Psychotic Academy

The kitchens rang out with the sounds of vegetables being chopped, meat being fricaseed, and the occasional sous-chef having a strip torn off him for incorrectly arranging a canape. In the midst of it all, Daniel Jackson unhappily swept the floor. He’d been working in the Starfleet Academy kitchens for eighteen months now, ever since he’d been kicked out of the Academy proper. Matt Stark had found him a job there as partial recompense for having been the most useless counsel for the defence ever.

Jackson supposed he should be grateful to at least have a job. He’d tried for a wide variety of different jobs after the Academy dispensed with him, but, strangely enough, his record seemed to preclude him from all of them. Sweeping the floors in the kitchens was the only job he could now do. However, that didn’t mean he had to like it. For all that it was keeping him in credits, it was quite possibly the most dull thing Jackson had ever done. Just for once, he wished for some sort of change. Possibly he could try again for that security guard’s job he’d seen advertised. Admittedly, they’d turned him down before, but perseverance, and all that…

In the meantime, he had to get these kitchen floors spotless. Originally, he hadn’t bothered, but then Starfleet Health and Safety had come in, and the resulting pest-control operation had cost him several days pay. Apparently, cockroaches weren’t a normal part of kitchen operations. Jackson splashed some more disinfectant down, and prodded the puddle with his mop. He’d been promised a few lessons in the art of being a chef by Stark, but they hadn’t materialised yet.

Jackson looked at the collection of chemicals he’d dug out of the stores cupboard. They were all supposed to be hygiene related, and, in his current state of boredom, Jackson didn’t really care what the labels said about chemical safety. If they were all disinfectants, and he applied them to the floor all at once, then the floor would get really clean. With any luck, he wouldn’t have to clean the floor for a week after this.

Jackson opened a couple of bottles up, and began splashing them onto the floor. Emptying one, but leaving a little of the other, purely for the hell of it, he put the first two bottles back, and opened another couple. In a few minutes, he’d emptied varying quantities of the different chemicals onto the floor, and went to pick his mop up again. Interestingly enough, although Jackson wasn’t to know this, the mixture of chemicals on the floor had never before been produced. Perhaps that explained the purple glow that began to form in the centre of the pool.

 

Stark was having to do something he hated. One of the sous-chefs in his section had made a bit of a blunder, and Stark was having to reprimand him. Stark, an easy-going sort, didn’t enjoy delivering a bollocking, even in deserving cases. Luckily for him, the quivering moron before him had made it easy for him.

“Now, I appreciate that there are many forms of cuisine I’m not familiar with,” Stark commented. “After all, with the Federation as vast as it is, no-one could possibly ever know every meal ever created.” He paused a moment as the sous-chef’s face went blank, not seeing where Stark was going with this. If truth be told, Stark was in danger of forgetting himself.

His memory returned just as his pause was in danger of leaving the realms of threatening and arriving in embarrassment territory. “The thing is, for all that what I’ve said is true, I’m pretty certain that nowhere in this universe is an omelette supposed to do that!” Stark gestured at the offending omelette, which hulked ominously in a pan.

The sous-chef glanced at it, and said, “I didn’t mean for it to end up like that!”

“I should bloody well hope not! We’re going to have phaser it out of the pan, at this rate!” The omelette was the most glutinous, viscous, and downright sticky disaster Stark had ever seen. It weighed in at somewhere over forty kilos and was firmly attached to the pan, apparently having some of the strongest adhesives known to man employed in its construction. Three of them had turned the pan over and shaken it in an effort to free it, to no avail. Similarly, attempts to scrape it out with knives had failed. Stark had called for volunteers to eat their way through it, but there had been a long enough silence to confirm the utter futility of such a request.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“You know, I can believe it.” Stark looked at the omelette for a moment, then gestured to a few of the chefs. “Right, you three, give him a hand dragging it over to the matter reclamation unit. I guess that’ll be the simplest way of getting rid of it. Guess I’ll just have to indent for a new pan.”

 

Jackson was clutching his mop, watching the swirls of colour in the puddle with fascination. Added to the purple now was a deep red, and occasional flecks of electric blue sizzled across the hole that was forming in the centre of the now-smoking puddle. Jackson leaned forwards slightly, to stare into the hole. Strange, he thought. By rights, the research labs on the floor below should be visible, but all he could see was sheer blackness. Maybe they’d turned the lights off down there.

Suddenly, the hole expanded a little more, and Jackson felt a tug towards it. The mop began to flex as it was pulled towards the hole. “Uh, Matt…?”

“What?” Stark was trying to put the omelette disaster out of his mind and concentrate on the problems of creating lunch for the Academy faculty.

