The smell of the baked crusts of affordable price with molten cheese substitute, red tomato flavored paste and luxurious spices such as salt and the special secret ingredient - an addictive and hunger reducing substance with the name 'green' to which Pablo, the owner of the restaurant, owed his success - lingered in the air throughout the streets around his well oiled business. The purchase of the low calory low nutrient and highly sating crusts was indeed turning people into a similar state that Robert found himself in - a living skeletal human. You could see all those thin but healthy people turn sickly and skeletal, their eyes located in shadowy indents as the fat around the eyes got used up to fuel the survival of their boy, if you had recorded them day by day going to the pizza restaurant. The smell was delicious as it mixed with the actual pizza that Pablo was making for himself, he could afford it, whilst his customers were just there to fuel his real consumption.
Pablo really hit it off, a well life, family, a job that didn't endanger him, nor removed him from any contacts he could make, everyone liked Pablo as he made what they were addicted to. But being addicted to food - that was for most people just a sign of its quality over other food. Little did they know of proper business practices of other pizza sales, which went out of business because of Pablo. Competition really brings out the ugliest products to the customers, while no competition brings shitty products to the customers.
Only the good old self preservation brought a high quality product pizza to Pablo the baker, exposing the sweet spot of commerce: DIY.
It just does not pay well, making things for yourself only, so mixing DIY with common low quality commerce is the actual sweet spot. Why doesn't everyone live like Pablo?
Well not everyone knows the secret, nor has everyone the skills to benefit themselves.
An accountant for example won't be able to do their own accounting as they would also have to be the owner of their own business then - which is no small feat and thus eats up a lot of time. Some jobs are not very well optimized in the exploitation of their customers and thusly there is not enough time for DIY, just work and sleep on a loop that ends when getting fired for more rational people. Rational people that come up with good exploitation schemes. Bobby was completely oblivious to the fact that this exploit persisted throughout the entire world of economics as he had a narrow mindset of simply surviving until he could become a murder-slave to the state, low pay, miserable work conditions and a dark future - he would become a customer of a system optimized for so called 'citizens', just like the pizza sold to customers of the business he intended to steal from.
This was part of how the system perpetuated. Low expectations of life, being paid to make people have low expectations of life, having no special DIY skills that waste time better spent on government missions, it was the ideal deal - for the government.
The door of the pizza place was locked, within the place Pablos pizza was almost good to eat. Bobby unlocked the door with the stolen key and entered the extremely delicious smelling place. He would commit ANY atrocity to get a bite of this pizza, but the real atrocities he had already done (like ratting out his parents) had yet to be rewarded.
Bobby readied the stolen chainsaw in case someone would get between him and the pizza.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Just the unfiltered feeling of desire, appetite and the righteous feeling that he deserved it after all the near death experiences he had been through gave him a second wind.
The door didn't move a bit. Of course one did not rely on a mere key to keep ones home safe. Even Bobbys parents had a bolt that made opening the door from the outside impossible inside of the door, so why would a successful businessman like Pablo forego this simplistic defense?
Anger swept through Bobby, frustration about the food that was inside, taunting him with divine smell and the knowledge that it could be a person that was not himself that would eat it, to never be the one to ever eat something like that forever.
Expectations are a finnicky thing, when they are high, we are miserable, when they are low, we are content. And yet, the more we get, the higher the expectations. The perfect analogy to expectations is the addiction to anaesthetic substances that Bobby had fallen prey to.
The boy had experienced too blissful days lately and now he was miserable as it was taken from him. A slumber lasting felt 28 years?
A preposterously luxurious experience that had instilled unrealistic expectations.
Consuming all those brain juices, whose absence had caused deeply seeded trauma, in just a few days when life got a bit more rough?
Only the upper class could afford that kind of thing.
Being a sheltered child with two parents that both worked until exhaustion to give Bobby the wonderful experience of a heated, well isolated home with flowing water and electricity had made him very complacent. He just threw all that away at the sight of a neat number rising up - and that is why putting numbers on vague concepts like 'Strength', 'Intelligence' or 'Charisma' was such a dangerous thing to do. The most important things are not the things one self IS, they are the things one HAS or is GIVEN. All that strength does is allow you to take what others have, it barely means anything if the other side is a large network of exploitation and optimization. Could a singular strong individual always defeat an individually weaker collective? Maybe if magic really exists?
Well hate to break it to you, but saying 'it's magic' is a sign that YOU have unrealistically high expectations on what you'll get - magic is just that, a wish for unrealistic things to happen to you. Life isn't unrealistic, that's why it will severely disappoint you if you keep reading about all that magic shit - especially spiritualism. But hey it COULD be that nice! Not everything is known and that is why having high expectations of the unknown will never really help anyone - fear the worst and be content - let that sink in.
Bobby had grabbed the abandoned sink (with at least the emotional force of a mother that lifts a car, throwing it at a large monkey, that had climbed up a skyscraper, to save her child) and threw it through one of the windows in an act of illogical fury, he was surprised when it worked and the heavy sink was let in by the shattering of the cheap plastic shutters and of the glass behind it.
Pablo ran upstairs where he kept his shotgun.
This often happend to him, some murderhobo had enough of eating their kin after opening a bodybag in some trash container and went to his house to get some pizza - but not with him. No no, he wasn't a weakling trash store owner who got robbed - he would show that punk to not mess with THIS pizza baker. A store fight at night - who is going to eat the real pizza in the end and who will bite the dust?