The quiet after the judging was different. It wasn't the peaceful quiet of sleep, or the tense quiet of waiting. It was the hollow, echoing quiet of a report card laid bare on the kitchen table. The sparkling ice cream was gone, consumed by the silent tendrils. The only evidence left was the grade hanging in the water, and the weird, pulsing number on my STAUST screen.
I stared at the
[D-]
evaluation, still faintly glowing where Mr. Fin had carved it into the membrane. The minus sign seemed to wiggle, a tiny, mocking worm of failure.
"Why is it minus?" My voice was flat. My eyes narrowed. My hands, back to normal, bunched into fists at my sides. A hot, prickly feeling—not anger, but a deep, personal offense—rose in my chest. This wasn't about cooking anymore. This was about me.
I stood up, the sand whispering. With deliberate, almost ritual movements, I wriggled out of my shrimp-pajama carapace. The plates clicked softly as I disengaged them, the bioluminescent veins dimming. I folded the strange garment neatly and placed it on the sand by the bubble wall. It was an act of defiance, shedding the costume of this place.
I pointed a finger at the offending minus sign. "That is worse than the old one. Make it go away, STAUST."
Nothing happened. The blue pane hung silently, showing only my user data.
"STAUST," I said, my voice tightening. "I do not want it to have a minus. I didn't remove ice cream. I gave it to them." I took a step forward, addressing the empty spaces where the tendrils had been. "Make it a plus. Tell the judges…" I swallowed, summoning every ounce of orphanage-yard bravery I had left. "Tell them I will not make something new if they bully me."
The reaction was swift and absolute.
STAUST's serene blue pane didn't flicker. It collapsed. The rectangle of light imploded inward like a star crushed by its own gravity, the pearly text sucked into a single, dense point. From that point, a new glyph exploded outward—a complex, pulsing rune of interlocking bars and locks that throbbed with a dull, bureaucratic red.
[NEGOTIATION DENIED: JUDGES' BIOMETRIC INTEGRITY LOCKED. EVALUATION FINAL.]
The glyph pulsed in a rhythm that perfectly matched the soft, forlorn clatter of my discarded carapace plates settling on the bubble floor.
Mr. Fin's dorsal fin moved. He didn't write in light this time. He carved directly into the fabric of our reality, his fin-tip parting the water with a sound like tearing canvas. The words appeared not as light, but as deep, permanent grooves in the very medium of the bubble, leaking faint streams of primordial brine:
[GAUNTLET PROTOCOL §7.3: SUBMISSION EVALUATIONS ARE RETROACTIVELY IMMUTABLE. APPEALS PROCESS REQUIRES 50,000 BP ADMINISTRATIVE FEE.]
Proti, sensing the finality, gave a wet, miserable gurgle. It convulsed, and from its core, it regurgitated the seven beautiful, spiraled glasses NightSnack had lent us. They weren't separate anymore. They had fused in the chaotic energies of the judging into a single, lumpen mass of cloudy, abyssal silica. It landed with a thud, smelling sharply of burnt sugar and the fine print at the bottom of a contract you shouldn't have signed.
The fossilized rice grain, my amber heart-monument, levitated higher, as if trying to escape the bad news. Its internal vanilla bioluminescence flared, casting stark shadows. In that sudden light, I saw the eight circular scars on the membrane where the lobby tendrils had attached. They weren't healing. They were active. From each one, a single, fat drop of iridescent brine welled up and fell.
The droplets didn't aim for the sand. They streaked through the air, drawn like magnets to my neatly folded shrimp pajamas. Each drop hit the fabric and solidified instantly, not staining it, but encasing tiny portions of it in perfect, miniature amber prisons. And trapped inside each tiny amber coffin was a perfectly preserved, glowing replica of the D- evaluation, minus sign and all.
The message was clear. The grade wasn't just a note. It was a contaminant. A fact. It stuck to you.
I took a deep, shuddering breath. The fight drained out of me, replaced by a cold, pragmatic resignation. Fine. They wanted to play with numbers? I could play with numbers too.
"Okay," I said, the word heavy. I turned to Mr. Fin, my makeshift teacher and cosmic banker. "Mr. Fin. How many Bubblepoints do you get? You got 5,000 for my F-rank rice. What is D-rank worth?"
Before he could react, STAUST's pane—now reassembled but looking somehow bruised—flickered with an answer.
My eyes scanned the figures. My brain, used to calculating the cost of a single onigiri against a week's pocket money, did the math.
