Back in the before-times, when I was still a workaday meeting-attendee and ass-kisser at BigTech Ltd, I used to shop at this grocery store chain called Safeway. Sure it was a bargain-mart, but it was so clean and well maintained that it got plenty of foot traffic from the upper-crust yuppity-yups who could afford the insane rent prices in the area. And yet, beneath the posh decorum and carefree facade, if you took a long enough look at the products on the Safeway shelves, you could tell the community had serious issues bubbling under the surface. Remember the Carolina Reaper from earlier? The thing I compared to my first taste of gigabee venom? At 1.5 mega-Scovilles, it's one of the hottest peppers to ever be conceived of by man.

Safeway sells them in packages of nine.

NINE.

Why?

I completely understand a person wanting to purchase one just to experience the maximum amount of pain that the nerves in their mouth are capable of expressing. I’d also understand if they wanted to buy a second one to prank a family member or a cuntfuck mother-in-law. However. If any person, of their own free will, purchases nine of these edible war crimes, there’s only one realistic explanation:

They get off on it.

When they were young, their parents gave them fifty with the belt for every grade that didn’t start with an A because

Pain Is Weakness Leaving The Body

And now, after decades of #grindset and a full-blown addiction to suffering, working 12 hours a day staring at a computer screen isn’t enough punishment, they need more.

They would love to get their fix of delicious agony by playing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 (on their wrists*), but they couldn’t afford to leave a scar. Because if their friends figured out what they were doing, they might recommend therapy, or hold an intervention. And the average reaper enthusiast doesn’t want that.

So they walk into the supermarket week after week, quietly purchasing their eggs, their milk, their sandwich meat… and their pain. Everything they need to survive.

I popped open another refreshing vial of poison and took a sip.

Euric winced. “Can you please not do that? We’re trying to sell that stuff once we get to Castella. Each of those is worth a silver.”

I considered the proposal.

“Euric, back on Earth I made about a quarter of a million dollars every year. And I didn’t blow it on gold diggers the way most guys do. I ate what I wanted, drove what I wanted, and went where I wanted. I walked into a Balenciaga one time and told the price tags to go fuck themselves. Money doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Except at Safeway, because a deal is a deal.

“So a million… quarter… dollars is valuable?”

“Very.”

“What did you do for a living that was so valuable?”

“I attended meetings and kissed the occasional ass.”

“Sounds dull.”

“It was. I would’ve drank poison back then as well if I’d found one that was this delicious.” I took another sip. “Best we had back on earth was Don Julio, but that shit was overpriced as fuck. I only drank it to flex on bitches.”

“And how much money do you have right now?” said Euric, approaching his point.

“I’ve got a small stack of odd coins. No idea how much they’re worth, but none of them are gold, so probably not much.”

“You’re flat broke, Bradley. You can have the rest of that vial, but don’t go nicking any others. They’re worth more than you are right now.”

Oof.

I’d barely managed to convince Euric to allow me to ride with him today, and here I was getting on his bad side. After watching me season my meat with venom, he wasn’t worried that I’d harm myself any more, and I’d also agreed to drive the horses all day. A small price to pay for isolation from the bukkake of douchebags in the other cart. Their laughter occasionally wafted over, like a fart in the wind, but it no longer fazed me. I didn’t have to wonder if they were making fun of me any more.

I knew they were making fun of me.

Fuck that noise. Enjoy the beautiful scenery.

The environment we were rolling through hadn’t changed much over the past few days. Hilly, grassy fields, with a few trees and streams mixed in. There were craters everywhere, in various stages of being repossessed by flora, and plenty of agricultural activity as well. Mostly grazing animals, sometimes an orchard or a wheat field. Every once in a while we’d roll through a village, with the same wooden housing and salt-of-the-Alterra people as Apis, but we never stayed - hotels were well outside the budget of a flat broke, poison-pinching pleb like me.

Interestingly, the land was also dotted with active geothermal features. We’d passed by several rainbow-hued ponds already, and a few steaming mounds of rock that looked like geysers.

Maybe if I drank the boiling water I’d gain an immunity to heat.

Tempting, but I wasn’t quite bored enough for that kind of party.

Besides, if I pulled a stunt like that, Euric and Tom would tie my hands behind my back.

Stella and I sat on the top of a hill, still out of breath from the workout we’d just completed. It was getting dark, and the final colorful traces of sunset were leaving the sky. The brightest stars were starting to become visible, and as we watched, a pink dot slowly descended from among them, landing well outside our field of view.

“Is that what the meteor looked like when it carried me here?” asked Stella.

“Pretty much, yeah. Do you think you were inside the meteor when it hit, or did you only appear in the Crater after it hit?” I pondered.

