A Dream and A Scream

Maxine finds herself mentally inspired by being surrounded by the Kitty Burger. And not in a good way. At least she can wash her clothes.

It was warm, and strangely orange. The sound of a beating pump echoed through all surroundings, bringing with it lines of red through the orange haze. As Maxine's eyes cleared, she saw the red veins throbbing with the flow of blood into and throughout fleshy tissue. This tissue surrounded her like the walls of a large, round room. Bits of hair suck out from the flesh here and there, but where it did not block Maxine could see through the thin film of living thing, towards some bright light beyond. Maxine blinked.

Um...where is this place exactly?

Maxine clutched at the hair. It was soft and wispy, but very thin. Fearful to look down but far more fearful to do otherwise, Maxine forced herself to look and see downwards. Below her, the gently sloping hill of flesh pinched in from all sides, leading down to a pit, too far and dark to perceive as anything more than an inky well. Yet as the climber looked upwards, she noticed that the flesh thinned out, and the light behind it was brighter. The hair wasn't very strong, and Maxine feared that at any moment it would fall from its follicles and send her plunging into the darkness. She grabbed the hair in big fistfuls when she climbed, and hoped for the best.

A soft purple glow shone upon her from behind, and Maxine looked up to see Pocki floating there. He wore his usual stylish suit, and yet it was all a shimmery purple, and the cape he wore was long and winding. It flowed about him with the wind, and the wind also blew at Maxine. She stayed still so that she wouldn't fall.

"Pocki!" she called out. "Pocki, I'm stuck!"

It wasn't apparent that Pocki had heard her. He floated in a meditative trance, arms extended out as sparkles sang and danced around him. However, there seemed to be a kind of current to this place, so Pocki naturally floated downwards. As he did, Maxine could see that his eyes were closed, and he wore a smile of perfect content.

"Pocki! If you can fly, get me down from here!"

Apparently he could hear Maxine, as at this point his eyes opened. There was no other sign of his having noticed her; his eyes remained glazed over with some amusing thought, and his lips grinned broader, as though he was caught in a kind of ecstacy.

"Oh Maxine," he finally said. "You are so concerned with ordinary things. You must learn to look above."

"Uh huh. And how am I supposed to do that?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he splashed at the air as though he were swimming, and he began to circle over her.

"You must learn to look above...you must learn to look above...you must learn to look above..."

As he spoke his voice grew louder, echoing off the sides of the wobbling flesh. His words merged with the pulsing of the blood, until heartbeat and saying were one and the same. The wind stirred up harshly, and Maxine forced herself to the side of the skin wall to hold on for dear life.

"But...but what does it mean?" she cried out. "I don't understand."

The wind roared, and her words drowned in it. Desperately clinging on, she tried to think of someway to get Pocki to stop his flying and chanting. More than this, when she tried to think, all she could see in her mind was a dark tunnel, and from that dark tunnel emerged the face of Fate, with his long bat ears. Fate sniffed her forehead, touching her with his cold nose.

"Remember your mission, soldier....Remember your mission, soldier...remember your mission..."

And so Fate too chanted, and Maxine only got more confused. It didn't help that she found herself staring at Fate. Then she stared at his ear. She stared harder, noticing a little speck on it: a little speck of a human grasping desperately at the ear hair so that she didn't fall into the ear canal below.

Fate stopped chanting, and began to meow. For some reason, this was the strangest thing yet, because though Maxine had heard Fate speak, she had never before now heard him make normal cat noises. And yet he meowed, louder, and louder.

"Mrrrrreeeeoooowww......."

Maxine gasped, and with a jolt, she awoke. It wasn't Fate's cold nose on her forehead, but that of Princess Trixie Puff. She had somehow fallen asleep cuddled with the cat princess, and even now she had a forepaw over Maxine. Once the cat noticed that Maxine was awake, she began to lick the top of the human's head. It was about then that Maxine realized she was gripping the cat's fur very tightly. She startled and immediately rose to her feet.

"Oh, your highness, I'm sorry! What a horrible indulgeance! How terrible!" Maxine nearly fell over herself trying to apologize, yawn, and brush away the cat hair from her clothes at the same time. "I'm sorry...ugh....how many pizza burgers did I eat last night? Um, so like, what?"

