King Cake, by boochicken
Title: King Cake [a late entry for the sga_flashfic cake or death challenge. Someday, I will finish something before the deadline.]
Pairing: Gen
Rating: G. Not even any dirty words in this one.
Words: ~ 2000
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended. Stargate Atlantis is the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. This was written for fun, definitely not for profit.
"Is it citrus?" Rodney asked. One of the burly guards "escorting" him forward shoved him in the back with the butt of his gun. "Right, it was just a question."
"That's what got us into this in the first place," Sheppard said tightly, stumbling as his own escort pulled him along the uneven ground.
Rodney snorted. "Then it's too bad we're on a mission of scientific inquiry. And if people weren't so damn touchy -- "
"About their deeply-held religious beliefs?" Sheppard asked, faux-innocent.
"About scientific absurdities, yes -- " The guard shoved Rodney again. "Right, shutting up now."
"Now he shuts up?" Sheppard muttered sotto voce.
"Sarcasm is so helpful, Colonel," Rodney snapped, and jerked back into the unwilling embrace of his guards, away from the chasm that had opened up practically at his feet.
Sheppard eyed the precipice with resigned curiosity. "There had better be a really big cake at the bottom of this cliff."
Rodney turned to his guards. "You do realize how ridiculous this is, right?" he demanded, waving his hands for emphasis.
His guards -- chosen for their muscle-to-brain-ratio, he noted, as such guards usually were -- looked at each other and shrugged their enormous shoulders. Then they stepped forward as one and shoved. Rodney didn't even have time to shout before he tipped over the edge.
***
Even before he opened his eyes, Rodney had an overwhelming sense of yellow -- a lurid, glowing, nausea-inducing yellow. He took a quick survey and determined that he was lying on his back, on something soft yet firm. It was rather like his prescription mattress, actually, although his mattress didn't usually smell so strongly of vanilla. He was sweating, even though the damn Felinians had wrestled him out of his jacket and vest; the air was hot and thick with humidity, like Florida in August. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and stared up at a narrow strip of the purplish sky. From this vantage point it was framed on all sides by sheer reddish cliffs. They seemed to be looming inwards, which was probably a good thing; he didn't think he'd bounced off anything on his way down. The same spongy yellow stuff that was beneath him was splashed halfway up the sides of the rock walls, layered like drips of old paint.
He heard a "blurp" somewhere nearby, and turned his head in that direction. A dozen yards away the yellow stuff looked softer, almost liquid. As he watched, a golden-skinned bubble a yard across rose lazily to the surface and burst, releasing a puff of sweet-smelling, yeasty steam to the already moist atmosphere. He took a moment to be grateful that he had landed on relatively solid ground.
He heard a groan behind him and shifted around. His view was mostly obstructed by a wall of sorts, formed out of chunks of the yellow stuff that had sheared away from the cliff walls, but he could just see the toe of a black boot.
"Colonel? Sheppard?"
"That's my name," came the response after a moment. "Excuse me if I don't really feel like talking to you right now."
Rodney shoved himself upright, indignant. "Oh, like this is my fault," he began, then yelped as he sank a few inches into the yellow mire. "What the hell is this?" It was warmer beneath the top crust, and unpleasantly damp.
"It's cake," Sheppard said. "Just like the nice people at the top of that very tall cliff said. Repeatedly."
"That is a scientific impossibility," Rodney protested, scrabbling at the yellow goo with his hands. It coated his fingers like glue, and as it dried it left a powdery residue behind that collected in the creases of his palms. "There is no possible way --"
"There could be a natural spring that gushes cake batter?" The boot apparently belonging to Sheppard twitched. "Or that this cake batter --"
"It is not cake batter --"
"That this alien cake batter," Sheppard continued ruthlessly, "could flow into a series of canyons that get as hot as an oven at night, thanks to the local volcano?"
"I am willing to believe that this, this valley, is filled with some sort of airborne hallucinogen." Rodney started crawling over to Sheppard, trying to distribute his weight as broadly across the ground as possible. "Because then all this would make a tiny fractional bit of sense."
He found Sheppard just on the far side of the yellow wall-thing, lying on his stomach and scooping a hole in the yellow loam with one hand. He was flocked with crumbs of it, cheerful gold dust clinging to his vest, the edges of his empty holster, the laces of his formerly black boots. That, combined with the glare, made him look a bit like an angry bumblebee. "Will you give it a rest, McKay? It's cake. You even ate some of it, back at the Elder's house."
