The Triplets’ Sweets Shop and their Extravagant Lollipop

“For the love of sugar, Amandine, what did you do to my Choice!?”

Melusine’s voice is so shrill, Amandine doesn’t understand how the rows of full glass vials on the shelves don’t shatter. Her sister’s shriek startles her enough to forget about the last drop of flavored DMCE (Decision-Making Concentrated Extract) dripping from the flask held out between her fingers. It drops in the funnel underneath her, and a burst of gelatinous mixture instantly erupts on her face. 

So much for her new goggles.

Scandalized, Melusine drops her little shopping basket on the doorstep to their cramped, tiny fabricating room. The air is thick with pink and green and blue clouds of fruity dust, and flashes of unbridled electricity pulse through a labyrinth of glassware. It’s a mess that Amandine would qualify as a ground for unbridled creativity. Melusine would qualify it as something like the apocalypse. Celestine would not qualify it as anything, because Celestine is too busy snoring.

Amandine wipes the slime from her face.

“I just wanted to try. You never let me try!” she protests. There is powder in her peppermint hair and something both itches behind her pointy ears and sticks to her whiskers. Her overalls were an extravagant patchwork of furry things. Now, with a good wash, they’ll look like promising rags. “Your recipe has been rejected twice by the Pondercenter, now. But once it’s perfected, maybe they’ll like the Choice I’m making.”

Amandine glances hopefully at the tricky concoction in the cauldron next to her. Somewhere under a thick layer of crusty foam, it bubbles quietly now, and has even turned a decent color - a promising watermelon pink with swirls of petulant orange. Nothing like the graceful and balanced results the Pondercenter usually buys from Melusine, but that’s precisely the point. With a few more ingredients and the adequate mold, it will look like an extravagant lollipop no one has ever seen before. 

The potion burps and Amandine sighs. 

Well. Maybe it will look like an extravagant lollipop.

Melusine storms past Amandine, her little hands flailing by her sides. She stumbles to the war zone that is her sister’s workspace. 

“With Lifelong Misery? Crushed Dreams?” Discarded tubes of substances more colorful than the other fly across the room as Melusine furiously reviews label after label. Amandine thinks she always looks crazy with her groomed pelt, pink checkerboard skirt and tasteful choice of sparkly pendants, but indignation also gives her much in common with a strawberry about to be cremated. “Need I remind you what happened last time you tried one of your own recipes? Those are terrible, terrible Options to put in a Choice, Amandine! ” 

Amandine shrinks on her stool. Choice is the Triplets’ Sweets Shop specialty, but it’s also a specialty in most handcrafted sweets stalls on Judgment Lane. A handful get their products exported by the Pondercenter to Consequences Cake Factories, further down Decision-Making Avenue. The others contemplate their neighbor’s successes, then fatally run out of business. 

It makes competition quite brutal, the Pondercenter quite selective and Melusine quite hysterical. 

 “But I’ve mixed everything with very high Stakes to compensate - lasting happiness, self-fulfillment... And you weren’t gone long so it became a time-sensitive Choice. It’s definitely made under pressure.” Amandine timidly reviews her notes, a mess of instinctive thoughts and incomplete measurements. Melusine swears by delicate measurements and calculations, but Amandine believes Choices can be just as tasteful with a bit of spontaneity.

Not that she ever really tested her theory. 

“Uh, this smells worse than decaying licorice.” Melusine doesn’t listen. Instead, she lifts the cauldron off the worktable with a disgusted grunt. “This is why I make Choices. You are more careless than a bowl of ice cream relaxing by the stove.”

“If I could just add a bit of sweetener -”

Amandine reaches for the little box of tablets that spilled from her sister’s basket, but Melusine already scurries to the backroom, the potion dramatically held out in front of her. She slams the door shut behind her.

Amandine’s shoulders drop. In her notebook, the scribblings look back at her helplessly. 

“Maybe this was a bad Choice after all,” she mutters.

Slumped over her chair like a round piece of blue jelly, Celestine stirs. Her glasses are askew over her muzzle, and her lips still have the tell-tale purple of procrastination juice.

She lifts her head for an impressive two seconds.

“How are you supposed to make it a better Choice if you let Melusine make it in your place?”

Celestine falls back asleep. Amandine blinks. 

A second later, she bangs on the backroom door.

