At Charlie’s Charlies something was stale and it wasn’t the food. The famous intergalactic diner had good air which was filtered by the hour, so neither was that stale source. It was something stale about its visitors, namely two groups of them in opposition. It was a stalemate.

On one side of the diner, leaning on artillery forged from neutrino cores and backrests carved to gluon-level geometries, were the Kivvons. Hardy space lizards with three nostrils which had granted them robustness to sleep ailments such as apnea and narcolepsy, they were so well-slept that they had quickly colonized a quarter of the habitable planets in the galaxy twin system Spin-Nips.

Across from strewn tables, harboring nanobots in their veins and a truce with their own immortality with said nanobots, a population recently cleaved by internal events, were the Iglodots from the planet Ziii.

Charlie had everything he could put in his face, in his face. Shirt, apron painted with grease, and all his pairs of hands. He was upset that a stalemate – a showdown – was happening in his pocket of space. Four-hundred years, that’s how long it took a dirty asteroid littered with bottles, rags, and space party confectioneries to become the central grub hub of the Undergalactic Midway Current (UMC). It was so integral to long-distance travel along the UMC that the local authorities had made it illegal to not pull over at Charlie’s Charlies to grub your hub if you were coming from Urdan Lepht to anywhere beyond the Wasteworld Line.

Charlie’s son had died in a spaceport accident when a colleague had forgotten to turn off the deep-fat fryer. The micro-nuclear explosion in wing twelve took six neighboring moons with it. Charlie’s son busked tables in wing twelve, but his shift had ended an hour before the explosion and he was drinking with friends in wing eleven. When the spaceport shook and rippled, it triggered a stampede of arms, legs, and heads – these consciousnesses were desperate to not be sucked into the black vacuum, jumping on the nearby ships or teleporting to local star systems. Charlie’s son crushed in the chaos.

The Grub Hunters Anonymous (GHA) came in full force with documents and signed documents a-hundred and uncountable. Two-billion dead from the micro-nuclear potential of a bubbly oil bomb! With the galaxy in an anti-grub slump, GHA swayed the Outergalactic Order to unanimously ban all consumption of food anywhere within a four-thousand light year diameter of Florns Point. They put little red blinking cones at the boundary and the decision was final because it was signed on paper.

Charlie mourned twice. Once for the death of his son, for he shared fifty-percent genetic material and a lifetime of synthetic memories all held in packages of his cognition. This was reason enough to cry. The second tear was for gastronomy, for food, and for all the holes for munching and sucking that would munch and suck no more. Charlie was a man of vows because this made him feel he had more free will than he operationally could. The night he heard the news that Outergalactic Order declared for the immediate de-grubbing of the galaxy, Charlie made himself a new vow. The universe, he promised, would be shown that grub was no enemy, that without food there was no life. To have a son’s death be the reason for universal hunger, why it boiled any blood of which he had none.

And now Charlie slumped under the kitchen counter, his diner unwinding before him. He saw his work, his son’s retribution, his “Freedom to Fry” campaigns, it all came apart like counterfeit string cheese. He would not allow it for he had made a vow – not in Charlie’s Charlies.

The Kivvons were cooking up a storm of insults, testing the patience of the Iglodots.

“You nano-bugs! We will crush you like cryetin jelly packets.” one yelled and it echoed in the diner.

“Twenty-years, for twenty-years I haven’t eaten, but I wouldn’t each Iglodot flesh if it was served to me on a plate of bismuth with spice squeezed from the Nooty Nebula.” said another and this one shot phlem from its mouth instead ending its sentence with an implied period.

A third Kivvon simply said, “Yuk!” and this one hit the Igolodots the hardest and they couldn’t hold back. An Igolodot that was really rattled, only fifty-percent of itself in attendance for the insult from the Kivvons, fired back: “You disgusting lizards full of holes! Never have I seen a Kivvon with nose holes that weren’t used for anything but smelling their own feces.”

“Plug those nostrils before I vomit. I can see all the way to the other side of the galaxy through those things.” said a second Iglodot, spurred on by the boldness of the first.

“Nose hole pickers!” came a quip from an Iglodot near the back. Kivvon nostrils were common angles of attack for those looking to cut them at their emotional knees, there wasn’t much else to insult on these perfect creatures, for science had proven scales were the perfection of the creator.

Someone from the Iglodot crowd threw a slice of rye bread and it hit a Kivvon on the front of its forehead. At first the Kivvon seemed to have not noticed it and then, slowly, the veins around its neck began to swell a hot red and ripple like the frills of an eel.

“No nano-bug breads me!” it yelled and then fired a neutrino core-forged laser gun into the huddle of Iglodots. The Iglodots were prepared and in a flash a silver wall materialized on their front line. Laser hots from the Kivvon deflected off the silver wall and attacked the abandoned meals and drinks around the diner hall. The ones that didn’t fizz out in piles of mulluck mash or garden salads ricocheted right back at the Kivvons.

