Erzulie, Angel of Cooking

By Moe Lane

**Flaming Feather**

Erzulie
Seraph of Creation IST the Sword (this year, at least)
Vassal of Conscience, Vassal of Flowers
Angel of Cooking

Corporeal Forces: 4 Strength: 8 Agility: 8
Ethereal Forces: 6 Intelligence:12 Precision: 12
Celestial Forces: 6 Will: 12 Perception: 12
Word Forces: 15

Vessel: human female/2, +1 Charisma

Skills: Cooking/6, Dodge/3, Enchant/6, Fighting/3, Knowledge (Recipes/off the scale), Large Weapon/3 (ladle), Savoir-Faire/3, Small Weapon/6 (knife)

Songs: Fire (Corporeal/1), Healing (All/3), Might (All/3), Sensation (All/3), Shields (All/1), Solace (all/3), Succor (all/6, virtuoso)

Attunements: Seraph of Creation, Malakite of Creation, Elohite of Creation, Seraph of the Sword, Seraph of Flowers, Seraph of War, Abracadabra, Transubstantiation, Scabbard, Heavenly Judgement, Vassal of Conscience, Vassal of Flowers, Angel of Cooking

Angel of Cooking: To semiquote Terry Pratchett, Erzulie is the sort of cook that can cause people to promise to be better people if they could have just one more bite. She cannot cook badly. No ifs, ands or buts: this angel can make anything organic taste good (indeed, no one is about to bet that she can't make inorganic things taste good, either). That's the default setting.

When she's trying to outdo herself, well, with a Precision -2 roll (and 4 Essence) she can create a meal that will remove one point of dissonance from the deserving. Discord only gets removed on favorable Interventions - but fairly solid rumor has it that eating one of her meals keeps you from unfavorable Interventions for the next eight hours, so you never know.

Rites:



Artifacts: Well, Eli gave her a ladle that he made himself. Legend has it that it's got all sorts of useful things bound up into it: nobody's been dumb enough yet to make her use it in anger, which is probably wise...

Well, nobody in Heaven is a Glutton, of course, but they do like a good meal, now and then. It's Heaven, after all. You know, that entire milk and honey thing: it's part of the background.

But you haven't had milk and honey until you've had Erzulie's Milk and Honey-Glazed French Toast. Or her Buttermilk and Honey Biscuits, or her Honeycombed Potato Skins with Sour Cream, or ... look, until you've had anything prepared by the Angel of Cooking, trying to describe the gustatory delights is futile. The mere smell of her kitchen can staunch blood loss, banish hangovers and cure arthritis: the taste of her food absolutely requires Heaven's unique dimensional structure for proper enjoyment.

Archangels scheme, plot and connive to get her to cater their parties, as a certain musing on the origins of the above Attunements and Songs might suggest. Actually getting her to work semi-exclusively for one Superior for any length of time is usually a feat worthy of an epic (and a certain amount of smugness). Currently, Laurence has a death grip on her services: he happens to be a superb cook himself (to the point where she'll let him into her kitchen and let him use her utensils), which is generally considered to be highly unfair.

Not that she's perfect, by any means. For example, Erzulie is possibly the worst actor in Heaven: she knows that cooks are supposed to be bad-tempered and insubordinate, and she tries her best to emulate this stereotype, but even the relievers aren't fooled. Indeed, she's one of the most relaxed Seraphim in Heaven. She has mastered the art of singing badly, at least: unfortunately, she just can't seem to get the hang of double entrendres (to quote Pratchett again, they're usually single entrendres, and proud of it).

If there's a genuine flaw in her personality, it's her seeming inability to recognize the most elementary dangers in life. Erzulie will think nothing of going to extremely dangerous places on the corporeal plane, just because she needs one particular spice or food item (Transubstantiation will do in a pinch, but the flavor's always missing something, somehow). She also doesn't quite seem to grasp the concept that demons aren't always just confused and waiting for someone genuinely nice to come up and explain to them the errors of their ways. When her current Superior does let her go shopping, it's always with a suitable backup. Laurence is considered to have a doubly unfair advantage in this: Erzulie sometimes trusts him with the shopping list.

Yes, he goes personally. If you ever tasted her pumpkin pie, you wouldn't ask why.

Now, at this point, the spectre of the Demon Prince of Gluttony appears as ... by God, yes, a ghost at the feast. He'd just love to see what the Angel of Cooking tastes like, right? After all, she's been almost marinating in culinary goodness for centuries, so the flavors must be amazing.

At least, that was the reasoning recently espoused by one of Haagenti's most influential Barons. I say, was, as Haagenti proceeded to throw said Baron into a wall so hard that it was deemed easier to just slap a new coat of paint over him. Serves him right for assuming that Haagenti was an idiot.

The Prince can reason, after all: no more Erzulie means no more Chocolate Chip Manna Cookies. Erzulie is the only entity on three planes that can make Chocolate Chip Manna Cookies that won't wreck Haagenti's digestion. The Prince of Gluttony (through a long, convoluted and deeply secret process) once managed to get a whole dozen Chocolate Chip Manna Cookies. He made them last a week before he broke down and ate the last one (and the plate, and the table, and the floor, and eventually just about everything else in the room that might have had one last little molecule of chocolate manna goodness attached to them). Erzulie is on Haagenti's Do Not Eat list.

Needless to say, in a Oops campaign the Archangel of Gusto will pile so many Attunements, Rites and Songs on Erzulie that she'll have difficulty moving. The cookies are even better when you have an angelic palate...

**Flaming Feather**

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