It was a cool, clear March day in Sacramento, just a week before the Spring Coronation ceremony. It would be great, Sonnie Wu thought to herself, to get things back to normal after all this worry and fret over missing monarchs and broken cycles.

The TV in her apartment's living room was on, as it almost always was, and was tuned to the cartoon channel. It was an old animation, probably from the 1960s, featuring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The Beast appreciated the rabbit's humiliating antics towards the hunter on a level which mortals probably couldn't.

She wasn't paying much attention to the television, however. Instead, Sonnie sat on the counter of her kitchenette, where she practiced.

"This looks nothing like the picture in the book!" she complained to her dog. Fugly sat on the floor, looking up at Sonnie with curiosity and the lingering hope she would drop something good to eat.

The cookbook she held in her hands was on Hawaiian cuisine. She peered back and forth between the book and the messy display on the countertop before her. Sliced up watermelon lay splattered about, as did bags of grapes and berries. "You'd think a fruit salad would be easier than this," she grumbled, a kitchen knife twirling in the toes of one of her monkey feet. Those toes were as deft as her fingers, yet none of that seemed to help her lack of cooking skills.

Fugly heaved a canine sigh and flopped down to take a nap after it finally dawned on him that his mistress wasn't going to lose any snacks to the floor. Life was ruff rough.

Frustration mounted, and her foot jammed the knife into the remains of the watermelon. The toes picked up a grape and tossed it into her waiting mouth. Chewing, she thought over the other preparations.

The Hedgespun costumes were ready, thematically-appropriate and beautiful. They hung hidden away in her Hollow. So did buckets of Goblin Fruit. Sonnie had spent days gathering anything that looked like it was tropical... and was edible. The fruit had no special abilities beyond unusual tastes, and the Coronation needed a buffet.

There had been an... attempt... to find a Hedge boar. It had proven to be a... disappointment. The less said about that brief fiasco, the better.

But one could not subsist on faerie foods alone. Thus, the Beast had bought this specialized cookbook and a bunch of mundane fruit.

The fruit salad seemed like the easiest place to start, and while she had agile digits and experience with blades, her efforts were... not pretty. Something wasn't computing properly between recipe and reality. That something was probably her monkey brain.

Only seven days left, and Sonnie hadn't even attempted the poi dishes yet.

"The hell is a taro?" she grumbled, peering at the cookbook.

This was going to be a long week.