Arthur's 'not much' turned out to last over two hours. For Mary, it wasn't that bad - turns out that when you shed the pretence of mortality and no longer need to care about stuff like sore muscles or an empty belly, time spent waiting is of little consequence. She used most of it practising her voice and telling Paolo the rest of everything that happened while he was more indisposed than her. He listened attentively, and every time she paused to gather her thoughts, he asked difficult questions like, “why did it take you so long to get out of an open cell”.

Arthur observed the dice throwing in silence, pretending to not listen to Mary's tale. He overdid it, though - with nothing interesting to focus on apart from the conversation, ignoring it totally was kinda a giveaway.

But finally, the Greek-robes guys stopped the clatter.

“It is done,” they said in unison. One of them made a wide gesture which ended in a ceremonial press of the enter button.

Nothing happened.

“So..?” Mary asked, almost able to properly trail off by now. Darn, that voice trick sure was a tricky beast to tame.

“Now we wait for the computation,” Arthur said, pointing to a 'screen' magnifying the computer screen to an absurd size. There was a long progress bar slowly crawling towards the right.

Mary tried to groan, but it came out like a tortured bear's roar. The guys below started running before she managed to get the echoes under control. She wasn't there yet, and the smirk Arthur sent her made it hard to concentrate on her job, be it waiting patiently or protecting everyone around her from herself.

Finally, a long list of numbers showed up on the screen, which slowly, one by one, changed into letters.

“Two eggs of gryphon,

One breath of a #ff01fd dragon,

Thirty-two and eight-ninths ounces of sugar,

A gallon of gaian spider milk,

A jar of Yggdrasilberry honey,

Four pounds of Gold Medal organic flour.

Whisk all liquids until smooth,

Keep slowly adding the solids,

Bake in the dragon's breath until solid.

Decorate with an inverse gold unhealth.

Serve at the Chapel that ought to be more consistent

When all hope is lost.

Error: Segmentation fault at line 1234: memory buffer exceeded, allocated 423B, read attempt at 424. Core dumped[...]”

A few seconds after the last character revealed itself, the machine beeped thrice and burst into flames.

“Okay, got that!” The man with a clipboard called with visible pride.

“Thank you, Nathaniel. I'll take it from here,” Arthur said, taking a sheet of paper from the eager subordinate.

Mary looked between Arthur and Paolo, then back again. Neither seemed particularly surprised by the recent developments.

“Okay, what the heck was that?” Mary asked, tightly controlling her voice. She didn't want to disturb the guy who tried to put out the fire with an extinguisher or the other one who tried to put out the first one with a water bucket when the extinguisher inevitably caught on fire too.

“What do you mean?” Paolo asked. “We wanted instruction on what to do - and we got them. Isn't that how prophecies are supposed to work?”

“No! This wasn't a prophecy, it was a recipe!”

“A lot of books in Mary's reality tended to romanticize this stuff,” Arthur explained. “You know all those veiled allusions to vague villainous vices and so on.”

“Wait. How do you know?” Mary didn't recall telling Arthur much of anything, least of all herself. Or her reality, or whatever. But wait a minute, did he just imply that Paolo came from somewhere else...?

“That sounds... dumb. How would it be helpful?” Paolo cut in. Hmm... actually, if the boy still thought that things in the world made any sense at his age, he really must have been from someplace very different. How come she hadn't noticed? She'd have to ask him more about it sometime.

“Don't judge, lest you be judged, young hero.” Arthur almost spat the last word. “You really should have learned this lesson by now.”

Mary felt a strong sense of déjà vu. At least the scolding wasn't directed at her this time. She could get used to the change, to be honest.

They went back to the audience hall, where dozens of individuals of all shapes and sizes were already waiting in a broken circle with two gaps. The first one was occupied by the throne. Mary and Paolo took the other, two places away. To Mary's amusement, she felt much more fitting in the place now that she was even weirder than before.

“Okay, people, here's what we got,” Arthur started without any unnecessary preambles and quickly presented the list of ingredients they needed to gather.

“Your thoughts?” he finished, speaking to no one in particular.

“I will handle the gryphon's eggs, my Pri, ” said a one-armed man armed with a quadruple flail after taking a long sip from his beer mug. ”A friend of a wife of a friend of my cousin's granddaughter knows a chef who buys them every solar eclipse, and she may trade me some for a favour or two.”

“That would be appreciated.”

One really short guy started stroking his really long beard. “One breath of a #ff01fd dragon, ye' said? The closest we have at hand would be some #ff08f0 and a single #fe00e1 one. We should be able to breed them, but it'll be quite a pain in the butt.”

A tall blonde with a comically large bow replied in a silky voice. “You speak as if your delicate bottom could hurt any more than from having to bear your weight day after day, my little fellow.”

It sparked a gale of laughter and turned the face of the fellow in question increasingly purple.

“Listen here, you, wooden-”

A pillar of sickly green flame exploded in the middle of the circle, drowning any further discussions in a sudden roar, which ended as violently as it started. Everyone went quiet, and all the faces turned towards Arthur.

“You were saying?”

“I'm sorry, my Pri,” the blonde replied.

“Sorry,” the other one grumbled with a lowered head. “I'll have it done by the end of the month.”

“Thank you for your cooperation”, Arthur said.

It was going to be a long planning session.