Fandom Island and Town

“We were called away last week. Hopefully you all saw the note,” Stark said once everyone had arrived.

"It was a whole thing," Summer added, waving a dismissive hand. "But, hopefully, it'll be a hot minute before anyone needs to go help take down a resurgent bogus galactic empire again, so that means you guys'll have plenty of opportunities to impress us and wow us and probably also gross us out a little, which is fair, because we plan on grossing you out a little, too."

Well, Summer planned to, anyway.

“We do?” Stark asked, looking mildly concerned. “I don’t remember agreeing to that.” He had agreed to that when he’d agreed to this class, obviously. “I thought we were just trying to have you all cook something interesting for us.”

He was very aware that with Summer involved the word ‘interesting’ would be doing a lot of heavy lifting.

"Well, yeah," Summer grinned, with an overexaggerated roll of her eyes. "Interesting is the whole point! So, if you already know what Chopped is, then you also already know what I mean. If you don't know what it is….well, basically, it's a competition cooking show where the contestants are given a box of ingredients and expected to put them together into something edible. Simple enough, right? Usually, the boxes are pretty random, and the challenge is to make something impressive with, like…green onions and sour candies, or, like, maple syrup and half a California sushi roll. But we're going to make it a little more personal than that. We're not making your boxes as random as that. Each box is going to be inspired by something very near and dear to us, and that….is cupcakes.

"But not just any cupcakes We're doing….!"

It was at that point where Summer, clearly living her best life as either a television host or an evil super villain in the middle of her big monologue (was there really that much of a difference?), moved over to a cloche on the counter and pulled off the cover to reveal.

"...terrible cupcakes!

"This here, specifically, is a wheat germ and ginger wasabi cream with tuna creme fraiche cupcake. And so, in your boxes, you'll find elements of this cupcake that you'll have to use in some way that's not a cupcake."

“Please don’t make it a cupcake,” Stark added quickly. He could only take so much,

"Anyone who just makes another cupcake," Summer decided with a decisive nod, "has to eat the cupcake. And if everyone makes a passable dish, then we'll eat the cupcake."

“We will?” Stark said, eyeing the cupcake warily. What had he gotten himself into?

"Everyone," said Summer, clearly ignoring that and focusing her attention on the class. "You may open your baskets."

“Good luck,” Stark said. They were all going to need it.