It kinda hurts to announce but I had to eventually. It's been like a year I think since I updated this and it would be kinda awkward to just... try and pretend like it doesn't exist. but it's always hard to just go to a fic and announce that you lost motivation to work on it, y'know?

the main problem really was that I just realize now that I do way better for stories when I plan them out BEFORE I start writing them and I... did not do that here. like I had somehow out of the Chili Pepper Support Group(tm) forgotten about Rye Cookie and just did not think about her in regards to this fic like at all I was going to cover Red Pepper and Peppercorn but not Rye which is just like. Yeah I think that's definitely a sign I was doing something wrong okdfjfkdnvn

also I had like way too many plotlines planned for this fic or like. well more like "it was going to end up going after a few too many characters when like this fic should've def JUST focused on Chili Pepper" and like y'all didn't get to SEE THAT because I didn't get that far but like my ideas ended up kinda going full murder mystery and like. I had like a lot of characters involved and it was just. It would've taken attention away from what actually mattered like. I kinda wanna remake this fic someday if I get the motivation and just focus it down to the stuff that like really matters and maybe split the murder mystery idea to its own fic even but also I may not do that since I have a bajillion other fanfic ideas to write and brutal ADHD that just smites me when I try to do anything for too long.

...except recently I've managed to work for two months straight on a fanfic and actually complete it and I posted it to Tumblr and was going to post it here too. and another thing that motivated me to make this notice is that I just felt awkward going ahead and posting another Cookie Run fanfic while leaving this one hanging. I just want to give you guys some form of closure and say: uh the St. Pastry Order did it btw it's because of all those special Cake Hound decors (ok by that I mean that one decor that said something about cake hound domestication in the cookie kingdom I think gave me ideas-). Pastry was gonna have a whole arc- but like again it kinda detracts from. y'know the fact this fic was supposed to be about Chili Pepper and Custard III. (I love Pastry and need to write about her more but like yeah this wasn't the place for it-)

uh anyway so. that fanfic I mentioned is probably gonna go up soon after this one (edit: it's up) and it's already completed so you don't have to worry about me losing steam this time :'3 again I've realized I do better at writing when I don't start posting it publicly before it's done. and I'm really sorry I couldn't finish this it just felt awkward to come back to this or to try and continue it when it wasn't planned from the start and I had already kinda set up all that stuff I complained about in like the second chapter. like. again I may remake this if I get the right motivation for it but for now I have a bunch of other fanfic ideas I need to write through as well or at least. attempt to.

I don't even know if anyone here would even WANT to read the new one I'm posting but I did work literally two months on it so I think I have the right to shamelessly plug at least. Don't worry I won't throw a tantrum if y'all don't go there and I'm sorry that I came back after all this time with my only writing being Not This but . again I just wish I planned this fic out more instead of just rushing in like this. but if you did check out my new thing I'd appreciate it since I've improved a lot at writing since this one. (Funniest thing about it is that it also has to do with poisoning like. if I had a nickel-)

so uh. I hope this wraps up enough loose ends. and idk exactly how many people were waiting for this fic to update but like, I'm sorry this probably wasn't what any of y'all wanted to hear. but uh since me remaking this fic is an "eh don't count on it" type of thing y'all can like. if anyone else wants to take this up and remake it for themselves then like you can go ahead even just don't feed it to an AI please those things are like NFTs but for water and no one acknowledges it like don't use my writing to destroy the earth please-

(...also I just realized after all these years of so many discontinued fanfics why is there still only the options of marking a story as ongoing or complete. and the complete option is like very clearly intended for a story that's Finished when you look at the way it's described. like. I think I used to just mark discontinued fics as complete as a means of saying "I'm not writing this anymore; I'm done with this story" but it looks like that's. not what that was for and I feel silly for only just realizing this after all these years :'3 ...tbh I think they should let you mark stories as discontinued like it should be its own category imo-)