Pots de Creme
Jun. 8th, 2011 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolMinions, thank you for coming. I feel that I don't express often enough my gratitude for your service. When people see me, they see only Doktor Pauer, Criminal Genius and Scientific Uberlord. They never see the little people who stand behind me, and sometimes under me, toiling away to make my dire works possible. Gentlemen, I salute you. HEIL!
All right, enough with the nicey-nice. I'm in a very bad mood. The first being I catch sleeping on guard duty, or failing to keep the power cells charged, or not wearing antiseptic gloves at all times, will be rendered down for their complex proteins. It's bad enough that the Liberteers banished me and my Barbican of Barbarism to the Silurian Period. Well, technically the Llandovery Epoch, Aeronian stage I should think, judging from the spines on the fish. Never mind that. I shall not tax you with taxonomy. You may laugh. Excellent.
As I was saying: bad enough to be stranded in the distant past with only a handful of imbeciles, creations and robots for company. But now, curse the luck, it's my birthday. And there's nobody to make me my birthday dessert! Oh, why did I disintegrate you, Mummy?
Never mind that. Chin up! There is No Crying in Megalomania! We must simply make the best of it and forge ahead. I shall be making my own birthday dessert – with your help, of course. And I have decided that we shall make a nice Pots de Crème! Ah yes, the King of the Custards. Tonight we dine like kings! Well, I dine like a king. You'll serve like, shall we say, a king's servants. Which is something I should think any minion would aspire to. Yes.
Now then: minor challenge. Pots de Crème is a dessert with few ingredients, none of which we actually have. Or have any way of acquiring, given the fact that many of these items will not come into existence for another four hundred million years, -ish.
What's that, Monstro? Synthesize the molecules?! Have you gone mad?! To a greater degree than usual? This is THE BIRTHDAY DESSERT, you simple hunchback! Back to your pit! BACK I SAY!
We're synthesizing nothing, my minions. We're going to make a Pots de Crème for my birthday, gentlemen. It won't be easy. But Mad Science laughs at 'Easy'. It laughs mockingly, and steals Easy's lunch money, and clones Easy's puppy and crushes its skull again and again, night after night, until Easy begs for mercy. And then I smile coldly, for Easy is not my friend. Hard is my friend! Me, Hard and Mad Science are the best of chums, and the Universe is our oyster, and my birthday dessert is the pearl! HA! Ha HA!! ah HA HA HA HA ha!!
NOW we're cooking with EVIL!
All right. I think we're all ready in the laboratory. I mean the kitchen. Yes.
Monstro, are you ready to be positive and productive? Yes? Good, good! Now scurry out here and preheat the reactor to twelve thousand degrees. Yes, of course Fahrenheit! In this laboratory we don't use temperature scales named after Scots, Irishmen or Swedes! Go, run!
All right, the rest of you. It's time to assemble our ingredients. All right, first let's go with sugar. Tricky. Sugarcane is a monocot, and those don't appear until the Cretaceous. However, there are certainly bacteria that fix sucrose, and I have a few strains in the deep freeze. I don't really have time to prepare culture baths for them, however. All right: Georgi! Dmitri! I'm going to inject you with large quantities of sugar-fixing microbiota. Your bloodstream will culture it for us. When the time is right, we'll harvest the sugar from your bodies got it?
What is it now, Georgi? HOW will we harvest the sugar? That's a silly question. With a tap, numbskull! Like they use on a maple tree! Honestly, I'm not sure why I bother harvesting the good brains for you minions if you're not going to bother using them.
Next, next, next. Let's see: eggs. Yecch. We have fish eggs aplenty, but that's no good, no good at all. There can be no substitutions here; we need a proper chicken egg. Well, there's nothing to be done except play God. AGAIN. Gorgo, go outside and catch me a nice fish. No, I don't care what kind; something nice and bony. Then we'll throw it into the Evolvatron until it's something like a chicken, tinker with its DNA, and go from there.
