The sky outside his berth window still lingered with purple twilight when Kit awoke; the dawn slowly brightened the horizon with white rays of sunlight peeking out from behind the ocean. Kit sat up and squinted to see the clock on the far wall; it was just a few minutes before six o’clock.

            “Yeesh, morning already,” he yawned. He threw off his covers and rolled out of bed, then staggered over to where he had his sweater hanging on a hook. After slipping it on, he headed out to the kitchen. Usually, he wouldn’t be up so early, but he had something special in mind...

            Too far from Pirate Island, the Iron Vulture had anchored for the night near the cove of an uninhabited island to allow the crew to sleep. As he walked down the chilled, iron corridors, the ship was filled with an almost-eerie silence, save for the echos of the other pirates snoring from their own bunks.

            Once in the kitchen, Kit looked around for a moment to figure out where to begin. It was a large room, and not one that Kit was particularly familiar with. It was specially designed to prepare hundreds of meals a day, with several sinks and stoves, a garage-sized freezer and refrigeration unit, stacks of plates towered along the walls, silverware piled up in crates, pots and pans hanging from the walls and ceiling, and rolling bus trays heaped with towels and other utensils. Overall, it was a place that might be confusing, or even intimidating, for a person who didn’t know what he was doing... Kit considered himself fortunate that, of course, he wasn’t one of those persons.

            He had never formally cooked a meal before, but he was certain there couldn’t be anything difficult about it. First thing was first... he put on the cooky’s white chef hat, and checked his reflection in the freezer’s shiny steel door (as per Karnage’s worldly advice that anything worth doing was worth looking like a continental plate of fashion for). “Nothin’ to this cooking stuff," he smirked. "Bet I’m halfway done already!”

            From the refrigerator, he picked out a carton of eggs; from the freezer, a slab of bacon; and from one of the pantries, a bag of coffee beans. He placed them all on the cupboard next to a stove, and turned up the burner dial.

            “This thing even working?” he wondered, since he could barely hear anything coming from the stove. He cranked the dial to the far right, until he heard a nice, strong hissing sound. “There, that’s more like it. Now lessee, it needs a light...”

            He went around the room, opening drawer after drawer and cabinet after cabinet, until he finally found a box of matches. He held a match up to the stove and swiped it across the box, but it wouldn’t light. A second try, and it still refused. Now he was just getting irritated, and perfectly good gas was still streaming from the burner and going to waste. He gave the match one more firm swipe across the matchbox...

            *POOF!*

            Kit bolted out of the kitchen for a fire extinguisher, with a streak of smoke following him out the swinging double doors (which was mainly due to his chef’s hat being on fire, but who had time to think about hats?).

            With much effort, he struggled to pull a long, rubber hose through the galley and into the kitchen. It was already turned on and spraying water all over the place. Kit aimed at the stove and put his thumb over the nozzle, dousing the smoke with all the hose could muster. Nothing was actually burning, but the explosion left plenty of black, sooty residue on the walls, ceiling, and cabinets; basically everything near the stove... including Kit.

            When he was finally certain there was no sign of fire, Kit set the hose down, panting and coughing. But something was wrong... he could still smell something burning... his head. “Yipe!”

            He knocked the chef’s hat to the floor and drowned it until he was sure it was good and dead. It looked like a giant, scorched, soggy mushroom. The cooky probably wasn’t going to be too happy about that... and the Captain was probably going to be even less thrilled about the smoke damage.

            “Great, I’ll be toast when he sees this...” He swept some of the soot from his face and frowned. “Spoke too soon.”

            The kitchen could always be cleaned, though... he wasn’t giving up that easy. After putting the hose away, Kit was back in the kitchen for another try.

            He got himself a footstool so he could reach better, and moved the entire operation over to another stove. The one he had worked with was kind of... wet.

            This time, Kit lit the match before turning the gas on, and was happy to see the burner ignite properly for a change; although, the flame seemed awful tiny to him. It was just an inch or so. A little twist of the dial—or a big twist for that matter—and the flame grew to about six or seven inches. “Yeah, that oughtta be hot enough.” He turned it up just a hair more for good measure.

He set a frying pan in place, and grabbed an egg, holding it diligently in his fingers as he wound his hand back, then swung it forward against the counter. To his chagrin, it splattered all over his hand. “Ew, yuck!”

            He shook the goo off, then tried again with another egg... and again, decorated the counter with a sloppy mess of egg white. “Dang it,” he huffed. “These eggs don’t open right!” He grabbed yet another egg and examined it, as if checking for signs of defect. “Well, third time’s a charm.”

            It wasn’t. By now it was stuck all over the front of his sweater.

            “Forget this monkey business,” he fumed, wiping the mess aside with his sleeve. He tried a new approach: he took three eggs and simply tossed them into the frying pan. Much to his disappointment, though, the shells didn’t crack open all the way. Kit glared down at them, thoughtfully rubbing his brow. Then he took out a spatula...