[TOTAL ACCOUNT BALANCE: 430,000 BP]
"Hundred times…" I muttered, tracing the numbers in the air. "Why does it say we got 430,000?" I blinked, double-checking. A slow, incredulous smile spread across my face. The crushing weight of the D- lifted, replaced by the giddy shock of sudden, absurd wealth. "Is it enough… to make Chiari's bubble larger?"
I started rapid-fire calculation aloud, my finger poking the glowing numbers. "If a pajama and a bed are 5,000, then 430,000 should be like…"
[Minimum Bubble Expansion: 150,000 BP]
I gasped, my eyes going wide. "STAUST says it's 150,000 for expansion? That's so cheap!"
I nodded, decisively. The minus sign was forgotten. This was a new equation.
STAUST's display obediently fractured into a detailed breakdown:
Mr. Fin's entire dorsal fin gave a single, violent twitch. The motion sent a ripple through the water that made the amber-prison droplets on my pajamas tremble. The numerals of the award seemed to materialize from the cosmic brine still weeping from his earlier engravings, smelling sharply of ozone and the uneasy feeling of a deal that benefited the wrong party.
Proti, ever the living calculator, convulsed around the fused silica lump. It extruded several thin, frantic pseudopods that began tapping against the fabric of my folded pajamas. The taps weren't random; they were a precise, rhythmic code. Each tap corresponded to a number, spelling out a conversion rate directly onto the chitin:
[BUBBLEPOINT CONVERSION]
[1 BP = 0.0034% BUBBLE EXPANSION]
The rhythm of the taps was eerily familiar—it matched the last, fading vibrations of NightSnack's greedy proboscis, still subtly eating microscopic, entropy-riddled holes in the membrane if you knew where to look.
The fossilized rice grain's light pulsed erratically, like a heart under stress. It projected a single, staggering result across the eight scarred points of the lobby:
[TOTAL EXPANSION ACHIEVABLE: 1,462%]
As if this number was their cue, the eight tendril scars on the membrane convulsed. With a series of wet, reluctant schlorps, the tendrils fully retracted, vanishing into the outer void. Their departure didn't leave smooth wall behind. It left eight perfectly circular, raw-looking holes, each about the size of my head. From them, a slow, constant trickle of brine began to weep, carrying a scent that was oddly, depressingly mundane: the damp concrete and lonely echo of an overpriced, unfurnished studio apartment.
I looked around my home. My tiny, glowing sand-floor, curved-wall home. It was safe. It was mine. But it was also… just a bubble. I couldn't walk more than five steps in any direction.
I turned to Mr. Fin, my request simple, born of a deep, human need for space, for growth, for something that was more.
"Can I have a garden?" I asked, my voice full of hope. I gestured at the oppressive, perfect blackness beyond the membrane. "It is all dark outside. And my bubble is not large enough to walk." I clasped my hands together. "Please, Mr. Fin. Make it larger enough."
[Price Request - Deepsea Garden Biome (Worst): 120,000 BP]
For a long moment, the cosmic shark was silent. His starry eyes regarded me, then the weeping scars, then the staggering number hanging in the air. There was a sense of immense, cosmic reluctance. Expanding the bubble wasn't just adding room; it was increasing the surface area of our vulnerability. It was inviting more of the abyss in.
Then, with a sound that began as a deep grind and escalated into a piercing metallic screech, his dorsal fin moved.
[User CosmicFlip Spend 200,000 on BUBBLE EXPANSION ]
He didn't write. He excavated.
He carved the command
[BUBBLE EXPANSION INITIATED: 680% INCREASE]
directly into the brine-darkness in front of him. The letters didn't glow; they were negative space, tunnels cut through reality that hissed with escaping void-pressure.
The effect was instantaneous and violent.
[User CosmicFlip purchased Deepsea Garden Biome (Worst) for user Chiari]
[TOTAL ACCOUNT BALANCE: 110,000 BP]
The bubble's membrane, once taut and defined, bulged. It wasn't a gentle inflation. It was a lurch, a stomach-dropping stretch as the fabric of our pocket universe was violently pressurized from within. Through the eight weeping scars left by the judges, torrents of cold, dense, alien brine—not from our local abyss, but from the cosmic funding source of the Gauntlet itself—exploded inward.
This brine didn't just flood. It crystallized on contact with the internal pressure of the expansion. Jagged, irregular support structures of salt and fossilized nightmare shot out from the scars, branching and intersecting like the insane skeleton of a cathedral designed by a dying computer. They smelled not of the sea, but of rusted playground equipment left in the rain, and the faint, oily scent of unfilled tax documents.
