Midnight clocked over on what started out as a normal day in North America. The rest of the night plodded away the darkness of the mid November skies. It wasn’t until the sun was slowly rising on the Eastern shores that anyone noticed there would be anything different today. Along with the soft glow of the morning was an otherworldly phenomenon that seemed to be described most succinctly as as kind of inverted Aurora Borealis. The familiar welcoming gentle greens became a harsh and almost sinister light eating purple.
Before anyone but the most early of the Atlantic morning shows had done any reporting on the spectacle, a slow alternating rumbling and tone echoed from a million empty dinner tables. All of the undisturbed tableware was slowly becoming bigger and animated. The slow and curious transition suddenly ramped up as a kind of harmonic threshold was reached. All across the continent flimsy decorative eating areas and breakfast nooks were collapsing under the weight of this new and unexplainable new burden. It’s fortunate that so many did so, as it seemed to halt whatever process was going on. Only the few households where the cutlery was perfectly balanced did the true goal ever reach fruition.
As the sounds built up to a deafening crescendo the final transformation occurred. Whatever made it this far suddenly gained a kind of clumsy but unmistakable functional anthropomorphic limbs and faces.
For the longest time, nobody and nothing said anything. Then out of all the things that possibly could happen, possibly the strangest thing did. Almost nothing. Whether it was the weird pressing lights in the sky or just the impossibleness of it all there was almost no reaction. There was a buzz on social media; there was the perfunctory news articles, but with no real explanation and no obvious direction the story could go, it almost seamlessly became a new part of life that nobody questioned.
Knives and forks were following people to work, spoons were out walking dogs and feeding birds. Sugar pots were reading kids bedtime stories and salt shakers were sitting in the park waxing philosophical and just enjoying the day.
After a rather short few days, it became rather apparent that the average piece of tableware was a lot more suitable to most jobs than the average person. They didn’t need sleep, food or entertainment and despite being quite intelligent, didn’t complain about working conditions – even for rather boring and thankless jobs.
There were some exceptions of course.
Napkins seems to get the short end of the stick and few lasted beyond the first rainstorm, shower or water fight. The ones that were left had to go into protective custody lest they sacrifice their structural integrity over the first major spill in their adoptive household. Gaudy centrepieces flocked to Hollywood and insisted on trying out for all of the new movies. It was a few years before anyone but independent films would have them, and most ended up hosting talkshows or radio programs or going into local theatre – anything that got them being the center of attention, of course. Spices were a mixed bag, cinnamon ended up taking the lead in a number of eateries and franchising the individual locations to less entrepreneurial flavor enhancers.
The biggest exception, however, was pepper. Not content to continue hanging out with the quiet and thoughtful salt, they were hardly ever seen together again in the sentient variety. Pepper was out to have fun. Riding on rollercoasters, bungee jumping (with a proper cap), car racing or just hanging out at the local skate park. Not good enough for proper sports, like the protein shakes, but having a good time anyway. A lot of the other tableware helped out peppers as they didn’t want to work like the others, but that was okay. Pepper had the lead in teaching the humans their new place in this odd utopia.
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