ELIMINATED: Hexxat (disqualified), Jan (incinerated), Hayes (eaten by a tiger), Shar-Teel

REMAINING CONTESTANTS: Baeloth the Entertainer, Minsc, Neera, Zaviak, Aerie, Voghiln, King Gramm, Tiax, Alora, Kivan, Yeslick, Branwen, Garrick, Faldorn, Quayle, Xan, Korgan, Nalia, Cernd, Haer'Dalis

"The votes are in and by an overwhelming majority, King Gramm is eliminated," Edwin declared in a transparently bored voice. "The shrieking of these mating vixens has permanently damaged my hearing. As the only singer to get three thumbs up, Faldorn is safe from elimination in the next round."

Shar-Teel beamed proudly on as the three real singers; Haer'Dalis, Voghiln and Garrick, looked sulky.

That evening, a delivery arrived for the arena. The gladiators watched curiously as burlap sacks were carted by Thayan servants through the halls and toward the arena. The remaining contestants speculated as to their contents. Weapons perhaps? Or particularly nasty traps for them to fight their way around?

"No idea!" Shar-Teel snapped, when pressed. "All I know is that whatever it is the male pigs get first pick, as usual. That, and Edwin isn't going to let me judge anymore, like that's some terrible loss."

"Vy are ve getting first pick?" Voghiln asked, looking up hopefully from his beer.

"Perhaps as compensation for the ridiculously biased judging of the last round?" suggested Garrick resentfully.

"Not all of you scum get first pick. Just Xan, Haer'Dalis and Baeloth."

"What treachery is this?" cried Tiax, and soon the other men took up the cry. Faldorn watched them protest with a smug smile. Whatever the next task she, and she alone, was sure of immunity.

"Xan and Haer'Dalis get first pick because their sponsors paid for it, apparently." Shar-Teel grimaced impatiently. "And Baeloth supposedly because he has sponsors too."

"The audience appreciate my audacious exploits!" Baeloth beamed.

"The only person who'd sponsor an evil drow like you is Edwin!" Aerie snapped. "We all know you don't have any real sponsors!"

The drow's ingratiating smile did not meet his cold, calculating eyes. It was like staring down an alligator, and Aerie instinctively pushed her chair backward.

Nobody bothered to train the following day. They had no idea what they would be training to face and so, in the words of Xan, what would be the point? Instead the contenders tried to rest, ready to face whatever fresh horrors the evening would bring.

It certainly brought a larger crowd, if a respectable dozen counted as a crowd. Edwin was drumming his fingers together and chuckling. For the first time in the competition, the gladiators had been allowed to bring their own weapons, which could not be a good sign.

In the centre of the arena was a huge, cloth-covered slab. Xan eyed it with apprehension. Each contestant had a smaller table of their own to work on and a small, portable furnace. Minsc wondered aloud if they were going to be forging their own swords.

"Xan, Baeloth and Haer'Dalis are our sponsored contestants tonight!" the Red Wizard announced. "And since their lady-fans have paid so handsomely to get their hands on their buns, tonight they will get the chance!"

With a wave of his staff, the cloth covering the mysterious central table dissolved away to reveal… bowls?

Bowls, spoons, whisks, sieves and bulging sacks of flour. There were jugs of whipping cream, piping bags of icing, eggs from countless species of bird and every decoration you could imagine, some of which were clearly enchanted. There were sugar jewels which twinkled and gleamed like the real thing. Great fat toffees, mounds of truffles, enormous slabs of fudge and chocolate piled like gold bars. Zaviak was already eyeing a box of rainbow sprinkles and Korgan was calling dibs on a flask of honey ale. There was a very small bottle of what might be mistaken for maple syrup, but Xan's trained eye knew it to be rarest unicorn wee. A delicacy in some cultures.

"Your task," Edwin began, "Is to bake small sweet treats. Cookies, buns, fairy cakes; the choice is yours. Each member of the audience has been given a bag. When the time runs out, the contestants will step back and our revered guests will descend into the pits and fill their bags with whatever they wish to take away with them. Audience: you may taste the goods before you commit."

