A Brie Too Far

“You want to go where?” Caitlin asked, already regretting the answer.

Scarred-Snout folded his arms in the solemn, theatrical way only a heavily armed gourmand could. “Strend.”

“Strend,” Caitlin repeated, slowly, like the word had personally insulted her. “Totalitarian, surveillance-happy, aesthetics-over-everything Strend. Home of baroque cybernetics, philosophical bureaucrats, and very, very French people. That Strend?”

“Yes.”

“And why, by all the hells, do you want to go there?”

Scarred-Snout didn’t hesitate. “For cheese.”

There was a long silence. The kind of silence that only happens when everyone in the room is trying to decide whether this is a joke, a hallucination, or the early warning sign of a complete mental breakdown."

Caitlin adjusted her posture like she was recalibrating for violence “Would you care to repeat that?”

“Cheese.” The Aslan stepped forward, dead serious. “Not just any cheese. Le Crottin de Gravité. A wheel of transcendent brie, sung into maturity by the Monks of Fromagerie Sacrée, aged upon sonic velvet, and served with roasted cherries.”

Morwen blinked. “That sounds like you made it up.”

“I did not. I have a brochure.” He produced a small square of expensive synth-paper with solemn reverence.

“He has a brochure,” Maltz echoed, passing his hip flask to Morwen. “Well, guess that’s that, then. Better start preparing for customs interrogations about dairy-based terrorism.”

Caitlin looked at the brochure. It was indeed a brochure. Tasteful, elegant, and embossed in platinum foil. A monk on the cover appeared to be levitating a Camembert while crying tears of joy.

“It’s just cheese,” said Morwen, taking a sip from the flask. “You do realise we have an autochef?”

Scarred-Snout’s ears twitched, a subtle but definite insult. “This is no mere cheese. Le Crottin de Gravité is a sacred synthesis of texture, tone, and terroir.”

Maltz scratched his head. “Did you just say the cheese has tone?”

“It is aged in a harmonic grav-field to develop character. The monks hum to it.”

“They do what now,” Caitlin said, pinching the bridge of her nose like she was trying to defuse a migraine with pressure points.

“They hum,” Scarred-Snout repeated. “Each wheel is serenaded into maturity with a twelve-tone devotional brine chant.”

“That sounds like a cult,” Quinn observed drily.

“They wear robes and speak in riddles,” Scarred-Snout allowed. “But they also produce the most divine blue-veined chèvre this side of Vland. I must taste it before I die.”

Caitlin sighed, deep and long and filled with the spiritual fatigue of someone who’d once survived being ambushed by cybernetic spider ninjas and was now being out-argued by an Aslan about dairy.

“Right,” she said, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of the bridge. “We’ll plot a course for fascist fromage central. But if I get arrested for trafficking fermented protein, I’m blaming you.”

“I accept full responsibility,” Scarred-Snout said solemnly, placing a paw over his chest.

Cathbad crackled to life over the intercom. “Oh mortal fools, ye seek the curdled truth among the gilded liars. The rind shall not save thee from the eye of Les Mechanisms…”

Caitlin stabbed the mute button.

And so the Morrigan jumped, into bureaucracy, spectacle, and quite possibly the single most expensive cheese tasting in Charted Space.