Once I was playing as Chef when I noticed that this round had one of my favorite flags enabled: “funfood”. This meant that certain objects not normally allowed to be eaten were now able to be cooked. I don’t know exactly how the back-end of this flag works, because what is and isn’t cookable when it’s enabled isn’t always the same. But this time, it seemed like almost anything was fair game.
It started out fairly tame, making pies out of drinking glasses and forks. Toolbelt-filled donuts, etc. I kept trying different things, trying to test the limits of the mechanics, but there didn’t seem to be any. I could bake a loaf of bread, cut it into slices, then bake a pie out of each slice of bread, then cut the pie into slices and make each slice of pie into a cake, which could be cut into slices…
Then the hydroponicist came in and told me he’d managed to grow “the good stuff”. Ambrosia Vulgaris, it’s called. Basically space weed. He then emptied out my fridge and filled it with the stuff. I made it into a pie. Then I cut a slice of that pie and made a whole new pie out of it. Then I cut a slice of that pie, and made a new pie out of that. I was determined to find how deep this rabbit hole could go.
I was about 12 recursive pie layers deep when an Assistant (originally this job was intended to be an unskilled labor pool that all departments could draw on when they needed extra hands, but has since devolved into roving murder hobos determined to try and “win” at Space Station 13 (by being the last man standing (in a cooperative game))) beat an Atmospherics Technician to death with a toolbox in the Mess Hall, stole his suit, dumped his backpack contents out on the floor, and left. I went in and started trying to clean up and a Security officer came in and started yelling at me, assuming that I had been the one to commit the murder. As I was trying to explain that no, it in fact was not, the very same Assistant, now wearing an Atmos Tech uniform, threw a floor tile at the Security Officer’s head. The SecOp yakety saxed after him and left me alone to clean up the mess.
I dragged the body across the hall to medbay, dumped it on the lobby floor and rang the desk bell (standard procedure), and went back to the kitchen and tried to figure out what to do with all these atmospherics components. I started stuffing them down the pneumatic garbage chute, but the thing wouldn’t even flush. It’s not that they wouldn’t go, the chute wasn’t working. I called the Quartermaster (the garbage chute system doubles as the mail delivery system, so the tubes are his jurisdiction) to ask what was up, but he said the whole chute system’s power had been cut and he can’t figure out why. I called up Engineering but the Chief Engineer just yelled at me that he’s got More Important Things To Do than to listen to complaints about the chutes, which aren’t even his job, and also I’m an idiot.
I walked over to Cargo and told the Quartermaster what happened, and he checked the ship roster to see who was Chief Engineer that shift (round). “Oh. That guy.”, he said, which honestly told me everything I needed to know. He said he’d try and get the chutes back up and running without Engineering’s help, and I headed back into the kitchen and just stared at this pile of atmos ducts and vents on my floor. I suddenly remembered the Pieception I’d been working on and got an idea. I started throwing all the pipes and valves and vents and whatnot into the deep fryer, and sure enough, it accepted them. I went about deep frying all the ductwork, and glanced over at Medbay to see if they’d taken care of that body.
They hadn’t. I rang the bell again and waited at the counter this time, but nobody came. So I dragged the body back and tried to stuff it into the deep fryer too, but apparently a whole entire person is where the deep fryer drew the line. I’d had some experience using the surgery system from my time as a Roboticist, so I started cutting the body up to see if it was just a size issue, and sure enough, I was able to deep fry the individual parts just fine. I delivered the brain and butt to Robotics, but deep fried the rest, and at about that time, the Quartermaster texted my PDA to let me know he’d gotten the chutes working again, so I began dutifully stuffing all the atmospherics bits and pieces I’d deep fried down the disposals chute, which I’d reconfigured to go to the Chief Engineer’s office instead of Disposals (which I knew how to do due to my time spent working as a Cargo Tech).
I thought he’d be pleased to have all those lost parts back, since Atmospherics is part of his department, but apparently not! He was in fact not pleased.
I finished flushing the atmos parts and went back to my Pie Monstrosity, cutting slices of Space Weed Pie Pie Pie and using them as the filling for a new Space Weed Pie Pie Pie Pie. I was about 30 layers deep when I started to get hungry, so I started eating pieces of the pie.