“I think we might have a problem.” As Jackson spoke, he saw a lettuce suddenly fly off its table and disappear into the hole. “Yeah, we’ve got a problem.” He backed away from the hole, and frantically took hold of the nearest solid object, as the hole grew a little more and the gravitational forces around it increased.

“What the hell is that?” Stark asked, wondering why Jackson was clutching onto a stove like that. Particularly when it was lit.

Seemingly unaware of the pain of his fingers, which by now were smouldering gently, Jackson said, “I dunno. Could be floor-rot, could be a subspace rip in the space-time continuum, there’s just no way of knowing.”

“Well, I have been meaning to get these surfaces changed,” Stark mused. “I suppose we could have a structural failure…”

The hole grew a little more, and Stark suddenly felt himself get tugged towards it. “On the other hand, your subspace rip theory has possibilities…”

Other members of the kitchen staff were wandering over, trying to find out what all the fuss was about. Stark, whose feet were starting to slide towards the hole despite his best efforts to stop them, called out, “Stay back! There’s something bloody odd happening here!”

The chefs abruptly stopped wandering, and took cover behind whatever solid objects they could find. Stark forced himself far enough away from the hole to grab hold of a fridge, and began to consider his options.

Meanwhile, Jackson, who had finally noticed that the actually rather pleasant smell of cooking meat was in fact coming from him, had shifted his grip to something a little less flammable, and was trying to put his fingers out by blowing on them. Currently, this was only having the effect of increasing the flames. In between puffs, Jackson said, “I wonder how this happened?”

That piece of scientific curiosity helped focus Stark’s thoughts wonderfully. “Bollocks to how it happened, I want to know how to stop it!” He looked at the hole, and an idea was born.

 

The sous-chef who earlier had felt the wrath of his chief was bracing himself against an oven door. In truth, he was actually rather glad of this emergency, as it meant that Stark had at least forgotten about him. The boss’s next words, then, were to come as a shock. “Right! Who was the moron with the omelette?!”

“Uh, me sir,” the sous-chef replied.

“Good! Do you think you could perpetrate another one? A really really big one?”

“Sir?”

“I’m sorry, am I not making myself clear? I want you to create another gastronomic catastrophe like the previous disaster currently ruining one of my finest pans! And this time, I’ll help you!”

Stark struggled away from the hole, leaving Jackson trying to maintain his grip with one hand whilst the other was jammed into a tureen full of bouillebaisse, from which smoke was now rising. Jackson’s eyes were watering, and occasional high-pitched squeaks were escaping from between his compressed lips, but at least he now had one set of fingers extinguished. His feet were now trailing out behind him, the gravitational pull from the hole strong enough to counteract Earth’s. Very carefully, Jackson extracted his now soggy hand, and dried it on his trousers. He then gripped the handle he was clinging on to with both hands, before extending the burning hand towards the bouillebaisse. As he struggled, he tried to hum a merry tune, just to keep his spirits up. Unfortunately, the pain meant that he kept jumping octaves and the tune was massacred.

Far enough away from the hole that the effects were minimal, Stark and a group of chefs clustered round the largest shallow pan that they could find. Stark eyed the sous-chef warily, and said, “Right. You know how it worked. What were the ingredients?”

“Erm, eggs. Lots of eggs. And potatoes. And an onion. And…”

“That’s a good enough starting place.” Stark looked around at his team.. “You! Start cracking eggs. You, get some potatoes cooking. Boiled, I take it?” He asked the sous-chef.

“Yes, sir.”

“Lots of hot water, then, and get a move on!”

Stark’s team rushed about the kitchen, exhausting all their stocks in an effort to recreate the killer omelette on a much larger scale. Meanwhile, Jackson was slowly making his way around the cooker he was holding on to, in an effort to reach safe ground. The pain in his hands had fully kicked in now, making it harder and harder to keep an adequate grip. The constant pull of the hole, however, reminded him of the importance of hanging on. That and the fact his feet were no longer in contact with the ground.

One sous-chef was busy prodding a potato with a knife when Stark gave him an evil look. “We’re not making cuisine here, we’re trying to repair a hole in the space-time continuum! Stop weakening the ingredients!”

“Er, sorry, sir.”

“Now get those damn potatoes into this pan!” The eggs had been whisked, the onion fried, and a touch of green pepper thrown in for luck. Now they had to put the potatoes in, and start cooking the omelette. An entire range of hotpoints on a cooker had been lit up for the task, and already the heat was palpable. A lone metal spoon, left hanging above the cooker, was slowly melting and stretching out of shape in a Picasso-like manner that probably could have been a prize exhibit at any art gallery had anyone had the time to save it. As it was, the spoon dribbled onto the cooker, and where its liquid remains bubbled and smoked before the pan was slammed down on top of them.

“Any other ingredients?”

