Having been provided with a spark of inspiration, thanks to Jacob oh so cruelly maniputing her into doing something as reprehensible as making sure she’s taking proper care of herself, Mari has spent the st several days working on a project in her spare time in hopes that it will stop him and Cassandra from worrying so much. She has just finished this project in the early afternoon, having finished today’s shift about an hour ago, and is now in the kitchen, eager to see the results of her hard work.

  “Okay, Bze, you did very well with the cereal. It’s a low bar, but none of the other dolls were able to get this far.” Mari says as she rummages through the cupboards.

  “Thank you, Miss!” Bze, the newly constructed doll, says with a smile.

  Being the first doll to be built after Adeline, Mari has taken advantage of the aforementioned doll’s tailoring abilities and asked for Bze to get its own outfit, a simple dress with an apron over the top, which sports red trimmings to match the doll’s long, crimson hair. Mari did not ask for the cartoonish chef hat that the doll is also wearing, but she supposes it fits the look well enough.

  “Now, let’s see how you handle something a bit more complex.” Mari brings a mixing bowl and a number of ingredients to the bench. “If what they said on the forums about building a cooking doll is correct, you should already know a bunch of recipes, so I wanna see how you go about making a cake. Sound good?”

  “Of course, just leave it to this one.” Bze smiles confidently.

  “Great, so what’s the first step?”

  “Oh, that’s simple, Miss!” It says as it picks up an egg, before cracking the shell against the side of the bowl and pouring its contents into said bowl as it starts to sing. “~Crack crack crack the egg into the bowl!~”

  “...Riiiiiight. And what’s after that?”

  “~M-I-X the flour into the bowl!~” Bze continues, performing the actions as it sings.

  “Hold on a sec.” Mari interrupts. “Is the singing really necessary?”

  “Well of course it is, Miss! How can you cook without singing?”

  “...Okay, sure, whatever.” Mari sighs. “At least you actually seem to know what you’re doing. I guess I’ll take the singing if it means I don’t have to worry about anything weird happening with the food, or something like that. Let’s just keep going…”

  —

  “Gotta admit, this is pretty good.”

  A while ter, Mari is eating a slice of the finished cake in the study while engaging in her new favourite activity, lying dramatically on the new sofa. She needs to make the most of her purchase, after all.

  “Guess that’s one doll I can trust to do its job. No clue how it learnt that song, though... I don’t think I’ve even heard it myself since I was a little kid.”

  While she doesn’t want to count her chickens before they hatch, Mari’s gd that nothing seems to have immediately gone wrong with Bze, considering the chaos that went on with Adeline. It would seem that getting some more advice from the forums about how to make a doll for a specific purpose, as well as removing all those decorations from the workshop, helped a whole lot, even if it made the room feel a little spooky again. Still, if Bze keeps making stuff like this without issue, it kills two birds with one stone. Mari will get the variation in her meals that she’s been craving, and she won’t have to worry about Cassandra and her father making sure she’s eating properly.

  She scoops some more cake onto her spoon, and lets out a deep sigh after taking a bite. Between working her job, building the doll, and also finding some time to keep practicing her magic, the past few days have been quite busy. On one hand, it’s served as a decent distraction from everything else going on, but she’d be lying if she said it wasn’t wearing her out a bit, and a sweet treat like this can only help so much.

  “Maybe I should mix it up a bit? Try working on something a little different for a while? There’s a lot of stuff in that book I haven’t really looked at yet, could give something there a shot, I guess.”

  She puts the pte holding what’s left of her slice of cake on the nearby coffee table, and reaches out in the direction of the spellbook on the desk. It takes some effort, but after a moment she’s able to slowly float the bulky book over and into her hands, where she proceeds to zily flip through it.

  “Let’s see here… hexes… curses… still gotta finish reading the section with all the potions and stuff…”

  Mari lets out another sigh, for as many options as she has, none of them particurly stick out to her at the moment. There’s one section that seems to be… something medical reted? But unfortunately the handwriting is much rougher than the rest of the book, and the parts she can make out are filled with terminology she can’t begin to understand. It almost seems to be written on a different kind of paper than the rest of the book, as if it was added in at some point after the rest of it had been written, though she couldn’t begin to guess at the reason. As interesting as that section might sound to Mari, it’s clearly not to be.

  Just then, she hears a rustling sound coming from the doorway, and looks over to see a pair of ball-jointed, porcein hands holding onto the frame, as if their owner wants to peek in, but is too nervous to do so. Mari stares impatiently for a moment, but when there’s no sign of movement, she calls out “I see you hiding there, which one of you is it?”, prompting Leona to finally enter the doorway, slowly and nervously.

  “What’s up? You want some cake too?”

  “N-No. Well, perhaps… but not right now.” The doll answers as it nervously walks over to Mari. “T-There’s… a problem, Miss… I-In the garden.”

  “The garden? Is it bad?” Mari asks as she gets up off the sofa.

  “T-This one thinks Miss should see it for herself.”

  “Well, let’s go check it out then.”

  Mari pces a hand on Leona’s shoulder, not noticing how the action only seems to make the doll even more nervous, and jumps the two of them out to the back door. She didn’t know what to expect when ying her eyes upon the garden, but the entire thing seems to have become very badly overgrown in the time since the st time she was out here. Which, to be fair, is not that often at all, but it still doesn’t expin such a drastic change. It’s as if the pnts had been given free reign for years, the pathways between various plots of soil having been almost completely overtaken by all manner of colourful pnt matter.

  “...What the fuck?” She says in bewilderment.

  “Th-this one is sorry!” Naomi yells, bowing deeply. “This one and Naomi have been so busy cleaning the inside of the house that we haven’t been paying proper attention to the garden and now this has happened!”

  “No, I don’t think this is your fault, I haven’t exactly been keeping an eye on things out here either.” Mari says, still trying to comprehend what exactly could have caused this. “I just don’t get how it got so bad so soon, it’s only been like a month and a bit since the garden even showed up here.”

  “This one isn’t sure, Miss, but this one doesn’t think it would be a good idea to let this situation continue.”

  “Yeah, we better get on top of this quick before it gets even worse. You get the gardening tools, I’ll go see if the spellbook says anything about this, and tell the other dolls to help out.”

  “R-Right! I’m on it, Miss!” Leona runs back inside to grab the tools, while Mari jumps back into the study.

  “Dolls! I need you in here!” She calls out as she starts flipping through the spellbook in hopes of finding something about gardening.

  The dolls come running in as she gets about halfway through the book. “What is it, Miss?” Naomi asks.

  “We’ve got some kind of situation going on in the garden, all the pnts are overgrown and- Aah!” Mari holds her head as she’s suddenly hit with an intense wave of shock and disorientation. She’s had sensations like this before, it’s coming from one of her dolls, but nothing quite like this before, where it seems to be affecting her physically as well to some extent. After a few moments, she’s able to get her bearings, and noting that three of her dolls are in the room with her, and seemingly fine, meaning only one possibility remains for the cause of this sensation. “L-Leona?”

  Mari walks over and opens the back facing window, only to see the doll being held up in the air by a thick vine that’s sprouted out of a patch of dirt, being shaken around as if it was a doll in the more traditional sense.

  “Miiiiss! Heeeeelp!” The doll calls out upon seeing her in the window.

  “...What the FUCK!?”

  SyntaxSpeedway