Apparently when you make recursive food like that, the nutritional value of each successive layer drops, so while a Pie may restore, say, 50 Hunger Points or whatever, a slice of pie made from a slice of THAT pie would only restore say, 45 points, and so on. So I ate more pie. And more. I shoveled Space Weed Pie Pie Pie Pie Pie … Pie Slices down my gullet as fast as I could make them, and finally managed to get my hunger levels back to a safe level. I began mass producing this pie, cutting them into slices, placing them on plates, and stuffing them in my bag, intending to scatter them all over every surface of the end-of-round shuttle when it eventually came.
That was when I learned another quirk of the funfood mechanic. Since it wasn’t meant to be a ‘serious’ feature of the game, and only enabled once in a while when an admin was feeling silly, it wasn’t coded very thoroughly. While the NUTRITIONAL value of recursive food was coded to drop, the CHEMICAL value was apparently forgotten about. Meaning that a slice of Space Weed Pie Pie Pie^30 was just as potent as a slice of Space Weed Pie.
Just as I was taking the latest layer of pie out of the oven, I began to hallucinate. First I went blind for a few seconds, then I started getting phantom radio messages. Xenomorphs would materialize in the kitchen and vanish a second later. I turned into a cat for a few seconds. The kitchen was fully engulfed in flames, which then miraculously extinguished themselves. My body fell apart for a little while, then I got better.
I eventually fell over and started seizing. I laid there on the floor of my kitchen and twitched and babbled incoherently for a couple minutes before someone came by and saw. They dragged me to medbay, which apparently had staff now, and they threw me into the scanner. I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, but I could hear that they were talking. They brought me into an operating room, where I promptly died almost immediately.
When you die in SS13, you become a ghost. Players can’t see you (usually), and you can walk through walls, but you can’t interact with anything (you can do stuff like blow sheets of paper around or flip light switches, but there’s like a two-minute cooldown on this, and you can’t mess with anything important). What you can do, though, is see the whole map (no line-of-sight fog of war) and hear anyone in the immediate vicinity.
The doctors were baffled at my condition, and very surprised that I died so quickly, even though they’d just pumped me full of stabilizing chems. “What the hell?” said the Surgeon. Since I was already dead, there was no point in doing any surgery or whatever it was they’d planned, so they decided to just try and figure out what it was that killed me, in case it was a virus or something. Then the Surgeon opened my bag. “JESUS CHRIST. …ok so I’m pretty sure it’s not a virus”.
The cause of my demise now made clear, they decided to slab me (stick my corpse in the morge; usually reserved for crew members who “go braindead” (log out mid-round)), instead of cloning (respawning) me, since it was My Own Fault, and I Should Have Known Better, and they Don’t Have Time to be enabling dumb-dumbs by giving them a second chance to do stuff like overdose on space weed.
I watched them slab me and then stuck around to see what they did with my bag. As expected, they stuffed it down the garbage chute. It is a Well-Known Fact that disposals is a high-value targets for Assistants, whose self-made mission is to acquire as much loot as possible and cause as much chaos as possible, and sure enough, not three minutes later, an Assistant crowbarred his way into the garbage processing room and found my bag, crammed full of slices of Space Weed Pie Pie^30. What agent of chaos could pass up a treat like that?
He ate a couple slices and headed out. I followed him, ghostily. He gave some to some other crew members, force-fed some to a couple more, and just went about his business, occasionally chomping on another slice. A couple minutes later, the evac shuttle came, ending the round, and he got on board and immediately started throwing pie everywhere. Continuing my work.
As the shuttle was about to take off, another Assistant smashed the windows of the evac shuttle with a blowtorch and depressurized the entire cabin, killing everyone before they could make it out. That’s life in space.
EDIT: I found some old screenshots of this one.
Edit the IInd:
Oh yeah, after I died, an admin (presumably the one that had enabled funfood on that round in the first place) DMed me and said they’d been watching me the whole round and that they were losing it at what I had been up to the whole time. Also that by the time I died, I’d managed to dose myself with the highest amount of spaceweed-chem he’s ever seen in his life (admins can see any player’s inventory and physical stats, including what drugs, etc. are in their system and in what amounts). Enough that he didn’t even know the variable that tracked it could go that high. Normally people trying to get as much space weed into their system run into the problem that they get full too quickly and their character literally can’t eat any more, but I’d managed to eat the equivalent of something like 8x that many pieces of the raw stuff just because the pie was so unsatiating that I could just keep eating.
