|————————————> 1 <—————————————|

“Let me guess…” Droned James.
“Your secret ingredient is…I dunno…vanilla?”
His twin sister Katie screamed. Or laughed. It was hard to tell which.
“WRONG! It’s sugar!!”
James rolled his eyes. “I should have known.”
“Of COURSE you should have known! Sugar! It’s always sugar!”
James rolled his eyes as he finished the muffin. His sister loved sugar so much it was annoying for everyone else.
“So what did you make for Bake ‘n’ Make, bro?”

James opened his mouth to say something, but then shut it again.
And then opened it.
And shut it.
When he eventually opened his mouth again, Katie shoved the rest of his muffin into it.
“I can’t believe you forgot to bake something again! Do you find so interesting about drawing pictures of monsters in your little diary!”

James was a bit of a geek when it came to things like aliens and ghosts and the supernatural.
He loved the thrill and mystery of it all.
He was also quite a good drawer and writer, so he combined the two in a journal were he wrote and drew about mythical beasts and weird objects and suspicious people.

James was quite grateful that Katie hadn’t taken an interest in his book yet, because he didn’t think she would take too kindly to who he marked as a “suspicious person”.

“I just like it! It’s a fun, recreational thing for me to do! All you do in your spare time is to discover new things that you can mix with sugar, shove it in an oven and call a bakery item!”

“Shut up.”
“You shut up.”
“YOU shut up!”

Eventually, the twins reached a little house on the edge of the street, sort of looking like it was shoved off to the end of the street by the other houses, which were like elegant skyscrapers compared to the little flat.

The twins were about to knock on the door when James stopped and stared at something in the distance.
“Uhh…James?” Said Kate, waving a hand in front of his face.
“Kate…” He murmured.

|————————————> 2 <————————————|

“Look…”
He pointed at a haunched, hooded figure enveloped in a black coat shuffling along the sidewalk, carrying a bulging rucksack over its shoulder.
He yanked his camera out of his pocket and tried to take a picture to stick in his journal, but his hands were tingling so much he could hardly hold the camera, let alone press any buttons.
He growled in frustration as he dropped the camera.
“Can you feel that, James? It feels like my hands just fell asleep!” Said Kate worriedly.
James looked back up to where the figure was, but it had disappeared.

He immediately whipped out his journal and began writing in it (Or trying to write in it- his hands were still numb) like a madman, with a gleam in his eye that made him look insane.
Suddenly, the door burst open to with a BANG.

James threw his hands over his head, flinging the journal up into the air, and Kate simply fell backwards into a hedge.

“Oh dear, i’m so sorry, children. Did I startle you?” Said old lady in her mid sixties. She had curly, silver hair, wore glasses on chain and was covered in flower-themed clothing.

“Jennifer!” Cried Kate eagerly, wriggling herself free from the hedge.

“Jennifer!” Panted James.
“I’m so glad you’re here! I saw this weird person in a cloak with a big bag filled with something and I tried to take a picture but I couldn’t-”

“Alright, alright!” Chuckled the old lady, patting them both on the back.
“You can tell me all about the thing you saw after class.”

She ushered them both into the cottage.
Inside was a normal-sized living room, neatly decorated with a pinkish-yellow theme with the occasional stain on the floral wallpaper where somebody had spilled cake mix.
Overlooking the room was an enormous white board with recipes scribbled all over it in various different colours.

Kate plonked herself down next to a bespectacled girl called Zoe, who had an weird habit of always referring to herself in third person, and immediately began chatting about boys and tingling hands.

James sat next to his sister and began writing theories of what he just saw in his journal.

“Welcome back, everybody, to another week of Baking Block!” Declared Jennifer as she scribbled something on the white board.
“Today, we will be making-”
A fat kid at the back of the class put his hand up.
“Yes?” Jennifer said flatly.
“I made muffins last week.” He said.

Jennifer gave him a searching look, and then moved on.
“That kid at the back is a bit dim.” Whispered Kate.
“Zoe agrees. Annoying, too. Remember when we invited him t play monopoly and he wouldn’t shut up about how he was the top hat?”

“Do you mind?” Grumbled James.
“I’m trying to write about ghosts!”

“Today, class, we shall be baking…” Jennifer paused for dramatic effect.
“MUFFINS!!”
“YAYYY!” Cheered the whole class.
“We made muffins last week.” Muttered James, startled by the sudden uproar.
“Shut up.” Kate muttered back.
“You shut up.”
“Zoe is trying to listen! Both of you shut up!”

“Now, as you all know,” Continued Jennifer,
“The national baking competition is coming up, and we cannot afford for those amateurs at Kirkle Cupcake Club to win against us AGAIN.”
As the boos and jeers rang out in response to the club’s arch-nemesis’s name being spoken, Jennifer’s “sweet old lady” demeanour began to fall away.

“WE WILL BASH THEM INTO BAKING HEAVEN!!” She screamed, punching the ceiling.
“I want you to keep practicing with your wondrous muffins. They must be perfect in every way when the judging comes round.
“Do you understand?”

There was silence.

A fat kid at the back put up his hand.
“I can make muffins.” He said.

“Yes!” Said Jennifer, a hint of exasperation in her voice.
“And they need to be perfect by next week.”

More silence.

The fat kid put up his hand again.
“I put them in the oven.”

Jennifer sighed and pointed at the whiteboard.
“Everyone come up here and get the following ingredients: 2 eggs, a bag of flour, there we go, don’t rush all at once…”

James sat still at his desk, staring at his hands. They had stopped tingling the moment he looked back and saw the dark figure had gone.
What was it? A ghost? A monster? A cryptid?