“Friendly fire!” shouted a Kivvon and it pointed at a worm of light just before it swam into his chest. He keeled over, cooked, and the Kivvons took evasive action to match the Iglodots defenses.

Everything in the diner transformed into the raw material to complete the blueprint of a Kivvon fortress. Four-legged upright tables holding four-person roasts became four-legged sideways barricades to hide four hissing Kivvons. Chairs tangled in bar stools in a patchwork of Neo-modern barbed wire. Frightening.

Kivvon’s that were exposed near the edges of the diner hall quickly covered themselves in tablecloths to camouflage with the backdrop.

Every Kivvon had a neutrino core-forged laser gun trained on the Iglodot’s silver wall.

After the commotion of Kivvon construction, the dining room hung like a pin balanced on a three-star system’s Lyupanov-point. Some foot shuffled and a steel fork scraped along the floor, it echoed through the tables, the chairs, and the wine glasses still with wine like gorged fruits.

The fork lived as long as half a flutter of a budgie’s wing – it left the material world like an auriferous apparition from laser fire from somewhere.

There were the Igolodots, unarmed, seeming to have come to terms with the Kivvons’ offer to crush them like jelly packets. One Kivvon stood up from behind a four-legged barricade, pointed a talon at the Iglodot army like a saint delivering telepathic ablutions, and spat: “FIIIIRE!”

“– STOP!”

The word knocked the standing Kivvon’s saintly arm back to his side, and shifted the entire Iglodot army back two Iglodot paces. No Kivvon fired, no Iglodot silver wall materialized. There, in the space between the two sides, where full meals still lay steaming on tables and orbicular androids spun in circles stressed to their circuits about cleaning up the building mess, stood Charlie. His gaze was at the floor but his posture was furious, a convulsing statue, and in his hand was a tube about the breadth of three well-worked Kivvon biceps.

Charlie was so angry he was spitting steam and the tube spat along with him. A Kivvon camouflaging under a tablecloth shifted it could see and it then addressed Charlie, “Spindly fool. Get out of the way before our neutrino-forged laser guns pulp your insides into shards of – “

“GET. OUT.”

Charlie didn’t move and neither did the Igolodots or the Kivvons.

“EVERYONE.”

None budged, but the Kivvons hissed in anger. All the Kivvon guns were now trained on Charlie.

“In my hand,” Charlie began, “I hold a fryer. It is not any fryer, but a fryer of the deep-fat variety. Its purpose is to cook, to degrees two-hundred, matter of the battered variety. The fryer’s victims will first hear its sebaceous song sneak upon them as its surface bubbles pop with expectation, then they will feel its hot oily licks lacerate their skin as it whets its stomach for the treat. And then? By then it is too late.

“How does such a ruthless buttery beast harness such power? Why through eighteen uranium rods – the radiant green maw of the fryer – that secrete neutron bullets into its boiling belly. To tame such a brute demands a dexterity and awareness only accessible through twelve years of fryer education. Twelve years sleepless, surface hairs singed, wrangling nuclear nuggets and radioactive chips. Few survive.”

Charlie looked up now, he soaked in the effects that his words were having on the two armies. The Kivvons had their sights trained on Charlie but they couldn’t hide the shaking in their arms. The Iglodots were trying to materialize a silver wall but parts of it kept ghosting away in fright. Charlie had their attention.

“You have defecated on my holy ground, spat on the floor of my temple, defaced the handiwork of my gastro-artists. Blasphemy of an order equal to giving the rude sign to the blackhole, Ligus, at the center of our galaxy and then trodding all over its planets with not a show wiped once. To send you to the Outergalactic Order for trial would be an unworthy punishment, for they would elect to turn you into vegetables or freeze you in tarmac. No, these wouldn’t allow your souls to wallow deep. No. You will pay with a punishment far worse.”

The Kivvons now lookd for exits and the Iglodots tried windows, and everything was sealed because outside was the vacuum of space, but it sounded far less frightening than Charlie. Among the Kivvons was an anomaly. The anomaly spoke, “You’re bluffing! That device in your hand is no larger than three of my biceps. That couldn’t knock a rock out of orbit if you swung it fast!”

Charlie didn’t look at the one who had spoken out against him. Instead he put the deep-fat fryer down by his feet, lifted a cover to reveal a cavity full of buttons, and pushed one that was large, red, and round.

The button blinked.

The deep-fat fryer started to sing and oil started to spit. A green aura grew from somewhere deep inside the mouth of the hot oil and the well-trained ear of a linguist might have heard it gurgle a pattern that was far from random. Then four covers opened at its side and near its base and two arms and a pair of legs sprung from the fryer and it hefted its vat so that it towered over the mouthy Kivvon, whose nostrils flared.

Exactly like a tube of tomato paste, one great robotic claw reached down and squeezed the space lizard, and those nostrils they spat all sorts of lizard juices. Up it brought the body of the lizard and then down it dipped it headfirst into its boiling belly oils. In one side went Kivvon, out spat five inch-cubed cuts of deep-fried Kivvon fillet.

“Who’s next.” said Charlie. Charlie didn’t ask questions.