So Mutans is evil.

No, that's not true. They're just... mean? Sadistic? Wicked? It's somewhere in that conceptual space.

In some sense this should be an easy task for me, since I fear a lot of foods. I come by it honestly; I grew up in the Twin Cities in Minnesota during a time when the food there was not, shall we say, cosmopolitan. Dinner usually involved cream of mushroom soup, at least in the winters, and salt and pepper were the only 'spices' on the table. We did have a lot of herbs and spices in one of the cupboards but they were used so slowly that they lost all their flavor.

I've tried to be more adventurous since I left home, with some success. I'll now cheerfully eat Indian, Thai, Ethiopian, and even occasionally Sushi. Mutans recently... encouraged me to try pho, and it was delicious. Mutans isn't *all* bad.

But there are certain kinds of foods that I've resisted trying for as long as I've been aware of them. It isn't about spice or flavor, but about... alienness. How alien it is to my own experience. Extremely spicy noodles, vegetables, and muscle meat from a cow? Fine. Tendons or organ meats? That's... weird to me. I know, it's a personal failing.

As a child I ate a lot of tapioca pudding. It never occurred to me that tapioca occurred in a non-pudding form. Apparently it does. I learned this when I moved to Seattle and learned of "bubble tea", which I studiously avoided for ten years. There's a reason for this. Tapioca is unnatural. Mutans says it's frogs' eyeballs, but I don't think that's true. I'm pretty sure that tapioca is, in fact, the eggs of some eldritch Cthulu-like entity.

Mutans has announced their intention to 'encourage' me to try bubble tea. But I thought I was safe when, last night, we went out to a Thai restaurant not far from their work or my house. I'd never seen bubble tea there. I could just get a nice spicy Pad Nam Plig Pao which would cause my mouth mild pain and cheer me right up.

I was not, in fact, safe. I don't know if they called what they had "Thai Iced Bubble Tea" or something else, but I was informed that it was what I was drinking.

Now, I sort of like Thai iced tea, and this discover should also be attributed to Mutans' 'encouragement'. It seems like a perfectly nice, inoffensive drink. Why would you mix is with evil eldritch eggs?

So of course I ordered it.  And it arrived pretty quickly.  It looked like this.


Now, come on. Just look at it. It's obvious that those little... dark *things* are evil. Or at least alien.


Mutans mixed theirs up with a straw, so I did the same. And it felt wrong. I had a milder version of the terror I once had looking at a hornet's nest - this stuff was not from the world I am used to inhabiting.

Eventually, of course, I had to drink it. They didn't give us water, and I get very thirsty when I, well, undertake just about any action. I drink usually four liters of liquid a day. Maybe five. At first I managed to drink it without getting any of these eggs into my mouth. Eventually, though, one came up the straw and tried to get in my mouth. I was able to avoid taking it in, but I knew eventually I'd have to get the nasty little things onto my tongue and between my teeth, so I bit... not the bullet; that might have been less squicky.



Have I mentioned that these things are not from our world? They are alien eggs. They are *wrong*. They feel wrong in my mouth, and they feel wrong between my teeth. They have this slimy exterior and this unnaturally consistent interior. They squeeze and shift while I try to bite them, and I'm pretty sure I heard one cackle.


Okay. So I finished chewing one and I swallowed. This took long enough that I took my coat off in the meantime.

My stomach was not happy. Mutans was happy. Mutans was laughing like a psychotic five-year-old on nitrous who's just heard a new poop joke. But my stomach was reminding me of how horrible the barrium milk shake I'd had in the hospital fifteen years ago was. This experience wasn't nearly as bad as that, truth be told, but it had comparable qualia. My face and hands, without the volition of my conscious mind, decided to translate for my stomach.


At this point I started *trying* to get the damn things into my mouth whenever I was drinking, because I didn't want to end up with a score of them hanging around when I'd finished the actual tasty liquid in the cup. Unfortunately, they have a self-preservation instinct and would run from the straw. And I had no spoon. So I ended up with a score of the damn things hanging around.

I tried looking pathetic and hoping Mutans would have pity on me.

I think I succeeded... at looking pathetic. No pity was forthcoming, however. So I started trying to pick the damn things up one by one with the straw, which was time-consuming and annoying. The ice didn't help.


Mutans was complaining that I wasn't visibly suffering nearly as much anymore. Damn but they're impatient sometimes. Partially this was because I had entered a sort of meditative, sort of hypnotic state where I was declining to assign meaning to the fucked-up wrong little pieces of evil alien reproductive cycle that were in my mouth. The worst, though, was when about eighteen of them, in a clump, finally became... available. I don't think there's a picture of my reaction there. Or possibly there was but the picture, like the source of the eggs, is in some other dimension and thus is not viewable by mere humans. This is the last picture taken:

My stomach was unhappy. I really did feel like vomiting. Was this psychosomatic? Perhaps, or maybe my stomach was encouraging me to undertake some basic self-defense. At least one of the eggs made it all the way in unchewed - it caught me by surprise and was dropping down my throat by the time I was aware of it. Maybe my stomach acids will be enough to destroy it. Or maybe this will be the last proof I submit.