Yes, Gorgo, I know that will be time-consuming, but what else can we do? Except… just a moment, I think you're onto something. The Evolvatron will have to do about four hundred millions years of work. BUT, Gorgo, if I put you into the DEvolvatron for about a hundred million years until you're some kind of chordate precursor, and THEN put you into the Evolvatron the rest of the way, we could save, like, minutes! Superb thinking, Gorgo! Into the Devolvatron with you, there's a good chap.
Let's move on to Vanilla. The modern vanilla plant is an orchid derivative – again, something we won't see for some time. But what we're really after is the vanillin, and this is biosynthesized by a variety of mechanisms. The simplest is probably the production of guaiacol, which locusts make in their gut when digesting plant fibers. Well, if there's one thing this age has plenty of, it's proto-insects. FangTron, Old Ebenezer – go find some things that look like locusts and start cloning them. Yes, fine, disrupt the current queue at the cloning machines. Birthday Dessert takes precedence!
And that leaves milk. Obviously we don't have any native mammals in this day and age. Those of you remaining will note that each of you has nipples. This is no accident. Please line up for hormone therapy. Thank you for your cooperation and/or obedience. That is all.
Well well, Georgi, how are you feeling? Yes, fine, I didn't actually want to hear an answer. That's just what people say to one another, or so I am told. By people. WILLFUL people, who must be coerced to tell me things. Curse them! So you're feeling a little light-headed, eh? Superb; that's your blood sugar going out of whack. You're a tasty treat now for a child-vampire, ha HA! Yes, by all means laugh. All right, enough laughing. Get yourself over to the dialysis lab for blood filtration. Yes, I was only kidding about the tap; that would be messy and inefficient.
Gorgo! I told you to get into the Devolvatron and stay there until you have a notochord and not much else! And yet here you are, sliming up the floor of the laboratory, I mean kitchen, and trying to form words! Honestly, Gorgo, those gills are making your speech absolutely incomprehensible. What was that word, 'pity' or 'pastry'? Neither one makes much sense in this context, Gorgo. Monstro, help him back into the Devolvatron, there's a good chap.
Well, FangTron, how goes the isolation of guiacol? And where's Old Ebenezer? Well, yes, I did know that guiacol is the key chemical responsible for locust swarming, FangTron; those ARE plaques and awards concerning my expertise in various sub-fields of Mad Science hanging in positions of honor on my Wall of Superiority. Yes, good, so they're swarming; swarms imply great numbers, and that's a good thing, right? NO, skeletonizing Old Ebenezer was not a good thing; we only get vanillin out of plant matter, you tin-plated fool! Fine, close the blast doors on levels two through five and work with them down there. No bugs in my kitchen!
And how are my little milch-cows doing, eh? Boy, those hyper-steroids work quickly. I must say, not only are each of you to be commended for your invaluable service, but you're all sporting some epic racks. Now, I hope nobody is feeling tender in the nipple area, because I'm going to hook you up to the reciprocal pumps, and I suspect this is going to hurt like hell. Here, I'll play amplified sounds of babies crying, and that should start you flowing. I'll use the recordings of babies on deliriants I've had sitting around for a while; I figure if they're REALLY crying, then you're going to start REALLY lactating.
Monstro, is the reactor nice and warm? Yes? All right, we need a water bath. No, stop: scratch that; phase problem. Prepare me a plasma bath, there's a good fellow. What are we going to use for pots? Oh yes, those will do nicely. Just dump the brains out in the scrub sink; we'll tidy that up later.
Gorgo, have you evolved yet? You have some plumage there, I see. Yes, there's a beak. I see we have a gender issue, but that's a trivial fix. All right, close enough. You need to get to work laying some eggs, my good man. Chicken. Bird-thing. Whatever.
Dmitri! Georgi! You are not looking well at all. I specifically instructed the blood filtration units to put the blood back into your bodies when all the sugar had been separated out. What's that, it's still getting a little sugar out? Never mind. You boys sit tight; this won't take long. Watch some porn on the closed circuit TV's. Here, this one features – you guessed it – me. Oh yummy, vials and vials of sucrose! It's all stained red, but that's what bleach is for. It's all coming together, fellows!
