Fic: Soup Duct (PG)
Title: Soup Duct
Author: Chriss Corkscrew
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2018
Written for saywhat-now for the Twenty Years of Dwarf Ficathon.
Characters you want: Rimmer/Lister, Rimmer, Lister.
A brief prompt OR three things you want: Funny, light and umm... snarky.
Two things you don't want: Heavy, heavy angst. No ta. I don't do Kriss very well.
Maximum rating you'd prefer: Teen-ish
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters and am not making any money from this fic, so stop going on about it! Acknowledgements to Grant Naylor for using a bit of their dialogue and a lot of their characters.
Dedicated to Fia for arranging this swinging fic-fest and bringing back some great memories!
Setting: The night after the evening before. Set during the Last Day (Series 3) between Kryten's going away party and the hangover from hell.
"Dah dah duh DAAAH. Duh, dah, DAAAH," Lister sang the Indiana Jones theme tune as he crawled through the vent. "Dah, dah, dah, DAAAH, duh, dah, dah, dah, DAH!"
"Shut. Up." Rimmer spat.
"Dah dah dah DAAAH. Duh dah DAAAH!"
"Shut. Up!"
"Duh, duh DAH DUH, duh DAH DUH, duh DAH DUH, duh DAH DUH, duh DAH DUH duh duh."
"Shut up you goit! This is serious."
"This is a laugh, man. I feel just like Carlton Durance, the definitive Indiana Jones. The albino midget with the whip. Smeggin' awesome. It's a classic."
"This isn't pleasure, Listy, this is work." Rimmer brandished the holographic 14b he'd had Holly create for him and waggled it threateningly.
"We haven't been chicken soup operatives for years!" Lister protested.
"It's our sacred duty as technicians, Lister."
"Actually, Rimmer," Lister pointed out, "our sacred duty is to go up there and remove Kryten's head from the vending machine before he wakes up. It's his last day, man! Tomorrow they're gonna switch him off. Would you like to spend your last day extracting your own head from a vending machine?"
"But that is tomorrow, Lister. Today we are men of action, of purpose."
"The vending machine isn't working." Lister protested, "so smeggin' what. We ordered chicken soup to lubricate Kryten's head enough to remove it from the delivery slot, it didn't deliver and suddenly we're here."
"The machine said..."
"The machine said you were a goit."
"After that!"
"It also said you were a smeghead."
"After th-."
"And a mummy's boy."
"Aft-."
"And that you couldn't tell a 14b from a 14c."
"Now that's unfair!" Rimmer stuck out his chin obstinately and his light bee skittered as it made contact with the vent. "I've been operating a 14b for over a decade of faultless service. I have medals."
"Yeah. Five years long service, ten years long service and that replica Iron Cross you got for buying two gallons of petrol at a Jupexo fillin' station on Io," Lister reeled off.
"That's not important. The smegging vending machine can't deliver chicken soup. It's bad. It's a problem. It's down to Rimmer's ace unit, Z Shift to fix that problem. And according to that upstart of a vending machine, the problem is in the ducts."
"I should be asleep with me face in a kebab." Lister moaned.
"Not whilst there are vents to unblock."
"And what about Kryten?"
"You don't think he'd like things to be tidy before he died?"
"I don't want him to die, Captain Emerald."
"But it's his purpose. Born, clean, die. He's already gone way beyond his parameters. With a blocked nozzle happening on his watch, how is he going to earn his place in Silicon Heaven?"
"The great Dixon's in the sky," Lister scowled. "You really are a piece of work."
They crawled forward slowly. Soup travelled a long way in this place. They'd been going for 15 minutes already. Suddenly, "what the smeg!" Lister exclaimed.
"What is it?"
"You don't want to know.”
"What is it?"
"You'd never smeggin' believe it."
"Lister! If you don't tell me, I'll get Holly to create me a holographic pad and a holographic pencil and I'll write it down. You'll be on report, Miladdo. And then I don't hold out much chance of you ever being elevated above Third Technician, much less Space Bum."
