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Chapter 17 - Cake, Anyone?

"May I have your attention, please?" Gloria yelled. The music stopped and everyone turned towards her. They could not see her because the disco ball also stopped glowing, and the room did not have another source of lighting, but they looked towards her general direction based on where her voice came from.

She cleared her throat before continuing.

"Ohohoho! Welcome, one and all, to my daughter's 'opening wings' party!" Gloria said to the whole room, full of excitement.

"I told you not to call it that!" Thaught shouted back.

"Oh just let your mother do what she wants for once, will you?" Gloria responded and then kept talking to the crowd.

"We gathered you all today to celebrate..." she said and added a whispered "or mourn," to the sentence. "...my daughter's, Thaught's, new chapter of her life! She got a new job and even her own apartment, which I hope is full of pink, you know, she loves pink!"

"Love is a strong word, mom," Thaught said.

Gloria ignored her and continued talking. "Is this even legal at that age? Running away from home just like that? I don't think so!"

"Mom! I am twenty years old!"

"In my mind, you will always be a four-year-old baby that loves the color pink and needs her 'teddy bear' wherever she goes. I wish you would stop calling me 'teddy bear' after I lost the weight though."

Gloria calmed herself down, not letting tears flood her eyes. "Excuse these interruptions, dear guests, you must all be hungry from all this partying and dancing and fighting, so we have prepared for you a delicious cake!"

Gloria pulled a lever that was not part of the house normally, but was installed specifically for this occasion. Suddenly, a bright light shined over the cake, making it the only visible thing in the room.

"Wow! This cake looks so good! I sure do hope everyone gets to taste it!" yelled uncle Rodney.

"It IS just as good as it looks. I tried it in the future!" Thaught also yelled.

"Why are you all yelling? You sound like a low budget dishwasher commercial!" Responded Gloria Senior, the Tiebreaker, evidently annoyed by all this.

"It seems like someone is really eager to have a slice. Please come forward and take the first one," Gloria said.

Thaught smiled and started immediately walking towards her mother, and more importantly, the cake.

"Not you, Thaught!" Gloria said, which made Thaught wonder how she knew, since the lights were all still turned off.

At that point, the lights finally turned back on so that Gloria could see who was the one that wanted the slice of cake earlier and so that there are no accidental stabbings happening. It was rule number three on this house's rules: Stabbing is prohibited, unless it's intentional.

Gloria looked at uncle Rodney, standing tall and proud, looking as if he waited all his life for this moment. "Please come forward... uhhm... uncle Rodney?"

He stepped forward and was given a plate. Shortly after, Gloria gave him the most odd-looking slice of cake he had ever seen. The cake indeed had a different flavor on every floor and Gloria wanted everyone to try every flavor. Each floor, though, was smaller in diameter than the one below it. Gloria needed to ensure that there will be enough cake for everyone, so this ended up being the tallest, thinnest, most misshapen piece of cake uncle Rodney ever had. And that was before even noticing that the inside had the oddest colors: pink, blue, purple, and green.

Uncle Rodney was not planning on eating the cake himself in the first place, but seeing the slice made him want it even less. He turned to the person next to him, who seemed to be a girl somewhere around Thaught's age, probably one of her friends, and offered her the cake.

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"Here, you can have it," he said.

The girl gave a concerned look at the piece of cake. "Does it have gluten?" she asked.

"Most probably, yeah."

"I can't eat it then, sorry," she said and lightly pushed the plate away.

"Oh, are you allergic? I'm so sorry," uncle Rodney said.

"No, I am not, but it's really in to avoid gluten these days, so no thanks."

Uncle Rodney did not insist. The teens’ minds are too mysterious for him to argue — he knew this was a lost case. Wasting no more of his time, he turned around and walked away.

"I can always find another one," he mumbled to himself as he walked, searching for someone to accept his cake.

"Would you like this piece of cake?" He asked a young man he saw standing a couple of meters away. "I would have it myself but, you see, I am allergic to gluten. You can have it instead. Don't worry."