She was still far too out of it to understand her surroundings. It took her several moments of pausing and blinking to finally realize where she was. She was indeed in the kitty area of the Kitty Burger, standing before Princess Trixie Puff's cave. Several eyes peeped out through the low light of a pale, early morning streaming in through the windows of the far wall. As for the nearer walls, various cats relaxed, stared, stretched, or strutted across to a long, low table, set with metal bowls. One such cat was Narnia. She gazed with deep eyes at Maxine, then focused on the table. Then she stared again at the human.

Maxine approached to get a better look at it. The table was only half a foot or so above the ground, and apparently holes had been cut into it, because ten pairs of metal bowls in it sank nearly all the way into the deep mohagany wood. The foremost of each pair was empty, but the back bowls were a little more complicated. A little drain on the bottom of the bowls apparently cycled up the water through a pump on the back to gush out water at a little pipe overhanging the back bowl. They were like tiny little fountains.

"Oh wow," Maxine said as she scratched her head and yawned again. "Pocki really got you guys some fancy water bowls."

Narnia stepped atop her foot and gazed deeply into her eyes. She opened her mouth as if to meow, but no sound came out. Maxine got the idea anyway.

"Sorry, little cat. I can't feed you guys. Besides not knowing where Pocki keeps the cat food, he probably has some really great organic or whatever diet for you guys, and probably has a schedule for feeding...though now that I think about it, I'm not so sure he'd be happy if he knew I spent the night in the cat enclosure."

Maxine scratched behind Narnia's ear as she tried to think. Did Pocki know she was here? Had she actually asked the night before? All she could remember about the previous night was hot suds, dishes, and pizza burgers. Then again, cleaning up after the catwalk had taken basically all night the previous evening. Maybe she had claimed she was going to leave and just hid with Princess Trixie Puff until Pocki locked up.

Narnia walked away; she didn't want pats, she wanted kibble, and since none was forthcoming, she strutted her upset self back to a scratching post and tried to communicate by her scratching what she would do if Maxine proved herself a disappointment again. Of course the human wasn't paying attention. She, as usual, was thinking about food. Then she looked down at her shirt, and started thinking about cat hair.

"Y'know, your highness, you may be royalty, but you still shed. Remind me never to ask about your hairballs." Maxine scratched again at her shirt. "Ugh, and this is my only work shirt too. Hm, well, maybe because I'm not a waitress, I can..."

Suddenly Maxine remembered that a washing machine had been installed in the back of the store, so that they could wash the wipe-rags, towels, and cat costumes. Maxine also remembered that she had in fact brought some clothes in her locker so that she could surrepticiously do her laundry when Pocki and Mitzy weren't looking. Mitzy was only a cat, but Maxine found herself avoiding being caught in the cat's gaze.

Hm, maybe I can put some of the cat costumes over my clothes when I sneak them into the laundry. The door of the kitty area was locked, but not from the inside (except from cat's paws), so Maxine let herself out. She doesn't always hang out in the receiving area, and now that we're open, she might mingle with the customers more.

Maxine opened the door to the kitchen. The kitchen was dark and empty, as expected, and since there were no windows in the back of the shop, only a pale light next to Pocki's office at the right was lit. It might have been put there to light up the area for security cameras, but as Maxine passed by Pocki's door to get to her locker, she realized that she hadn't seen any kind of security monitor in the office with camera feed on it, like it would be in a normal store. Thankful, she grabbed her clothes out of her locker and started thinking about where she could change.

The washer and dryer were stacked on the wall next to the dish washing area, because of course washing things was going to be the busboy's job. This didn't bother Maxine much, and she thought of many happy hours of working to stave of the horrors of hunger. She dreamt of princess pancakes as she poked around the washer and dryer to make sure that there was detergent.

Aha! Maxine joyfully lifted a jug of off-brand laundry detergent. I have it! I...what's that sound?

A strange rushing sound echoed through the receiving, quietly like the low hum of electricity. It wasn't clear that this was electric in source, and Maxine got the sense that it was like the faint running of water. But it stopped after a moment, and Maxine shrugged. Before she could walk off, several bricks swung out like a door, and Maxine found herself face to face with a metal thing wrapped in a towel. The metal thing froze, and Maxine saw blank, metal face, with skinless plates of metal arranged in an eyes-widened-with-horror expression. Maxine's face mirrored this expression when she realized that she was looking at 3R1N, devoid of skin, wig, and tentacles.