FangTron, NO. This is not at all suitable. I want a very, very pure vanillin extract. And when I say 'pure', I mean 'without small bug parts floating in it'. Also, you see that little fleck there? That's a piece of Old Ebenezer. Yes, I'm sure. I'm sorry, I've made a specialty of human flesh, and that's definitely human flesh. Purify that a little. Use radiation, super-magnets, R-Rays – anything. When you're done, if this tastes less like custard and more like a cannibal's attic, you might as well report directly for recycling. No, thank YOU.
Okay, let's have a taste of that milky goodness! …pflaugh! That's disgusting. Do you vermin dare to call this chalky, watery excuse for lactation 'milk'?! You turds had better get those mamms whipped into shape, or else there is ZERO chance that you're going to get to lick the spoon! I want some quality, frothy boobjuice in my butterchurn pronto.
(Yes, Monstro. I know it's a turbine piston. Today we are calling it a 'butterchurn'. Because we are in a 'kitchen'. And you don't generally have turbines in kitchens. Is that clear now? Fewer questions; more fear.)
All right! I'm excited! Are you excited? You don't look excited. Why aren't you excited? How can you not be excited?! I'LL SHOW YOU EXCITEMENT!! I think we'll all miss Dmitri; he was useful, and then he wasn't.
Gorgo, those look like eggs you have laid for me! They're a little veiny but they'll do. Now now; enough squawking; you can lay a few for reproductive purposes on your own time. Here, I'm very busy; Gorgo, crack your own eggs into this bowl and whisk them. Yes, that's right; batter your own flesh and blood into a uniform consistency. Stop sobbing; this is a happy moment! And for crying out loud don't get any feathers in my Pots de Crème!
Okay, we're blending sugar and eggs! We're heating the milk! We're whisking and sieving and adding vanilla! We're putting them into the jars, and popping the jars into the reactor! Now out it comes, and directly into the deep freeze!
Oh! They're beautiful. Quivery, but firm. No glaze, no skin. Congratulations, boys; we did it. And to think a little piece of each of you went into making my birthday dessert. Literally.
Get out the good service! Lay the cloths! Prepare the birthday dirges! It's time for me to eat my lovely Pots de Crème while you supply me with birthday presents!
You do, I trust, have presents.
I trust.
Yes. I see.
My minions, I will sit here and enjoy my Pots de Crème. And when it is done, I will expect to have presents to open.
Don't worry. I'll eat slowly.
All right, enough with the nicey-nice. I'm in a very bad mood. The first being I catch sleeping on guard duty, or failing to keep the power cells charged, or not wearing antiseptic gloves at all times, will be rendered down for their complex proteins. It's bad enough that the Liberteers banished me and my Barbican of Barbarism to the Silurian Period. Well, technically the Llandovery Epoch, Aeronian stage I should think, judging from the spines on the fish. Never mind that. I shall not tax you with taxonomy. You may laugh. Excellent.
As I was saying: bad enough to be stranded in the distant past with only a handful of imbeciles, creations and robots for company. But now, curse the luck, it's my birthday. And there's nobody to make me my birthday dessert! Oh, why did I disintegrate you, Mummy?
Never mind that. Chin up! There is No Crying in Megalomania! We must simply make the best of it and forge ahead. I shall be making my own birthday dessert – with your help, of course. And I have decided that we shall make a nice Pots de Crème! Ah yes, the King of the Custards. Tonight we dine like kings! Well, I dine like a king. You'll serve like, shall we say, a king's servants. Which is something I should think any minion would aspire to. Yes.
Now then: minor challenge. Pots de Crème is a dessert with few ingredients, none of which we actually have. Or have any way of acquiring, given the fact that many of these items will not come into existence for another four hundred million years, -ish.
What's that, Monstro? Synthesize the molecules?! Have you gone mad?! To a greater degree than usual? This is THE BIRTHDAY DESSERT, you simple hunchback! Back to your pit! BACK I SAY!
We're synthesizing nothing, my minions. We're going to make a Pots de Crème for my birthday, gentlemen. It won't be easy. But Mad Science laughs at 'Easy'. It laughs mockingly, and steals Easy's lunch money, and clones Easy's puppy and crushes its skull again and again, night after night, until Easy begs for mercy. And then I smile coldly, for Easy is not my friend. Hard is my friend! Me, Hard and Mad Science are the best of chums, and the Universe is our oyster, and my birthday dessert is the pearl! HA! Ha HA!! ah HA HA HA HA ha!!
