The Secret Ingredient is Foul Play

Fast food chains have always been competitive. They were forever coming up with new and improved flavors and affordable combos to keep their patrons from going elsewhere. And for every established food place, the recipes for their signature dishes were a closely guarded secret.

Sure, that burger joint also sells pizza, but their pizza would never be as good as the pizza franchise’s pizza. Do the trending pizza places sell ice cream? Yes. Can their ice cream compete with the gazillion flavors offered by the country’s leading ice cream brand? Not a chance! Can the bakery chain famous for its pastries compete with the pasta offered by the ‘authentic Italian’ fast food restaurants? Can these restaurant chains compete with the bakery’s cakes? No, non, and nope. So, private detective Lasoh could understand why these people would be paranoid about their secret ingredients. However, even he had to admit that something odd was afoot.

The first case came to him a month ago when a popular milkshake place claimed that their signature “shake for days” milkshake formula was stolen and was being used by a new fast-food place. By the time Detective Lasoh familiarized himself with the laws regarding patented recipes and plagiarism in the food world, he received his second client. This time, a noodle place claimed that their signature combo of stir-fried noodles, fried chicken, and ice cream mochi was being recreated by the same new fast-food place. They swore that this place couldn’t possibly recreate the flavors and taste unless there was an information leak. They wanted their own chefs to be investigated.

The more he investigated Tongue Twister, the more confusing things got. There were no obvious signs of foul play. He tried the milkshake, he tried the noodle combo. Both were very good, almost better than what his clients offered, but they didn’t seem like rip offs. But at the same time, their other dishes were mediocre at best. Then one day, Detective Lasoh was standing in line at Tongue Twister and he overheard a customer go on and on about how much the Tongue Twister milkshake tasted like 'shake for days' but was cheaper. The fact that this person thought the milkshakes tasted identical was…odd. The detective started to develop a hunch.

“Noodle combo again tonight, sir?”, asked the cheerful staff at the counter.

“Yes, please. And one…”, Lasoh went through the posters on the wall and deliberately chose something that wasn’t popular, “set of churros.”

The lady at the counter typed away at her screen, “would you like to try our new mini pizza? It’s 30% off if you pair it with one of our berry-range milkshakes.”

“Great, I’ll take a blueberry shake and a mini pizza.”

As soon as he got his order, Detective Lasoh hurried behind another customer who also got the noodle combo, “Excuse me, Larry? Larry Suhan?”

The stranger turned around, “uh…no?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, my mistake”, started Lasoh with a laugh, “I thought you were someone else.”

“Ah, no worries.”

“You look very familiar though”, continued Lasoh as they both walked towards their cars, “did you used to go to Noodland?”

“Yes!”, said the stranger in surprise, “Their noodle combo was my favorite!”

‘jackpot!’, thought the detective, “So, you’ve switched to Tongue Twister too, huh?”

“Ha ha, yeah. Isn’t it uncanny how similar they taste? But the T T one is just…better.”

“I know, right?”, lied Lasoh as he got into his car, they didn’t taste the same to him, “well, goodnight.”

“Goodnight”

The detective hurried home and tried the food. The noodles tasted as good as ever, the churros were okay. The blueberry milkshake was too sugary and lacked any real flavor, very unlike the stolen (supposedly) milkshake. The pizza however was baked to perfection, even though he had to reheat it in the oven.

‘So’, thought Detective Lasoh, ‘only the stolen food taste good and if you’re a fan of the original, the fake would taste identical or better.’

Lasoh made some notes while the TV blared some game show in the background, ‘So, if they copy something I’m addicted to, it should taste identical to me, hmm…’

As he thought up various theories, some old memories came to him.

“Never eat faerie food. You can’t leave their domain if you eat their food.”

He vaguely remembered a cousin swatting some berries out of his hand, “Don’t eat those, this is fae turf!”

Lasoh shook his head to clear it. He consulted more notes, sent an email to someone who knew more about food tasting, set up a meeting with the branch manager of the local Tongue Twister, and contacted his dad in the local police department to see if there were any illegal drug activity in the area.

On the day of his interview with the T T branch manager, Detective Lasoh received his third client. It was a pizza place, but from another city. This time, they had an active police investigation already underway, but they contacted Lasoh because they heard about his clients through the fast food grapevine and wanted him to share info with their local police. As he guessed, the investigation was about the mini pizzas.

Half an hour later, Detective Lasoh sat in the small office of Mr. Ian Oaster. Mr. Oaster was not happy to have a detective in his office but he wanted to prove that he had nothing to hide.

