The silence after the burnt-popcorn scent wasn't peaceful. It was a thick, syrupy quiet, pressurized by the ghosts of vanilla beans and the chilling arithmetic of trauma trades. I sat in the luminous sand, the individual grains warming and cooling in slow, tidal pulses beneath me. They weren't just glowing; they were breathing, each minuscule exhalation a puff of spore-light that tickled the spaces between my fingers. The abyssal water in our bubble felt heavier, as if saturated with my own disappointment, dragging at my movements like invisible kelp. The golden veins in my shrimp-pajamas throbbed with a light, insistent rhythm, a visual echo of the frustrated heartbeat in my chest. With each pulse, the chitin plates grew fractionally warmer, a biological response to my rising emotion that made the carapace feel less like armor and more like a second skin feverish with anxiety.
"Staust!" I glared up at the empty space where the pane had been, my voice a sharp crack in the muffled atmosphere. It didn't echo; it was absorbed by the curved, hungry walls, leaving only a tingling after-vibration in the water that made the fine hairs on my arms stand up. "YOU SAID I'M AN ARTIST!" The word felt like a cheap plastic toy in the mouth of the void, a label without power. I scrambled to my feet, sand cascading from my lap in a soft, glowing avalanche. "HOW CAN I BE AN ARTIST IF I CAN'T DO ANYTHING? Show me what an Emotional Artist can do. They call it a skill, I think on TV. Show me!"
The air six inches from my nose shattered.
It wasn't a sound, but a silent, visual violence. The space itself seemed to crystallize and then implode. STAUST's interface didn't simply appear; it ruptured into existence, a dozen jagged shards hanging in the water like frozen lightning, each one humming at a different, discordant pitch. In each fragment, I saw a distorted reflection of my own glaring face—infinite, warped copies of my frustration, my wide F-grade eyes blazing with a demand that felt childish even to me. My own multitude of faces stared back, a council of angry, identical orphans. Then, with a reverse-bloom of cold light that raised goosebumps on my skin, the shards snapped together with a faint snick of dimensional realignment, the sound of a puzzle box locking shut.
The pane was whole, its blue depth now a perfect, serene rectangle that hovered with a slight, ominous buoyancy. The text was a pearlescent, luminous white, clean and severe, casting a soft, aquatic glow on the sand beneath it that made my own shadow dance with stolen light:
[EMOTIONAL ARTIST SKILL ACCESSED: NOSTALGIC RECONSTRUCTION]
[EFFECT: MANIFEST TACTILE/OLFACTORY MEMORY-SCAPE WITHIN LOCALIZED REALITY. FIDELITY DEPENDS ON EMOTIONAL CLARITY AND AVAILABLE AMBIENT CONCEPTUAL MATTER.]
[COST: 50 BP / MINUTE OF SUSTAINED PROJECTION.]
Beneath it, a secondary, smaller line flashed with sterile, bureaucratic finality, the white text blinking like a dead star:
[INSUFFICIENT FUNDS: 0 BP AVAILABLE. TRANSACTION DENIED.]
The gelatinous blob, still a quivering puddle from the failed vanilla synthesis, spasmed in sympathetic despair. It extruded a thin, wavering pseudopod that slapped the bubble membrane with a wet, pathetic thwack. Its own substance smeared into a glowing, runny message:
[NO BP! NO ART! CANNOT COMPUTE!].
The ink of its panic dripped down the membrane's curve, each drop sizzling where it met the sand, releasing a smell like overheated electronics, melted plastic, and a profound, simple sadness.
Mr. Fin's dorsal fin gave a single, sharp, downward twitch—a blade of obsidian cutting the tension with surgical precision. A stream of minute, silver bubbles, each one a perfect, self-contained cosmos spinning with tiny, dying solar systems, fled his gills in a sighing ribbon. They drifted upward in a languid spiral, and as they passed through the cool glow of my STAUST screen, I could see the micro-galaxies within them winking out, one by one, extinguished by the lack of possibility.
STAUST glitched. The pearly text scrambled, the letters melting and running like wet sugar down the pane before snapping back into order with a soft, chimeric chime that left a phantom taste of copper wires and faint, black licorice on my tongue.
[DEMONSTRATION MODE ACTIVATED. ONE-TIME USAGE. PLEASE OBSERVE CLOSELY.]
The fossilized rice grain—my amber monument, my first-grade card, my only proof of existence here—trembled where it lay half-buried. Then it unstuck itself from the sand with a soft pop, like a cork pulled from a bottle of deep time. It floated gently into the space between my cupped hands, rolling to rest in my palms. Its hard, golden surface softened, becoming liquid, luminescent, like a droplet of captured sunlight. An image bloomed within, deep and clear, pushing out against the amber as if trying to escape: a sun-dappled, small kitchen. My childhood kitchen, or a ghost of it. The memory was hazy at the edges, stolen by time and institutional blandness, but the center was painfully, vividly clear.
