kilonovaria - Tumblr blog

kilonovaria · 3 months ago

Text

Set Aside To Cool

—

A fic for Crepe’s debut day! A somewhat-kinda canon-compliant one-shot about Strawberry Crepe Cookie emerging from their cryobaking pod. :DD

It’s got angst. It’s got my uncontested headcanons and some worldbuilding that I am making up for my own purposes. There’s a child crying about waking up alone and a lot of hints of OC cookies not being around anymore.

Enjoy!!!

—

Click. Hiss.

That’s the first thing they hear when they wake up, warm and sleepy still. Strawberry Crepe Cookie yawns as the warm air cycling around them dries up the last of the cryo fluid. They’ll have to make a note of how crisp they still feel first thing after leaving the pod.

Except. Something’s off.

Not with their dough. Obviously the cryobaking pod worked perfectly. They feel as crisp as they did before getting set inside. What’s wrong is that things are never this quiet around here. Or dark.

They open the pod door with the inside release lever to find the lab housing their pod… completely empty. The overhead lights are off, there are projects sitting unattended on the counters, and Crepe can’t hear anyone else around. Not a cookie in sight even when they turn on the lights and peek out into the hall.

This doesn’t make any sense.

The Neapolitan Institute of Magichanical Engineering (NeaTech, for short) is home to the best and brightest minds from all over Crispia. There have been fist fights over funding, cookies shouting at each other over double-booked lab times. In all their time as a student here, Strawberry Crepe Cookie has never seen a lab that wasn’t either already in use or being prepared by Wafflebots for the next group of eager grad students lined up outside the door.

But lab 3-C sits empty. No, worse than that. It’s in disrepair.

At first glance, it looks like nothing’s out of place at all. But a funny thing about the cleaning bots is that they’re smart enough to identify what research projects in progress look like and are forbidden from disturbing any they come across without a direct order. So the sweet dust downright caked on top of notebooks and tools alike is unsettling.

“Things don’t get this bad in a month…” Crepe examines a stale, un-glazed piece of waffle paneling on a lab table beside them. “Not even three months. This is wrong.”

This feels unreal, like they’re still dreaming. Crepe goes back to the little chest they’d filled with their stuff before they started this experiment. They use the key they’d hid behind it to open it up.

Waiting safely inside is their precious headset. Raspberry Pie Cookie had rightfully reminded them just before they climbed into the pod that the extreme cold might damage its more delicate components, so they’d set it aside for safekeeping.

Their crepe cape was in here mostly so that it’d act as a cushion in case anyone or anything bumped against the chest while they were indisposed, but it’s nice to have the extra layer now as they brave this strange situation.

“Let’s see here.” Crepe is relieved when the cryobaking pod reacts to their request for its logs. They’re not nervous—their inventions never fail—but it’s a relief nonetheless. “There’s the data from the toppings I put in to test the cryo fluid. And the vitals from the sugar mice I froze for a week to test it on living desserts. And here’s my… wait, what?!”

The first set of commands is exactly what Crepe’s expecting to find. Their intention had been to preserve themself in their pod for a night, then a week, and finally a month with breaks in between to see if there were any adverse effects to keeping cookies on ice for long periods of time.

If there aren’t, then some of the professors with more medical backgrounds said they’d pitch the pod to their colleagues in hospitals across Crispia. Crepe admittedly wasn’t—and, honestly, still isn’t—all that interested in the practical applications of being able to put patients in stasis, but they’d risen to the challenge when presented with it nonetheless! It was an exciting project from start to finish and they were thrilled to finally be able to test it out themself after all this time.

Of course, some cookies had concerns about Crepe testing it on themself. The main one was that Crepe was too freshly baked to be taking on that kind of thing, but the worry that actually got Crepe to take a step back and put in some failsafes came from their friend Raspberry Pie Cookie.

She’s asked them if they’d teach her how the pod works so that, if a tiny issue popped up while they were inside, she’d be able to take care of it. Or, at worst, pop it open to take them out without having to call in a Wafflebot to shatter the sugar glass.

Needless to say, Crepe had written her a manual and walked her through it three times before the senior staff had let them go through with this.

So, Strawberry Crepe Cookie is understandably alarmed to find that not only did Raspberry Pie Cookie alter the settings on their cryo-sleep session, she’d made it longer.

Dozens of times longer.

