Night 55: Pantry 1 (First Floor)
[teleporting from here]
The pantry was only big enough for six grown men in the same sense that a K-car was. Arms everywhere, but it looked like nobody had materialized inside a shelf. S.T. leaned over the nearest body and pulled a package of chocolate chip cookies off a shelf. He ripped it open, stuck two in his mouth and four in his pocket, and offered them around.
Half-wax chocolate and artificial vanilla flavoring had never smelled so good. (Granted, vanilla was easy. One phenolic aldehyde and most people couldn't tell the difference. Most of the rest could only tell because the package said all-natural. There was an argument that wood pulp was natural, but that didn't count.) Whatever. He had ersatz Chips Ahoy. Manna in a pink-cream-of-wheat desert. They tasted almost as good as they smelled. Neither had his own blood, when he gnawed through a cuticle deep enough to make a bead well up. Psychosomatic. One day of not eating, even with the blood loss from the gash on his leg, wasn't enough to cause an iron deficiency.
He found Peter in the crowd. The red and blue was more than a little obvious. "You reset it like this." He tipped the prongs around the bead and it insta-crystallized. He didn't bother bandaging the cut. It would seal itself in a second, even if the rest of the blood didn't magically fossilize.
The pantry was only big enough for six grown men in the same sense that a K-car was. Arms everywhere, but it looked like nobody had materialized inside a shelf. S.T. leaned over the nearest body and pulled a package of chocolate chip cookies off a shelf. He ripped it open, stuck two in his mouth and four in his pocket, and offered them around.
Half-wax chocolate and artificial vanilla flavoring had never smelled so good. (Granted, vanilla was easy. One phenolic aldehyde and most people couldn't tell the difference. Most of the rest could only tell because the package said all-natural. There was an argument that wood pulp was natural, but that didn't count.) Whatever. He had ersatz Chips Ahoy. Manna in a pink-cream-of-wheat desert. They tasted almost as good as they smelled. Neither had his own blood, when he gnawed through a cuticle deep enough to make a bead well up. Psychosomatic. One day of not eating, even with the blood loss from the gash on his leg, wasn't enough to cause an iron deficiency.
He found Peter in the crowd. The red and blue was more than a little obvious. "You reset it like this." He tipped the prongs around the bead and it insta-crystallized. He didn't bother bandaging the cut. It would seal itself in a second, even if the rest of the blood didn't magically fossilize.