Chapter Text
Your night started off terribly. On a sultry summer evening, you woke up blind and sweating into your grubcocoon, electrocharged acid hissing on the silk strands. “Darn,” you thought, “I’ll have to make my bed AGAIN.” Your body seemed a lot heavier on your limbs, and in your sleep throes your fangs had come undone from where you had tucked them under your blanket. And you felt both too hot and too cold at once.
At least it was summer, so you had no responsibilities other than sleep and eat food. While you would give this burrow school a... C for the rooms, what with the lacking beds, it got an A for the food. Yesterday was a roasted pomeg salad with slivered almonds and sitrus zest. The creamy orange sweetness that fell apart with the softest bite...
On second thought, maybe you were hungry. You wiggled your body slightly, the damaged bedstrands jimmying until they fell away, releasing to smoothly roll onto the combee-waxed floor. Nice!
(Your grubcocoon would probably need to be replaced entirely.)
(Well, that was one of the vikas’ jobs.)
You walked out of the grubcocoon room with raised spirits. Mudslap Cocoon Hall was a nice distance from Leafy Dining Hall, which was great, because Leafy Dining Hall had better food than Berry Dining Hall because it was close to a river that ran aboveground, so all the vegetables were more tender.
In Leafy, Javika was serving the hot bar. You decided you didn’t want to talk to him, or for him to notice you in any capacity, and you tiptoed over to look at the cold plates. It's easy enough to sneak by wings buzzing with electromagnetism.
A charjabug, whose name you didn’t know, slept next to the microwave. The pulsing electrical waves coming off of them left a butterscotch taste in your mouth.
It was always nice being next to a charjabug. You wondered if you’d feel the same when you evolved into a charjabug, providing electrical energy to anyone who came near. Or, maybe, if hundreds of adoring electric-types would hand-feed you gourmet foods, dreaming for the slightest pulse of your attention. That would be nice.
But for now, you were just a grubbin that had to feed itself. You tragically and pitiably serve yourself some salad. The smooth avocado lightened the sourness of the tomatoes, overlaid with the aroma of sweet fresh basil, all crushed between your jaws. Delicious. The familiar sensations of eating were almost as good as the food itself.
All in all, those were some pretty good leaves. You decided to try the kale citrus salad as well. The sliced nomel berries were bright red, like they’d been soaked in wine vinegar, and with the sour apple and pickled onions were so powerful you could hardly taste the bitterness of the bruised kale.
It was lost in the sauce. No, it was drowned in the sauce. Disappointed and betrayed, you decided against the final smashed cucumber salad.
You could wake the unknown charjabug and heat yourself some frozen food... or you could talk to Javika for hot food. You felt a little less miserable after eating, and Javika probably wouldn’t leap on you like a starving pikipek. And all you had to do was say, “Hello, I want this,” right? Then you could get your food and not have to talk to anyone for the rest of the night.
You walked up to the hot bar--
“Oh! Vobub! I almost didn’t recognize--” Javika started.
“I WOULD LIKE THE MUSHROOMS,” you finished.
“Yes sir!” Levitating the metal spoon, he piled a plate tall with mushroom rice. You took it quickly and moved to the other end of the room.
You hadn’t had it before. It’s some kind of slow-cooked rice and mushrooms. That’s a thing about mushrooms -- no matter how they’re dressed up, you can always tell what they are because they chew-snap between the jaws instead of breaking apart. The rice is soft and pillowy, but the best part are the tiny occa fruits, which had been cooked from an unbearable spiciness into a caramelized heat.
Javika snuck up behind you when you weren’t looking. Your fangs almost met his face, but he only laughed it off. “Congratulations on the new charge,” he said.
Wait. What?
Oh, you'd evolved! Nice!