After spending enough time stuffed into the miserable little bunker, I just got used to it. Honestly, it was way more spacious than I expected, being far larger and with better 'accommodations' than the only other bunkers I'd actually spent a significant amount of time in. It even had a vending machine.

That being said, there were still way too many people in way too small a space for my liking.

Rather than read on my phone or play lightweight games on my laptop that wouldn't drain the battery too quickly like I anticipated, I ended up gambling with a bunch of dude-bros at a shitty folding table.

Specifically, I was helping one of them cheat.

While the main power in the area was still out—courtesy of yours truly—the bunker did have its own internal backup power, and that was what was being used to keep powering lights, ventilation, water, and most importantly, the vending machine.

It was fairly dark as a result—the power was supposed to be 'conserved' now that we only had an internal supply—but it was enough to see reasonably well by in certain areas. Also, the vending machine was pretty good. It was only stocked with the best, most popular shit, and even had whole donuts.

Those came wrapped in little paper and plastic packages.

There was a limited amount of shitty seating, and the entire reason I'd joined the literal gamblers in the first place was to have a chair. I wasn't keen on standing or sitting on the ground, especially without proper wall-leaning space. The edge of the bunker had been entirely taken.

So I joined the gamers. One of the guys happened to have cards and we all had money and food.

I didn't know what gave him the impression that I was an opportune partner, but one of the guys—one of the bigger, broader shouldered, duller looking ones, actually—roped me into his card counting scheme.

I didn't know how to actually count cards, other than that I knew enough to know that I didn't know. Basically, there was the actual 'counting cards' part—simple enough in concept, you just had to manage the part where you'd actually do it—but that alone wasn't enough to do what the average person called 'counting cards.'

As I understood it, there were these tables of cards, or probabilities, or something that you also needed to have worked out and memorized beforehand. Keeping track of all the cards was just the prerequisite for having the data to do the whole tactic.

Or something. I didn't know the specifics, other than that I knew enough to know I was hopelessly out of my depth.

What I did was play follow the leader. It was pretty simple and more socially-minded than anything else.

By the time the main power came back on and Civil Guard people were cracking open the bunker, Coby and I—that was the big guy's name—had effectively ended the game by winning everything there was to win.

Talk about good timing.

I was particularly quick on the uptake, gathering my backpack and sweeping my assorted paper money, gift cards, and snacks into the now-bulging hand-pouch thing of my stolen hoodie. "Bye guys, thanks for the game."

I cheekily fistbumped Coby as all the others moped and whined. "And thanks for showing me how to count cards," I confided just a little bit too loud.

Slipping away into the crowd as the whole group exploded on a now red faced Coby, I made my way past the Civil Guard officers and up the stairs to the ground level. At that point the crowd sort of dispersed, with most people going in the same few directions and more Civil Guard and AAG people watching over and shepherding things.

Not seeing or tasting any sign of Katherine, I decided it was time to call Cassandra.

"So I was thinking," Cassandra—otherwise known by her Guardian alias Anchor—said as she drummed her hands on the wheel, "that we could celebrate your first day back at school with some frozen yogurt before heading home. How does that sound?"

Reaching over to turn down the volume on the fucking—what, Avril Lavigne—music so we could have a proper conversation, I considered the proposition. There was only one conclusion I could come to.

"God, you're such a mom," I snickered. "By the way, how was your yoga class earlier? Did they finish setting up the kombucha bar across the street you were telling me about?"

Cassandra stayed silent for a moment as we exited the interstate and came to a stop at the service road intersection. "You're making fun of me."

I snickered again. "I would never?"

"That's not very nice," she lectured me as we turned onto the main boulevard cutting through her neighborhood, and as a result of our new living situation, mine as well. "I don't like it when you act like this."

An eye roll. "Okay, mom. Anyway, yeah, frozen yogurt sounds good. It's basically just hipster ice cream, right?"

Cassandra laughed. "Yeah, that's accurate. You got me there."

The frozen yogurt place was one establishment in a row of what looked like a fresh and cosmopolitan, gentrified take on what was essentially still a strip mall. It was all brick and glass, with nice shrubbery and carefully chosen pebbles.

What struck me upon entering, though, was the glorious DIY assembly line nature of it. This was clearly no traditional ice cream parlor where you lined up and pointed through the cases. This was a modern, industrialized affair where you got cups at one end, filled them up along the way, and exited to an area with a—scale?

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Oh hell yes, they weigh it.

That was the real sign that this was going to be good.

Cassandra, mom that she was, got one of the smaller cups. Rolling my eyes, I got the biggest one. I was an Anathema—there was probably zero reason to worry about what I ate. What was going to happen, I'd get fat?

Well on second thought—surreptitiously looking at my current body, I was struck by the realization that from an outside perspective, yes, this was exactly why I was fat. I had chosen to be the cute and curvy kind of overweight as Vonnie, after all.

Oh well. No need to act ashamed of it. Pigging out a bit just added realism. No, wait. Wouldn't it also be realistic for me to be insecure about it? Oh, whatever. Just get the ice cream. Frozen yogurt, whatever.

The actual frozen yogurt part was basically a soft-serve machine, allowing you to pump out however much—or in Cassandra's case, little—that you desired. I chose the chocolate and vanilla swirl. Basic, but so was I.

