Heart of Madness
Sweat stands out on your brow. You struggle to keep it together. Strange colors intrude on the edges of your vision as you survey the scene.
You can see a door labeled 'OFFICE' behind the counter.
Two complex-looking baking machines sit on a counter in the rear of the bakery. One is labeled "Bagelmat-5000 Industrial Bagel Oven and Biomechanical Artificial Womb," though you might have imagined a few of those words. The other just says "POPULAR" in glowing pink letters.
Behind the machines is a shelf strewn with people you went to high school with, all dressed as different books. Or perhaps just... books. It's hard to tell through all this snow.
| Try to get the office door open |
You try to turn the knob of the office door, but the keyhole keeps licking your palm, and it tickles.
| Try to get the office door open again |
You try grab the door's tongue with your left hand and turn the doorknob with your right, but you get your parts wrong and end up simultaneously licking and kicking the doorjamb. Neither is effective, though both are entertaining to your senses. You giggle.
You need to focus.
| Open the damned door |
Cake Lord  -- (edit metadata)
| |
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| Check out the bagel machine |
Leads to Bagelmat-5000
| Check out the popular machine |
If you don't have the popular part: You examine the popular machine, but you have no idea why it's so popular -- it's not even working!
You open an access panel on the side and discover why: there's a part missing.
If you have the popular part: You place the popular part in its proper position and the popular machine starts humming like a machine that is popular because it is so well-oiled.
Leads to The Popular Machine
| Dig through the recipe books |
You flip through the cookbooks until you find an interesting recipe.
It says here that if you cook
(ingredient)
with
(ingredient)
that you'll get
(product)
Huh. You'll have to try that one sometime.
| Take a deep breath and embrace the madness |
You breathe as deeply as you can, letting the spores of hallucinogenic fungus enter your nose, then your lungs, then your bloodstream, then the missile silo hidden under your alligator farm.
<messages>
When the effects of the fungus wear off, your mind has been stretched in eight different dimensions. You vow to never, ever shut up about this experience whenever you're hanging out with your friends.
| You 15 Wizardliness. |
| Opt out of the madness |
Not today, madness, not today.
Occurs at Madness Bakery.
Notes
- Madness messages include:
- A basket of baguettes wave in the breeze, then writhe and twist like snakes.
- A cake wishes you a happy birthday! How nice! You thank it, but tell it it isn't your birthday yet, and your name isn't Janet. The cake seems embarrassed. "Are you sure?" it asks you. You aren't sure.
- A loaf of french bread leans over and whispers something in your ear. Something mind-blowingly significant, yet inexpressible in human language.
- Down the aisle you see an interesting-looking display of muffins, but you would have to climb the floor to get there.
- In the corner of the bakery, there's a pink neon sign that says "Enjoin" in curly script. Your skin writhes and itches when the pink light touches it.
- It suddenly occurs to you that a "baker's dozen" is thirteen. The implications are staggering.
- Okay, but... what did they do with the rest of the bear?
- On a nearby tray, a cluster of donut holes shudder and begin to crack. You realize: donut holes. But holes to where? The creatures inside scream as you throw them on the ground and crush them underfoot before they can hatch.
- You glimpse a shadowy figure out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, it dives behind the coffee urn and escapes.
- You surreptitiously sneak a taste of icing from the edge of a cake, and gasp. This is the Ur-icing! How did they get this?
- You take a deep breath and try to act perfectly normal, so that the people with loaves of bread for heads don't realize anything's wrong. You smile and nod at them in a perfectly normal way. They ignore you.
- You find a basket of delicious-looking breadsticks. Wait, are those your fingers? How did your fingers get so long? Why is there garlic butter on them? You nibble the end off of one, and it's delicious. Your fingers are delicious! Great!
- You frown at a loaf of pumpernickel -- how rude of it to be hovering in the air like that.
- You are suddenly filled with a profound shame that you chose to become an adventurer instead of a baker, which is surely the world's most noble and important profession.
- You stop to sort a shelf of donuts by their auras, instead of their earthly flavors.
- Why are there donut holes for sale, but no bagel holes? What do they do with the bagel holes? Do they have a... different purpose?
- You find a three-ring binder filled with two-dimensional wedding cakes and the frozen souls of the people who bought them.
- Dig through the recipe books will give you one random recipe from:
- You can encounter recipes that you have already discovered.
- The Opt out of the madness option was added 2025/02/20.