Rodney blinked. "I did?"
"Yes, you did." Sheppard squinted at the shallow hole he'd dug. "The stuff with the berries? And the sausages? It's the Felinian's main food source."
Rodney felt a little sick. "Their main -- oh my God, are they going to eat us?" He had a sudden and terrifying recollection of whichever Narnia book had featured the giant's cookbook, How to Serve Man. He hadn't envisioned his life ending in a shroud of pastry, or at least not like this.
"No, they're not going to eat us." Sheppard grunted in triumph, thrust his arm into the ground up the elbow, and extracted his earpiece from the muck. Sheppard tapped it experimentally and winced when it emitted a dying squawk of electronic feedback. He sighed, and stuck the earpiece in his pants pocket. "Apparently they throw their criminals into a canyon they don't use."
"Well, that's not at all sanitary. Or comforting." Rodney started an inventory of his own pockets. No radio - check. No powerbars - check. No rubber band, paper clip, and watch battery that he could fashion into a radio transmitter, a la McGyver - check. "So what do we do?"
Sheppard squinted up at the darkening sky. "Well, it'll take Ronon and Teyla at least six hours to walk to the 'Gate. And it's hot now -- "
"And it's only going to get hotter, right." Rodney just barely managed not to groan out loud.
***
Sheppard had fallen onto a firmer piece of "ground" than Rodney -- he still couldn't bear to think of it as cake, even if he had eaten something of a remarkably similar yellow back at the Felinian settlement. So walking was easier, although their boots still broke through the crust. Sheppard was walking with a pronounced limp. Rodney tried asking about it a couple of times, but Sheppard just stoically muttered that he was fine. Rodney figured that he couldn't bear to admit that he'd been maimed by a fall onto what was supposedly an enormous baked good.
He tried not to think about baking as he picked his way between fallen yellow boulders, following Sheppard's uncertain path. It was only getting hotter as they walked, even as the sky grew darker. Rodney couldn't think of any reason why a planet might have diurnal volcanic activity, but he wasn't a geologist, and anyway, it seemed to be true. Occasionally the ground would rise gently under them, giving Rodney the unsettling sense that they were walking along the back of an enormous sleeping beast, and feeling it breathe. Once the ground cracked just in front of them, fissures forking at their feet like lightning, and they had to dodge the resulting cloud of steam. Rodney noticed uneasily that in addition to vanilla, the steam now carried definite undertones of burnt toast. Given the way the cliffs loomed oppressively above them, he tried not to think about what toast endured.
When Sheppard stopped, Rodney was exhausted enough that he almost ran into him. "You have no idea where we are," he said flatly, and wished he was surprised when Sheppard shook his head.
"No sun," he said, voice thick and rough, and jerked his head towards the narrow slice of sky above them. "And no landmarks either. So I've just been trying to head for cooler ground."
"I don't have any better ideas," Rodney admitted, and leaned against a handy slab of not-cake. "If it's the surface of the rock that gets hot at night -- "
"Ha!" Sheppard said, but Rodney thought his heart wasn't in it.
"Then we should probably try to get as far away from it as possible," he finished.
Sheppard raised an eyebrow. Like the rest of him, it looked tired. "Meaning?"
Rodney turned and wrestled a watermelon-sized chunk of the not-cake away from the cliff wall. With some effort, he heaved it on top of a nearby boulder. "Meaning, I hope you built a lot of snow forts as a kid."
"Not really," Sheppard said, but he picked up his own piece of not-cake anyway.
Rodney ended up doing most of the work after Sheppard admitted, reluctantly, that his knee had swollen up like a grapefruit. So it was Rodney that chipped rough bricks of the yellow stuff from the cliff sides, and who hauled them over to Sheppard, who tamped them down into a sort of platform.
"You know," Sheppard said thoughtfully, "there are some parallels to fairy tales, here."
"I get to be Hansel," Rodney grunted, shoving at a boulder that reached his sternum. Fortunately the stuff was dense but light; he just hoped it had some insulating properties.
"I was thinking The Princess and the Pea, actually," Sheppard said, kneeling on the platform and mopping at his face. He looked like he'd been dredged in crumbs and was ready for frying, and at that moment Rodney hated everything.