“You tell me. I was a dog at the time.”

“Do you think you would have turned into a human on your own, or was it just because you ate the…” I trailed off.

“What?”

I pointed. At the base of the hill, growing between two trees, was a clump of orange mushrooms. And as the sky got darker, the clump got brighter. Stella noticed it and gasped.

“No way! I thought you were lying about those!”

I rolled my eyes. “Stella, if I lied to you all the time, you’d be in love with me by now.”

“Whatever.” she scoffed. “So, when you ate the mushrooms, you regained a bunch of lost memories, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“What kind of memories?”

“That’s classified.”

She frowned intently. “Sounds like a good time. Beats listening to Clayton brag about lifting that weight again…”

She flounced over to the glowing lumps and picked one of them up.

“Wait!” I called out. “That thing will put you to sleep. Can we head back to camp first? If I have to carry you back unconscious, everyone will think that I -”

“-yes they will.” Stella finished. “Good point.”

I picked a couple of the remaining mushrooms, because you never know when you’ll need to knock yourself out, and we walked back to camp. As we laid down to rest, I purposefully chose a spot near Stella, just to see… Sure enough, she was out like a light. I thought about eating a mushroom myself, but wasn’t sure that I had anything else to gain from it. The memories felt real, so I didn’t think they would change. Instead, I got comfy in a patch of grass, and wasn’t long for the world myself.

I woke up just before dawn, yawning and rubbing my eyes.

Huh? Normally, I’m the last person awa-

Before I could finish that thought, I was distracted by a noise off to my left. There, curled in a ball up against a tree, was Stella, crying quietly. I didn’t want to know why, but I had some ideas.

When a guy blacks out, he’s gonna get a dick drawn on his face.

When a girl blacks out, she’s gonna get a dick drawn across her face… and to be uncomfortably realistic, it only goes downhill from there.

I thought about going over and comforting her… but in the words of a far wiser pickup artist than I:

You Are Not Her Therapist

I’m not Mr. Shoulder-To-Cry-On. I’ve done it before… you just feel used afterwards. You spend all this time investing yourself in a person’s past, you brainstorm all kinds of solutions to their problems… and they ignore every suggestion. Because they don’t care about you. They just want attention and validation. They don’t even fuck you for your trouble, because you’re too nice for something dirty like that.

Then she rebounds with her abusive ex because the emotional rollercoaster was the only thing she craved in the first place. You’ve been added to the long list of people she’s letting down, so the forbidden pleasure she feels is even greater than before. Her brain is ruined, she’ll never make any man-

Just then, a pinecone fell out of the tree I was under and bonked me on the head. I rubbed the spot gingerly, dazed.

...now, where was I? Something profound about the inherent transience of female nature…

Eh.

I tuned out the sobbing and laid back down to try and catch the last Z of the night.

There was this famous psychological study from a while back which found that children perceive time slower than adults. Everything is new to them, so their brains are working double-time to try and make sense of it all. Call me crazy, but I think that having a younger body messed with my own time perception, because the days on the road DRAGGED by.

It had been about a week since Stella reconnected with her… classified memories. I saw her talking to Owen more often when I looked back at the cart.

Poor sap doesn’t understand that he’s being played…

Fortunately, Stella and I were on unfriendly enough terms that if I didn’t ask, she didn’t tell. So I didn’t ask.

As I sat there, entranced by the metronome gait of the horses, a disturbing memory of my own resurfaced unexpectedly.

Did Burt say… Minotaurs?!?

I paused to consider. Marco Polo once claimed that he found unicorns, when really he’d just found rhinos. Surely it was the same thing with minotaurs… maybe some bizarre religious cult crucified a bull, and a travel blogger saw it from a distance? Maybe the gorillas on Alterra have horns?

Or maybe they fall from the sky, summoned from other worlds…

What are the odds?

We passed another geyser, and were lucky enough to see it go off as we went by. A ten meter column of water jetted from the earth, dissolving into a sulfuric mist and feeding a steaming basin.

I stared at it, tantalized by the chance to break the monotony, courage stirring within me.

No pussying out this time. I don’t care if they tie me up.

I’m going to drink the water… no - I’m going to jump in! Get that Freddy Krueger tan! I’ll become immune to heat for sure! I’ll be able to touch fire and walk on coals!

…what if that’s the only way to make this journey end!?!

Utterly convinced, I shifted my weight away from Euric, preparing to make a break for it. But before I could follow through, I saw a shape on the horizon. In front of a towering row of mountains… a city! Surrounded by stone walls, with a phat castle in the rear!

We had arrived.

I relaxed, and took another sip of poison: the steaming pool had lost its appeal.

My thirst was quenched - for now.