Being an orc must really suck. You’re pretty much at the bottom of the social food chain in about every fantasy world. You don’t have many job opportunities, and your fate is more or less to be treated like shit from day one until the day some hero kills you and leaves your rotting corpse for the buzzards without so much as a decent burial (because what paladin is going to stoop to touching unclean filth like you long enough to chuck you in a hole in the ground?).
From birth, you’ve got two strikes against you. If you’re an orc, chances are your parents are orcs, too (and if they’re not orcs, you’re probably in Shadowrun and they threw you out on your ass the second you hit age 12 and had more body hair than most adults). Either way, you don’t really have much of a support system there. In fact, if you dared to aspire to anything higher than “cannon fodder”, your parents probably threw you out of the clan for being uppity.
From there, you have to choose a career and make your way in the world. The bottom line is, if you’re an orc, you really don’t have much in the way of career choices. You can either be a berserker thug in a pillaging army, or you can go to work as a lackey for some evil wizard (or perhaps as a thug in said wizard’s army of evil – same song, different tune, really). Oh, there might be the occasional opening for a chaos mage or the like, but chances are you don’t have the aptitude for that – you never managed to pass Advanced Pillaging. Despite all the lawsuits filed on your behalf by the ACLU and the Orc Action Front (O.A.F.), the glass ceiling for your kind is still pretty low. Your fate, most likely, is to die ignominiously while futilely attempting to stop the hero from reaching his goal. Accepting your situation is the first step toward changing it.
Changing it, however, may be a problem. Anything that’s a step up from “thug” or “peon” may be just a little difficult to manage. Even being a professional wrestler requires acting ability that you don’t have.
So what’s an orc to do? There’s always politics, for one thing. In politics, being crude is called “quaint” and having poor hygiene means you’re a “man of the people” (whatever that is – it could possibly be a reference to cannibalism). If you clean up good and put on a suit and tie, there might just be a place for you on Capitol Hill (or whatever your world’s nearest equivalent may be).
Just stay away from wizardry schools. That Potter kid just can’t take a joke.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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