"This doesn't seem so bad!" perked up Aerie.

"There must be a catch," sighed Xan. "Edwin looks far too happy."

"There is a catch!" Edwin went on. "You are judged by the number of cakes or cookies the audience take. So there is a trade-off between quality and quantity. Also, anyone whose food is deemed unsafe for audience consumption will automatically find themselves in the pool of losers." He seemed to eye Zaviak in particular as he said this. "And using ingredients other than those supplied will result in automatic disqualification.

"Not a bad catch," hummed Minsc, "As catches go."

"Wait for it," sighed Xan. "There has to be a reason we were allowed to bring our weapons."

Edwin waved his hands theatrically and clapped them together. There was a puff of flour over Xan, Haer'Dalis and Baeloth's tables. Xan breathed in a lungful of it and started coughing wretchedly. As the dust cleared, before the three men there appeared a healthy quantity of eggs, flour, sugar and yeast.

"Our sponsored contestants will start off with basic baking ingredients," Edwin smiled nastily. "Anything else they want they will have to take from the supply table themselves. The rest of you start with nothing. You may not (are the thieving cockroaches even listening?) YOU MAY NOT take anything from another competitor's table. However, at the supply table anything goes short of permanent maiming of fellow contestants. You simians will fight for your ingredients like the squabbling gibbons you are!"

"Told you," Xan shrugged despondently.

Not all of the contestants took this as bad news. Korgan and Faldorn suddenly looked much more enthusiastic about the baking challenge. The dwarf was shifting his axe and staring at the fudge with a manic glint in his eye. Minsc too was dancing from foot to foot, eager to enter the fray.

"On your marks…" hollered Edwin. "Get set… BAKE!"

Nineteen pairs of feet charged the supply table. It was carnage. Kivan, being fleet of foot, snatched up an armful of fudge and chocolate, but met Korgan coming the other way. Too laden to reach for his bow, he was forced to duck and dodge the dwarf's madly swinging axe, scattering half his treats over the arena floor.

Korgan hacked wildly, as Kivan backed up. At the table itself, he tripped backward over a sack of flour. The axe hacked deep into it, sending up a volcano of white as Korgan wrenched it out. Quayle, who had been gathering candied nuts close by, found himself engulfed in it. The flour stuck to his clothes, beard and glasses so that he spent the rest of the challenge stumbling about the pit like a half-blind ghost.

Eggs were trampled, bags of icing pummelled apart like pinatas. Faldorn, who had immunity, was ignoring the challenge completely and was attempting to throttle Cernd with a long rope of liquorice.

Nalia, who had no experience with cooking but quite a lot with managing food supplies, was one of the few with the presence of mind to ignore the fancier ingredients and gather the basics first. She tiptoed behind the brawling fighters with a cupful of eggs wobbling dangerously on top of her sugar bowl. While Tiax and Baeloth squabbled over the candy gems, she began cracking eggs and stirring flour. It would have been an excellent strategy, if only the poor noblewoman had any idea how much of each ingredient she ought to be adding. Or that, traditionally, one does not beat the eggshells into the mix.

Surprisingly, Zaviak managed to snatch up his coveted rainbow sprinkles and return to his bench unmolested, but having attained his prize he lost all interest in the competition. Instead he spread them out over the bench and started moving them around into careful patterns with his wild magic and saying things like: "the colours… they're like… unreal dude."

"Boo says that we must get our paws on some nuts. Nuts are Boo's particular favourite. And Minsc's too! We are making Nut Surprise!"

"Oh… I don't know Minsc. The nuts are right near the centre," Aerie waivered timidly.

The centre was where the fighting was fiercest. Not wishing to be disqualified, Faldorn had released Cernd before he passed out, but was now pinning him to the floor with vines. Rather than decorating cookies, she was decorating him, wedging open his mouth with hard toffees so that she could sprinkle his teeth with raw yeast.