Lister rolled his eyes, turned around and sucked at his teeth, tradesman-style, "Found your problem, guv," he said chirpily, “more than me job's worth to fix though. It's an act of God."
"Act of God?" Rimmer shuffled forward. "What the smeg are you blithering on about?"
He squeezed past Lister and saw, "it's cats! It's bloody cats!"
"Are you talking about Cloister's noble and ancient people?"
"No you goit. I'm talking about two fossilised cat skeletons that clearly fought each other to death over that," Rimmer pointed to an ancient can of hairspray. "Hardly a noble endeavour."
Lister stared with interested. "I think that one's got his skull stuck in the chicken soup pipe," he gestured. "So every time I've gotten bevvied up and ordered chicken soup as a joke for the past three years, it's all gotten bunged up behind his head."
Rimmer rolled his eyes, "And it never occurred to you to report said problem to someone who could deal with it."
"It never occurred to me not to be grateful that I didn't have to drink the soup." Lister shrugged and clambered over the two skeletons, popping the skull from the pipe. Pretending to dodge, he wielded it like a basketball and shot the skull right through Rimmer's head. "Score!" he shouted and then spun around. "What the-?"
A tsunami of chicken soup cascaded into the vent. One moment it was up to his ankles and the next to his knees. "Let's get the smeg out of here, man," Lister said, but the automatic vents had detected the spillage and with a blaring sound of klaxons they closed, the relentless grey steel cutting them off from escape. Not even Rimmer's light bee could pass by them.
"It's up to me waist now!" Lister panicked.
"Well what about me!" Rimmer said as his image flickered. "If that stuff gets into my light bee I'll be souped to death."
"You're already dead. I'll be souped to death. You'll just be souped."
The soup surged up around their chests.
"I can't believe I'm gonna die drowned in chicken soup, man." Lister moaned, "Holly! Holly!"
"She can't hear us down here." Rimmer moaned, "no one can. I'm going to die. AGAIN! Trapped in a vent with a man who was so lax in his duties to chicken soup maintenance that he allowed a back up of several hundred liquid tonnes of soup to build up in the pipe. Kryten will be dead upstairs by tomorrow; Holly's just vacant upstairs and then the universe will be left to that mangy moggy, whose ancestors have just caused our death."
"Wasn't in me job description to proclaim a holy law against jamming yer skull in the pipework, man," Lister protested, "I didn't know that bein' God would be such a responsibility."
"Well just so you know, God," Rimmer spat. "I'm not talking to you."
And now death was imminent...
"It's up to me neck, man," Lister gulped as a cat skull floated past, the empty sockets adorned with the coolest of shades.
"Can't you drink it," Rimmer flared his nostrils where he stood and wondered how manly his light bee would appear in the morning; a battered circlet of metal covered in the pus-yellow slime of JMC standard chicken soup mix.
"I'll try," Lister took a gulp. "Bleurgh!" he spat it out. "That's nasty, man."
"This from the Scouser who once vindalooed my pillow."
"It was a dare, man. And it wasn't bad with that day-glo Indian sauce that no one knows what it is."
"Drink man, drink." Rimmer ordered. "Come on. Mouth open, slurp soup, swallow and wince. Come on! Be your own hero."
"Be me own hero?" Lister gagged on a sliver of chicken. "You know where you can stuff that poxy American motivational crap."
"How about into the pipe to bung it up?" Rimmer suggested, "No? Well then drink dammit. My life depends on this."
"Your life. Your life?" Lister retorted. "What about my life?"
Rimmer tutted and shook his head ruefully. "My Phrenologist warned me about this."
"Phrenologist? You don't believe in that. It's totally Mickey Mouse, man!"
Rimmer ignored him. "My reading showed I would spend my life beleaguered by the selfishness of others," he said. "My cranium is that of a general. Of a leader of men, but my bumps, ah! My bumps tell a different story. That of a man undermined by those who knew him; ruined by the self-serving actions of those who profess themselves to be better than him."
