It wasn’t that she didn't consider herself an early bird, but it also wasn't particularly often she'd be awake this early in the day, either. Sunrise proper was still a while away, but there was just enough light to see by, casting the world around her a dark blue color, until her surroundings almost blended in with the color of her skin. She reckoned she was twelve yards from the rock pool at the edge of the yard now, give or take two or three or something. Twelve-ish-or-so yards away, Mererna's quarry awaited.
	The pond itself was around fourteen feet across, lined entirely by rocks-- smooth and grayish, some speckled with moss-- and a little over two feet deep. A colorful assortment of insects, mollusks, isopods, and other sorts of invertebrates- judging by their appearances- had congregated along the sides of the  pool. Some milled about as though socializing with their peers of varying species, sizes, and presumably, placement in the fossil record. Others stood on the edge of the pond to drink, or else to do whatever their business might have been with a pool of liquid water. Mererna stopped walking, craned her neck upward, and switched her head left and right several times. Her neck popped rapidly and the handle of the iron cauldron on her head clanked brightly. The corners of her beak carved a relaxed smile on her face. A few steps later, the demon crouched down and flopped onto an unoccupied space on the mossy rocks, her belly providing cushioning and a soft plop as she landed with her beak about two feet away from the water. She reached down to her bottom, cupping her left cheek in her hand. As if scratching an itch, lazily rubbed her spidery blue ring finger along the gluteal fold of the cheek and turned her head to the right, observing the strange souls at the pond. 	
	Almost immediately, however, Mererna's attention was diverted by the crunching sound of another demon sauntering down the graveled path bordering the yard around the towering "house." To those who considered her a neighbor, seeing Lante walking alone this early in the day generally meant that on Earth, it was approximately Wednesday-- for her, at least. And for Mererna, Wednesdsay tended to mean one thing consistently. "Pizza day!" she called out to the approaching demon. 					
	The pig adjusted her direction about thirty degrees right in midstep, making eye contact with Mererna as a tiny smile switched on under her snout. "Isn't it Tuesday for you? You told me you were at 2 P.M. on Monday when we left Rockin' last night." Her ears flicked, sending a ripple down her nun's veil as she stopped at the opposite side of the rock pond.					
	"Yep." Mererna murmured before her beak stretched open into a gaping yawn. A faint, squeaked chirrup echoed in her throat for a second or two before her beak softly clacked shut. "I slept good while you were having another day, I guess.” Her right arm drifted outward, reaching into the crowd of crawling curiosities. Thin blue fingers probed about as she spoke, the darker-blue fingertips searching for the most desirable candidate. "N’ I figured I'll wake-n'-bake, so I came out to grab munchies."	
	Lante lowered her eyelids, smiled a little wider, and oinked an amused chortle. She kept her eyes on Mererna's hand as it hovered above the creatures around her. Something resembling a stick bug, but about four inches longer and a half-inch thicker, had wandered over to her elbow and was tapping at it with four whispy anntenae. Lante's eyes followed Mererna's arm up to her shoulder. "Escargot? Escamole?"								
	"Yep." The bird-headed demon's fingers rendezvoused on a smooth shell and ran up and down to inspect it as though massaging a scalp. "Yeah, I'm still a day behind you for some reason. I'll catch up, though." She reached her fingers down further until they reached the bottom of the shell and touched the body of its inhabitant: soft and slick, definitely a snail or some comparable strain of mollusk. Escargot confirmed. Still facing Lante, she traced her fingers around the base of the shell to find the creature's head and slid her hand down in front of the creature to let it slowly pull itself into her palm, smiling at Lante from across the pond. "But you kinda just confirmed it's Wednesday for you, so I'll have some pizza for you," she chirped. "I take it you're about to do another Overdrive trial?" 								
	Lante's choice of overall appearance was no guarantee of an Overdrive by any means, but certainly a fairly reliable indicator, considering that she had not yet begun her day proper. The veil she was wearing included openings for her ears to poke through, and its hammerspace didn't entirely hide the presence of her foot-tall mohawk like her usual one did. Four pairs of boobs ran down her body, rather than the usual two pair, and all of her nipples, bar the first pair on top, were pierced. She popped her knuckles loudly and spoke. “Eighteen pending trials, all related. Combining them into one, and all guilty parties are gonna testify against each other. And they’re all gonna think they’re allowed to be the jury for each other until... prob’ly the last ten minutes. Maybe five.”
	“That jus’ sounds complicated.” Mererna brought her hand back in front of her face, examining her catch. A smooth and shiny white shell with blue veins resembling fine cracks housed creamy-colored molluscan flesh. Its head was of a reddish hue, vaguely horselike in shape, and sported a corkscrew-shaped antenna above its two eyestalks. “Oh, hey. It’s Gulnar. I haven’t had this guy in a couple months, I think.” 
	Lante took a few steps closer to the pond to get a better look at the snail-thing. “He’s kinda pretty.” The creature’s head turned toward her, and its tiny eyes twinkled. “What’s he taste like?”
	Mererna lifted her hand to her headpot, and Gulnar began crawling onto it. “Like about halfway between lamb chops and oysters. Better than it sounds. Good with extra-salty broth. Chickeny texture. Really tender.” She scritched the mollusk under his chin as his foot left her hand for the surface of the cauldron, and he nuzzled her finger, emitting something between a cricketlike chirp and a ranine croak. 