“That- That can’t be right. There must be some mistake!” Crepe taps at holo-syrup displays. “A typo somewhere, the wrong value returned!”

The data doesn’t lie, though. The lights being off, sugar dust on everything that isn’t cleaned automatically, the

dead

silence.

“HEY!” They suddenly can’t stand it. This freaky calm, this deceptive peace. Strawberry Crepe Cookie rushes out into the hallway to find it well-lit but eerily spotless. “Is anyone out here?!”

There is no answer. Not from any of the equally empty labs they pass, not from the lifeless classrooms on the next floor, nor from any of the locked dorms.

The only things still moving and working within the institute’s walls are the Wafflebots. The ones scrubbing clean floors, dusting awards on shelves, and carrying dusty sheets off to wash like everything’s normal. Like nothing is wrong.

There’s even one sweeping at the end of the hall that briefly turns to watch them when they come across Raspberry Pie’s dorm room. It’s locked, unsurprisingly, but Crepe still bangs their fists against the maple wood while shouting for her to come out.

“Pi! Pi get out here right now!” Crepe rams their tiny shoulder against the rattling door without a care towards their own dough. They blink away tears. “This isn’t funny! Stop hiding, I know what you did!”

There is no answer. This ugly, raw feeling in Crepe’s chest turns to rage. They do something they promised Mint Chip Cookie they would never do again without his permission and seize control of the Wafflebot in the corner. It offers no resistance towards their hasty hack to give themself admin access, instead simply chirping quietly to confirm the change.

Strawberry Crepe Cookie steps back from the doorway and points to it. “Break this down. Now!”

“Task… accepted.” The Wafflebot cheerfully confirms. It then hovers over to the door and smashes it inwards with a single swing. “Task… completed. Currently… on standby.”

Crepe doesn’t wait for it to move aside, opting to duck under its arm instead.

What they find would be underwhelming if it didn’t make them cry even harder.

The berry silk sheets on the bed are freshly washed and neatly tucked in, done by a machine and clearly untouched since the last cleaning cycle. There aren’t any new tea stains in the cream rugs. But the dusty sticky note reminders that used to be on the walls have been left where they’ve fallen to the ground. There’s an inkwell that’s dried out from being left open on the desk. All of these things can only mean one thing:

Raspberry Pie Cookie has not been in this room for decades now.

“Pi…”

Pi is gone.

Crepe takes a step back, heedless of how their foot meets one of the chunks of the door. They take another step. And another.

And Strawberry Crepe Cookie leaves NeaTech behind.

—

They spend days snapping up control of every Wafflebot in sight, commanding them to search the whole Kingdom for their friends. For any sign of any cookie left behind with them. It’s by the second day that they realize they’re being horribly inefficient and adjust their plan accordingly.

Their new base of operations is the Wafflebot Hangar where they used to pester Mint Chip Cookie during an internship and for many months after it ended. He always joked that they were only hanging around to steal his job as Royal Engineer but he let them stay anyway. Said it was good to get more hands-on experience with the Wafflebots, especially when it turned out they had such a knack for them.

They wonder what he’d say now if he could see them send out a software patch from the main console to every active Wafflebot so they can just update permissions for all units at once. The last time they did this was for a prank that got them scolded for a solid twenty minutes over the dangers of having Wafflebots abandon their posts at construction sites and directing carriages just for something silly.

They’d do anything to have him here chewing them out about it and making them set things right again.

They don’t know what they did wrong. They just want to fix this.

—

The Wafflebots don’t find anyone. They remove rubble from houses, look under bridges, and search as thoroughly as Crepe demands. But even still, they come up empty.

The entire Vanilla Kingdom turned top to bottom, castle included, and the truth remains that Strawberry Crepe Cookie is all alone.

They cry. They scream. They throw things through the remaining intact windows they can find and scream louder when that does nothing to help. They feel awful all the time.

All the while, the Wafflebots they released back to their original functions look after them. The domestic gardening Wafflebots move to the fields at some point and start to pull fresh jellies from the ground for the cooking Wafflebots to make into meals for them. The ones that have been keeping the dorms in NeaTech tidy help Crepe turn Mint Chip’s office into a bedroom so they never have to leave the Hangar.

While it’s nice to feel cared for, Strawberry Crepe Cookie is lonely. Hasn’t stopped being lonely ever since everyone went away and left them behind.

But, as Triple Choco Cookie always said, busy cookies are happy cookies!

So they throw themselves back into their work.