“What!?” Melusine roars, wildly opening the door.

“Show me how you do it,” Amandine says. “Please. We can start over, and you can teach me how to make a Choice.” 

“Start over? Start over?” Melusine repeats in disbelief. “With what ingredients, mmh? You just rampaged through everything - there is barely anything left. Besides, I won’t risk you jeopardizing our livelihoods all over again with another of your inventions.”

“It’s not fair. I never meant for that cake to explode.”

Melusine sneers.

“Humor me, Miss Imprecision. I saw you spill DCME earlier and look at what it did to your face. Now get out while I try to fix this horror before Mister Pondermaster arrives.”

If Amandine’s fur hadn’t already been white, it would have been now. 

“M-Mister Pondermaster? He requested a sample for today?”

Mister Pondermaster is the Pondercenter’s representative, who both managed to devour Melusine’s last Choices and deem them inadequate for his employer. Mister Pondermaster is their best client, but if he doesn’t take their next Choice to the Pondercenter, he will likely be their last.  

“Why else would I rush to get sweetener in the middle of my preparation?” Melusine crumples her nose. “Unlike you, Amandine, I never rush.” 

Amandine wrings her hands. Her poor potion stands between the whipping machine and the solidifier, its precarious watermelon flavor already threatened by Melusine’s selective ingredients and the promise of her hasty, cartesian attempt at a cure. Amandine has watched her sister make Choices for a desperate amount of time, and if there is one thing she learnt, it’s that Melusine can definitely manage cartesian. 

However, Melusine definitely can’t manage hasty, and they both can’t manage bankruptcy.

“Don’t,” Amandine shrieks when her sister grabs a vial of crystals. “It’s not calibrated to withstand your changes. It’s not calibrated at all!”

“You’ve never made a Choice in your life,” Melusine sputters. What makes you think you can just wing that one into something so delicious it will miraculously surpass mine?”

In the ten precise minutes her sister had been gone, Amandine had asked herself the same question.

With a flick of her wrist, she resolutely throws her notebook over her shoulder. There’s a protest somewhere in the fabricating room, and she knows it landed on Celestine.

“Because this is my Choice to make and I trust it will be the right one.”

It’s a good thing the solidifier makes so much noise, because once Amandine manages to drop the sweetener tablets in the mixture, the mixture in a mold, and the mold in the machine, it drowns Melusine’s panicked squeals. The device’s inside flashes with bristling bolts of lightning while it chews and chomps and chunks the mold, until the voltage drops and it spits it out, directly into Amandine’s expectant hands. The Choice proudly swirls around a little stick, a shiny lollipop. 

Melusine instantly tries to snatch it. 

“A lollipop? This is ridiculous! It will ruin our reputation.”

“You mean it would ruin your reputation.”

“Give me that Choice!”

“Stop pulling my hair!”

Upstairs, the doorbell rings. The sisters gasp.

“Mister Pondermaster!” 

When they both reach the first floor, Mister Pondermaster stands happily in front of a display of golden chocolates, with his floppy ears, his signature velvet tailcoat and his black notebook of very important connexions. 

“Hello, mesdemoiselles,”he says.“What delicacy do you have for me today?”

Amandine holds out her creation, her heart racing.

“It’s the Extravagant Lollipop, Mister Pondermaster. A Choice on a stick.”

Mister Pondermaster picks it carefully, tastes it even more reverently, his eyebrows stretching and squashing with his thoughts on the flavors. Amandine’s breath swells expectantly for what feels longer 

“Unusually simple and yet truly audacious!” Mister Pondermaster finally exclaims. “I’ll have another one for the road, and three to present to the Pondercenter, dearies. I did not think anyone made unconventional Choices anymore. Ah, I know lots of Consequences Cake Shops that would be astonished! Tell me Melusine, is this one of your ideas?”

Amandine steps forward before her sister can speak, her tiny chin held up high.

“Oh, no, Mister Pondermaster, I made this Choice alone.”

Delighted, Mister Pondermaster is almost at the door, when he pauses, a hand on the handle.

“Tell me, Amandine, did you use any DMCE derivatives, this time?” 

“Derivatives, sir? No.”

“Ah, fortunate. I remember how the last piece of cake I bought from you literally blew in my car. It tasted awfully of procrastination juice. It’s made from an inverted version of DMCE, you know?”