AUTHOR'S NOTES: I'm back! And now I've got this new fanfic. I started writing this back at the end of April, and I finished it a couple of days ago. Once again, I need to remind myself to finish writing quicker, but at least it didn't take as long as my Going Trio fanfic. I decided to upload it now because I heard it was Bill Watterson's birthday today :-)
Like what I tend to say, I'm hoping this storyline hasn't been used before. I haven't read every Calvin and Hobbes comic or fanfiction. I have a feeling I worry too much.
I tell you what though; you have no idea how many times I've had to change the word 'Mum' to 'Mom'. Gargh, all the differences in trans-Atlantic pronunciation are confusing when you're so used to writing 'Mum' / 'Mom' a particular way!
Anyway, as everybody else has said, I don't own any of the Calvin and Hobbes characters; they all belong to Bill Watterson.
Calvin and Hobbes were lingering outside the kitchen. Mom had put tonight's dinner in the oven a few minutes ago, and both the young boy and his tiger buddy were curious…and hungry.
"Mom's finally going to feed us after an hour of starvation," said Calvin.
"What do you think your mom's making for dinner?" asked Hobbes.
"I don't know, but I hope its something good," replied Calvin.
"But do you think that's what we'll get? Something good?"
"No. It's very unlikely. If we're getting something decent, the planets must have aligned."
"Oh."
When Mom left the kitchen, Calvin and Hobbes sneaked in. They shut the door behind them.
"Let's see what junk we're getting tonight," said Calvin. He carefully opened the oven door, and the smell of seafood hit him instantly. "Yep, I was right. It's bad."
Looking inside, Calvin and Hobbes saw what was cooking: a fish feast.
"Ooh boy, that smells delicious!" Hobbes grinned and licked his lips.
"Are you kidding?" said Calvin. "That's poisoned garbage in there! Bleurk! There's no way I'm eating that inedible slimy mush!"
"At least you've got something to eat. There are starving kids all over the world who would do anything to get food, you know."
"Yeah, and if they knew this was what they were being served, they'd happily turn it down. It looks like something that's been rotting in an abandoned warehouse for a million years."
"Well what did you want to have for dinner instead?" asked Hobbes.
"I don't know…maybe a pizza or something. But because Mom's going to torture me with so-called 'fish', I'm just going to protest against her tyranny…unless…"
Calvin's eyes glinted as an idea came to his head. He went over to the freezer and looked inside. After a short moment of searching, he pulled a pizza out. "Jackpot."
"But I thought you mom had bought that as a treat!" Hobbes gasped.
"Stop complaining, or Mom will hear you."
Hobbes glanced over to the door. "You can't sneak a pizza in the oven! You'll get found out! Besides, your Mom will still make you eat some of the fish."
"No she won't – I can do a convincing 'feeling suddenly unwell' act. Now, whereabouts in the oven should I put this?"
Hobbes sighed. "Well, I suppose if you put it on the top shelf, it'd cook okay."
Calvin shoved the pizza on the top shelf and grinned. "Now that's a real delicacy right there."
"But your mom will see the pizza when she comes back to the oven. It won't be cooked before the fish."
Calvin reached up to the buttons on the oven and turned one of them until it couldn't spin any more. The flame inside the oven intensified. "There. Problem solved," Calvin declared as he shut the oven door.
"Ah, I see. I forgot that pizza cooks quicker than fish."
"Exactly, my feline friend! Do you want some of the pizza?"
"Uh…" Hobbes glanced at the oven. "…No thanks. I'd rather stick with the fish feast."
"Good, because I wasn't going to share any of it anyway." They strolled out of the kitchen and upstairs. "What is it with tigers and fish anyway?" Calvin asked. "Why do you like the stuff so much?"
"It's part of our staple diet. Fish is one of our main food sources."
"Oh, like how spiders eat flies?"
"Yeah –"
"So is that why sharks eat people? Are humans their staple diet?"
"Sharks will eat anything."
"And is that why people eat everything as well? Because of the staple diet?"
"Uh…I guess so."
"Well it can't be much of a good diet if you see unhealthy people. It mustn't have worked out right for them."
The two friends went into Calvin's room, and they spent the next few minutes just reading comics together.
Hobbes went to turn to the next page of the comic book, when Calvin stopped him. "Hey! I haven't finished reading this bit yet!"
"You're not normally this slow a reader."
"I know. I just can't concentrate on an empty stomach. All I can think about is that pizza."
"Oh."
There was silence for a moment.
"Do you think the pizza will be cooked yet?" asked Hobbes.
