I Accidentally The Whole Stove

So I set The Escape on fire today.

I was writing an article for UniversePress when my muse craved tea. Everyone has their writing thing, and my thing is my cravings. If I don’t satisfy them, I get stuck in writer’s block. Usually I just crave small things, though, like applestix, or raisins, or popcorn, or tea. It’s never really been an obstacle to my writing before, more like something to help it along. If I get stuck, I just roam through a cupboard, heat something with the autofood, chow down and Boom! back on track.

But the autofood broke. It just… broke. It even let out a puff of black smoke, as if to say, “Don’t bother, man, I’m down.” I had three backup autofoods on Blazegaze, but those autofoods are scattered ashes all across the Milky Way by now.

Here’s the part where I get whiny. Zeux brought a stove onto the ship. She doesn’t like autofood foods, she makes her own food. It was a human(ish) stove, so I should’ve been able to use it, but… well, I’d never used a stove before. My moms and my girl made me food all the time, back home.

And for some reason, I’m brave enough to ask Zeux if I can use her stove, but too much of a gizmo to ask her how to use it. I figured if I asked that, she’d just make one of those “what in the worlds is wrong with you” faces and just make my tea herself. I wouldn’t learn how to make anything that way.

I only have one box of non-autofood tea that my girl got me. It was a joke gift, because the tea was called “love potion” tea and we hooked over me joking about giving her a love potion. I only kept it because she made a point of giving back all of my gifts when she booted me, and I wanted to show I was better than that. Who am I showing that to? I dunno, myself?

So I put the box of tea in a pot, turned the stove on, and walked off. I figured I’d give it six or seven minutes and check back on it. I was messing with my allapp when I thought, hey, why don’t I look up how to make tea on the webs? So I did.

1) You make tea in a teapot, not a potpot.

2) You use the bags in the box, not the whole box. (I still don’t know what the box is even for.)

3) You boil water first, then add the bags.

And 4) the box does not come with water, nor is it meant to be melted into tea, like I’d assumed.

I came back to the kitchen to find my funeral pyre.

I’ve ruined Zeux’s pot, destroyed my box/bags of tea, my allapp wouldn’t shut off its fire alarm for ten minutes, and there’s now a big black stain on the wall of the kitchen. This ship’s been shinning for years, and it took less than a week for me to wreck it.

On the bright side, I got my article done.

Hogarth finished fixing the autofood an hour ago (“You should have just asked!”) but that doesn’t make me feel less awkward. Sure, this ship is mine, and my job at UniversePress is paying for ship expenses and Zeux’s new pot, but I otherwise feel useless on this ship. Messing up in this fashion doesn’t help.

Ah well, I didn’t want any “<3” tea, anyway. Let the glitch’s shit burn.