The peculiar, comforting fullness in my stomach suddenly felt irrelevant. A new, sharper need pierced through it—a craving born not of hunger, but of a deep, nostalgic certainty. Vanilla. The plain, sweet, creamy anchor of a thousand happy memories that weren't even mine, borrowed from TV commercials and discarded dessert cups.
"Can Proti make vanilla ice cream?"
The question hung in the thick, briny air. For a second, nothing happened. Then, the worry in my voice seemed to become a physical law inside the bubble.
I felt it. A weird, internal shifting, like something rearranging organs I didn't have. My pet—the Endless Faceted Protozean Essence of Satiation—reacted. It wasn't a thought. It was a biological reflex. The gelatinous blob, which had been a relaxed puddle, convulsed. It didn't wiggle. It writhed, its entire mass twisting in on itself as if trying to fold into a new shape dictated by my words. Its surface bubbled and seethed.
Wiggle. Wiggle more. All it does is...
"Pfffft."
A soft, almost apologetic sound, like a sigh from a deflating tire. From the center of the blob's distress, a single, dark puff of fragrant gas was expelled. It didn't smell like vanilla. It was rich, earthy, bittersweet.
"Cocoa smell?" I recoiled, my nose wrinkling. The shrimp antennae on my wrists drooped in dismay. "Ice cream must be vanilla, Prot! Not chocolate! How can we feed the next guest if we have no vanilla cows?"
I spun, my chitin-plated pajamas clicking a frantic rhythm against the quiet. I addressed the empty air, the darkness, the two cosmic presences that governed my existence. "Did you think about anything? Staust? Mr. Fin?" My voice climbed, plaintive and logical. "Where can we get a vanilla cow down here?"
Mr. Fin's immense body didn't move, but his gills violently ejected a torrent of brine. The water didn't just spray; it hit a pocket of condensed existential impossibility in the air and froze, crystallizing into jagged, floating glyphs of abyssal script that shimmered with finality:
[VANILLIN SYNTHESIS: IMPOSSIBLE]
The gelatinous blob gave up entirely, flattening into a panicked, iridescent puddle that trembled like astrophysical jelly.
The fossilized rice monument, my amber-grade card, reacted to the spike of my distress. It pulsed, a frantic, warning strobe. Hairline fractures webbed its surface, and from the cracks, tiny, writhing cilia emerged, waving feebly. They released a scent—not vanilla, not cocoa, but the cloying, suspiciously sweet smell of fermented coconut husks left in a damp cave.
Before me, the air shimmered. STAUST manifested, not as a flickering afterthought, but as a solid, rectangular pane. Heeding the new design, its background was a deep, calm cerulean, like the heart of a tranquil, impossible sea. The text that scrolled across it was a pearlescent, luminous white, clean and official against the blue.
[SUBSTITUTE LOCATED: ABYSSAL ORCHID MUCUS (86% VANILLOID SIMILARITY. WARNING: DIGESTIVE CORROSION PROBABILITY: 78%. MAY INDUCE TEMPORARY PERCEPTION OF BEING POLLINATED BY GHOST-MOTHS.)]
The text glitched, the pearly letters stuttering before repeating the warning about digestive corrosion in a frantic, scrolling loop.
Outside, the void took notice. User NightSnack's distant, spiraling silhouette, which had been fading, suddenly glowed with renewed, voracious interest. Where its thousand psychic eyestalks had pressed against the membrane, residual drool sizzled back to life. The oily smears melted and reformed, writing directly onto our bubble's skin in crackling, iridescent static:
[TRADE OFFER: 3 VANILLA COW EQUIVALENTS (TERRESTRIAL-GRADE, PRE-TRAUMATIZED FOR TENDERNESS) FOR 1 ARTIST-CLASS ORGANIC. IMMEDIATE DELIVERY.]
"I'M NOT FOR TRADE, NIGHTY!" I shouted at the membrane, stomping a foot. The sand accepted it with a soft, glowing puff. A wave of helpless frustration washed over me, followed by a spark of desperate, homesick ingenuity. My shoulders slumped. I looked down at my feet, then clasped my hands over the soft stalks of my shrimp pajama. The carapace let out a soft, sympathetic hiss, mirroring my dejection.
