Laughing is strictly forbidden in all situations, on the account that uncontrolled flexing of the throat muscles can induce accidental breathing. That was what the sign read. Four-hundred miles of no signs and then this one seemed to spring up out of nowhere like a risk-prone seedling. Clearly this place had something to offer and Flink was right about one thing, something smelled like old burnt toast, and that just didn’t smell right.

Hulton stopped breathing. As flamboyant as his confidence was that Flink’s smells were all in his head, he wasn’t one to throw himself into potentially perilous situations without caution. He also armed his watter thwatter in case any creatures took it upon themselves to use physical force to snack on him. Mental force for snacking was handled by the pyramidal nickel hat he wore on his head at all times. A staple for orbital body-faring bipeds of his generation.

Something smelled funny. It felt very quiet now that Hulton had switched off his lung pump. Oxygen would divert noiselessly from between layers of fat deposits in his skin so the only sound was that of his feet clomping through the dry grass. His clomping was soundless because of his pair of foot sound-dampers. The sum of the situation was that Hulton’s auditory system decided he might be floating and he spun into a momentary wave of nausea.

The smell started like notes of burnt toast, but that was too surface level for an olfactory system like Hulton’s. By the recommendation of his olfactorologist, Hulton had upgraded to the brand-spanking-new Olf-OK-tor 8080 with ten nostrils to a nasal cavity and repositioning hairs that tracked floating molecules of interest like worms to the drumming of rain. Right now sounds were returning as the Olf-OK-tor 8000 requested body ATP to increase production a half percent to divert energy supplies from his body and dig deeper into the origin of what it was smelling. Hulton’s nose was a nostril hawk. The hawk telescoped into a few particles in the stream passing through his nose cavities and pieced apart these anomalies into smells of resolution that neighbouring electron levels would gawk at. The Olf-OK-tor 8000 had started at burnt toast but was moving deeper at lightning speed. Hulton smelled burnt rye, then burnt chapati, and then chapati cooked at twelve degrees celsius above standard cooking temperature for two minutes longer than package instructions. Soon he found this chapati was a third-sector smell, third-sector of the Subdromeda Galaxy that is. He honed in on the star system, Opdop Fee, and crash landed onto the roof of a restaurant named Gib’s and Jim’s Jibs and Gims.

There was nothing he could do now. He was learning so much and getting carried away in it like a white water rapid ride across the surface of knowledge. Where would it stop? By this point he knew the name of the chef that had prepared the chapati and how said chef had been distracted by a noise outside and went to investigate such that upon returning the chapati had been overcooked. He learned of the chef’s daughter. Of extravagant Kath Lawson, who ran away from home at age sixteen due to the bullying she had received at schooling and only sought out her father twenty years later. The smell told him how the chef had been in the throws of depression since his daughter’s departure, sleeping pills required to dowse his flaming thoughts of grief at night. And despite wanting to run in any direction that was away from such a sad story, Hulton’s Olf-OK-tor 8000 kept drilling, dug so far in fact as to find the scent of the story’s resolution. Hulton learned that the noise outside had been the chef’s daughter hiding among the bins unbeknownst to her that her father was on the other side of the brick wall she had used as one wall of her shelter. And that the chef had never actually returned once he discovered his daughter living homeless in a trash disposal unit. Instead, a second-in-command chef had marched into the kitchen after he saw smoke through the porthole window of the swinging kitchen doors and doused the flaming chapati in a carbon-dioxide fire extinguisher, saving five-hundred passengers aboard a ship named Flapping Famingo, the first voyage of said ship which would sink two years later after grounding on a shallow island reef that an inebriated captain failed to take notice of on an advanced radar system that was yelling at him to yaw left. Said radar system was the Ra-DAD-Ar 8080.

Hulton’s Olk-OK-tor 8000 trip was interrupted by a call from Flink: he’d found the source of the leak in the planet’s ozone, patched it up with a two short swabs of Sticktator Tape TT12 and was now whizzing by to pick Hulton up quicker than a flatswitch can divert a ten volt charge. Hulton breathed.