pike ducks her head a bit — clearly touched, if her bashful smile is anything to go by. Tary practically glows, flush with the joy of a successful project.
“Tary…” Vex is still reading down the page; she even flips it over to check the back. Her tone is more restrained, and there’s a crease between her eyebrows. Tary feels his momentum start to falter. Does she think it’s stupid? Is she offended that there is an item based off of Trinket but not her? He has a whole host of ideas for her that he’d brainstormed, and he’s certain he included at least one in the list of alternates-
“I don’t see any desserts based on you, darling.”
Oh.
Hm. There aren’t any, are there? Even without the list in front of him, he has all of them basically memorized — he’d done his best to run through all of the material on Vox Machina he had at his disposal, names and places and spells and weapons, making as many references as he could — and come to think of it, not a single one makes any sort of reference to himself.
He doesn’t think the idea ever crossed his mind.
“Ah, is that right?” He says, nonchalant, grabbing for the list again. Vex lets it go easily, but locks her gaze onto his instead; that will be much harder to get her to drop. He cuts his away first and re-reads the list, even knowing he won’t find anything new. “Well, I suppose in my excitement I just forgot! Silly me.”
He laughs, putting on an air of humble embarrassment. Pike and Keyleth join in, with the latter making some sort of joke about how “that’s the first time that’s ever happened.” Vex doesn’t say anything; Tary refuses to look, but swears he can feel the weight of her eyes on him.
“Well, we should try to think of something,” Pike says. “What about… some sort of yellow cake, for your hair? And your armor, and also your… well, everything.”
“Oooo, what about rock candy? Like the gems in your helmet?”
“Do you even know the first thing about making rock candy, Kiki?”
“I’m sure the Earth Ashari would know something-”
Vex’s voice cuts through their back-and-forth:
“What about blondies?”
The shock is enough to get Tary to look up from tracing the wood grains of the table. Vex is still staring at him, but she’s smiling now, in that sweet and just slightly sad way that he sees all the time. “You know,” she reaches out to poke him gently on the nose, “because you’re Blondie.”
Tary refuses to cry over a stupid dessert pun, simply on principle, but he feels his throat choke up regardless of his wishes. It’s an easy thing to clear it, but it’s so noticeable too; he tries to ignore the expressions Keyleth and Pike make in his periphery, he can’t possibly ignore Vex’s, the open kindness that fills his vision.
“Taryon’s Blondies,” he suggests, wavering just slightly. “I like the sound of that.”