Work Text:
"Now, once you've carefully removed the excess fat from your preferred cut of meat—" Crashing, banging, clattering, metallic clanking, and some screaming interrupted the chef’s demonstration.
Barry the Chopper pointed a cleaver in the terrified man's face. A mysterious liquid dripped onto the floor. "You're chopping all wrong!"
"Who the hell are you and how the hell did you get in here?!" the chef shouted. An usher discreetly directed the audience to an emergency exit before making a run for it himself.
"I'm the chopping expert you called for!" A man with a clipboard mouthed "Police?" to a woman in an equipment booth. She shook her head and pointed to the telecommunications box on the opposite wall, now badly dented and hanging by one sad, frayed wire. He swore under his breath.
"I didn't call for a chopping expert!" The chef assessed how effective his own knives would be against a maniac in armor armed with his own set of cleavers. He left them on the counter.
"Fine then, I broke the lock. And the door." A hinge gave a final, plaintive squeak and fell from what remained of the doorframe.
"Please leave, armor-wearing weirdo!" Equipment Woman, having determined that there was no clear escape route for her and her broadcasting crew, locked the booth door and barricaded it with some very expensive, very heavy, and very power-thirsty equipment. Hey, if he intended to chop her and her crew up, several thousand volts of electricity were going to make him regret it.
"I'm not wearing armor, I am armor!" Barry performed his favorite crowd-displeasing move, then spun around to display his empty armor to the unfortunate few still trapped in the studio with him. Clipboard Man fell to the ground. Equipment Woman started writing her last will and testament. "Oh, only one fainter this time."
"If I let you show me your chopping technique, will you go away?" When was the last time that humoring a lunatic was effective? Well, there's a first time for everything, Chef reasoned.
"Fine, fine. Drag the fainter over here and I'll show you how it's done."
"Chop the meat on the counter, not my director!" Correction: a homicidal lunatic, and that first time was not going to be today.
"Spoilsport. Chopping people is more fun." Equipment Woman pushed her will aside and set to work on a list of grievances of varying degrees of pettiness against everyone in the studio, starting with that damn director for scheduling her to work today. She would have worked today under normal circumstances anyway, but someone needed to take the blame for her probable imminent demise, and it might as well be that jerk.
"Just please do your chopping and leave," Chef sobbed, pointing at the slab of meat on the counter.
Barry clanked over to the counter to demonstrate his considerable skills in the fine art of dicing meaty things to bits. "Those slow and careful cuts? No fun! Hold your knives over your head and bring them down fast to experience the true joy of chopping!"
Chef leapt out of Barry's arc of destruction. "Watch where you're swinging those cleavers!"
"The blood gets everywhere, but that's part of the fun!" Some was splattered on his helmet's fangs. He continued hacking away. "Ooh, a nice marrow bone!" He split it open with a sickening crack.
The chef tried in vain to hold back his tears at the culinary carnage. "Please stop mutilating that side of beef and go."
A blonde woman in a black turtleneck shoved the debris out of the ruined doorway. "Barry!"
His blades stopped in mid-air. "Uh-oh, Missy is here. I'm in trouble. Coming, Missy!" He skipped — Chef dropped his jaw and Equipment Woman dropped her pen at the sight — over to the mystery woman.
"You know this is why you're not allowed to listen to cooking shows on the radio. Now apologize to these poor people for ruining their program!" she scolded.
"Sorry, Bad Choppers." He bowed to the hapless crew in apology and followed their anonymous savior outside. "Hey, Missy, can I chop someone up on the way home?"
"Absolutely not!"
"Not even your jealous boss?"
"Especially not him!"