"You paid some tosser in a silk cravat to rub your head and tell you that it's not your fault you're a failure of epic proportions?"
"It was very revealing. He told me, for example, that my soul mate would be blessed with a flat head to offset my soaring peaks of leadership. His calliper had never been so extended, he said."
"Well I hope you and Kryten will be very happy, mate."
Rimmer spluttered. "It's a serious science!" His image flickered as the soup dripped into his light bee. "It showed me to be a natural soldier, a great lover..."
"...The sort of bloke who likes to have his head massaged by other blokes," Listen continued, "and what about my head?" Lister said. "What about that?"
"It's shaped like an old spud." Rimmer dismissed.
"And what does that mean?" Lister demanded, "that I'd made good chips?"
"It means that you're getting us drowned in chicken soup."
"What would you have picked? Gazpacho? Look it's not my fault man. I wasn't built for this. I was abandoned." The soup closed over Lister's trembling chin as his alcohol-raddled brain remembered the shameful admission he'd made during the maudlin stage of Kryten's party.
"Who was your mum? Lady Bracknell?" Rimmer scoffed. "A handbaaaaag!"
"Rimmer, for smeg's sake! I'm drowning! This is possibly the last moment of my life and you're driving me nuts!" There was another surge of soup, “you always drive me nuts," he said, strangely sentimental, and then the soup encompassed Lister's mouth and nose. Bubbles began to stream thickly to the glutinous surface as he began to drown.
"Lister! Don't die. Don't die, you goit! You space bum! You Rasta wastrel! You horrible excuse for the last human being in the universe... I..." Rimmer shouted panicked as the soup began to corrode the wires within his light bee and his image flickered violently, "...I need you."
It was the end... It was the end... And so many things had been left unsaid.
..."Lock and Load," Kryten's voice boomed out as the cat loaded slices of bread into Talkie Toaster and two perfect pieces of browned toast arced over the heads of Rimmer and Lister and splashed into the soup.
"Oncoming!" the Cat shouted as he lobbed bread rolls and baguettes into the lake.
"Wotcha," Holly drove forward her mobile monitor and rolled a cascade of bread sticks into the great soup lake.
Then Kryten dunked his vacuum hose into the soup and with a great 'schluuuurp' sound, he began to suck up vast quantities of soup and the level began to drop.
"We're saved! We're saved!" Rimmer cried as Lister lifted his head from the glutinous lake and gulped great lungs of air.
Kryten looked at him with the smuggest of smiles. "How do you think I'd get to Silicon Heaven if I left a soup stain behind me the size of Lake Como? Not on my watch!" Kryten saluted and sucked up another gallon of soup whilst Marilyn Monroe droid lumbered in and lifted Lister out of the soup and clear over her head.
Lister shook his head at the hardheadedness of the droid and tried not to be too grateful. It offended his religious sensibilities. Thanks to Kryten's master-servant complex and his religious convictions, he and Rimmer were saved. And Rimmer would be so smug too. He'd pointed out that Kryten could be relied upon to fulfil his purpose to clean.
Rimmer.
Rimmer?
What did he say just now?
"A handbag!" Lister repeated slowly and then, struggling with the vice-like grip of Marilyn Monroe, he shouted, "I am gonna kill him!" Every sentimental feeling he had for Rimmer instantly evaporated. Pointing at Rimmer he threatened, "you are gonna get some severe phrenology of the light bee when I get hold of you..."
* * * * *
"Oh... oh my head." Kryten groaned as the reality of the morning dawned on his hungover mechanoid brain and he woke up. "What happened to me? Damage control report:
Dehydration level: 45%
Recall of previous evening: 2%
Embarrassment factor: 91%
Advised repair schedule: reboot start-up disk, offline for 36 hours and replace head. And... does anyone remember why there are croutons wedged in my groinal socket?"
