Entering the stage, it occurs to Hiroko that perhaps she should have considered that she would have to be baking in this costume while putting it together. It’s not an impossible task, granted, but it is a bit... inconvenient. The first thing she has to do upon arriving to her station is slide up the kitsune mask to her forehead in order to see a bit better, then roll up her long, draping sleeves and tie them back. Here was hoping she wouldn’t have to lose any points on that front.
Once better prepared (and slightly less liable to stain the soft whites and pinks of her kimono), she sets Junko to taking inventory of the ingredients available to her--what she needs is dropped neatly on the preparation table using psychic--while Hiroko goes to ask the servant to find her a short list of other items. Though she lacks the flair and fanfare a few other competitors have already displayed, she and her team have an efficiency to their lack of communication that--to anyone paying attention, at least--was rather impressive in and of itself. That was the benefit of links, in a way--Hiroko didn’t even need to spare a glance towards her pokémon to know what she did and didn’t need thanks to the silent stream of communication between them.
Besides, there would be plenty of time for flashy later.
With all her ingredients gathered thanks to the servant’s help - she thanks them with a little bow as they return - Hiroko quickly sets about preparing her recipe. Her partners had set out an array of bowls and utensils for her use. (She has to stifle a laugh at Junko’s addition of a comically large saucepan lid, but no saucepan. Evolved or not, she was still awfully young and, evidently, hadn’t completely understood some of Hiroko’s requests. Ryou scoops up the lid by its handle in his mouth and trots off to the chime of the bells on his legs as he returns it to its rightful place for Hiroko.) From the prep area she scoops up one of three apples and goes about peeling the skin off with a knife.
The flair in Hiroko’s performance is more subtle, something easy to catch for those paying attention to her but not loud and eye-catching; the choice to pull the knife from her hip, a gorgeous blade with a polished white-and-gold handle and engraved with the Azai name, or the flourish she uses to unsheathe it, spinning the knife around in her palm before setting to work. Her knifework is, as one would expect, almost inhuman, peeling and dicing the fruit with such speed and precision it’s a wonder she doesn’t cut herself.
In the meantime, Junko goes about measuring out other ingredients, still using her Psychic to quickly and cleanly float measuring cups and bowls around; sweet rice flour and sugar are mixed together with Psychic; a kettle floats over and pours a bit of boiling water in, mixing it together bit by bit as per Hiroko’s mental instruction until they had a solid mochi dough. Hiroko practically knew how to make mochi by heart thanks to her years of begging the cook back home, Nana, to make her favorite treat, which meant Junko could easily rely upon her partner’s memory to clear up any uncertainties. The espeon finishes her measurements just as Hiroko is peeling the last apple--
Why not show off a bit?
Ryou rejoins them at the counter and sits positioned next to the bowl of diced apples Hiroko has been preparing, already sensing what she had planned. As Hiroko finishes with the peel, she steps back and tosses the apple into the air; the Glaceon, at the same time, uses his Ice Shard. Razor-sharp blades of ice slice through the fruit in midair and it falls back down into the bowl in chunks, met with the sound of applause from a few entertained onlookers.
Next Hiroko measures out the remaining ingredients for the apple filling--cinnamon, sugar, lemon juice. She doesn’t exactly know the apple pie filling by heart the way she does mochi (in fact, she’d had to do a bit of research before the competition to try to find something a bit more seasonally themed), so she handles this portion of the preparation herself. The filling is then mixed together and popped in the microwave to heat (again, admittedly, she’d had to learn what a microwave even was before the competition). Once complete she brings the bowl back to Ryou’s side; he quickly chills the hot filling with Frost Breath until it’s down to a workable temperature. Next, Hiroko and Junko take the cooled filling and portion it out onto a sheet of wax paper--Junko, of course, being much more efficient at it using Psychic, a fact with Hiroko plays up for a few laughs as she can only scoop out one ball of filling while Junko single-handedly divides up the remainder in the bowl in the same amount of time. Ryou then settles down next to the sheet of portioned filling to keep it chilled as Hiroko and Junko move on to the next step.
Hiroko has Ryou use his Frost Breath once again to quickly chill the bowl of mochi, then she divides up the dough into separate chunks, two large and three much smaller chunks. She adds a bit of food color and kneads it into each chunk of dough--black and purple for the two largest, yellow and red for two of the smaller, and the last remaining its natural white--and proceeds to roll out the two larger piles of dough and cut palm-sized squares out of them, three black and six purple. Again with Junko’s assistance to speed up the process, Hiroko retrieves the filling and scoops it into a piece of dough, pinches it shut to keep the filling in, and has Junko shape them better into balls one-by-one.
Perfect! Now just to decorate them! The black-dough mochi are first. Hiroko squishes them into more oblong ovals, then pinches the tops and bottoms into little wisps. She then traces a shape on a piece of paper for Junko, who proceeds to cut the shape out from the rolled-out white dough to make up for Hiroko’s less-than-stellar artistic skill. Three little skull-like masks of a duskull, which Hiroko attaches to the re-shaped black mochi. She then pinches a bit of dough from the red and white to create the stripes on its back and single glowing eye for each one.
Next, she repeats the process for purple, having Junko cut out x-shaped pieces from the yellow and little cloud shapes from the white to create Drifloon, then rolling out thin strings of the remaining black dough and attaching them to the bottom and little black dots for eyes. Finally, for the last three she pinches the dough up into little spikes along its body, followed by using excess purple dough to build up two long spikes on its head and a tail on its rear, then two stumpy arms and legs against its side. Add two rough triangles to make eyes and a crescent of white for a big, cheshire cat grin, and viola! Three cute (albeit a bit lopsided) Gengar.
As she goes to present them to the judges she has Ryou whip up a colorful mist with Aurora Veil, obscuring all but the front of the stage. She fixes her costume, sliding her mask back down and returning her sleeves to her proper position before stepping out of the fog with a single, empty plate in hand and Junko and Ryou flanking her on either side. Junko again uses Psychic to float each “ghost” upstage, towards Hiroko, and down onto the plate--and as Hiroko and her pokémon give their bow towards the judges, the plate floats out of her hand and over to their table.