Suddenly there was a piercing shriek and a deafening clang as Branwen brought her club down full force on Korgan's helmeted head. The dwarf reverberated violently before falling flat on his face in the eggs, knocked out cold.

"The flooo-ur be ours!" Yeslick crowed, scooping handfuls of it into his helmet. "I've a wonderful recipe fer current buns. Baking is a bit like forging, and all dwarves be knowing how to forge."

"Surely not all?" Branwen frowned, pushing her dirty blonde hair from her eyes and wondering if it was possible to be racially prejudiced against your own species.

With Korgan's fall, and the best ingredients already taken, the mood around the supply table grew slightly more civilized. Aerie dithered in the middle of it, biting her lip and looking around her desperately.

"Oh dear, what can we bake without eggs?" Aerie fretted. "They're all over Korgan's face now!"

She was not the only one facing this problem. She, Minsc, Quayle, Faldorn and Yeslick were all forced to manage without them, though Yeslick did not seem to mind provided there were currants a-plenty.

"Are you certain those aren't rat's droppings?" Faldorn asked spitefully.

"I'm no druid, lady, but I kin tell the difference between a plop and a plum," the dwarf retorted.

"Pity," Faldorn sighed regretfully. "A few rat droppings would have finished off my masterpiece nicely. She left an iced-Cernd tied on the floor, like Korgan unable to compete, and gathered the few remaining ingredients to make a token effort. It was the second time in a row the shadow druid had bested him. Cernd swore inwardly that if he made it through this round there would not be a third.

There was a dull intermission between placing the buns in the oven and icing them, but Edwin had planned for this. His servants scurried along the benches peddling ridiculously overpriced drinks and a special Collector's Edition Elimination Guide. Each page featured a glossy artists impression of one of the contestants alongside a (mostly fictitious) profile.

Aerie wilted when it was time to remove her cookies from the oven. They were as dry as charcoal and powdered under her fingers when she tried to pick them up. Without eggs, Quayle had faired little better. He tried to disguise his failure with icing, but had no experience with in the kitchen.

"No Uncle, you need to let them cool first or… oh dear…" Aerie sighed.

"See Boo! Perfection!" Minsc beamed, removing his own tray from his portable oven.

"Ah," said Quayle, peering over the tops of his spectacles. "I see the surprise part of Nut Surprise is that it is literally just nuts."

"Does that even count as baking?" Voghiln wondered. Edwin cocked his head to one side.

"I'll allow it. What is the whimpering elf doing? His efforts look almost competent for the first time in our acquaintance…"

Xan had rolled his tray cake flat and was scooping dollops of whipped cream over it. He hadn't had the heart to fight for ingredients when he had most of what he needed easily to hand, but the cream had not been a fiercely contested extra. Slowly and carefully, he rolled up his creation into a swirly roulade and cut it into thin, delicate slices.

"…might have a winner here, for the first and last time in this moping cretin's life," Edwin went on.

"Why won't you rise?" Neera pleaded with her muffins. This was her first attempt at baking, and she was discovering that she didn't like it. Her hair was more flyaway even than usual and she wore a harassed expression.

"Just use magic," suggested Nalia. "I am."

The wild mage glanced wistfully at the other woman's cupcakes which (while as stodgy as porridge because she had added far too much flour) were a presentable colour and shape. She was icing them now with pretty, intricate lattices. The designs she had learned during needlework lessons with her aunt were finally, and unexpectedly, coming in handy.

"Magic it is!" panted Neera.

She murmured a swelling incantation over the determinedly concave muffins… and swell they did. Neera was forced to yank the tray free before they got so big as to explode the oven. She rested them to cool on her table, which within seconds collapsed under their ever-increasing weight.

"Stop! Stop!" Neera howled.

Yet the muffins refused to stop and Nalia was forced to move her own table out of the way as they swelled first to the size of dogs, then people, then horses. By the time they were done, the wild mage was in despair, for it would be impossible for the audience to fit one of these into their goody bags even if they wanted to.