“Erm, cayenne pepper, paprika, a spot of oregano…”

“Christ, what were you trying to do? Kill us all?” Stark asked, before upending a bottle of cayenne pepper into the omelette, which was bubbling and making ominous ‘gloop’ noises. Turning away to sneeze violently for a few seconds, Stark forced himself to look back and toss in the other herbs and spices. Giving them a perfunctory stir, Stark let the omelette cook through slowly. “Fire up that oven! We’ll need to brown the top! You, grate some cheese onto it!” When the sous-chef in question balked, Stark bawled, “Grate, man! Grate like you’ve never grated before!”

Thirty seconds later the chef was down to his knuckles and the omelette had a thick layer of grated cheese on top of it.

“Are we up to temperature yet?!” Stark yelled.

“Yup!” It took seven of them to carry the pan across to the oven, which could barely contain the gargantuan mass. Stark noted that in future he should check the relative sizes of pans to ovens before ordering supplies from a catalogue.

 

Jackson, meanwhile, had reached a place of relative safety. He was now sheltered behind the cooker he’d he’d been clinging on to, but had just noticed that the floor-mounted cooker was starting to creak and groan, not to mention buckle. He judged he had a couple of minutes before the cooker ripped off it’s moorings and disappeared into the rupture. “I really hope you have a plan!” he shouted at Stark.

“Don’t worry!” Stark shouted back. “Rescue is on it’s way!”

“Good! Soon would be nice!”

“This has to be just right, well, just wrong! Give me a minute!”

Stark was only giving the omelette preparation half of his thoughts at the moment. The rest of his concentration was focussed on exactly how he was going to get his omelette over the hole. His eyes lit on a length of cord Jackson had been using to cordon off areas he had been cleaning. Stark grabbed the cord, and, shouldering minions out of the way, tied one end securely to the panhandle.

“It’s browning nicely, sir!”

“Good! We mustn’t let it get too dry. We need it nice and sticky!”

Stark and his team manfully heaved the pan out of the oven, to discover that the omeltte now overlapped the pan by several feet. “Dump it on the floor!” Stark cried. “We’ll let gravity do the rest!”
Stark and the chefs slowly paid out the cord, controlling the pan’s increasing speed as the rupture sucked it in.

As the omelette passed Jackson, his eyes bulged and he cried, “This is your idea of a rescue?”

“Trust me!” Stark called back.

The cooker chose that moment to wrench itself away from the floor, and Jackson threw himself desperately at the next available object, which in this case proved to be a shelving unit. The rupture fluxed again, and the gravitational pull became inconveniently stronger. Objects on the shelves began to fly towards the rupture, which was fine as long as they were spoons and spatulas, but Jackson couldn’t help but nervously eye the block of knives that was starting to shift.

The omelette was a few metres from the hole when Stark screamed, “Let go!” The chefs, most of whom now have rope burns, let go thankfully. The omelette accelerated into the hole.

Jackson heard the whirr of blades as the knives shot over his head. Whimpering involuntarily, he ducked and held on for dear life.

The pan dipped into the rupture and promptly disappeared from our reality. The omelette, by now a bubbling monstrosity measuring several metres in diameter, slid over the hole, dipped in the middle as the intense gravitational forces caught it… and stuck fast.

The gravitational forces abruptly died away, and everyone was thrown to the floor as the forces they were struggling against were no longer there.

“Bloody hell,” Stark commented, “What say we evacuate?”

 

Some time later, in another room, they watched on monitors as personnel, wearing gravity boots turned up to high, gingerly entered the kitchen to secure it.

Jackson had had his burns treated, and was only grumbling occasionally now. Stark was chatting to a science officer who had been drafted in to figure out what the hell had happened.

“Yeah, sounds like your disinfectants reacted poorly with one of the experiments in the research labs downstairs. Who’d have thought?” the scientist commented.

“Took me by surprise,” Stark replied.

“At least it wasn’t too dangerous. No official punishments on this one,” the scientist added, with a wry smile.

“Not exactly a Prime Directive violation,” Stark chuckled.

 

It may have interested Stark to know that he was completely wrong on that last point.

 

Several dimensions away, the inhabitants Zzrglb@#! watched in no little surprise as a mysterious green object appeared from nowhere, bounced a couple of times, then settled to a halt in front of them. The spontaneous hail of cooking implements was just as unusual, but by that time their attention was occupied with the lettuce.

After many months of study, the by-now mouldy lettuce was determined to be some form of prophetic orb from the Gods, and venerated accordingly. The inevitable religious wars took their toll of the planet’s population, and, once the dust had settled and the survivors emerged from their blast shelters, later scholars were to agree that the mysterious sphere was the worst thing ever to happen to their civilisation.

Stark and Jackson never knew.