Proti let out a squeal of alarm and flattened itself against the seabed, becoming a quivering, defensive pancake. My neatly folded pajamas were suddenly sent sliding away as the sand-laden floor beneath them stretched, the membrane groaning like a water balloon seconds from bursting. The sound was a deep, visceral complaint of physics being asked to do too much.
STAUST's display, overwhelmed, erupted from the now-churning sand in a dozen shattered panels, each screaming a different warning or metric:
[STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: 89% (HOLDING)]
[PRESSURE EQUALIZATION: IN PROGRESS]
[GARDEN FEASIBILITY ANALYSIS: 12.7% OXYGEN RETENTION | 88% PSYCHOTROPIC SPORE LIKELIHOOD]
Then, the light changed. Eight points of soft, gold-green light detached from the ceiling—or where the ceiling used to be. They were the other fossilized rice grains from my failed assimilation attempts, now activated by the surge of energy. They floated down to orbit my head in a gentle, bioluminescent halo, their amber surfaces reflecting the transformation.
The stretching slowed. The groaning subsided to a low, permanent hum.
I stood up, my legs wobbly.
[EMOTIONAL ARTIST bonus triggers BUBBLE EXPANSION x 10 => 68 times, bubble sized varies with users emotions]
My bubble was… gone.
In its place was a chamber. Vast. Or it felt vast after the closet I'd lived in. The curved walls were now distant, lost in a gloom that my rice-grain halo couldn't fully penetrate. The floor was no longer a neat circle of sand. It was an uneven, rocky expanse, like the bottom of a tidal cave frozen in time. The jagged, crystalline support structures pierced through it in places, glowing with a faint internal phosphorescence.
And it was empty. Not peaceful-empty. Parking-lot-after-hours-empty. A void barely defined.
The brine from the expansion scars wasn't stopping. It pooled in low spots, forming wide, shallow puddles that reflected the weak light. But the reflections were wrong. They didn't show the ceiling. They showed intricate, infinitely repeating fractal patterns—fern-like and diseased—that grew and dissolved in the standing liquid. The puddles themselves were creating spontaneous, fractal gardens of crystallized salt and despair.
[User Y0g_S0g0th (The Unraveling Geometry) observes the non-Euclidean growth patterns in the substrate. Notes efficient use of entropic brine for spontaneous fractal recursion. Aesthetically sterile, but computationally elegant.]
The observation appeared not as text, but as a sudden, geometric chill in the back of my mind, a cold appreciation for the mathematical horror of my new floor.
[User princesspamperville23 (Starcrushing Vine Lvl 9849) messages User C'thullus the Ever-Hungering:]
OMG she actually did it. She bought the "studio apartment" expansion package. That's, like, the worst value-for-BP in the catalogue. The spore-venting alone is going to be a nightmare. Tell her to at least get the basic atmospheric scrubber next time. The secondhand psychic mould is NOT a good look.]
I didn't see the messages. I only saw the space.
I took a tentative step forward. Then another. My footsteps didn't echo; the sound was swallowed by the porous, rocky floor and the vast hum. I could walk. I could run. I could do a cartwheel if I knew how.
I spun in a slow circle, my rice-grain halo spinning with me, painting streaks of light in the gloom. A laugh bubbled out of me—pure, unfiltered delight.
"It's huge!" I whispered, then shouted, "IT'S HUGE!"
I saw the jagged, creepy support structures as glittering crystal pillars. I saw the fractal brine puddles as pretty, sparkling decorations. The stale scent of rust and ozone was just "new house smell." The crushing, indifferent emptiness was "potential."
I turned to Mr. Fin, who now looked proportionally smaller against the vast new wall, like a guard dog in a suddenly cavernous warehouse. His dorsal fin was still rigid, his eyes scanning the new shadows with deep suspicion.
"Thank you, Mr. Fin!" I beamed, my earlier frustration with the minus sign completely forgotten. "Now… about that garden!"
I pointed to the largest, flattest section of the rocky floor, near one of the weeping judge-scars. "There! We can make a garden there! We need soil! And seeds! And a little pond!"
Mr. Fin's gills expelled a long, slow stream of bubbles that traveled halfway across the new chamber before popping. Each pop released a tiny puff of scent: damp fertilizer bag, chemical bloom, and the sharp tang of rooting hormone.
Proti, still flattened, quivered. It was looking at the proposed garden spot with what could only be described as gelatinous dread.