Unit 5a23 awoke from his meditation, the smell of incense tripping the olfactory sensors in his mental sensory module, and activated his vision to behold a beautiful beginning of a sunset just barely cresting over the edge of a leafy horizon.
"This... is truly beautiful," he said with a sigh as he took a sip of his zlinseng tea. Flungunglia was his home now.
He was still reeling from the realization of who he was. He remembered it all now - he'd been a prized Tyre starred chef in Gifflenberg, only to lose everything when the meteor and the alien attacked. He remembered watching his restaurant being leveld to the ground as if it were but a child's sand castle. He remembered the pain in his heart, and in his wallet, watchig his business implode forever.
Well, for what he'd thought had been forever. He'd been on a quest to find himself a new place to set down his gourmet roots, and Flungunglia was that very place. He felt the love of life wash over him as the rays of the sun started to shine through the trees...
The rays of the sun?
Shit. Unit 5a23 started to rush. He'd almost been so wrapped up in his memories that he'd forgotten that it was time to start his process.
Unit 5a23 activated the jets in his feet and blasted over to the next door building. It is worth mentioning that both Unit 5a23's live-in restaurant and the next door building were not so much building as they were enormous, hollowed out mushrooms that taumans and automatons could live in.
"Glumbunguskaja! Glumbunguskaja, I need your best bread!" called Unit 5a23 with stress static in his atonal voice.
"Here are the loaves!" replied a tauman with a bit of a green hue to the skin of theirs that was not covered in living wood. A classic fungus elemental look, that went nicely along with little slime molds and mushrooms growing on the living wood on their face.
Unit 5a23 felt like such a fool. How could he have forgotten the routine? Every day since his realization of true identity, Unit 5a23 would wake up with the sunrise and pick a new, freshly baked loaf of unsliced sandwich bread from his baking friend, Glumbunguskaja. Well, really what would happen is, Glumbunguskaja would give him two loaves, and he would weigh them on a golden scale - as he was doing presently.
"Huzzah!" said Unit 5a23 with triumph as he selected the light loaf and charged up his chest laser. Then, with expert precision, he tossed the loaf in the air and shot a flurry of blasts out of his chest. As the bread tumbled from the air, ten perfect slices tumbled into his metal claws. Unit 5a23 buried the two ends of the loaves undergroud in his bread graveyard, as he called it, and whispered to them a kind yet simple prayer of peace and tranquility. Then, he took the remaining slices and inspected them with his robotic vision. Small blue boxes popped up and analyzed each slice of toast.
[Toast]
[Moisture 69%]
"Ugh, this one is damp!" He threw the slice as far as he possibly could, skipping it across a small, nearby pond and hitting a duck in the back. "Like toast off a duck's back, as they say."
[Toast]
[Dryness 112%]
"Ugh, this one isn't damp enough!" He threw that slice, too, as far as possible - this one hit the duck in the back of the head with such force that it toppled over for a bit with an angry quack before bobbing upright again.
[Toast]
[Even slice coefficient: 2]
"Gods damnit, this one's a little lopsided!" He threw that slice with such force that when it hit the duck's neck, there was an awful cracking noise that only a robot could hear from a distance. Unit 5a23 stood up, holding seven slices of bread, and pulled out a large butcher knife and took a deep robo-breath. "DUCK'S ON THE MENU TODAY!"
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About an hour later, Unit 5a23 was standing outside the entrace to his live in restaurant, admiring the underside of the large, red mushroom top that functioned as its roof. It had nice, big, white dots all over it. Unit 5a23 said it gave the place character, although a few folks had remarked that the vibrance made them a little nauseated.
Regardless, he didn't have too much time to spend looking at his home and occupation. Unit 5a23 needed to decorate the board. The board was a large, attention-grabbing blackboard that he'd decorate with the finest Gifflenbergian calligrapghy - something that would've been quite boring in his hometow, but that here in Flungunglia was an absolute novelty and a treat to everyone passsing by.