The man looked at the cake, then looked at uncle Rodney like he just said the most atrocious, racist joke about donkeys. He calmed himself down and sighed in disappointment. Then he smiled, but then he frowned again. He finally said "Look, man, do you have any idea how many calories this thing has? I would love to have some, but no matter how I manipulate my calories, I will end up going over on my carbs and fats if I eat the cake. I have to politely decline."

The search continued. Uncle Rodney approached another one of Thaught's uncles, but he quickly refused the cake. "You have high blood sugar too? Man, we can't even enjoy a piece of cake nowadays. Damn these doctors and their stupid medications!"

He then proceeded to go on a rant about doctors and how they were paid by the government to make you feel miserable instead of treating you so that you can get more easily manipulated, but uncle Rodney did not hear any of this as he had already left to resume his quest.

Uncle Rodney offered his cake to a lot more people, including a girl that said she did not like sweet stuff. Thaught and Gloria Senior, the Tiebreaker happened to hear it and immediately asked her to leave. In the heat of the moment, Gloria Senior, the Tiebreaker, took uncle Rodney's cake-offering as an invitation to fight and tried to break his jaw with an uppercut.

Thaught, while patiently waiting for her piece of cake, which she thought would probably be the last piece, based on some dumb hospitality rule, passed the time by watching uncle Rodney walk in circles, trying desperately to donate his own piece, but getting rejected over and over. You could see a new wrinkle forming on his forehead after every "no" he received. She found this behavior very odd, but her whole family is odd so it did not particularly surprise her.

If you paid attention, you would notice a faint, crackling sound was heard across the room at that point, which signified uncle Rodney's sanity giving its place to lunacy.

He stopped for a second and did absolutely nothing. Even forgot to breathe. He then walked back to the kitchen, where Gloria was still cutting these weird pieces of cake and putting them in cute, pink plates with Thaught's face on them. She decided she would hand them out all at the same time after they were ready.

Uncle Rodney left his plate right next to the other cut pieces and took a deep breath in. He grabbed half his piece of cake with his bare hand, making a disgusting, mushy mess in his palm, and, with a swift motion, blasted the cake across the room, aiming for a guest's open mouth.

As one would expect, he missed the target completely. The cake landed on one of the closed curtains, creating a particularly hard to remove stain.

This did not have any effect on the idea's perceived quality on uncle Rodney's mind. Instead, he grabbed the rest of his cake, and tried to throw it again, only to realize that cake, and especially the glaze, can become quite sticky on your hand if you let it sit for more than a few seconds. This made him have a late release on the cake, landing on the floor right in front of him. Thankfully, there was a towel next to him, which he figured he could use before every throw.

Unfortunately for him, he was all out of cake, but this did not stop him from throwing more. There were many more pieces lined up next to him, waiting to be thrown.

His aim was getting better with every throw — until it wasn't. The closest he actually got was when he was aiming for a really tall guest. He completely missed, but it landed right on the nose of the guy standing next to him, a mere two inches from his upper lip.

The two times where he would actually find his target were when he was aiming for the calorie-counting dude and for Gloria Senior, the Tiebreaker. The former had unexpectedly good reflexes and dodged the cake before it found its mark, while Gloria Senior, the Tiebreaker, parried the incoming cake, making it fall dead on the ground.

The situation, just like the cake, was getting out of hand and Thaught needed to bring things back in order.

She approached uncle Rodney and grabbed his shoulder before saying: "Look, I don't think thi-"

"Why won't they eat the cake!? They ate it in the past!" uncle Rodney cried, interrupting Thaught.

"I know you are my uncle, and probably from my mother's side, since you give off the same kind of crazy vibes, but I still can't let you do that, you are wasting a perfectly good cake."

Thaught's mother heard everything Thaught said. She happened to be standing there, taking a break from cutting the cake since her hands were trembling, messing up the already messed up pieces.

"Ohohoho! Your uncle? No, this is not your uncle, pumpkin. We have never seen this man before."