"Then I get to be the pea," Rodney snapped, and Sheppard scowled and gestured to where the boulder ought to go.
They ended up with a rough oblong about eight feet high, just big enough for the two of them to lie down uncomfortably. "One of us will have to keep watch anyway," Rodney commented as he stomped a set of stairs into existence. Sheppard pulled him up the rest of the way, then flopped onto his back, wincing as the movement jarred his knee.
"This is the most ridiculous thing that's ever happened to me."
"I don't know about that," Rodney said, fruitlessly scrubbing his hands together. The yellow stuff just would not come off. "What about that time on MSX-471, with the lizard and the feather boa -- "
"Shut up."
"Fine." Rodney glanced up at the sky, which was so black and starless as to be boring. Something popped and crackled in the distance, and the horizon glowed orange for a moment. Lava cake, he thought. "I wish we had some MREs. Or some powerbars."
Sheppard made an odd, choked sort of noise, and Rodney very nearly started the Heimlich maneuver before he realized that Sheppard was laughing. "What?" he demanded. "What's so funny?"
"Cake," Sheppard wheezed. "We're surrounded by acres, miles of cake. Deadly, evil cake. And you're hungry."
Rodney thought about objecting to Sheppard's illogic, but he could kind of see his point. Kind of. And he was so, so tired, and his head was throbbing from dehydration and caffeine deprivation. He stared up at the blank sky.
"It doesn't make any sense," he said, not looking at Sheppard. "Cake batter is what, flour and sugar and eggs and things? How on earth is that supposed to come from a hole in the ground? It's like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
"I liked the original better," Sheppard said sleepily, and threw an arm over his eyes. "Wake me for second watch?"
"Okay," Rodney said, and waited until he was sure that Sheppard was asleep. Then he broke a piece of not-cake off the edge of their platform and tasted it.
It was, he had to admit, very good.
Author's note: The title was loosely inspired by the New Orleans "king cake," served at Mardi Gras, which has a trinket or trinkets baked inside. Historically speaking, the lucky trinket was a gilded bean or a baby doll, but other figures have apparently become popular. For more than you ever wanted to know about king cake, click here.
Pairing: Gen
Rating: G. Not even any dirty words in this one.
Words: ~ 2000
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended. Stargate Atlantis is the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. This was written for fun, definitely not for profit.
"Is it citrus?" Rodney asked. One of the burly guards "escorting" him forward shoved him in the back with the butt of his gun. "Right, it was just a question."
"That's what got us into this in the first place," Sheppard said tightly, stumbling as his own escort pulled him along the uneven ground.
Rodney snorted. "Then it's too bad we're on a mission of scientific inquiry. And if people weren't so damn touchy -- "
"About their deeply-held religious beliefs?" Sheppard asked, faux-innocent.
"About scientific absurdities, yes -- " The guard shoved Rodney again. "Right, shutting up now."
"Now he shuts up?" Sheppard muttered sotto voce.
"Sarcasm is so helpful, Colonel," Rodney snapped, and jerked back into the unwilling embrace of his guards, away from the chasm that had opened up practically at his feet.
Sheppard eyed the precipice with resigned curiosity. "There had better be a really big cake at the bottom of this cliff."
Rodney turned to his guards. "You do realize how ridiculous this is, right?" he demanded, waving his hands for emphasis.
His guards -- chosen for their muscle-to-brain-ratio, he noted, as such guards usually were -- looked at each other and shrugged their enormous shoulders. Then they stepped forward as one and shoved. Rodney didn't even have time to shout before he tipped over the edge.
***
Even before he opened his eyes, Rodney had an overwhelming sense of yellow -- a lurid, glowing, nausea-inducing yellow. He took a quick survey and determined that he was lying on his back, on something soft yet firm. It was rather like his prescription mattress, actually, although his mattress didn't usually smell so strongly of vanilla. He was sweating, even though the damn Felinians had wrestled him out of his jacket and vest; the air was hot and thick with humidity, like Florida in August. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and stared up at a narrow strip of the purplish sky. From this vantage point it was framed on all sides by sheer reddish cliffs. They seemed to be looming inwards, which was probably a good thing; he didn't think he'd bounced off anything on his way down. The same spongy yellow stuff that was beneath him was splashed halfway up the sides of the rock walls, layered like drips of old paint.