“Of course they’re baseless accusations”, he said, sounding bored, “sure we search the market for items and combos that are trending, but then we make our own version. That’s hardly illegal. If a kids’ movie about cupcakes comes out this season, of course we’ll offer a new cupcake range, that doesn’t mean we’re stealing the idea from some cake shop.”

He went on and on for quite a bit while Detective Lasoh pretended to be interested and talked as if he agreed with him. He was looking for a chink in his stories because frankly, he couldn’t find one. Their sudden popularity seemed legit.

“I hear you’re opening three more branches across the country?”

“Yep, we opened four since we started in October. We’ll have three more by next year.”

“That’s some quick growth.”

“If that’s all detective, I’d like to return to work, good da-“

“One last question, Mr. Oaster”, interrupted Lasoh, “I’ve noticed that your delivery trucks take back your leftover food, could you elaborate on that?”

“I- wha-“, Mr.Oaster cleared his throat, “ah, yes. We, ahem*, we give our extra food to a few charities around the city.”

“Oh?”, honestly, this was not the question that Lasoh expected the manager to fumble on but it was better than nothing, “They seem to be heading out of the city though.”

“Ah, yes. There’s been some logistical issues. So we have to store them in our warehouse for a while.”

“Ah, I see”, he didn’t see, but the detective wanted to leave in time to follow their delivery trucks, “well, thank you for your valuable time. Good day.”

The detective prided himself for his stealth in the city. However, the delivery truck he was following drove off into the suburbs and then into a region that opened into the woods and mountains.

‘Where the frick are these people going’, he wondered, glad that the route wasn’t entirely alien to him. His grandparents' house was in this general region and he used to spend his holidays there.

Eventually, after four and a half hours of careful tailing, and almost losing sight of the truck, he parked his car on the side of the road, behind some bushes. The detective went on foot through the more sparsely wooded area around the road and reached a large warehouse. There was a garage off to the side and he could see several trucks there, including the one he was tailing.

Lasoh tried to text his location to friends in the police department but there was no signal out here. This made him hesitate to go closer to investigate.

The sun had already set but the sky was clear and the moon was bright. He thought about how scared he was of the nighttime woods when he was a kid. It didn’t help that his grandma told him creepy stories to keep him from wandering too far. He smiled at the memories, his grandparents were no more and he hadn’t thought about his summer vacations in a while.

Detective Lasoh was brought out of his reverie when some of the lights inside the warehouse went off. Soon the people working there started to leave. Lasoh gave it another 15 min before approaching the warehouse from the side. He checked his phone, still no signal. He figured he’ll try again from the top of the building.

Keeping to the shadows as much as he could and checking for security cameras, he found a second garage. This one wasn’t under any direct lighting, so he approached it. He took out his lock-picking set and went to work on the padlock. He got the lock to open and, with a lot of patience, opened the creaky garage door inch by inch so that it wouldn’t alert anyone. Once he slipped inside, the detective closed the door behind him and looked around.

The garage was in total darkness but the hallway outside was lit by dim night-lights. Detective Lasoh took out his phone and started looking around with the dim light of its screen. He didn’t want to use the torch in case someone saw the light.

The place was mostly used to store recyclable trash. There were cartons and glass bottles and plastic covers. There were large trash bags full of bottle caps and squished takeaway boxes. One corner had a stack of Styrofoam boxes filled with…Lasoh took out one of the empty glass bottles and read the label.

‘What in the…’, he was pretty sure these were tranquillizers. Doses strong enough to be used on large cattle. There couldn’t possibly be a legal reason for a food chain’s warehouse to have so many.

Detective Lasoh took a few photographs and tried to get to the roof to get a signal. Normally, he’d just go back to his car with his evidence but he just had to see what they did with the leftover food. He had to tie up some loose ends in the theories he had in mind. Eventually, he found the large freezer where it was stored. The freezer had shelf upon shelf of old food, the labels dating back several weeks.

‘Are they just re-selling stale food? How hasn’t anyone noticed???’, even with refrigeration, he was sure some of these items wouldn’t hold up well after a week. 

He took some more pictures and went on his way, being extra quiet this time because he could hear some sort of machine being operated far away. Clearly, there were still people in the building. He was following evacuation maps to reach the roof when he spotted a turn with a LOT of warning signs. Posters on the wall, a stand, reflector stickers with ‘caution’ symbols and texts. It was really overkill.

There was no way the detective could pass up the opportunity to look at what was here. He checked his phone, the message had gone through. He must have gotten a signal in some room with a signal booster.

‘Yes!’, thought Lasoh, ‘if they don’t hear from me in an hour, they’ll send people over.’