Crepe can safely label their cryobaking pod a success. They don’t really have anyone to sell it to, but knowing they’ve achieved their goal is reward enough. It has to be.

So, their next project is less about utility and more about making something fun. They spend weeks making big, fancy crepe arms for smashing rubble and reaching stuff on the top shelf without having to call over a Wafflebot to do it for them. Their first prototype had a laser cannon in it too, but that exploded so they unfortunately had to scrap that aspect. They’ll revisit it some day.

Triple Choco was onto something though. Crepe has so much fun ramming their new toys against all kinds of ruined candy sculptures and exposed sugar steel support beams to stress test them. They go through five designs before they finally find one that’s durable and easy to store with magic. A brilliant solution that means they don’t have to mind a pair of massive floating arms everywhere they go.

Their next venture is obviously making the Wafflebots more exciting. There’s really not much of a point in having them clear the streets and rebuild all these houses if Crepe’s never going to use any of them, is there? Exactly. So the ones better suited for heavy lifting can help them with making all their new designs instead!

Lasers, lances, hard armored waffle shells, healing tech, and whatever else Crepe can think up to add gets implemented into the next batch of Wafflebots. They sink days, weeks, months into making more Wafflebots than they even know what to do with. Some get stripped down for parts, others redesigned, but on the whole their total number of mechanical friends only ever goes up.

And the Wafflebots are their friends. Every single one that Crepe has brought in for routine maintenance to keep in tiptop shape is near and dear to their heart.

From the simplest floor-scrubbing Wafflebot to the dozenth Berry Bishop, Strawberry Crepe Cookie knows every single one of their little quirks. The ones that prefer to play ball games with them over tic-tac-toe. The older models that need a bit of extra care when they come in to have their joints cleaned out. They are all worth the work, mean so much to them.

The Wafflebots are their friends, yes, but it’d be fair to say they’re family too.

—

“Do you think I should give Goliath three limbs or four?” Crepe asks the nearest Waffle Guardian hovering near their workspace.

There’s a brief pause where their friend probably flips a coin or something, but it does answer. “Four… provides more… stability.”

Crepe hums thoughtfully. “That’s a fair point. It’ll be a bit too heavy to justify giving my first attempt hovertech, but maybe the final model can—“

“Cookie… spotted.”

Strawberry Crepe Cookie stops talking. They turn to stare wide-eyed at the Wafflebot that floated into the Hangar without their notice. “What did you just say?”

The Wafflebot repeats itself. “Cookie… spotted… on the… east bridge.”

“That’s gotta be a false positive. There aren’t any cookies up here.” Strawberry Crepe Cookie sets their tools down and makes a beckoning gesture. “Come here, I’m gonna hook you up to the console and run some diagnostics. We’ll get your issue sorted and you’ll feel better in a sec, okay?”

The poor bugged Wafflebot complies, letting Crepe hook it up to the console and sift through its recent scans to find whatever crumbling statue made it think it found a cookie. This is a problem that Crepe thought they’d coded a solution for ages ago, back when they were first scrambling to search the kingdom and coming up with false positives left and right.

Except, thats not what they find in its storage.

“You… you actually found a cookie.” Crepe’s head spins at what this means. “That’s not a statue. You- you really…”

The cookie’s unique ingredients turned up as corrupted text somehow, but the baseline stuff is all there. Flour, sugar, salt, jam… that’s a cookie! That’s a real, live cookie!

They have to go meet her! Did she take an airship here or patch up the busted teleporter? Did she know they were here? Is she going to stay? Please, please, please tell them she’s going to stay—

“Well, isn’t this a surprise?”

Crepe startles so badly that they summon their crepe arms as a reflex. They whirl around to find that the mystery cookie is right here. And she’s tall. Even without her horns she’s nearly twice their height.

“With the state this kingdom is in I didn’t expect to run into any cookies at all.” She looks between them and their crepe arms that they make no move to use. She then looks down at him and smiles. “Much less any as gifted as you, little one.”

Strawberry Crepe Cookie looks up at this stranger. This real, solid, dough and jam stranger.

And they smile back.

#THIS IS SO GOODDDD #explodes like a grenade oh my GODDDD #OP!!!! thank you so much!!!#telepathically communicating with you and your headcanons on this one so so hard rn oh my god you're so real for that #strawberry crepe cookie #this is beautiful actually oh my god

12 notes · View notes