He heard a "blurp" somewhere nearby, and turned his head in that direction. A dozen yards away the yellow stuff looked softer, almost liquid. As he watched, a golden-skinned bubble a yard across rose lazily to the surface and burst, releasing a puff of sweet-smelling, yeasty steam to the already moist atmosphere. He took a moment to be grateful that he had landed on relatively solid ground.
He heard a groan behind him and shifted around. His view was mostly obstructed by a wall of sorts, formed out of chunks of the yellow stuff that had sheared away from the cliff walls, but he could just see the toe of a black boot.
"Colonel? Sheppard?"
"That's my name," came the response after a moment. "Excuse me if I don't really feel like talking to you right now."
Rodney shoved himself upright, indignant. "Oh, like this is my fault," he began, then yelped as he sank a few inches into the yellow mire. "What the hell is this?" It was warmer beneath the top crust, and unpleasantly damp.
"It's cake," Sheppard said. "Just like the nice people at the top of that very tall cliff said. Repeatedly."
"That is a scientific impossibility," Rodney protested, scrabbling at the yellow goo with his hands. It coated his fingers like glue, and as it dried it left a powdery residue behind that collected in the creases of his palms. "There is no possible way --"
"There could be a natural spring that gushes cake batter?" The boot apparently belonging to Sheppard twitched. "Or that this cake batter --"
"It is not cake batter --"
"That this alien cake batter," Sheppard continued ruthlessly, "could flow into a series of canyons that get as hot as an oven at night, thanks to the local volcano?"
"I am willing to believe that this, this valley, is filled with some sort of airborne hallucinogen." Rodney started crawling over to Sheppard, trying to distribute his weight as broadly across the ground as possible. "Because then all this would make a tiny fractional bit of sense."
He found Sheppard just on the far side of the yellow wall-thing, lying on his stomach and scooping a hole in the yellow loam with one hand. He was flocked with crumbs of it, cheerful gold dust clinging to his vest, the edges of his empty holster, the laces of his formerly black boots. That, combined with the glare, made him look a bit like an angry bumblebee. "Will you give it a rest, McKay? It's cake. You even ate some of it, back at the Elder's house."
Rodney blinked. "I did?"
"Yes, you did." Sheppard squinted at the shallow hole he'd dug. "The stuff with the berries? And the sausages? It's the Felinian's main food source."
Rodney felt a little sick. "Their main -- oh my God, are they going to eat us?" He had a sudden and terrifying recollection of whichever Narnia book had featured the giant's cookbook, How to Serve Man. He hadn't envisioned his life ending in a shroud of pastry, or at least not like this.
"No, they're not going to eat us." Sheppard grunted in triumph, thrust his arm into the ground up the elbow, and extracted his earpiece from the muck. Sheppard tapped it experimentally and winced when it emitted a dying squawk of electronic feedback. He sighed, and stuck the earpiece in his pants pocket. "Apparently they throw their criminals into a canyon they don't use."
"Well, that's not at all sanitary. Or comforting." Rodney started an inventory of his own pockets. No radio - check. No powerbars - check. No rubber band, paper clip, and watch battery that he could fashion into a radio transmitter, a la McGyver - check. "So what do we do?"
Sheppard squinted up at the darkening sky. "Well, it'll take Ronon and Teyla at least six hours to walk to the 'Gate. And it's hot now -- "
"And it's only going to get hotter, right." Rodney just barely managed not to groan out loud.
***
Sheppard had fallen onto a firmer piece of "ground" than Rodney -- he still couldn't bear to think of it as cake, even if he had eaten something of a remarkably similar yellow back at the Felinian settlement. So walking was easier, although their boots still broke through the crust. Sheppard was walking with a pronounced limp. Rodney tried asking about it a couple of times, but Sheppard just stoically muttered that he was fine. Rodney figured that he couldn't bear to admit that he'd been maimed by a fall onto what was supposedly an enormous baked good.