My own small, clumsy hands, pale and covered in a dusting of flour that caught the light like diamond dust, kneading dough on a worn wooden board scored with generations of knife marks—faint lines that felt like ancient writing under my fingertips. Over them, a pair of older, gentle hands with floury fingerprints and a single, faded freckle near the thumb guided mine—an aunt, maybe, or a kind foster mother, her face a warm, smiling blur of kindness and patience, but her hands were real, their touch a memory of safety. The scent of active yeast, earthy and alive, and real sunshine, beaming through a checkered curtain and warming the dust motes in the air, filled my nose, so real it made my salivary glands ache with a phantom sweetness. I could feel the warmth of that sun on the back of my neck, a sensation so visceral I shivered.
Then, the image flickered. The warm, guiding hands pixelated into jagged static, the comforting freckle dissolving into a speck of digital noise. The dappled sunlight warped, stretching and bleaching into the sterile, flickering glare of the orphanage cafeteria's overhead tubes, a light that made everything look washed-out and tired. The warm, living smell of yeast curdled in an instant, sharpening into the acrid, unmistakable, lung-clinging scent of burnt sugar—the universal smell of a failed treat, a ruined hope, a watched pot that boiled over while you were being scolded for watching it.
The image dissolved into grainy, black-and-white static that buzzed unpleasantly against my eardrums.
User NightSnack's distant silhouette, which had been a passive, spiraling smear in the deep like a sleeping galaxy, suddenly awoke. It glowed with voracious, pinpoint intensity, like a dormant black hole flaring to life as a feast passed its event horizon. The afterimage of the memory didn't just fade; it was actively siphoned. A single, beautiful, glowing kanji for "WARMTH"—a complex character of hearth and heart, of shared food and familial love—hung in the air for a heart-rending second, a perfect, poignant artifact of everything I'd lost. It pulsed with a soft, desperate light. Then it crumbled, not like sand, but like ancient, desiccated parchment, into a shower of dying bioluminescent plankton. The plankton didn't drift aimlessly; they were tugged on an invisible current, streaking in a glowing stream toward the membrane where they were absorbed with a faint, wet, sucking sigh, adding their stolen light to NightSnack's vast, spiraling shadow. The bubble dimmed just a little.
A new line of text, written in a thin, spidery script that seemed to crawl along the bottom of the STAUST pane, appeared:
[AMBIENT CONCEPTUAL MATTER HARVESTED: 'LOST DOMESTIC WARMTH'. QUANTITY: MINIMAL. MARKET VALUE: NEGLIGIBLE. ADDED TO USER NIGHTSNACK'S COLLECTION.]
The message was like a psychic ice cube dropped down my spine. He hadn't just watched. He'd taken a piece of the memory. The best piece.
A hot, defiant anger bubbled up, cutting through the despair. It was a stupid, human anger. He had my grade. He had my debt. He couldn't have my ghosts too.
I let the thought-project hang in the communal psychic space, a lazy, psychic stone tossed into a pond of infinite, patient hunger.
[User Chiari the Ever-Rice (Lvl. 2 Emotional Artist) says too bad that nobody offers some BP for the skill, so we have to make rice again.]
I pretended to examine my shrimp-claws, turning my hands over in the faint light. The red chitin clicked softly as I flexed them, watching the tiny, intricate joints articulate with unnatural, insectile precision. I didn't look toward NightSnack. It was impossible anyway; his presence wasn't in a direction, it was a pressure, a subtle, constant folding of space that was most palpable in the periphery. It was concentrated in the corner of my eye, in the elongated, grasping shape of my own shadow on the glowing sand. The sand's light seemed to flee from that shadow, making it darker, deeper. I studied it now—my shadow wasn't just a flat darkness. Within its outline, a small, toothless maw had formed, a puckered O of pure avarice. From it dripped a slow, iridescent saliva that hit the sand with a silent, sizzling hiss, each drop leaving a tiny, smoking crater that smelled of ozone, static, and an insatiable, cosmic want.
He was watching. He was listening. He was filthy rich, and he'd just tasted an appetizer.
"I guess we won't be able to cook something that is more vanillany than vanilla cows then," I sighed aloud, pouring every ounce of performative, theatrical disappointment I could muster into the psychic ether. I hugged my knees to my chest, making my carapace plates click a sad, rhythmic click-clack, click-clack like a broken metronome counting down to nothing. "Too bad that nobody gives us some Bubble Points to make it for so cheap. It would have been… really special. The kind of special that sticks to your ribs. Or your tentacles."