Waiter!
by Gumnut
26 Jun 2002
He nudged it with his fork.
He could have sworn it had moved. He chanced a look at the others around the table. They all seemed to be behaving normally. Rygel had his face almost buried in his bowl. Chiana was nimbly spooning broth into her mouth between conversation with D'Argo and Aeryn. Zhaan looked like she was saying grace, but that was nothing unusual.
He nudged it again. Still no movement. It was half buried in a creamy sauce-broth. Chiana had been extolling the broth's virtues for the last several arns. Then again that didn't mean much since she was the cook.
'This'll fix it', he thought. He made to stick his fork into it, only to have the fork slip and fling the unidentified ingredient directly, splat, into D'Argo's left eye.
"Crichton, what the frell are you doing?"
"Sorry, Big D, er…accident." He moved to wipe the offending morsel, but the glare exuding from D'Argo's other eye stalled him. "Would you like to borrow my napkin?"
The cloth was snatched from his hand as D'Argo reached to wipe his eye. At that moment, the 'ingredient' sprouted legs and crawled up D'Argo's forehead. It made a noise somewhere between a buzz and an offended squeak, before launching itself into the air and flying out of the room.
"What the hell was that!"
"It looked like a Leviathan Beetle-Fly. What was it doing in your soup?" Aeryn's look of exasperation had its usual effect of making him feel totally stupid.
"How the hell should I know? I've never seen one in my life."
There was a giggle from Chiana. "You were going to eat it, weren't you. Hah, you're fahrbot, Crichton."
He spent the rest of the meal hunkered over his bowl vainly trying to decide whether it had been edible before the fly or not. Probably not, but then again not much out here was. He obviously didn't know which was which anyhow.
The soup ended up in the trash.
xxxxx
FIN