He tried not to think about baking as he picked his way between fallen yellow boulders, following Sheppard's uncertain path. It was only getting hotter as they walked, even as the sky grew darker. Rodney couldn't think of any reason why a planet might have diurnal volcanic activity, but he wasn't a geologist, and anyway, it seemed to be true. Occasionally the ground would rise gently under them, giving Rodney the unsettling sense that they were walking along the back of an enormous sleeping beast, and feeling it breathe. Once the ground cracked just in front of them, fissures forking at their feet like lightning, and they had to dodge the resulting cloud of steam. Rodney noticed uneasily that in addition to vanilla, the steam now carried definite undertones of burnt toast. Given the way the cliffs loomed oppressively above them, he tried not to think about what toast endured.
When Sheppard stopped, Rodney was exhausted enough that he almost ran into him. "You have no idea where we are," he said flatly, and wished he was surprised when Sheppard shook his head.
"No sun," he said, voice thick and rough, and jerked his head towards the narrow slice of sky above them. "And no landmarks either. So I've just been trying to head for cooler ground."
"I don't have any better ideas," Rodney admitted, and leaned against a handy slab of not-cake. "If it's the surface of the rock that gets hot at night -- "
"Ha!" Sheppard said, but Rodney thought his heart wasn't in it.
"Then we should probably try to get as far away from it as possible," he finished.
Sheppard raised an eyebrow. Like the rest of him, it looked tired. "Meaning?"
Rodney turned and wrestled a watermelon-sized chunk of the not-cake away from the cliff wall. With some effort, he heaved it on top of a nearby boulder. "Meaning, I hope you built a lot of snow forts as a kid."
"Not really," Sheppard said, but he picked up his own piece of not-cake anyway.
Rodney ended up doing most of the work after Sheppard admitted, reluctantly, that his knee had swollen up like a grapefruit. So it was Rodney that chipped rough bricks of the yellow stuff from the cliff sides, and who hauled them over to Sheppard, who tamped them down into a sort of platform.
"You know," Sheppard said thoughtfully, "there are some parallels to fairy tales, here."
"I get to be Hansel," Rodney grunted, shoving at a boulder that reached his sternum. Fortunately the stuff was dense but light; he just hoped it had some insulating properties.
"I was thinking The Princess and the Pea, actually," Sheppard said, kneeling on the platform and mopping at his face. He looked like he'd been dredged in crumbs and was ready for frying, and at that moment Rodney hated everything.
"Then I get to be the pea," Rodney snapped, and Sheppard scowled and gestured to where the boulder ought to go.
They ended up with a rough oblong about eight feet high, just big enough for the two of them to lie down uncomfortably. "One of us will have to keep watch anyway," Rodney commented as he stomped a set of stairs into existence. Sheppard pulled him up the rest of the way, then flopped onto his back, wincing as the movement jarred his knee.
"This is the most ridiculous thing that's ever happened to me."
"I don't know about that," Rodney said, fruitlessly scrubbing his hands together. The yellow stuff just would not come off. "What about that time on MSX-471, with the lizard and the feather boa -- "
"Shut up."
"Fine." Rodney glanced up at the sky, which was so black and starless as to be boring. Something popped and crackled in the distance, and the horizon glowed orange for a moment. Lava cake, he thought. "I wish we had some MREs. Or some powerbars."
Sheppard made an odd, choked sort of noise, and Rodney very nearly started the Heimlich maneuver before he realized that Sheppard was laughing. "What?" he demanded. "What's so funny?"
"Cake," Sheppard wheezed. "We're surrounded by acres, miles of cake. Deadly, evil cake. And you're hungry."
Rodney thought about objecting to Sheppard's illogic, but he could kind of see his point. Kind of. And he was so, so tired, and his head was throbbing from dehydration and caffeine deprivation. He stared up at the blank sky.
"It doesn't make any sense," he said, not looking at Sheppard. "Cake batter is what, flour and sugar and eggs and things? How on earth is that supposed to come from a hole in the ground? It's like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
"I liked the original better," Sheppard said sleepily, and threw an arm over his eyes. "Wake me for second watch?"
"Okay," Rodney said, and waited until he was sure that Sheppard was asleep. Then he broke a piece of not-cake off the edge of their platform and tasted it.
It was, he had to admit, very good.
Author's note: The title was loosely inspired by the New Orleans "king cake," served at Mardi Gras, which has a trinket or trinkets baked inside. Historically speaking, the lucky trinket was a gilded bean or a baby doll, but other figures have apparently become popular. For more than you ever wanted to know about king cake, click here.