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re still obsessing over that weirdo in the cape we saw, bro-bro.” Kate said, snapping him out of his daydream.
“It was probably just some guy in a jacket because he was cold, carrying a bunch of stuff in a bin bag because…well…maybe he was homeless?”

James gave her a look.

“Look, James. Whatever we saw, there’s an explanation for it. We just need to focus on baking block, and win the competition, and THEN you can obsess over your obsessive obsessions.”
James was sweating with excitement.
“But this is a real supernatural sighting! A REAL one! I-i-i could get the police involved in this! I could become a celebrity-”

“Zoe wants you to shut up.” Said Zoe.
“You shut up.” Said James.
“You shut up.” Said Zoe.
“You shut up!” Said Kate to no one in particular.

About an hour later, a stream of children holding trays of muffins flooded out of the small cottage, bringing with them a rather odd smell that carried a message that said, “Welp, you tried.”.

James stared across the street at where the weird figure was, trying to ignore the burnt smell of charred muffins wafting up his nose.
There was nothing there. No evidence that anything had ever been there.
He looked up at the sky, but as he did, he caught a flash of something in his peripherals.
His heart skipped a beat.
There!

The figure was sitting on the side of a roof, a hood over its face, and its bare taloned feet gripped on its perch like a bird of prey.
James hardly got a glimpse of the thing before it realised it was being watched, it hissed, spread its cloak like bat wings, and flew down an alleyway.

James shot a quick glance at Kate.
“One muffin, two muffins, fwee mffins, frr mffns, ” Chanted Kate and Zoe as they shoved muffin after muffin into their mouths.
“I can eat muffins too.” Said the fat kid.

He ran after the creature.

|————————————> 3 <————————————|

James raced through the ramshackle end of the town, being careful not to trip over random piles of bricks and feeling like a real ghost hunter.
As he chased the dark shape ahead of him, he noticed a huge plume of thick fog descending over him and the creature.

“Too late to turn back now,” He muttered as he charged into the mist.
He immediately fell to the ground, coughing and spluttering.
The mist crept up his nose, popped his ears, and burnt the back of his throat.
It was like having chilli sauce poured into every hole in your face.

Wheezing and gasping at the sudden agony, James turned around and ran senselessly through the fog, stubbing his toes on piles of bricks, running into walls, until he finally had to stop.
He had seemed to have escaped the mist, and he had regained his smell and hearing, but his eyes were still burning.
He tried to rub them, but his hands were hurting even more than his eyes were.
Trying to figure out where he was, he reached out.
He touched something soft and squishy.
It grunted.
“Kate?” He asked as his eyes stopped hurting.

“Huhuhuhmfgrblebrf!” Replied Kate.
“Swallow that.” James said, gesturing to the mountain of muffins she had crammed into her mouth.

Kate chewed and swallowed.
It was the human equivalent of a garbage truck using its trash compactor to flatten 10 or so bin-fulls of rubbish.

“Where have you been, James? I’ve been standing here with muffins in my mouth waiting for you for over 1 minute! I can’t be expected to wait for someone for this long!”

“Kate, I-i-i-i saw it! I saw it again! T-t-t-t-the thing! It can fly! I chased it, but it lead me into this fog and I think it threw chilli sauce at my head-”

“JAMES!!” Screamed Kate.

James looked down.
To his horror, his hands were almost completely transparent, as if they were made of the mist he had encountered earlier.

Kate grabbed them, screamed and ran away.
And then came back, grabbed them, screamed, and ran away.

James flung his arms around as if there was a particularly angry lobster hanging off each one of them.

After this pattern went on for a few minutes, Kate ran over to him, grabbed his hands and felt them once again.

His hands were no longer made out of mist, but something seemed wrong with them.
James couldn’t really move them as well, and they felt odd to the touch, like rubber that had just been left to bake in the sun on a hot day.

Neither of their parents quite believed what the twins had seen, and the next morning brought doubt for both of them.
It was all so distant, like a half-forgotten dream.
The only paranormal things that happened since then were a few splitting headaches. It was like someone was tampering with their minds.

The days sped by until it was time for Baking Block again.

The twins stepped up onto the porch and rang the doorbell.
As they waited for an answer, James stared across the street.
Something significant had happened here- what was it again?
It was a…a monster or something.
James frowned. Why couldn’t he remember?

The door opened slowly with a drawn out, earsplitting creak.

“Zoe?” Said Kate.
“Hi, guys. Zoe is not sure what is going on. Jennifer never showed up.”
She said as the twins entered the house and sat down.
“So, its like she just disappeared?” Said James.
Zoe adjusted her glasses. It was something she did when she was nervous.
“Zoe guesses so.”

“Wait.” Said Kate, putting her hands up to silence them.
There was the faint sound of rap music coming from outside.
Everyone jumped up and began fighting for the best windows to look out of.
A beat-up old Hino Dutro truck with graffiti slathered all over the back dragged itself along the road.
It had a wonky tire, which made it bounce up and down seemingly in time with the rap music blaring on the radio.
It did an impressive drift and crashed into a sign that said, “NO PARKING”, knocking it over like a bowling pin.

The children stared at it in silence for a while.
It did not move.

Suddenly, the door exploded open, and a gust of chilled wind swept through the room.
James almost fainted.
It was the figure.
Haunched over its walking stick, it surveyed the class.
“Goodbye, life. I had a good run…” Whimpered James.
It pulled up its hood, revealing the wrinkled head of a very old woman.

“Hiya, class!” Said the head.