Page 10 of Nine Inch Nasty
Delaney, squeezing herself against me once more, swats Saladriel gently on the arm. “Oh, knock it off. He's not an alien. Why would you even say that? That's probably really offensive.”
“I actually get that a lot,” Turtle admits, completely nonplussed.
Delaney has an idea. “You're a happy unicorn. What's your secret? How did you become happy? And can I scale it up to affect the entire realm? I have a lot of unicorns I’ve got to make happy before I'll be allowed to leave here.”
“This is going to sound really stupid...” Turtle starts, folding his arms across his chest and leaning against the door frame.
“It can't be any stupider than the theories I have in my head. Come on, go on then,” Delaney says, urging him on.
He side eyes Salad as if fearing his judgment, but then he shakes that off and tells us his secret. “I was visiting somebody's house, somebody not originally from Glittertopia. They served me this dish they smuggled in... do you guys know what cheese is? I swear to you it changed my life.”
Delaney starts cackling like a mad woman, pointing at Saladriel while saying, “I told you so, suck it!”
Rush, who's been quiet up until now, scootches forward towards Delaney and smiles at her. “Knew you were on to something, babe. Good job. Your plan’s going to work.”
“Okay, I know we're literally in a different planet, is this considered a planet? Anyway. What the hell are you guys all talking about? What plans? What theories? What?”
Delaney squeezes me, all giddy from Turtle’s revelation. “In order to leave this realm, Fairygoddess told us that we had to make her people happy again, because the planet is failing. It's getting too sad to function, and her unicorns are no longer thriving.”
She looks at Turtle as if to decide if he's going to be a reliable holder of secrets, and in response, he closes the door behind him and steps further into the room.
“Remember she told me that some of the gray clouds are going to fail soon? If that happens, if it continues to spread, then the clouds that these unicorns build their homes, their lives on, will fail as well, and they'll just fall. I don't know what's down there, but it's nothing good.”
“I'm still confused,” I admit. “What does cheese have to do with anything? How is that at all part of the discussion right now?”
“Look around you, what do you notice about Saladriel’s place?”
I try to take everything in, wondering what exactly she wants me to point out, so I start listing things hoping one of them is what she's looking for. “Well for starters, it's tiny. There's no color. And is that sofa made of cardboard? That's... certainly a choice. And honestly, what is the point of this coffee table? Other than stubbing your toe or your shin on it? Because it's barely big enough to hold a few of cups, let alone anything else. And are there any windows? Where's the daylight for goddess' sake?”
Delaney smirks at Saladriel with another I-told-you-so grin. “Exactly. The unicorns here don't know how to be happy. It's like they get a sick fulfillment from being purposely miserable. It's…different.”
On a hunch, I walk forward to what looks like a kitchen in Saladriel’s place. I know he's been gone for a bit, but surely there'll be remnants ofsomethingthat will give me a clue about what kind of food he likes. A cookbook maybe, or spices?
I dig through the cabinets to find nothing but canned vegetables, a few nuts, and freeze-dried soup cubes that are an unappetizing shade of gray. The fridge is mostly empty with nothing but some bottled water, reusable of course, and the freezer has some sort of lumpy thing wrapped up that looks very confusing. “Was this thing living at one point?” It honestly looks like some sort of roadkill or something that somebody decided to wrap up and throw in a freezer for the sole purpose of creating confusion.
Saladriel struts into the kitchen and slams the freezer shut. “No! I'm vegan!”
Oh. This explains much.
I spin to Delaney, connecting the dots. “You think if you give them good food, it'll lift their moods?”
“Ding, ding, ding! Obviously there's good vegan food out there, but what concerns me is that the goddess controls their diets. They’re vegan because... they are? It's not really a choice from what I gather. That's just what the goddess has told them to do. And they do it. But the food they have here... it's awful. There's no joy in it, Cory. Food should bring you joy. As well as nourish you.”
“So what's the plan? We... pass out cheese cubes?”
“I was going to make cupcakes, but maybe. Rush went down to Hell and got us ingredients. We just haven't gotten very far because Saladriel got a taste of the buttercream and there was an incident.”
“What sort of incident?” How does one have an incident making cupcakes? I see nothing burnt, nothing ruined. Everything seems mostly intact, other than a few dishes on the counter.
“You want to tell them, or should I?” Delaney asks Salad.
While we've been talking, Turtle has walked toward the kitchen to figure out what's going on in there, apparently hungry. He comes back with a spoonful of what I'm assuming is the buttercream, puts it in his mouth, and has something that greatly resembles a seizure.
Nope, he just spontaneously came in his pants.
Now I understand Saladriel’s state of being. I pat him on the shoulder in condolence.
“Holy cloudscapes! What is this stuff?” Turtle asks, running back to the bowl like he's about to eat all of it.