The End (thankfully).
Author: Chriss Corkscrew
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2018
Written for saywhat-now for the Twenty Years of Dwarf Ficathon.
Characters you want: Rimmer/Lister, Rimmer, Lister.
A brief prompt OR three things you want: Funny, light and umm... snarky.
Two things you don't want: Heavy, heavy angst. No ta. I don't do Kriss very well.
Maximum rating you'd prefer: Teen-ish
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters and am not making any money from this fic, so stop going on about it! Acknowledgements to Grant Naylor for using a bit of their dialogue and a lot of their characters.
Dedicated to Fia for arranging this swinging fic-fest and bringing back some great memories!
Setting: The night after the evening before. Set during the Last Day (Series 3) between Kryten's going away party and the hangover from hell.
"Dah dah duh DAAAH. Duh, dah, DAAAH," Lister sang the Indiana Jones theme tune as he crawled through the vent. "Dah, dah, dah, DAAAH, duh, dah, dah, dah, DAH!"
"Shut. Up." Rimmer spat.
"Dah dah dah DAAAH. Duh dah DAAAH!"
"Shut. Up!"
"Duh, duh DAH DUH, duh DAH DUH, duh DAH DUH, duh DAH DUH, duh DAH DUH duh duh."
"Shut up you goit! This is serious."
"This is a laugh, man. I feel just like Carlton Durance, the definitive Indiana Jones. The albino midget with the whip. Smeggin' awesome. It's a classic."
"This isn't pleasure, Listy, this is work." Rimmer brandished the holographic 14b he'd had Holly create for him and waggled it threateningly.
"We haven't been chicken soup operatives for years!" Lister protested.
"It's our sacred duty as technicians, Lister."
"Actually, Rimmer," Lister pointed out, "our sacred duty is to go up there and remove Kryten's head from the vending machine before he wakes up. It's his last day, man! Tomorrow they're gonna switch him off. Would you like to spend your last day extracting your own head from a vending machine?"
"But that is tomorrow, Lister. Today we are men of action, of purpose."
"The vending machine isn't working." Lister protested, "so smeggin' what. We ordered chicken soup to lubricate Kryten's head enough to remove it from the delivery slot, it didn't deliver and suddenly we're here."
"The machine said..."
"The machine said you were a goit."
"After that!"
"It also said you were a smeghead."
"After th-."
"And a mummy's boy."
"Aft-."
"And that you couldn't tell a 14b from a 14c."
"Now that's unfair!" Rimmer stuck out his chin obstinately and his light bee skittered as it made contact with the vent. "I've been operating a 14b for over a decade of faultless service. I have medals."
"Yeah. Five years long service, ten years long service and that replica Iron Cross you got for buying two gallons of petrol at a Jupexo fillin' station on Io," Lister reeled off.
"That's not important. The smegging vending machine can't deliver chicken soup. It's bad. It's a problem. It's down to Rimmer's ace unit, Z Shift to fix that problem. And according to that upstart of a vending machine, the problem is in the ducts."
"I should be asleep with me face in a kebab." Lister moaned.
"Not whilst there are vents to unblock."
"And what about Kryten?"
"You don't think he'd like things to be tidy before he died?"
"I don't want him to die, Captain Emerald."
"But it's his purpose. Born, clean, die. He's already gone way beyond his parameters. With a blocked nozzle happening on his watch, how is he going to earn his place in Silicon Heaven?"
"The great Dixon's in the sky," Lister scowled. "You really are a piece of work."
They crawled forward slowly. Soup travelled a long way in this place. They'd been going for 15 minutes already. Suddenly, "what the smeg!" Lister exclaimed.
"What is it?"
"You don't want to know.”
"What is it?"
"You'd never smeggin' believe it."
"Lister! If you don't tell me, I'll get Holly to create me a holographic pad and a holographic pencil and I'll write it down. You'll be on report, Miladdo. And then I don't hold out much chance of you ever being elevated above Third Technician, much less Space Bum."