Thinking ahead, I formed a thick, ice cream 'basket' with a pit in the middle instead of the stereotypical, swirly cone shape, due to my need to load it up with all manner of extra toppings.

There were a lot of those, including whole ass gummy worms. Gummies, cookie, dough, marshmallows, actual boba—all of it went into the pit until it wasn't a pit anymore but a flat, level ground of carcinogenic food dye and sweet, sweet diabetes.

Finally, I capped my candy foundation with a properly iconic-looking, swirly cone of whipped cream—and a literal cherry on top.

By contrast, Cassandra's tiny cup had a single, sad little log of 'plain' yogurt that had dripped and folded over on itself. The only additional topping was a splatter of walnuts. Fucking walnuts. I beheld the thing with pure disdain.

Cassandra, meanwhile, eyed my own glorious creation with an odd expression that might best be characterized as anthropological, like a particularly gormless Brit witnessing a peculiar foreign custom for the first time.

Rather than commenting, she shook her head as we both stepped over to the weigh station, which also served as the register and checkout. I put mine on the scale first. The digital display shot all the way up to over two pounds.

The clerk gestured for Cassandra to add hers as well. She did, but with the change in decimal precision that came with jumping into the whole pound realm, the numbers on the display didn't change.

After we paid—or rather, after Cassandra paid—we grabbed our containers and found a table over by the front windows. "Do you think you got enough?" She asked with no small degree of sarcasm.

"Depends," I mused, savoring my first spoonful of cream. "Strictly speaking, no, not really. Do you have any idea how much I would need to eat to reach Tier 5? It's absurd."

Cassandra's eyes darted around the mostly empty establishment, like she was worried someone was listening in. She leaned forward. "Is that what it is? You just have to eat a certain amount, and then you tier up? Just like that?"

"Pretty much." I ate the cherry next. "I kind of thought the hunger was infinite, but it's not actually a bottomless pit. There is a bottom, it's just really, really far down." Digging deeper through the gratuitous mountain of whipped cream, I got my first taste of the frozen yogurt itself.

It was surprisingly good, and I found myself soon going for a second spoonful. "When it finally caps out, that's when we tier up and evolve. Then it's back to an empty pit again, except the pit is now even bigger this time, so it's basically still endless."

"Huh." Cassandra sat back, thinking about it. "That sounds a lot simpler than what the rest of us have to do. I'm a bit jealous. I wish I could get stronger by eating."

I put down the spoon. What had been a casual, if secretive, conversation had just turned markedly serious. "No you don't," I said, fixing the older—but not old—woman with a flat gaze.

This wasn't something I tended to talk about, and I'd done a decent job of shouldering it thus far—frankly, the few major lapses and minor erosion of control were the exceptions that proved the rule. Not that I don't need to keep improving…

"I am in constant and agonizing pain. Imagine the worst hunger you've ever felt. It's like that, but probably worse, at all times, forever. And you know what happens if I just keep resisting it, or if I can't find enough proper food for too long? The part of me that seems like a person crumbles and I become no different from all the others."

I took a breath. "You don't want this. I don't want this. The powers are cool, yeah, but you already have that. And you get to choose whether to fight and get strong or just keep living a normal life. I don't get a choice."

I went back to eating my ice cream. Frozen yogurt, whatever. The cookie dough and boba toppings were good, but I was regretting adding all the different gummies. I could tell they would have been fine as regular candy, but piled in the middle of the frozen desert, they got cold, hard, stiff, and slippery—not a fun combination.

Eh, fuck it. You're an Anathema. Eating random bullshit's your whole thing.

I was so absorbed now in devouring the candy and ice cream—frozen yogurt—that I failed to mind the awkward silence until Cassandra eventually interrupted it.

"I'm sorry."

What? I looked up from my now half-devoured frozen yogurt. Shifting my mindset from human mode closer to an Anathema mode worked, making the rock-hard gummies far more palatable. "What?"

"I'm sorry," Cassandra repeated, "for what I said. I didn't realize—well, I also didn't really bother to think it through, and I should have. Feel free to raid my pantry when we get home." Smirking slightly, she flicked her gaze to my not-yet finished desert. "Although I suspect I'll have to start claiming my new food bill as a business expense."

I snorted. "Yeah, whatever, I—hey, wait a minute." I held up my spoon, or rather, I held up half of it. The whole end had broken off from the rest of the handle, and I didn't see any sign of where it went. "My spoon—oh, come on. I think I accidentally ate it."

Cassandra laughed. "Okay, you can raid the pantry, but please don't eat my silverware."

"Well you know," I said between bites, hurrying to polish off the last bits of frozen yogurt, "when it comes to non-living materials, metal is one of my favorite things to eat. Like, a proper fork is basically a weirdly-shaped cheese stick. Or maybe like one of those nut bars or something. You know?"

"Uh, not really," Cassandra admitted. "Just—don't eat my silverware, okay?"

"Yeah, yeah," I muttered as I finally finished and scooted out of the chair. "Whatever, mom."

"And stop calling me that," she said as she also got up and dumped her own cup and spoon in the nearby trash can. "Hey, don't leave trash on the table—wait, where'd it go? Did you…?"

"It's okay, mom," I continued to snicker as I ushered her back outside, "I also ate the cup."

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