“This is embarrassing,” Newt muttered darkly, his skin flushing orange from his shoulders down to all four feet and his tail. “You’re being inappropriate!”
“I,” Sam retorted smugly, “do not care. Neither about you being embarrassed, nor about it being inappropriate. I refuse to—mmf, mmfmm.”
Nathan popped another twisted piece of crackling green foodstick into Sam’s maw, the capsule ghosting past the helmet of her armor with a burst of ephemerality. The lightning curse sparked against the inside of her mouth, exploding in flavor and sensation. It seared a psychic flame to go with the electric charge and capsaicin-equivalent, and the power-armored woman moaned in bliss.
“I mean, I was totally on board with her, like, figuring out a way to give you a blowjob or whatever. But this! It’s obscene.”
“Mm g’n fckn—” Sam swallowed convulsively. “Nyaaaagh! Motherfucker, that burns!”
Nathan smirked at her. “Another?”
“Yes!”
“No!” Newt’s tail slapped against the ground. “I’m bored and we should go do something else, anything else.”
“I could stand to eat,” Nathan admitted after a moment’s thought. “Can I even eat the food here?”
“Definitionally there’ll be something for you,” Sam responded thoughtfully. “You’ll have to avoid basically everything with a metaphysical component, and you can’t have anything that’s got a Delta of two or higher…”
Her voice trailed off under the force of Newt’s glower. “He should stick to a one-point-five,” he snapped. “Just because something won’t kill him doesn’t mean that he’ll enjoy the experience of having a reduction reaction catalyzing in his mouth.”
“Fancy words for a little Newt,” Sam muttered with a faint smirk. “But yeah okay.”
Nathan, understanding none of that and preferring to remedy that lack rather than dwell within it, interjected. “Delta scale? What’s that?”
“Diversity,” they answered in unison. Sam stuck her hand out carefully, keeping it immobile, and Newt slapped it with his own hand—for it so happened that this completely unrelated universe populated largely by people who were not humans still had that same piece of cultural body language. “It’s a person-specific scale of how far anodyne something is,” she continued. “Everything has Delta ratings on them, and what you see is based on the Games League Organizing Committee’s megascanner data, so it’s about as good as it gets.”
“Unless you’ve got whatever your living metal thing is,” Newt added pointlessly. “Because who even knows what Precursor tech can do? I mean, everyone, because it can do anything.”
Nathan nodded at the obvious and evident truth of that. It was Known in every universe that the ancient times were greater times, and thus the technology of the ancients was without peer and could do anything and everything better than modern technology—this was true whether it was the Romans calling down aliens to build their aqueducts or the snamoR calling down aliens to build their aqueducts.
There was one thing about what she’d said, however, that was bothering him.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Why anodyne?” He tilted his head at her quizzically. “Is it going to put me to sleep? Do people use food as anesthetic?”
“Yes?” Sam blinked at him in the bafflement of someone who was being asked a question that she was doing her best to respect, but which displayed a profound ignorance on the asker’s part. “Do people where you come from not get put to sleep with food so spectacularly boring that it drains the awareness out of you?”
“No? No,” he said slowly, “we don’t. Usually for anesthetic we use drugs which hyperpolarize neurons, whether it’s from GABAA receptor agonists or two-pore potassium channel activators, though I don’t know if there are any drugs that specifically target the K2P mechanism rather than the GABAA one. It’s all about the ion pathways and channels. And there’s at least one alpha2 adrenergic receptor agonist that works for sedation, but it’s off-label in humans—”
“Now you’re just making shit up. Alpha adrena-what? Two-core potassium funnel?” Newt slapped his tail against the ground, though his attempts at drama were muted by the fact that there happened to be a thick patch of grass underneath his strike which rendered his tail-slap inaudible. “I call foul!”
“I was having a medical procedure to extract some teeth which had been unwisely left in my mouth and eventually caused a bunch of trouble, and there was a big argument about what kind of anesthesia to use in the surgery,” Nathan said, eyes distant as he reminisced. “So obviously I did a bunch of research, and by research I mean I looked up a superficial amount of information on the internet and came to the most obvious surface-level conclusions. And by that point my boss had, I think very illegally, redirected a shipment of propofol so that the anesthesiologist had access to the better drug? He didn’t actually tell me the details of that, something about me being too young and besides I needed to focus on getting better.”
“Oooookay.” Newt blinked a few times as Sam struggled to keep from laughing. “Well, over here where it’s not absolute bullshit world, we get the very presence and awareness sucked out of us when we eat food that’s boring enough, because it’s literally draining our will to encode memories. Then we come back to ourselves slowly as our bodies digest it, or we can get shocked back into the moment with strong enough flavors.”
Nathan stopped and stared for a moment, barely aware of the fact that they had to have been walking in order for him to do so. His stare shifted into a boggle, then into a goggle—but the goggling did nothing, so he shook his head and went back to walking. “I can’t believe you think that’s less bullshit than biochemistry. Actually, wait,” he said to himself, realizing the utter nonsensicality of what he’d just said. “I take it back. It really is less bullshit than biochemistry. Everything about how neurons work where I come from is completely ridiculous, like someone was ad-libbing how the next layer down worked as we were starting to look at it.”
“And speaking of ad-libbing,” Sam interjected, “I have no idea what I was going to say, but it was really funny. Anyway, what do the ingredient-cards on this table say about this food?”
“This one’s a one-point-two. Is that going to put me to sleep?”
Newt laughed. “Buddy, the sleep effect falls off exponentially once you move away from the zero-value limit. I drink quarter-dee when I’m having trouble sleeping, or when the nightmares are too full of viscera and viral parasitoid swarms that devour the semiotics that define you. Works like a charm!”
“I… don’t know what to say to that,” Nathan admitted uncharacteristically. “But I see something that looks like a blended paste on top of bread, which has a one-point-four?”
“Pita and hummus!” Sam and Newt cheered in unison, and they left him momentarily in the dust as they raced towards the table.
“If you two fuckers eat all of it before I get there,” he began heatedly, “I am going to be really annoyed that you weren’t able to hear my over-the-top threats because you were too busy running off to eat the food I had my eyes on.”
Hearing laughter from everyone around him, he walked on towards the table of food, surrounded by hundreds of contestants and staff whom he hadn’t spoken to or taken notice of, and equally surrounded by technologies and vistas unlike anything he’d ever seen.
His time to engage with them was, alas, rapidly coming to an end as his myopia sealed his fate, but he knew it not.
Such was life. And death.