"Nah. Give it another two hours, and that should do."
"Two hours?" Hobbes asked, surprised.
"Yeah. What about it?"
"Don't you think that's a little long to keep something in the oven? Heck, even the fish will be cooked by then."
"But Dad once told me how it would take hours to cook roast dinosaurs when he was my age, and Mom spends hours making dinner, so it'll be the same with other food."
Hobbes frowned. "But there's a big difference between dinosaurs and pizza. I read in one of those books that it usually only took fifteen minutes or so to cook things like pizza."
"You've been reading too much. And notice the word 'usually'. But seriously, it'll be fine."
"If you say so," Hobbes sighed.
They got back to reading the comics again for some more time. But as the minutes passed, Hobbes became aware of a strange smell in the air. And he recognised it too.
"Say," he said to Calvin, "Susie isn't hosting a barbeque right now, is she?"
Meanwhile, at that exact moment, Mom and Dad were sitting the living room downstairs. They were going about their usual boring (in Calvin's eyes) grownup lives of reading newspapers and stuff, when…
"What's that?" Mom said, sniffing the air.
"What's what?" asked Dad.
"Is it just me, or can you smell something burning?" said Mom.
Dad sniffed the air. "It's definitely not you," he said. Mom shot him a funny look. "It smells like tonight's dinner," Dad commented.
"It does, actually…" Mom's face went pale too. The two adults noticed some thick smoke seeping through into the living room from the kitchen. Mom suddenly gasped and jumped up. "THE DINNER'S BURNING!" she yelled as she ran into the kitchen.
"It can't be! You only put it in the oven ten minutes ago!" Dad called through.
"I did!" Mom entered the kitchen and was instantly hit with thick smoke. She stumbled through the smoke to the oven.
Dad got up and followed her, talking all the way. "I knew you shouldn't have used the oven! You should've used a frying pan and stove instead of something unreliable!"
"Oh, stop moaning!" Mom spluttered. She made it to the oven and checked the dials. "Someone's been playing with the oven. It's turned up to maximum power!" She switched the oven off, grabbed a towel and opened the oven door, thwacking through the smoke. "Oh no! All the food's burnt to a crisp…HEY!" she yelled. "WHY THE HECK IS THERE A PIZZA IN THE OVEN?"
Dinner was served a few minutes later.
Calvin sat at the table with his parents, while Hobbes sat under the table beside Calvin's chair. In the centre of the table was the dinner – or what was left of it. What was meant to be a fish feast was now reduced to blackened, smouldered lumps of rock. Calvin's parents were eating the burnt fish, much to their disgust. The knives and forks just snapped the carbonised food like brittle twigs, and the fish crunched horribly when they bit into it and chewed. On Calvin's plate were some charred cuts of fish and the remains of the pizza, which had suffered the same fate as the fish. Calvin prodded the pizza with his knife, and it crumbled under the slight pressure.
"I can't eat this," Calvin moaned, staring in misery at his plate. "It looks like something thrown out from a volcano. It's been in that oven so long it's fossilised!"
"You'll get what you're given, and you've got what you wanted. Just eat what's on your plate and don't talk to us," Dad said quietly.
"Alright! Alright! Sheesh!" Calvin sighed.
Mom didn't even speak. She just stared daggers at Calvin; both parents had sussed out the reason behind the burning of the food and the pizza appearing in the oven. Mom and Dad looked like they were wishing for a hole to swallow their son up.
Calvin turned to Hobbes and asked "What do you think of it then?"
Hobbes finished chewing a piece of the burnt dinner he had taken from Calvin's plate, and swallowed. The look on his face said it all. "It's too crunchy for my liking," he spluttered eventually.
"I can't believe Mom grounded me for this. It was my first go at cooking a pizza, so what did she expect? She should be happy to see that I was trying to learn something new. And it's not like dinner got burnt on purpose."
"Well at least you got the pizza."
"That's beside the point. It's all burnt."
"Urgh! This is why we tigers prefer to eat our prey raw," Hobbes complained as he chewed another burnt piece of fish. "But at least this hasn't ended up like the noodle incident."
"Just shut up and eat," Calvin grumbled.
"Calvin, stop talking under the table," groused Mom.
And they remained in silence for the rest of the meal.
Yes, you could say Calvin had given a whole new meaning to the phrase 'too many cooks spoil the broth'. Or you may not.
I hope that went well. I do have a few other C&H story ideas, and I may get round to writing them if this one goes okay. If you're wanting to know why Hobbes could smell the burning food before Mom and Dad, that's because tigers have some better senses than people.