It was a dark and stormy night. Rain was falling in heavy, unrelenting sheets as though the storm were a monsoon and not the thunderstorm that it was. The streets of New Earth's first town, Independence (or, affectionately, 'Indy'), ran like small creeks with water that was surrounded by waterfalls created by the rain gutters of the buildings. Lightning hotter than the surface of the sun pierced the sky, very badly hurting any living thing that happened to be in the way and being a nuisance to anyone who, for some bizarre reason or another, decided to practice their scenery photography in the storm. The town's nameless bar, which was famous among the drifter colonies before its re-founding on New Earth for its stock of five hundred varieties of alcohol from various worlds (this was why its New Earth version was affectionately titled, by an entirely meaningless coincidence, "The Indy Five Hundred"), was chock full of folks seeking shelter from the rain that had so suddenly appeared. The storm was growing in intensity, threatening Independence with blackout.
But that's not the object of our concern. The spaceship Valkyrie, where our hero lives, has its own power generators, which are built to withstand the violent and nasty nature of some of the worst solar storms. To the townsfolk of Independence: Neener, neener. As a matter of fact, the only real reason in including the first paragraph was to induce the proper mood for the DARK and MYSTERIOUS nature of this story. As another matter of fact, it isn't even a dark and stormy night. It's a dark and stormy late morning.
In we go to the Valkyrie. Up the gangway, down the hallway to the right, and past a few corners, we come to the galley. Our hero hunched over the object of his attention. It was a small book, roughly pamphlet sized and fifty odd pages long. All of his crewmates, in turn, were hunched over our hero, making the situation very stuffy indeed. They were attempting to figure out what it was the superintelligent being was saying as he read. They were also attempting to read over his shoulder, although he flipped through the pages more or less entirely too fast to be read by someone of average intelligence. Only our hero knew what he was mumbling: he was discussing with himself the discontent that resulted when all of his crewmates took part reading over his shoulder. This was, in fact, his greatest pet peeve.
The tension was unbearable. They had waited for long and painful hours while our hero dug through various similar-looking booklets for the one--which he found a few minutes earlier and was currently flipping through--that they knew had the potential to relieve them of the discomfort that they felt in their tummies. They were very hungry indeed, and the microwave wasn't working. There were other devices in the room that they could have used, but the only one who knew how to use them--Korso--had died a cheesily heroic death a few years previous. Preed might have been able to figure it out, but he was gone. Each of them wondered why no one else knew or had bothered to learn how to operate the equipment (because of this everyone thought that it was everyone else's fault that their tummies hurt), and were convinced that one must be a mechanical guru and a cooking wizard with mystical powers if they wished to operate the devices well enough to produce satisfactory results.
"I'm a big girl, you know," said an annoyed mantrin woman of Sogowan descent, average appearance (according to her species' standards, anyhow) and considerable musculature. She was not the happiest camper when her tummy pained from hunger, and she found great satisfaction in venting it by nagging everyone else and generally just ranting on and on about it. It also took her mind off of the fact that she had not eaten since dinner some seventeen hours ago, and that the source of her nourishment was now inoperational. It also took her mind off of the fact that she had woken up several hours previous and discovered that she had drunk all the remaining coffee the previous morning. This only added to her list of frustrations. The poor girl's day just wasn't going very well, at all. She wanted a hug.
"Yes, we know, Stith," said a fairly attractive human woman of Asian descent with a bizarre hairdo that would have made Princess Leia turn green with envy. It sort of resembled a regular hairdo for a woman (that is, long in back and short in front) turned backwards, shaved completely down the middle so that her face could be seen, and then died a deep pastel lavender in what was now the front. It was very curious looking, indeed. Stith, her friend, had asked her about it before and the only response the Asian woman gave was: Blackberry Kool-Aid. Her tummy hurt, too.
"Yeah. Big girls need food!" Stith complained. She knew that she had explained this fact to the whole lot several dozen times within the past five hours or so. She also realized that her complaining was quite possibly distracting our hero from completing his task, but it seemed to make her empty tummy hurt less because, as said before, it kept her mind off of it.
"For crying out loud, Stith, he's working on it," said a blonde man of average height, appearance, intelligence, and just about everything else. He groaned in his annoyance. His tummy hurt, too, but he was so concerned with appearing macho and physically strong that he didn't feel it.
"My tummy hurts, Cale!" said Stith to the blonde man, holding her aching belly. "I want food." She gave a sad little whimper that would've made a puppy lover burst into tears and sweep her up into their arms to pet her.
"Quieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet! Gune's concentraaaaaaaaaating!" droned a high pitched voice. At this, everyone immedietally fell back into the painful silence. The owner of the voice was a small, green, turtle-like being wearing a pair of unbelievably huge goggles and a lab coat. No one really knew for sure what his species was. Some say he was a Grapoan, some say he was self-made. Korso and Preed, on the other hand, said that he formed out of mold that was growing on a sandwich that Preed left in the Valkyrie's interstellar tapography lab and forgot about, but no one believed it.
This unusual being was our hero. His name was Gune and yes, he was indeed concentrating.
Everyone had agreed that, once the microwave was fixed, Gune would be the first to derive his nourishment from the device as his reward. Then it would all come down to a simple contest of who got to it first, or who was able to hold off the others for a time sufficient enough to obtain their nourishment. They all agreed that it was probably going to be Stith, except for Stith. To Stith, there was no 'probably' about it. Big girls need more food, as she had pointed out so many dozen times earlier. She also promised to buy the others breakfast if she ended up eating it all. This was highly unlikely as with their super-freezing technology they only had to actually buy fresh food once every few months and they had just bought fresh food a few days earlier. Stith pointed this out to them, but they made her promise anyway. This related to their unanimous agreement that Stith would probably be the first to manage to keep the others away from the microwave long enough to derive her nourishment from it.
No one knew when that would be, though. It had taken Gune four and a half hours to find the microwave's user guide, and he had spent the last half hour reading it.
Suddenly, our hero moved. What he got up for, much to everyone else's disappointment, was not to fix the microwave: he had to visit the little boy's room. They were all silent except for the occasional groan from Stith, and eventually she herself picked up the booklet that Gune was reading. She folded over the corner of the page he left off on and started to flip through the pages.
The chief problem with the manual was that it never really gave the reader solutions to any problems. It went something like this: It would have a list of problems in the table of contents--it wouldn't turn on, in this case--and like any other table of contents it would give you a page to go to to try to find the solution. However, when one went to the page it mentioned, it would give a list of symptoms to get more details into the analysis of the problem. If you had this symptom, you went to this page; likewise if you had that symptom, you went to that page. Every page got more and more specific. In other words, it was a dichotymous key, which should have been very easy to follow although it never really seemed to lead anywhere but in circles. The purpose behind this, of course, was to make the device's owner think that the problem was far too complicated for their simple minds. Then they would, if the device was small enough, take it to the closest retailer to be fixed. This would cost an arm and a leg or so. If it was too large then they would call a qualified repair technician, who would cost an extra arm and a leg plus a head or three for the tip. This was a sneaky way for the manufacturer to get more money.
This is perfectly understandable, of course, as most companies have their own nasty and sneaky ways of making extra money. The only problem with this one was all of the retailers were on Old Earth. Old Earth's location was not only very far away, but it was destroyed by the Drej nearly two decades earlier.
"Do we have anything I can just eat raw?" Stith asked with a sigh, putting down the booklet and leaning against the nearest counter. The counter creaked in annoyance. "An apple or something like that?"
"Nope," Akima said. "All of our produce is hyper-frozen and unless you want to wait a few days for it to thaw, you have to put it in the microwave." Stith whimpered sadly at this.
"What about ice cream?" offered Cale. "That's supposed to be eaten frozen." He hoped to get the large female that was Stith to hush long enough for him to come up with a miraculous solution and save the day. He did have technical skills, but this was far beyond his reach. His field of specialty was space ships, not cookware. To be quite honest, he wasn't even sure how a microwave worked.
"Cale, if she tried eating hyper-frozen ice cream she'd die of hypothermia. I happen to be very fond of her," Akima said and finally gave Stith the hug that she wanted. Stith's day instantly improved dramatically.
Several minutes passed. They were beginning to worry about Gune. Perhaps he went into his lab to clear his mind so that the solution would simply come to him? they wondered.
They decided not to worry about him. Gune was far too intelligent to get himself hurt in a simple way. If Gune were hurt, they'd know about it before they saw him or heard the medical alarm because, normally, a deafening and ship-shaking explosion would accompany his injury. The last time he hurt himself was when he was experimenting with a device that he allegedly built in his sleep the night before Cale was brought onto the Valkyrie.
It was a bizarre, small, cone-shaped structure made from gindrogak (which is a form of phlegm hydroxide that is solid at room temperature and is very, very explosive). It seemed to find great delight in floating about the room when one picked it up and generally just not being very cooperative when one tried to work with it, but that's another story entirely. The fact of the matter is this: the device that he allegedly built in his sleep had a button on it, located at the point of the cone. Gune spent months playing with the device, trying to figure out what it did by experiments that never involved actually pushing the button. Finally, about a year after its creation, Cale offered Gune this advice: To find out what the button does, all one has to do it push it. Gune pushed it.
