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As Halloween draws near, a good number of the shops at the local mall have decided to take part in the festivities by handing out candy bars and bite-sized goodies to all of the customers who stop by. You score a fair amount of sweets while you're out and about.

After you consume a handful of them, though, you discover you don't feel.. quite right. You can't put your finger on why you don't feel right but soon the side effects from your candy munching come to light. When you sweat, your perspiration is noticeably brown and smells sickeningly sweet... almost like chocolate. In fact, your natural scent has seemed to take on a more sweet approach, as if you were a walking candy bar yourself. You've got no clue which shop handed out the cursed candy but the saccharine effect on you lasts for an entire day, until the candy has made it out of your system.


Honestly, Shikora loved Halloween.

The primary reason why she loved it, though, was not the costumes nor was it the horror stories--those really weren't her thing, they were more the purview of her siblings--it was the candy. It was so much candy. It was cheap access to a lot of sweet things, and Shikora had a notorious sweet tooth.

So when she got wind that the local mall was just passing out candy to anyone who came through any of the stores, well, Shikora decided to take her time to go ahead and go to the mall during her lunch break. She was going to get all the candy. She was going to get so much candy.

Unfortunately, that seemed to have been a mistake.

When Shikora rushed back to her desk in her practice, she noticed that there was a bit of sweat on her brow. When she had reached up with a tissue to wipe it off, she had been alarmed to find that the sweat was brown. Brown, of all colors. At first, she thought she might have been sweating off her foundation, which meant that she would have to toss that foundation, but when she took the tissue and wiped it on her arm, she discovered the brownish substance was showing up there, too. Why was she sweating brown? What was happening? She hadn't gotten the sweet substance on her hands, had she?

But then she would have had to get it on her head...

When she lifted the tissue near her nose once more to get a better look at it, she also noticed the brown stain smelled strange. It was almost sickeningly sweet, much like some of the chocolate bars she had decided to snack on while she was at the mall. There was no way she was literally sweating out chocolate. That was impossible. She hadn't eaten that much chocolate. Her blood hadn't turned into sweet.

The only way that her breath would smell like that would be some kind of magic or, perhaps worse, she had something physically wrong. Was she diabetic?

Why would she suddenly be diabetic?

Shikora laughed nervously out of instinct as she lifted her phone off the desk, alarmed further when she realized that she was leaving sticky brown markings on the screen. Was she literally a chocolate bar? Flipping the camera so she could look at herself confirmed that she was definitely not a chocolate bar, she just looked ... an unusual shade of brown. That was not her skin tone. Where was her skin tone? Why was she covered in this sickening sweet substance and why did it seem to be literally secreting out of her?

Nervously, she quickly dialed her sibling, waiting for them to answer.

"Shik--"

"Nem!" exclaimed Shikora, unable to keep the panic out of her voice. "I'm sweating brown!"

"What exactly does that--"

"I mean I'm sweating brown! I ate some chocolate at a mall event and I came back home and now my sweat is brown and it smells really sweet and--"

There was some laughter on the other end. She would have turned a bit red in frustration if it hadn't been her sibling laughing at her. As it was, she just grumbled, even as they responded with a, "Calm down, Shik! You're fine. You probably just ate a bit too much chocolate and it's still on your hands or something. Just take a deep breath."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, Shik," replied her sibling, with a cheerful laugh. "Now isn't it time for you to see some patients, or something?"

"Right, right. Alright. Talk later, Nem."

Shikora hung up the phone with a deep sigh. Maybe she would just put a candy bowl out to disguise the smell that was coming off her. That would work, right? Then her patients wouldn't question anything...