Piece by Piece | Ultimate SciFi Smack Down [✓]

[R2] The Book Of Tasty And Delicious Food

It was a fine summer morning above the USSR. Donald Duck sang a jovial, incomprehensible tune as he prepared cheese-filled pastries in his cloaked spaceship’s kitchen.

Donald's spirits soared. Time tourism was special and could only be improved with freshly baked treats. Plus, his connections with the Disney company meant that he was able to book a luxury suite, which resembled an apartment more than a spaceship.

To Donald, the launch of the first satellites was more exciting than the Titanic or watching Mansa Musa crash the economy. Donald had a bizarre nostalgia for the early days of the space race. He also had a soft spot for animals who’d been experimented with. 

A slightly panicked street mongrel named Laika passed near Donald’s trajectory. He noted the internal temperature of Sputnik 2 had risen to an uncomfortable level, then he became distracted by a beeping alarm. He pressed the wrong button on his console. 

Laika was transported aboard Donald’s ship, right outside the kitchen door. He did not notice.

Laika was confused, which was understandable. Her stomach growled.

Donald successfully located the source of the beeping and pressed the STOP button on his kitchen timer.

Laika watched as Donald kneaded rich, pliant dough. Her mouth watered. The smell of fresh flour and cheese drifted out the doorway. Laika hadn’t eaten recently, as preparation for her launch. As a dog who’d wandered the streets of Moscow early in her life, she was intimately familiar with hunger.

She was usually a calm dog, but she balked when she heard Donald’s singing.

“WE ARE THE LAST [incomprehensible]/ WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO!”

Though Laika could not have known it, Donald Duck was difficult to understand because he’d wanted to be a better science communicator, so he’d sought eternal youth to have enough time to learn everything. Unfortunately, in the process of experimenting on himself, he’d become unintelligible.

He’d also become the physical manifestation of a quack, but that was a coincidence.

Laika watched with a wary eye as Donald set half a dozen pastries to rise on his kitchen table in a column of sunlight. He turned his back on the new batch as he attended to something in the oven.

Donald sang, "WILL OUR STORY SHINE LIKE A LIGHT/ OR [incoherent]."

With Donald's back turned, Laika approached the table where the pastries glistened in the sun.

The smell of baking bread was intoxicating. She wolfed down three raw pastries without chewing.

Laika thought the pastries might have tasted good, but she didn't care as long as they were edible. She wanted to soothe the deep pain that coiled from her stomach to her throat. She wanted to quench her thirst. She felt the dough cool her from the inside out.

Donald extracted hot pastries from the oven. He turned around to see a heat exhausted, drooling street mongrel in his house. 

He jumped about two meters in the air, prompting Laika to flee. The entire batch of fresh pastries somehow flew through the air, landed on Donald's head in a perfect tower, and scorched his scalp.

She panicked. She wove between Donald's feet and darted through the nearest door. 

His head was lobster red, though from fury or the scalding, Laika could not say. Donald brought a rolling pin down, hard, where Laika's head had been a moment ago. It shattered into splinters.

"AAAAGH!" he hollered.

Laika dashed underneath a table, wove around a sofa, bounded off a bed, and ended up in a tiny guest bedroom.

Their chase caused chaos. Donald upturned furniture. He toppled a dresser. Whereas Donald was clumsy and furious, Laika was agile and terrified.

He waved the shattered remains of the rolling pin above his head as she backed into a corner.

Laika shrank, as if she could make herself disappear.

"WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU, I'LL [unintelligible] AND BLAST YOU BACK INTO SPACE!"

Her ears perked up. Laika loved being a cosmonaut. She couldn't speak, so she wagged her tail.

Donald froze, surprised.

"You wanna be part of the space race?" Donald said in soothing tones.

Laika kept wagging her tail.

He spoke slowly. He closed the distance between them. His entire body was spring loaded. "You wanna be a good dog?"

Donald swiped her in a single, swift strike. She didn't bolt, even though every cell of her body screamed at her to.

She looked back at him with her big, innocent eyes. Something in his expression softened.

He seemed less willing to kill her now that they literally saw eye to eye. He sighed deeply.

"You can't go back. I have reservations about animal testing," admitted the anthropomorphic animal, anachronistically.

He opposed animal testing out of love and compassion, but deep in his inflamed heart, he knew that science without animal testing was a castle in the sky.

Laika panted.

Donald frowned. "And I can feel every rib in your body. And you only got raw pastries? Don't you know they're better when they're cooked?"

He marched her to the kitchen, holding her aloft like Simba from The Lion King, an animated movie that would be released in the next 40 years. It was uncomfortable, but Laika didn't squirm because it was better than being launched back into orbit.

He dropped her to the ground and fed her every single cheese pastry he'd baked.

"I can't eat these anyway because they touched the floor," Donald told her.

Laika vacuumed up all the pastries. She was only vaguely aware that Donald had put the three surviving pastries in the oven. When they finished baking, he hid them somewhere on the counter.

When she finished, she sat and looked at him expectantly.

He hit the roof. "You want more‽"

Laika focused on making herself look as cute as possible, because she'd heard that dogs could decrease hypertension in humans, and Donald Duck was very human.

After his blood pressure returned to baseline, Donald grumbled and told her that dinner would be in three hours.

He went to work straightening all the furniture that he had knocked over. He watched as Sputnik 2 burned.

Laika followed him as far as the living room. She jumped on the sofa and took a long, restful nap, mostly oblivious to her rescue.

She dreamed of space. She dreamed that she became a patriotic meteor that burned bright through the sky. She knew she would be famous.

When she woke up, she was surprised that Donald had cuddled next to her. That explained why she had gotten so hot.

Laika snuggled closer to him. As far as she was concerned, Donald was a hero. She had found her way home.