The resulting explosion gave Gune a very nasty headache that kept him up for several nights, gave Cale several broken bones, and completely redecorated the lab with various chemicals and shards of glass and metal arranged in such a way that, by some freak accident, very closely resembled the Mona Lisa.
Stith, Cale and Akima soon started to plan on replacing that section of the wall and selling the one whose mess resembled the Mona Lisa, partly because the original was destroyed with Old Earth and the display of this new version would help encourage the budding of art on New Earth, but mostly because it would help their anorexic wallets gain weight. Unfortunately, Gune (who had no knowledge of the plan and didn't know what the Mona Lisa was) had cleaned up the strikingly beautiful mess before their plan could get off the ground.
This was several years ago. Gune had not so much as gotten a papercut since then and, as far as Akima and Stith could remember, it was the only time he had ever been injured. They didn't worry.
Cale drummed his fingers on the same counter that Stith was leaning on. He was the first to speak. "So where is he?"
"He went to the bathroom," Stith said, lightly squeezing the counter's edge. "He'll be back eventually."
"He's not that big. Maybe he fell in?" Cale asked, partly sincere and partly sarcastic.
"Cale! That's unneccessary," Akima protested and gave him a playful shove, which caused him to stumble into Stith's nearest leg. This caused Stith to grunt in annoyance as his weight caused her to lean against the counter some more, and the counter creaked again in a kind of 'you think you've got problems?' way.
Another awkward silence fell over them. Again, Cale was the one to break it. "Why can't we just order pizza or something?" he asked. They all considered this. Indeed, it was a very logical suggestion, and it would calm their aching tummies while the microwave was being fixed. Naturally, the idea was squashed.
"For breakfast?" Akima asked. She looked at the chronometer, and corrected herself. "Lunch, rather? Well. . .I suppose there's nothing wrong with it. Food is food." She considered this notion a little longer, then shook her head again. "No. Stith can eat an entire large pizza with the works and then some all by herself and still have room for desert, you can eat a whole on by yourself, and I can eat most of one. Gune would probably eat a whole one."
Cale nodded slowly. He was eager to see his hope realized. Again, it was squashed, this time by Stith.
"Cale, there aren't any pizza places here, yet! We have to make our own! And to make our own we have to have the microwave!" Stith sighed, swung an arm down to punch the drawer underneath the counter. After ten or so minutes of still more silence, Stith spoke up. "I'm going to go check on him," she said, and started out of the galley and into the hallway, toward the bathroom.
Still more silence. Someone's stomach rumbled. After yet another ten or so minutes, Stith returned to the galley, followed by Gune, who was carrying a flashlight. Stith leaned against her counter again, which creaked in that 'not again' sort of way, and Gune stood in front of the whole lot. "Gune figured it out," Stith said, and sighed. It was a very depressed sigh, and Cale and Akima wondered why Stith was sad. She should've been happy, because now she would be able to nourish herself and her hours of complaining would finally be rewarded. "I don't think you're going to like it."
Akima sighed. "It's damaged beyond repair, isn't it?" Another sigh. "Let me guess. Some freak magnetic storm scrambled its system and rendered it useless." All eyes landed on her, and all eyes were giving her a very strange look that otherwise could only be prompted by a certain famous painting of melting pocket watches. Akima shrugged. "Or something wierd like that."
"No, no, Akima," said Gune, shaking his head quickly. "It is very simple. It can be fixed in less than a second." He smiled proudly. All eyes now turned to him, wide and expectant. Gune stepped over to the microwave, stooped below it, and opened the cupboard that was below it. It was very dark in the cupboard, and when Gune turned on the flashlight, several long cords that apparently came from the other machines in the kitchen could be seen. They were all black, although they were also all labeled so as to avoid confusion. Again to avoid confusion, they were all neatly bound together by string in several places. What Gune did could not be seen because his wide body took up the entire door, but as he said it did take less than a second. The lights on the microwave flashed on, and the room echoed with the cheers of his friends.
Gune then backed up, turned off his flashlight, closed the cupboard and stood up. Then he rummaged through one of the containers of hyper-frozen food to select what it was he would nourish himself with. Stith was literally bouncing on her feet in eagerness; Cale and Akima had that twinkle in their eyes that otherwise is only seen on young children on Christmas day.
After they had all eaten, there was one question that haunted their minds: what was it that Gune did? How could a problem seem so drastic and yet be so mind boggingly simple? It was Akima that asked the question. As Stith had predicted, she didn't like the answer. The answer was a mental kick, reminding her of her ignorance when faced with technical emergencies. The thing that they should've done in the first place before troubling Gune and having to wait through the long, painfull hours. What was especially upsetting was that none of them had bothered to check it, and Gune didn't bother to ask because he assumed that they did.
He plugged in the microwave.