"Three for the pool of losers so far," smirked Edwin. "Make yourself useful elf, since you're out of the running. Move Cernd and Korgan out of the way. Just pile them next to your muffins. That's it."

"Half-elf," corrected Neera resentfully.

The sky was a glowing orange by the time the cakes were ready to test. Each contestant found themselves immobilised as the barrier spells were lifted and the Thayan audience swarmed into the pit. With delicate little steps, they picked their way about the arena sampling some food, turning their noses up at others, and every so often popping a cake or cookie into their bag.

Some of the offerings were more popular than others, and the tiefling's flat, blackened splats were particularly unappetizing. Like a true Doomguard, Haer'Dalis had thrown a bit of everything into the bowl and let entropy take its course. He would certainly have ended up in the pool of losers, were it not for his sponsor, who bagged three of his 'creations' just to keep him in the game.

The dark horses in the competition turned out to be Garrick and Alora. While the others were fighting over fancy ingredients, cursing their ovens and generally making an exhibition of themselves, these two had been quietly whisking away unnoticed by the competition. Garrick's skilful bard fingers had managed an elaborate fancy icing, like snowflakes on his biscuits. Alora's were simple in appearance but by far the tastiest and most numerous. Both soon found their tables cleared. Likewise Minsc's nutsacks were quickly snatched up by those in the audience who preferred savoury to sugar, much to little Boo's dismay.

"Zaviak's rainbow-sprinkle-zen-garden obviously does not qualify as baking," Edwin snapped impatiently. "One brain-fried hippy for the pool of losers. This one could do with spending some time in a real pool… unwashed slob…"

Baeloth had excellent instincts when it came to crowd pleasers and had opted for simple chocolate-chip cookies with a glass of milk. With the aid of sorcery, he had done a decent job of them. He was hampered, however, by the general mistrust that surface dwellers harboured toward drow. Only two patrons were brave enough to taste something a drow had made, but this was enough to keep him safe another round.

There were a few more additions to the pool of losers. Faldorn was saved by her immunity carried over from her victory in the singing round, but Quayle and Aerie's eggless cupcakes were scorned by the choosy Thayans.

"What is this supposed to be?" a haughty woman with pinched features demanded of Kivan, waving a knot of bread under his long nose.

"It is an elfin eventie," the immobilised elf replied. "They bring luck and enhance the beauty of the consumer."

"Bah! It is nothing but the bastard spawn of a donut and a pretzel!" snapped the Thayan, but she slipped four into her bag anyway.

Branwen and Voghiln caught each other's eye, and immediately adopted a similar sales pitch. Their traditional northern fare gave the eater strength and courage according to Branwen, or 'epic virility' in the words of Voghiln. They were convincing enough to shift a few of their dubiously-appealing pastries and keep themselves safe.

The remaining contestants all managed a last minute rainbow cookie or butterfly-cake, stuffed into the audience's bags once all the better offerings were gone. Nobody touched Xan's, to his dismay, but Edwin's spell had frozen him in such a position that he could not see why.

When the audience returned to their seats, stuffing their faces until their cheeks were as swollen as Boo's pouches, Edwin lifted the spell. Xan looked down at his table and howled in anguish.

"My roulade!" Xan wailed. "What happened?"

Alas, like Quayle, the elf had forgotten to let his bake cool before decorating. The whipped cream had melted, drenching his sponge and transforming it into a limp, dripping pile of goo. His carefully cut slices had merged into one. A sad, drooping mess which was dripping pathetically onto the floor.

Edwin surveyed the carnage with a superior sneer.

"Alora, Garrick and Minsc win immunity!" he declared. "And now to vote off one of these worthless losers. Audience, it is once more time to go fishing in the pool of losers. One of these imbeciles must go!"

Noble citizens of Thay!

Vote now for: Cernd, Korgan, Xan, Neera, Zaviak, Aerie and Quayle!

(Votes and sponsorship can be registered in the comments section. Votes cast after I have started writing the next chapter may not be counted but will still be charged.)