NOW we're cooking with EVIL!
All right. I think we're all ready in the laboratory. I mean the kitchen. Yes.
Monstro, are you ready to be positive and productive? Yes? Good, good! Now scurry out here and preheat the reactor to twelve thousand degrees. Yes, of course Fahrenheit! In this laboratory we don't use temperature scales named after Scots, Irishmen or Swedes! Go, run!
All right, the rest of you. It's time to assemble our ingredients. All right, first let's go with sugar. Tricky. Sugarcane is a monocot, and those don't appear until the Cretaceous. However, there are certainly bacteria that fix sucrose, and I have a few strains in the deep freeze. I don't really have time to prepare culture baths for them, however. All right: Georgi! Dmitri! I'm going to inject you with large quantities of sugar-fixing microbiota. Your bloodstream will culture it for us. When the time is right, we'll harvest the sugar from your bodies got it?
What is it now, Georgi? HOW will we harvest the sugar? That's a silly question. With a tap, numbskull! Like they use on a maple tree! Honestly, I'm not sure why I bother harvesting the good brains for you minions if you're not going to bother using them.
Next, next, next. Let's see: eggs. Yecch. We have fish eggs aplenty, but that's no good, no good at all. There can be no substitutions here; we need a proper chicken egg. Well, there's nothing to be done except play God. AGAIN. Gorgo, go outside and catch me a nice fish. No, I don't care what kind; something nice and bony. Then we'll throw it into the Evolvatron until it's something like a chicken, tinker with its DNA, and go from there.
Yes, Gorgo, I know that will be time-consuming, but what else can we do? Except… just a moment, I think you're onto something. The Evolvatron will have to do about four hundred millions years of work. BUT, Gorgo, if I put you into the DEvolvatron for about a hundred million years until you're some kind of chordate precursor, and THEN put you into the Evolvatron the rest of the way, we could save, like, minutes! Superb thinking, Gorgo! Into the Devolvatron with you, there's a good chap.
Let's move on to Vanilla. The modern vanilla plant is an orchid derivative – again, something we won't see for some time. But what we're really after is the vanillin, and this is biosynthesized by a variety of mechanisms. The simplest is probably the production of guaiacol, which locusts make in their gut when digesting plant fibers. Well, if there's one thing this age has plenty of, it's proto-insects. FangTron, Old Ebenezer – go find some things that look like locusts and start cloning them. Yes, fine, disrupt the current queue at the cloning machines. Birthday Dessert takes precedence!
And that leaves milk. Obviously we don't have any native mammals in this day and age. Those of you remaining will note that each of you has nipples. This is no accident. Please line up for hormone therapy. Thank you for your cooperation and/or obedience. That is all.
Well well, Georgi, how are you feeling? Yes, fine, I didn't actually want to hear an answer. That's just what people say to one another, or so I am told. By people. WILLFUL people, who must be coerced to tell me things. Curse them! So you're feeling a little light-headed, eh? Superb; that's your blood sugar going out of whack. You're a tasty treat now for a child-vampire, ha HA! Yes, by all means laugh. All right, enough laughing. Get yourself over to the dialysis lab for blood filtration. Yes, I was only kidding about the tap; that would be messy and inefficient.
Gorgo! I told you to get into the Devolvatron and stay there until you have a notochord and not much else! And yet here you are, sliming up the floor of the laboratory, I mean kitchen, and trying to form words! Honestly, Gorgo, those gills are making your speech absolutely incomprehensible. What was that word, 'pity' or 'pastry'? Neither one makes much sense in this context, Gorgo. Monstro, help him back into the Devolvatron, there's a good chap.
Well, FangTron, how goes the isolation of guiacol? And where's Old Ebenezer? Well, yes, I did know that guiacol is the key chemical responsible for locust swarming, FangTron; those ARE plaques and awards concerning my expertise in various sub-fields of Mad Science hanging in positions of honor on my Wall of Superiority. Yes, good, so they're swarming; swarms imply great numbers, and that's a good thing, right? NO, skeletonizing Old Ebenezer was not a good thing; we only get vanillin out of plant matter, you tin-plated fool! Fine, close the blast doors on levels two through five and work with them down there. No bugs in my kitchen!