"Hey there, Unit 5a23!" said Shammy. Shammy was a bright, energetic tauman who loved picking mushrooms and eating toast. She was one of Unit 5a23's first customers, but he was so popular these days that she could almost never get a reservation. Still, she always seemed to stick around him, for whatever reason, so that he always ended up seeing her and she always ended up seeing him. "How's it going?"
"Great, Shammy, great," replied Unit 5a23 atonally as ever. "You know, there's duck on the menu today." He held out to her a large, laminated scroll.
"Yes, I see that," said Shammy with a smile as she read the only item on the menu, that was printed in bold lettering: DUCK TOAST. "What exactly is duck toast, Unit 5a23? It sounds delicious, and of course since it's you making the toast I know for certain that it will be."
"Oh, it's simple," said Unit 5a23 with a chuckle. "It's just a nice little curried duck breast, no big deal, over some perfectly toasted bread. Of course we do offer salt and pepper on the side, although I must warn you the duck breast is already seasoned to perfection. As the meat is quite gamey, I really can only produce one meal today that will be up to my rigorous standards. I hope you understand if I'm not able to pencil you in today, especially considering that Station 2.4 is coming by today with Viktor Viktorioso, my original mentor here in Flungunglia."
"I figured, Unit 5a23, I figured," she said with a glint in her eyes. For whatever reason, Shammy always seemed to have something in her eyes, or something about her eyes, or what have you, whenever she interacted with Unit 5a23 - even before he'd become famous among Flungunglia for his amazing toast.
"You really ought to get your eyes checked," said Unit 5a23. "It looks like they have something terribly wrong with them by the way you're looking at me."
Shammy just laughed, and sighed, and rested her living wood hand on Unit 5a23's metal shoulder. She gave it a squeeze. "Ooh. That's so hard and cold."
"It's because I'm made of metal, Shammy," replied Unit 5a23. "If that comes as a bit of a surprise to you, I might want you to consider getting your head checked, as well. I am saying this only out of courtesy."
"Gods," Shammy sighed with a dreamy smile. "That's what I love about you, Unit 5a23. You've never let fame change your personality. All the time I've known you, you've always been the same - cold, uncaring, atonal, almost dissociated from everything but your work, and always incredibly rude to me. It's... an incredibly attractive trait, if I'm being honest."
"Please stop distracting me from my work," said Unit 5a23 as he continued to write on the chalkboard with a claw arm. "If I get the calligraphy wrong, I'll have to start it all over again, and I am concerned my prepared meal may get cold."
But, there was no need for this worry - although the coldness he imparted to Shammy seemed to greatly impress upon her his desireability, which of course meant that she wouldn't eve consider leaving his side and would indeed stay there and distract him.
Soon enough, though, Unit 5a23's literal laser focus - he'd been staring at the chalkboard with laser vision - was interrupted as a tauman with a camera and a tauman with a booming voice approached with a smile.
"Hey there, Flungunglia, it's me, Stheven Stheveson with Station 2.4 News, and I'm here today with the one, the only, Unit 5a23!"
Stheven handed Unit 5a23 a microphone with an overbearing smile that could scarcely have been genuine.
"Hello. I would like to get back to work now, I have a customer coming soon and I want to be sure their food is perfect," replied Unit 5a23, pushing the mic away.
"Ah, that's trademark Unit 5a23 - always focused on his art, never on promoting it! So, we've just got to do it ourselves, even if he pushes us away! Now, I've gotten permission from his building owner to come on in to the shop today and film while he works, and-"
"To clarify," Unit 5a23 interjected, "I am the building owner, for anyone wondering."
The crowd that had gathered ooed and ahhed at this.
Soon enough, the news crew was in there watching Unit 5a23 take his toast and insert it into his inbuilt toaster.
"People say that having the toaster built in to your body give you extra control over how well it toasts. Is this true?" asked Stheven.
"How the hell should I know? All I do is stick the bread in there and wait for it to pop."
The crowd cheered.
Well, most of the crowd. For there was somegthing sinister lurking in their midst... something sinister and power hungry to the max.
Something that was inhabiting the body of an incredibly affable undead skeleton.