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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!
Mia wasn't terribly surprised by the bag of star candy sitting outside her door, especially considering that the tag on it bid her a happy Star Festival. Clearly, it was a nice gift someone had thought to leave as a part of well wishes and merry making during the festival. If she saw whoever was handing them out, she was going to have to thank them! So she scooped up the bag and walked into her little house with it.
"Look, Gramps! We got a StarFest gift!" Without even waiting for his response, she dropped the bag of candy right in front of him on the table. "We gotta try it. Like, now!"
Mia's grandpa chuckled. "Pushy and impatient as always, but your heart is always in the right place," he said as he began undoing the twist-tie on the candy bag.
"Wow, backhanded compliment much?" Mia grumbled through a grin. They ribbed at each other like this all the time; it was that kind of relaxed teasing that she trusted the intent of that made her grandpa so easy to live with.
"Yeah, yeah." Mia's grandpa held a star candy out to her. "You first, firebug." The nickname always tickled her.
"Down the hatch!" she proclaimed, before making an exaggerated noise as she popped the candy into her mouth and bit down it with gusto. She took a moment to contemplate the flavor and texture of the candy. "Meh. It's like eating a sucking candy but not as hard. Kinda like... eating a magic crystal or something?"
"You and your imagination," her grandpa said as he took his own candy. A pause passed, and it occurred to him that he was being looked at funny. "Mia, why are you looking at me like that?"
"Uh oh." Mia had no idea what was in that candy, but everything looked very different after a few blinks. The outlines of everything seemed bolder and colored, with everything else a bit more saturated. Then she laid eyes on her grandpa, who suddenly looked a bit more... stylized. His mustache wasn't that neatly trimmed, she knew it, but she figured out what was really up: he looked like a badass from her animes.
"Uh oh?" From the gleam in his eye, Mia suspected her grandfather was having a similar issue. "Hm. I never thought I'd get to see you as a charcoal portrait."
"Oh crap! Sorry Gramps! Shoulda known better than to just grab random outside-the-door candy," Mia said, still goggling at the neat style everything had been converted to. She kind of wanted to check a mirror, or go out and see people to see how this illusion rendered them.
Her grandpa sighed. "I could have stopped you, just as much as you could have vetted the candy a bit better." A beat passed as he, too, took in his sketchy surroundings. "I don't think we should leave the house today."
"Yeah, yeah, fine... bummer. It'd be cool to do some sightseeing."
Never mind that running around hallucinating while powered sounded like a recipe for disaster.