Lister rolled his eyes, turned around and sucked at his teeth, tradesman-style, "Found your problem, guv," he said chirpily, “more than me job's worth to fix though. It's an act of God."
"Act of God?" Rimmer shuffled forward. "What the smeg are you blithering on about?"
He squeezed past Lister and saw, "it's cats! It's bloody cats!"
"Are you talking about Cloister's noble and ancient people?"
"No you goit. I'm talking about two fossilised cat skeletons that clearly fought each other to death over that," Rimmer pointed to an ancient can of hairspray. "Hardly a noble endeavour."
Lister stared with interested. "I think that one's got his skull stuck in the chicken soup pipe," he gestured. "So every time I've gotten bevvied up and ordered chicken soup as a joke for the past three years, it's all gotten bunged up behind his head."
Rimmer rolled his eyes, "And it never occurred to you to report said problem to someone who could deal with it."
"It never occurred to me not to be grateful that I didn't have to drink the soup." Lister shrugged and clambered over the two skeletons, popping the skull from the pipe. Pretending to dodge, he wielded it like a basketball and shot the skull right through Rimmer's head. "Score!" he shouted and then spun around. "What the-?"
A tsunami of chicken soup cascaded into the vent. One moment it was up to his ankles and the next to his knees. "Let's get the smeg out of here, man," Lister said, but the automatic vents had detected the spillage and with a blaring sound of klaxons they closed, the relentless grey steel cutting them off from escape. Not even Rimmer's light bee could pass by them.
"It's up to me waist now!" Lister panicked.
"Well what about me!" Rimmer said as his image flickered. "If that stuff gets into my light bee I'll be souped to death."
"You're already dead. I'll be souped to death. You'll just be souped."
The soup surged up around their chests.
"I can't believe I'm gonna die drowned in chicken soup, man." Lister moaned, "Holly! Holly!"
"She can't hear us down here." Rimmer moaned, "no one can. I'm going to die. AGAIN! Trapped in a vent with a man who was so lax in his duties to chicken soup maintenance that he allowed a back up of several hundred liquid tonnes of soup to build up in the pipe. Kryten will be dead upstairs by tomorrow; Holly's just vacant upstairs and then the universe will be left to that mangy moggy, whose ancestors have just caused our death."
"Wasn't in me job description to proclaim a holy law against jamming yer skull in the pipework, man," Lister protested, "I didn't know that bein' God would be such a responsibility."
"Well just so you know, God," Rimmer spat. "I'm not talking to you."
And now death was imminent...
"It's up to me neck, man," Lister gulped as a cat skull floated past, the empty sockets adorned with the coolest of shades.
"Can't you drink it," Rimmer flared his nostrils where he stood and wondered how manly his light bee would appear in the morning; a battered circlet of metal covered in the pus-yellow slime of JMC standard chicken soup mix.
"I'll try," Lister took a gulp. "Bleurgh!" he spat it out. "That's nasty, man."
"This from the Scouser who once vindalooed my pillow."
"It was a dare, man. And it wasn't bad with that day-glo Indian sauce that no one knows what it is."
"Drink man, drink." Rimmer ordered. "Come on. Mouth open, slurp soup, swallow and wince. Come on! Be your own hero."
"Be me own hero?" Lister gagged on a sliver of chicken. "You know where you can stuff that poxy American motivational crap."
"How about into the pipe to bung it up?" Rimmer suggested, "No? Well then drink dammit. My life depends on this."
"Your life. Your life?" Lister retorted. "What about my life?"
Rimmer tutted and shook his head ruefully. "My Phrenologist warned me about this."
"Phrenologist? You don't believe in that. It's totally Mickey Mouse, man!"
Rimmer ignored him. "My reading showed I would spend my life beleaguered by the selfishness of others," he said. "My cranium is that of a general. Of a leader of men, but my bumps, ah! My bumps tell a different story. That of a man undermined by those who knew him; ruined by the self-serving actions of those who profess themselves to be better than him."