And how are my little milch-cows doing, eh? Boy, those hyper-steroids work quickly. I must say, not only are each of you to be commended for your invaluable service, but you're all sporting some epic racks. Now, I hope nobody is feeling tender in the nipple area, because I'm going to hook you up to the reciprocal pumps, and I suspect this is going to hurt like hell. Here, I'll play amplified sounds of babies crying, and that should start you flowing. I'll use the recordings of babies on deliriants I've had sitting around for a while; I figure if they're REALLY crying, then you're going to start REALLY lactating.
Monstro, is the reactor nice and warm? Yes? All right, we need a water bath. No, stop: scratch that; phase problem. Prepare me a plasma bath, there's a good fellow. What are we going to use for pots? Oh yes, those will do nicely. Just dump the brains out in the scrub sink; we'll tidy that up later.
Gorgo, have you evolved yet? You have some plumage there, I see. Yes, there's a beak. I see we have a gender issue, but that's a trivial fix. All right, close enough. You need to get to work laying some eggs, my good man. Chicken. Bird-thing. Whatever.
Dmitri! Georgi! You are not looking well at all. I specifically instructed the blood filtration units to put the blood back into your bodies when all the sugar had been separated out. What's that, it's still getting a little sugar out? Never mind. You boys sit tight; this won't take long. Watch some porn on the closed circuit TV's. Here, this one features – you guessed it – me. Oh yummy, vials and vials of sucrose! It's all stained red, but that's what bleach is for. It's all coming together, fellows!
FangTron, NO. This is not at all suitable. I want a very, very pure vanillin extract. And when I say 'pure', I mean 'without small bug parts floating in it'. Also, you see that little fleck there? That's a piece of Old Ebenezer. Yes, I'm sure. I'm sorry, I've made a specialty of human flesh, and that's definitely human flesh. Purify that a little. Use radiation, super-magnets, R-Rays – anything. When you're done, if this tastes less like custard and more like a cannibal's attic, you might as well report directly for recycling. No, thank YOU.
Okay, let's have a taste of that milky goodness! …pflaugh! That's disgusting. Do you vermin dare to call this chalky, watery excuse for lactation 'milk'?! You turds had better get those mamms whipped into shape, or else there is ZERO chance that you're going to get to lick the spoon! I want some quality, frothy boobjuice in my butterchurn pronto.
(Yes, Monstro. I know it's a turbine piston. Today we are calling it a 'butterchurn'. Because we are in a 'kitchen'. And you don't generally have turbines in kitchens. Is that clear now? Fewer questions; more fear.)
All right! I'm excited! Are you excited? You don't look excited. Why aren't you excited? How can you not be excited?! I'LL SHOW YOU EXCITEMENT!! I think we'll all miss Dmitri; he was useful, and then he wasn't.
Gorgo, those look like eggs you have laid for me! They're a little veiny but they'll do. Now now; enough squawking; you can lay a few for reproductive purposes on your own time. Here, I'm very busy; Gorgo, crack your own eggs into this bowl and whisk them. Yes, that's right; batter your own flesh and blood into a uniform consistency. Stop sobbing; this is a happy moment! And for crying out loud don't get any feathers in my Pots de Crème!
Okay, we're blending sugar and eggs! We're heating the milk! We're whisking and sieving and adding vanilla! We're putting them into the jars, and popping the jars into the reactor! Now out it comes, and directly into the deep freeze!
Oh! They're beautiful. Quivery, but firm. No glaze, no skin. Congratulations, boys; we did it. And to think a little piece of each of you went into making my birthday dessert. Literally.
Get out the good service! Lay the cloths! Prepare the birthday dirges! It's time for me to eat my lovely Pots de Crème while you supply me with birthday presents!
You do, I trust, have presents.
I trust.
Yes. I see.
My minions, I will sit here and enjoy my Pots de Crème. And when it is done, I will expect to have presents to open.
Don't worry. I'll eat slowly.
