Work Text:
It was always sweltering hot in Dirk's apartment, for mostly practical reasons - he didn't like to leave the AC on because the AC cost money, and seeing people be uncomfortable in his presence from being sweaty was one of life's minor pleasures. That being said, he was not a monster, so there was a gigantic box fan taped to a pulley embedded in the ceiling that he raised and lowered while he and Jane both worked in his kitchen. Occasionally, he would reach over and grab the long string of tied-together shoelaces that held it aloft and give it a good yank or so at the most inconvenient possible moment, earning him a proper glare from Jane, and then he would lower it back again and she would breathe some sort of sigh of relief in the boiling Houston heat.
There were practical elements to consider when building a robot, of course. There was the positronic brain, contained within a very small computer chip, the wonders of technology at your fingertips. Instant sentience of any level of your choosing. For today, Dirk had gone with a nice selection of "Mild" - this was not enough of an occasion to warrant him breaking out the spicy or medium level AI chips, so just mild would do. The process of hooking it up to several wires and from there into a circuitboard was arduous, back-breakingly neck-achingly precise. He had to use little plastic calipers to grip it tightly and lay it down onto a small chunk of paste, and then get the soldering iron out and get to soldering the tiniest little dots possible on each individual wire. The air was filled with the haze of heat.
Jane, for what it was worth, had the much harder job, at least in Dirk's eyes. For, you see, Dirk did not possess a stand mixer, so while he worked, he could hear the arduous, wet sounds of a wooden spoon just going at some cake batter. Just absolutely going at it. "Jane, don't stop mixing, but I do have something important to tell you." Dirk said, wiping his brow after the sixth and final solder on one end (just getting ready to do the other six on the other end of the wires).
"Yes, Dirk?" Jane asked, turning her head just over her shoulder, her apron flecked with spots of flour and batter. Her arm kept going entirely on muscle memory, the strangest machine for humanity.
"That is, if my sources are correct, exactly what good pussy sounds like." Dirk said, smirking quietly to himself before he was whacked over the head with a cake batter covered spoon. "Ow." He mumbled underneath Jane's loud, raucous titters of laughter, while she went to wash off her now-hair-gel-contaminated spoon before plunging it back into the bowl.
They continued to work quietly, with Dirk unable to stop himself from making the occasional lame Vine reference, and only rarely earning a thwack on the head for his troubles. Eventually, the cake was put in the oven, making the entire apartment heat up another two degrees, and Jane decided that a more judicious use of her time and energy would be just standing in front of the fan as it churned and whirled the hot air into slightly cooler air, fanning herself with a paper plate just to make it go a little more.
As the cake swelled and expanded and cooked itself fully in the oven, Dirk put the finishing touches on their machine, which was happily scooting around Dirk's workbench without a care in the world, back and forth. He tested it by having it fling several small junk parts across the room (at Jane), to which she responded by picking them up and chucking them back, where they landed on the congealing cake batter in Dirk's hair. How did this keep happening to him?
Eventually, the cake was cooked. And then, it was cooled. And then, cutting a slice out and placing it on the machine's catapult bucket, Jane turned to Dirk with an exceptionally smug grin on her face. "Say "aah!""
Dirk sighed quietly, accepting his fate as the victim of slapstick. Then, he opened his mouth, and to increase the humor value, began with a mild "Aaah" before rapidly accelerating into a high pitched shriek right as a frosted slice of warm cake splattered across his entire face.