"You paid some tosser in a silk cravat to rub your head and tell you that it's not your fault you're a failure of epic proportions?"
"It was very revealing. He told me, for example, that my soul mate would be blessed with a flat head to offset my soaring peaks of leadership. His calliper had never been so extended, he said."
"Well I hope you and Kryten will be very happy, mate."
Rimmer spluttered. "It's a serious science!" His image flickered as the soup dripped into his light bee. "It showed me to be a natural soldier, a great lover..."
"...The sort of bloke who likes to have his head massaged by other blokes," Listen continued, "and what about my head?" Lister said. "What about that?"
"It's shaped like an old spud." Rimmer dismissed.
"And what does that mean?" Lister demanded, "that I'd made good chips?"
"It means that you're getting us drowned in chicken soup."
"What would you have picked? Gazpacho? Look it's not my fault man. I wasn't built for this. I was abandoned." The soup closed over Lister's trembling chin as his alcohol-raddled brain remembered the shameful admission he'd made during the maudlin stage of Kryten's party.
"Who was your mum? Lady Bracknell?" Rimmer scoffed. "A handbaaaaag!"
"Rimmer, for smeg's sake! I'm drowning! This is possibly the last moment of my life and you're driving me nuts!" There was another surge of soup, “you always drive me nuts," he said, strangely sentimental, and then the soup encompassed Lister's mouth and nose. Bubbles began to stream thickly to the glutinous surface as he began to drown.
"Lister! Don't die. Don't die, you goit! You space bum! You Rasta wastrel! You horrible excuse for the last human being in the universe... I..." Rimmer shouted panicked as the soup began to corrode the wires within his light bee and his image flickered violently, "...I need you."
It was the end... It was the end... And so many things had been left unsaid.
..."Lock and Load," Kryten's voice boomed out as the cat loaded slices of bread into Talkie Toaster and two perfect pieces of browned toast arced over the heads of Rimmer and Lister and splashed into the soup.
"Oncoming!" the Cat shouted as he lobbed bread rolls and baguettes into the lake.
"Wotcha," Holly drove forward her mobile monitor and rolled a cascade of bread sticks into the great soup lake.
Then Kryten dunked his vacuum hose into the soup and with a great 'schluuuurp' sound, he began to suck up vast quantities of soup and the level began to drop.
"We're saved! We're saved!" Rimmer cried as Lister lifted his head from the glutinous lake and gulped great lungs of air.
Kryten looked at him with the smuggest of smiles. "How do you think I'd get to Silicon Heaven if I left a soup stain behind me the size of Lake Como? Not on my watch!" Kryten saluted and sucked up another gallon of soup whilst Marilyn Monroe droid lumbered in and lifted Lister out of the soup and clear over her head.
Lister shook his head at the hardheadedness of the droid and tried not to be too grateful. It offended his religious sensibilities. Thanks to Kryten's master-servant complex and his religious convictions, he and Rimmer were saved. And Rimmer would be so smug too. He'd pointed out that Kryten could be relied upon to fulfil his purpose to clean.
Rimmer.
Rimmer?
What did he say just now?
"A handbag!" Lister repeated slowly and then, struggling with the vice-like grip of Marilyn Monroe, he shouted, "I am gonna kill him!" Every sentimental feeling he had for Rimmer instantly evaporated. Pointing at Rimmer he threatened, "you are gonna get some severe phrenology of the light bee when I get hold of you..."
* * * * *
"Oh... oh my head." Kryten groaned as the reality of the morning dawned on his hungover mechanoid brain and he woke up. "What happened to me? Damage control report:
Dehydration level: 45%
Recall of previous evening: 2%
Embarrassment factor: 91%
Advised repair schedule: reboot start-up disk, offline for 36 hours and replace head. And... does anyone remember why there are croutons wedged in my groinal socket?"
The End (thankfully).