She instantly turned away and covered her face. "Sorry! So sorry! I didn't see anything!"

"You're right, you didn't see anything," 3R1N snapped. "There's nothing behind this wall, got it?"

"Uh...I was actually talking about you," Maxine said from behind her hands. "But ah, okay, nothing behind the wall."

"Oh please, I'm a robot, there's nothing there to look at." 3R1N hustled past Maxine and to the kitchen. "Well, besides several highly classified and/or patented trade secrets, but I don't expect you to understand anything like that. This is my private area, and no one's to know about it."

"Uh...yeah, okay." Maxine thought about it for a second, and with a grin she realized that this could play in her favor. "Y'know, I might be more tempted to stay mum if you made it so there was a shower in the bathroom."

"Fat chance, Plain One. If I did that, I'd have to depend on you not leaving any evidence behind on a regular basis." 3R1N glared at her up and down. "That is, assuming you shower on a regular basis. No, my luxury microfiber station benefits me alone."

"Well, I tried. Anyway, it's cool, I won't say anything." Maxine removed one of her hands long enough to give a thumbs up, then started back for the employee bathroom further down the wall. She paused momentarily. "Uh, but why do I need to hide the brick wall thing? If Pocki bought you, surely he knows he knows that you need maintenance. Or did you mean not to tell the Burg-girls?"

"I meant everybody," 3R1N said as she emerged from the kitchen, now clad in a flowery red bathrobe and two of her tentacles sticking from her neck. "Pocki said I can't have my own cleansing station in the restaurant because I'm supposed to get a place to stay and learn to 'live with humanity'. Practicing my 'human relations' and all that crap."

Maxine turned back from the bathroom. "Oh please, that's super overrated. 'S why I'm not getting a roommate when I find an apartment. People are totally overrated. And if you're really full of trade secrets and stuff, you probably shouldn't be out where people can find you and sell you to some tech company or foreign government."

"Thank you!" 3R1N slapped the wall between the kitchen and receiving. "This dimension doesn't have anything as far as robotics go, so you'd think that Pocki would be more security minded for my safety. I shouldn't have to worry about things like rent, or getting back and forth to work. I have my image to maintain, and I can't show myself around town like some peasant. Besides, that's the wall where the water pipes go between the customer and employee bathrooms. Why not make it my little hideaway?"

"Sure, sure." Maxine shrugged her shoulders. "Anyway, I'm probably going to bum the use of this washing machine for my own clothes, so I can't really tell on you."

3R1N frowned. "What are you even doing here this early anyway?"

"Oh, that," Maxine chuckled and rubbed her neck. "I just stayed kinda late last night, and well, Trixie Puff was so fluffy..."

"Say no more." 3R1N rolled her eyes. "I know how crazy everyone gets over that cat. I'm just lucky I don't have a soul. Cat power only works on people with souls. Which reminds me, I think I'll wear my red wig today."

"Coolio. So, like, I'm gonna change into non-fuzzy clothes now." Maxine pushed open the door to the employee bathroom. "If there's something I can be doing before we open, let me know."

For a moment, 3R1N looked at Maxine, and gave her an odd look. She puzzled to herself a moment, then called out.

"Hey, Maxine, what do you want for breakfast?"

Maxine popped her head out of the door. "Oh really, you're cooking? I guess I'd like princess pancakes. It's chocolate pancakes with chopped up strawberries in it, and orange marmalade on the top. Oh wait, do we even have that stuff here?"

"Sure, I've been experimenting with making a dessert burger. Hmph, you have pedestrian tastes in food, Plain One."

"Yeah, I've heard that before."

Maxine disappeared into the bathroom before 3R1N could say anything else. 3R1N was tempted to make some sort of comment about it, but she paused. She inspected the brick wall once more for any outside sign that it was visible, then went back behind Pocki's office to grab the ingredients for the pancakes.

"Princess pancakes," 3R1N snorted. "I bet she just made that up."