SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS
OASIBAST
“PLUGGED-INTO HELL”
1
Chumba's was on Oasibast’s east end. Tonight's staff was scheduled to be Tige Berm (bar tender and night manager), Rusrick Cringibb (cook), Norven SMV T8-V104 (waiter), Tiffiana Matte (waitress), and Pykquat Catank (kitchen hand, bus boy, and dishwasher). At the last minute, Tiffiana called off, stranding Norven to wait tables alone.
Due to Antaakian ale being half-price, Norven was overwhelmed by a steady influx of patrons. Displeased with the slow service, the bar's usual assortment—criminals, hustlers, miscreants, and addicts—hurled abuse at the hapless android while he scrambled to and fro the kitchen or back and forth from the bar between taking and fulfilling orders.
Partway through his shift, Norven accidentally initiated a drunken brawl by mistakenly serving a bucket of sausage-stuffed cheesy poppers to the wrong table. Before the fracas spread out of control, Tige restored order by brandishing an LX-291 Disintegrator Combat Rifle stashed behind the bar.
Despite the shift being one ordeal after another, Norven endured till its end. With Chumba's now set to shutter, all he had to do was clear a few remaining tables. Manufactured with four arms, he could clear and clean a table in a minute or less, as he could perfectly balance a tray on one hand while two other hands stack it with empty beer bottles, dirty glassware, plates, bowls, utensils, and napkins while the fourth hand wipes up.
Norven halted his feverishly precise bussing upon discovering a scumbag passed out in a corner booth. The straggler was wiry and aged prematurely from substance abuse. Covering his head was a wire fishnet helmet with a spike on top. Tattooed beneath both of his closed eyes was a single red triangle extending past his heavily pierced lower lip. “Sir? Excuse me, sir?” Norven said to the scumbag, who didn’t respond. Norven started rapping the tabletop. “Hey! Wake up! Time to go!” After still receiving no response, Norven intensified the rapping. “Hello! HELLO!” Intent to remain put, the scumbag grunted and folded his arms. “Great,” Norven whined.
“Problem?” Tige asked from behind the bar.
“This deadbeat is refusing to leave,” Norven explained as he approached Tige. "I hate to ask you to step in, but I seriously can not deal with another belligerent skinbag fuckwad getting in my face!”
Tige finished wiping off the bar top. “I'll handle it.”
“Thanks, Tige,” Norven replied before entering the kitchen.
•
Standing on an upside down milk crate, Pykquat grumbled profanities as he was transferring dirty plates from a bus tub cluttered with dirty tableware to a pegged rack. When the runty, middle-aged bimbavor—a purple and white mammalian resembling a bear cub—with shaved arms covered in tattoos finished, he slid the rack of dirty plates into a dishwasher and slammed its top-down hood shut, initiating a wash cycle.