He looked around the corner into this heavily warned-about turn in the corridor. It opened to a short hallway that led to yet another industrial-sized freezer. There were little cairns of smooth, flat rocks on the hallway floor. They sent a chill down his spine. He remembered seeing those in the woods as a child. Grandma used to scare him with stories of kids being snatched up by the woods if they crossed borders marked by these. Lasoh had a bad feeling about this, but he absolutely had to look.

As he entered the hallway, he realized that the security cameras were all wrong, they pointed at the freezer. He stuck to their blind spots and turned them away. His heart thumped even faster when he realized that the freezer door was padlocked, with chains wrapping around the handles.

‘What is the world are they hiding?’, he thought, ‘do they have actual dead bodies in there? Drugs? Illegal animal parts like horns and tusks? Was Tongue Twister just a front for something?

The lock clicked open after a few minutes of picking. It was freezing cold inside and, unlike the other freezer, there were no automatic lights. He turned on the torch in his phone and nearly gasped.

There was an uprooted tree-base in there. No shelves or food, just the wide base of a cut tree with the flat part of the trunk on the floor and the trimmed roots sticking up in the air like creepy fingers. The detective was more confused than ever, ‘are these roots some kind of narcotic?’

He set the phone down on the floor, away from the freezer door, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. There were weird ropes crisscrossing over the roots. He squinted, they were…IVs? There were stands all around, holding saline bags of what he assumed was the tranquillizer, and IVs going from them to the remains of that tree. With a jolt, he realized that there was a person there.

‘No, not a person', he moved closer, ‘some kind of mannequin’.

It seemed to be carved out of ashen wood. It was extremely well detailed and pretty. The body was smooth and androgynous, the hair was made of dark vines and leaves and flowers, all closed and shrivelled up in the cold. The torso was wrapped in see-through plastic. The hands, halfway up to the elbow, and the feet, halfway up to the knee, were pitch black.

As the detective moved closer, his feet crunched on something, it made him jump back with a yelp. He thought he stepped on a cockroach or snake but it was a circle that went around the mannequin and its throne of roots. A circle made of what looked like rock salt and smooth rocks. Lasoh knelt down to examine it. He had created a break in the circle when he leapt back in surprise.

He looked back at the freezer door, no one seemed to have heard his yelp. He stood up and turned around. This time, he screamed. He screamed and fell and backed away from the circle. The thing was standing right at the edge of it, looking at him with white-less black eyes and a too-wide grin.

‘FAE’, his mind shouted.

A flood of childhood memories assaulted him. He remembered following noises into the woods with the family dog and at one point, Mimi had started growling for no reason. She stomped and barked and brought him back to the house, and slept at his door that night.

“I don’t believe this stuff”, his grandfather often said, “but I respect these folklore and you have to avert your gaze when you-”

Lasoh quickly looked at the floor instead as he fumbled for his inhaler. He heard shouts from outside the freezer as he took long gulps of his medicine. There was more frantic shouting and the freezer door was shut and locked.

He was still out of breath, so he couldn’t scream for help. He backed away against the door and stood up. His mind was still abuzz.

“Do not litter near faerie rings”

“Don’t go near that tree.”

“That hill is haunted, not by ghosts though.”

“They were here long before us.”

“These things don’t care if humans live or die”

“If you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. If not, who knows? They might rip you to shreds or ignore you, whatever takes their fancy.”

In his peripheral vision, he had a vague view of the plastic around the torso expanding. They were folded wings all along. What he thought to be part of the roots were antlers made of branches. He heard the snap of the IVs as it pulled them out one by one.

Lasoh’s heart was beating so fast that his chest hurt, he had broken the circle, it could get out now. A person or a tame animal might feel grateful for the rescue, but this thing was as feral as they came.

A sharp, musical whistle cut across the air, making him jerk his head up just in time to watch it pounce on him with unbelievable speed. Lasoh screamed as it slammed into him and the freezer door. Its ribs opened up and engulfed him whole. He screamed inside the moving prison of live branches, ferns, and vines. Seconds later, he was dumped on the forest floor.

Lasoh gasped for air. He fumbled for his inhaler but he didn’t have it, the thing was kneeling in front of him. Lasoh stayed down and kept his eyes on the ground, struggling to catch his breath. The detective saw the shriveled leaves on the thing’s body recovering, the deep purple flowers blooming. It stroked one of the flowers with its thumb and without warning, put its hand under Lasoh’s chin and raised his face towards its head. Lasoh immediately closed his eyes, it was disrespectful to look. The thing chuckled and smeared the pollen on the detective’s tongue. Then it leaned into his ear and whispered in his late grandmother’s voice, “eat, little Lay.”

Lay Lasoh was so startled that he opened his eyes and found himself back in his car. He accidentally swallowed the pollen and his lungs immediately cleared up, allowing him to take deep gulps of air.

“Oh, the food was spiked with faerie dust.”