Star Candy (3) : In your mailbox, locker, or desk drawer appears a bag of star candy! There is no indication of where or who it came from other than a small tag that reads: “Happy Star Festival!” The small, colorful pieces of sugar seemed to almost glow faintly, and after eating them, the world looks a bit different. Cartoonish and much less…real. Is it a hallucination? Is it some new reality? The strange vision lasts only half an hour, and after it wears off, the rest of the candy seems to disappear. How strange!
Faustite was hungry, but he still couldn't eat much of anything. Digestion still eluded him. Compounded with a perpetual headache and an unplaceable malaise, the Negaverse's torch had been particularly grumpy.
The past weeks had been miserable, and Faustite had been informed, by a Sovereign, no less, that his ails were due to his youma's dusting, and the length of time they had been bonded. Faustite assumed it was his tic to collect as much information as possible that sent him scouring over his prior records, cussing under his breath that the lot were on paper and never transcribed digitally. He had the date that he first endured this malaise -- May 17th -- but he needed to know how long he had the youma. That was a date he knew he would've recorded, even if his younger self was less sensible as his current one.
The office was a hectic mess as he searched. The General did not care to return files after he'd opened them, and left them strewn haphazardly over the chairs, his desk, the stool, the floor. Some of them sprayed their contents when he chucked them out of frustration. Some of them he'd dropped because he held them long enough for them to get singed, and while he could still hold them for longer than when he had his youma, he still faced a short timeframe where he could handle files safely.
He tossed another file, and it slapped atop a rat youma that squeaked its apologies for trespassing. "Get out," he muttered to it, and it dutifully darted out of the room. He didn't know why they still reported to him, they might have tried to tell him something, but he hadn't the time to spare for that.
Finally he settled on a file dedicated to Squiddy. It was faced the wrong way, with the tab shoved into the back of the bookcase, and he cursed himself for making this a longer hunt than it should've been. The file was slapped down on the desk, atop all the other fires, and he seated himself at the stool, atop yet more files. Faustite opened it to the first page, saw the printed photo of his youma, and --
Covered it with another file before he started to choke up. He needed a date. He skimmed for a date.
April 30th, 2018. "Happy birthday to me," he murmured. Three years, that stupid squid stuck with him.
The cindered General's mouth crumpled, and he swallowed, and ink stains dotted the page. He shoved himself away from the desk, dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, and forced himself to take a breath. Long and slow. In, then out. It didn't matter, he told himself. The Negaverse lived on. He lived on. The world would not stop for his grief.
He wanted his composure to be what broke the spell, as he sat for a full minute like that. He wanted to feel in control of himself. It was hunger that roused him out of it -- an insistent burning in an organ he no longer had. That was as close to hunger as his youma half could approximate.
Taking a last steadying breath, Faustite pulled his ink-stained hands from his face. With reticence, he opened the middle drawer of his desk, where he had squirrelled away a profusion of different long-expiration snacks, from nuts to jerky to Twinkies to trail mix bars to Oreos. Anything he grabbed would have a lot of calories, he knew, so he settled for whatever first touched his hand. He pulled it out, looked at it, and --
Furrowed his brows at the Happy Star Festival! tag. Must've been some Lieutenant, he figured. Maybe it was Roselite, or Kamacite wanted him to cheer up, or the lower ranks were having another competition over who can do the most stupid s**t without attracting a General's notice. Free food was free food, though. He popped one in his mouth, decided it tasted too sugary for his preference, and dumped the rest of the bag into the grate. He singed the tag, though, and hastily blew it out before he had to deal with a whole office on fire, what with all the paper lying around.
A few moments passed, in which Faustite started to clean up, and in those moments, the office began to turn. What was once a perfectly normal sheet of paper shifted, flattened, and grew a black border about itself like one of the games Lauri used to play. The one with the wolf, if he recalled. Everything looked rendered in brushwork.
His entire office looked like a drawing. And as he looked down, even his fire was animated with forked tongues and bold, black linework.
"Not the worst," he told himself and the candy. "Have to try harder than that." It hadn't nearly the impact of Peregrine's mushroom sandwich (the nasty thing).