            *whack* *whack* *whack*

            Now they were cracked. “Guess that’s what they mean by ‘beating eggs,’”, he mused. Now if he could only get those darn shells out of them...

            He’d get back to the eggs later. He needed to get the bacon on, so he set up another pan and lit the burner. Unfortunately, the bacon was still frozen solid; it would neither strip apart nor cut. So, without much deliberation, he just threw the whole slab in the pan and blessed it.

            He checked on the eggs... they were turning white and starting to sizzle. Come to find out, the crushed shells hardly affected their cooking at all. “All right, then. Something's finally looking good!”

            Next came the coffee. Though he had never brewed any himself before, he knew it had to be simple. Everyone in the whole wide world drank it all the time, after all (but only a few of the pirates did, for that matter; Hacksaw, for instance, was officially banned from all known sources of caffeine after an ugly incident he had involving three pots of coffee and an unexpected ballet recital on the Captain’s dinner table. Those were just the leaked details... no witnesses were ever permitted to speak of it again.) Kit once heard that people made tea by boiling tea leafs; therefore, it naturally followed that they made coffee by boiling coffee beans. “Yeah, makes so much sense it’s almost ridiculous!”

            He fetched a pot and filled it with water, poured it half-full with the coffee beans, and set it on a third burner.

            Suddenly, he noticed the eggs were sizzling and smoking fiercely. “Uh-oh!” He quickly turned the fire off, then grabbed the panhandle. “Yeowch!”

            Apparently, he needed an oven mitt.

            After hopping all around the kitchen in an “Ow-my-burning-hand!” interpretive dance, he snatched a mitt and pulled the pan from the stove. Setting it down on the footstool, he looked at its contents rather drearily. It didn’t look much like fried eggs. “Well... maybe it’ll look better when it’s served on a plate.”

            He put the pan over a plate and tilted it, but the eggs were stuck stubbornly to the bottom. He grumbled at them and grabbed the spatula, and tried to scrape them out... then they just stuck to the spatula. “Well for cryin’ out—yikes!”

            The bacon had started a grease fire! With no time to go get the fire hose again, Kit sped to a sink to filled a cup with water, and threw the water into the bacon pan.... the flames jumped higher. “Aw, crud!”

            Water wouldn’t do it, he needed another idea. He took a towel and threw it over the pan, but the towel went up like a piece of notepaper, and the fire laughed in his face. “Aw, crud!”

            Next, he scrambled to the pantry, and drug out the nearest sack of flower. It weighed more than he did, so hurrying wasn’t much of an option. But even when he got it near the stove again, the burlap sack was sewn shut. He tried ripping it, biting it, punching it, kicking it, stomping it, cursing it, begging it—but it was no use. The flour meant business.

            He raced to get a steak knife, raced back, and started hacking at the sack like a psychotic butcher. Finally, the top tore open, but it was still too heavy for him to pick up; so he grabbed a couple handfuls of flour and chucked them at the fire... it was pitiful. “Aw, cru-ud!”

            Then he scooped out half the sack onto the flour, picked it up by its corners, and swung it broadly toward the stove...

            The room went as blank as a Thembrian blizzard. When the air began to clear, and he opened his eyes again, he found the fire was out, but the kitchen looked like a white Christmas. Practically everything, himself included, was matted with flour. He coughed and stood there, stilly, looking at the mess surrounding him. “Crud.”

            Kit started growing hot under the collar; he rolled up his sleeve, more determined than ever. No, this was no longer a kind favor... it was a mission. A quest. A holy war in the kitchen. “I came to make breakfast, and gosh-darnit, I’m gonna make breakfast!”

            He scraped out what he could of the eggs onto a plate, then scraped chunks of the charred bacon on top. It was still bacon and eggs, after all. Then he checked to see how the coffee turned out... he discovered he was the proud creator of a pot of boiled black beans, but hardly coffee. It looked like dirty water, but maybe it would still taste like coffee... even if it was doused with flour. But, then again, so was the rest of the meal, so in a way, it was all... well, balanced. And certainly everyone knew the importance of a balanced breakfast.

            At approximately seven o’clock that morning, Don Karnage was abruptly startled from his beauty sleep when Kit—not exactly quietly—pushed open his cabin door.

            “What...?” Karnage leaned forward, seeing Kit storm inside. He had countlessly scolded the boy for barging in as he pleased, and didn’t take to his intrusion as a pleasant surprise. “Boy, what have I told you about—!” He paused, noticing Kit was bringing him a tray of something... what it was, he had no idea, but it looked like it was smoking. But what really struck him speechless was Kit’s appearance... what part of his body that wasn’t doused in flour was black with soot, slicked with egg white, or dripping with water. A track of white, powdery footprints followed him in the room. He might have been limping.

            Kit marched up and plopped the tray down at the foot of his bed. “Here, happy stinkin’ birthday! I’m going back to bed!”

            As Kit tromped away and out of sight, Karnage sat up and scratched the back of his ear, wondering what the heck just happened.