"Can we… not get vanilla from home?" The question was small, fragile. "Can you bring me back? Just for a tiny bit? Staust? I swear I no longer run away like I used to." The memory of cold linoleum and flickering fluorescent lights was suddenly a painful paradise. "Every supermarket has some. Just for 20 minutes. I swear. I bet it's okay for this short. And I'm a lower life… that's my home. So it should be easier than for you."
The plea hung in the water, a child's logic launched into a cosmic courtroom.
STAUST's pristine blue pane shattered.
Not into nothingness, but into a dozen jagged, mirror-like shards that hung spinning in the water. Each shard reflected not the bubble, but my own face—my pleading expression, my wide, homesick eyes—repeated from an infinite regression of angles, a prism of desperation. Then, with a sound like reversing glass, the shards flew back together. The blue pane stabilized, the pearly text flashing sternly:
[DIMENSIONAL BREACH: PROHIBITED]
[REASON: F-GRADE LIFEFORM BIO-STABILIZATION REQUIRES CONSTANT ABYSSAL ANCHOR. SURFACE REALITY WOULD INDUCE SPONTANEOUS CONCEPTUAL UNRAVELING. (ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLITE ONTOLOGICAL DISSOLUTION: 4.2 SECONDS)]
A dry, terrifying sound filled the bubble. Rattle-rattle-rattle. It was Mr. Fin's scales. Every obsidian plate on his body was vibrating against its neighbor, producing the sound of a primordial warning system. It was the sound of a mountain preparing for an avalanche.
The gelatinous blob spasmed as if electrocuted. A pseudopod, moving with frantic energy, shot out and slapped the bubble membrane. From its tip, a jet of dark, bioluminescent squid-ink sprayed, forming stark, glowing figures:
[HOME TRANSFER COST: 50,000 BP]
[CURRENT OWNER BALANCE: 0 BP]
The fossilized rice grain levitated, moving between me and the shark as if to mediate. Its amber surface ceased displaying my grade. Instead, it projected a small, looping hologram. It showed a familiar, mundane supermarket aisle. But as the camera (my memory's eye) moved past labels, the words "Pure Vanilla Extract" blurred and warped, their letters melting and recombining into pulsating, eldritch glyphs that the pearl-white STAUST text dutifully translated in a footnote:
["Vanilla" = Memory of Warmth = Forbidden Nostalgia Contamination. Risk of Reality Backflow: CATASTROPHIC.]
User NightSnack's eyestalks, witnessing this display of profound, touching impossibility, pulsed in perfect, hungry sync with the hologram. Their static returned, not as an offer, but as a predatory clarification, etching beside the squid-ink numbers:
[ALTERNATE OFFER: 1 VANILLA COW EQUIVALENT FOR 1 CHILDHOOD TRAUMA (MINIMUM 3-YEAR DURATION, VERIFIABLE PSYCHIC RESONANCE). EFFICIENT. NO LOGISTICAL BREACH REQUIRED.]
Before I could even process the horrific barter, Mr. Fin's tailfin moved. It wasn't a dramatic slap. It was a swift, brutal smack against the membrane right where the static text glowed. The impact didn't make a sound, but the shockwave traveled through the water and into my bones. NightSnack's offer dispersed like a smashed halo of gnats, dissolving into a final, mundane, and somehow insulting scent: burnt microwave popcorn.
The silence that followed was absolute, charged with the ghosts of vanilla beans, trauma trades, and the clinging, acrid smell of a snack gone wrong.
I stood there, in my clicking shrimp pajamas, surrounded by the artifacts of my impossibility. No vanilla. No home. Just a cerulean screen of bad news, a trembling blob of failed synthesis, a shark vibrating with protective fury, and a fossil of my first emotional dish.
The craving for vanilla ice cream was gone, burned away by a colder, more profound understanding.
I looked at the pearl-white text on the blue STAUST pane, then at Mr. Fin's dark, rattling form.
"Oh," I said, the word very small.
The crisis wasn't about ice cream. It was about the walls of my new world. And I had just hammered against them with all my might, only to find them infinitely, immovably hard.
I sat down in the sand, the warm, glowing grains shifting around me. I pulled my knees to my chest, the shrimp-tail on my pajama back bending awkwardly.
"Okay," I whispered to my pet, to the system, to no one. "No vanilla cows."
The blue STAUST pane flickered softly, its pearly text updating with a single, gentle line, as if offering the only comfort it could:
[QUERY REGISTERED. ALTERNATIVE AROMATIC PROTOCOLS MAY BE AVAILABLE. PLEASE STAND BY.]