	Lante’s hands moved behind her head, clasped their fingers under her wimple. “Shit, we’ll have to split him sometime. If he’s game.” The creature turned its head back to look at her and gave a couple of short squeaks. Lante smiled and replied with a soft oink before giving Mererna a thumbs-up and dropping her other arm at her side as she turned to continue on her way. “I better leave you to it.”
	“All righty~!”

	Mererna returned the pig demon’s hand gesture, and Gulnar vocalized again, this time a high-pitched croak that segued into a short whistle. The bird stood up slowly and pivoted around on one jug-shod foot, sliding a hand up into her headpot and producing a small jar of ground marijuana and a zippo lighter as she started walking back toward the storm door embedded in the stone cliff face. While Lante was meanwhile making a show of some unfortunate souls’ sentencing a day in the future, Mererna would be putting on a show of her own.

	“Wh- No! Fuck!” The mouse girl reached to grab the bottle just as it fell over with a knock. Fortunately, she grabbed it before it rolled off her desk toward the power strip on the floor, but not before it spilled a puddle of whiskey next to her keyboard. Groaning from a combination of irritation and hangover, she reached over to yank a few tissues from the box on the edge of the desk. As she mopped the spilled liquor off the desk, she could hear the bathroom door swinging open over the rattling hum of the central A/C.
	A few footsteps sounded down the short hallway into the main room. “You better not tell me you got your ass fired again,” Glazea mumbled as she grabbed a tissue. 
	“No. Jeffa told me he didn’t need me to come in today.” The mouse turned to throw her wad of booze-gorged paper in the trash can. “And somebody fuckin’ puked in the deep fr--” She froze, noticing that the demon’s right hand was behind her back, and absentmindedly dropped the dripping mass into the bin. “...What the f-- What’re--” She stuttered for a second. “...What the fuck’re you doing?”
	Glazea pulled a partially-wadded tissue from behind her back and glanced at it before tossing it into the wastebasket along with the ones used to soak up the spilled whiskey. It was smeared dark brown. The mongoose idly pointed her thumb back toward the hallway before she reached for the box again. “We’re outta TP, JuJu.” 
	July pushed her keyboard forward and connected her forehead with her desk. She groped blindly for her mug, being careful not to knock the bottle over again. After four seconds, she had to lift her head and open her eyes to take a sip. Her eyes opened too wide and met with the word julaaay printed on the mug. Rolling her eyes, the deer mouse took two swallows of whiskey, barely holding back a cough when a drop started to take a wrong turn. Before she could put the mug down, she was alerted by the sound of her whiskey bottle being removed from its place.
	“Where’d the fuck you get this?” Glazea’s lips produced a smile that July could only hope was of mock-incredulity. She waggled the bottle in front of herself, splashing its little remaining contents around as she read the label: Hard Guy Rye  1.75 Liter  Alc. 42.5% by vol. (85 Proof). “Julya, did you fuckin’ steal this shit? Are you getting worse?”
	July reflexively grabbed her mug again. “No. Aaren gave me that.” She looked back up at Glazea, who had looked down at her awaiting her response. She was still staring. The mouse drained the last of the liquor in her mug and put it back down. “Aaren Salze. I met him at that stupid-ass meeting you dragged me to the other day.”
	Glazea chuckled silently. “Oh yeah. I talked to him once. He’s kind of a stupid dude.” She handed the bottle back to July. “Whatever. don’t fuck yourself up too hard.” Just as she was turning to leave, she paused, looking at July’s computer screen. “Oh, hey. Merry’s streaming.”
	“Huh...?” July poured another few sips of whiskey into her mug as the ring-tailed mongoose demon tapped her knuckles on the monitor screen. As she looked up at the screen, she noticed a brown mark over one of the thumbnails that had showed up onscreen. Her chair creaked as she pivoted it around to face the demon. “Glassy, I’m gonna murder you.”
	The demon’s eyes hovered from July’s infuriated face to her screen, and then down to her right hand as she raised it up to look at. She swiped another gossamer sheet from the tissue box, then another after a brief moment. “Goddamn it. Merry. If you stayed in the meeting room with me instead of hanging around in the halls with the rest of the losers, you would’ve met her.”
	July turned back to the computer screen, just now registering that the link she’d clicked had finally loaded, and only a couple seconds later remembering that in her haze, she’d decided to click on the Mukbang tag. Not knowing what to make of the dirtied thumbnail, she allowed her hand to drag the cursor over it and click. The browser window took a few moments before it started loading the stream. July took the time to dab a tissue with whiskey to wipe Glazea’s shit off the screen before she was met with the hazy image of a blue figure partially obscured by the animated buffering logo.
	“I’m gonna go do some gaming. You’d better take the trash out if you don’t want it to stink up the living room.” Glazea idly flicked the tissues she’d grabbed into the trash, stained in like manner to the last one she’d disposed of. 
	July recoiled, nudging the bin away from the desk with her foot. “Augh!!” In a hurry, she grabbed another tissue and held it against the top of her mug, splashed some whiskey on it, and tried to lay it over the top of the shit-stained papers.
	“-ways end up coming back with these guys.”
	The sudden sound of a chirpy, bubbly voice surprised her. She reached over to the speakers to turn them down just a bit. Of course, now that she was only morbidly interested in whatever the fuck she’d been looking up, her internet wasn’t so crappy all of a sudden. That’s how this level worked, wasn’t it? Looking back at the monitor, she remembered the confusion she hadn’t quite processed upon seeing the thumbnail.
	A blue, furless figure placed a smooth whelk-like white shell peppered with veiny blue lines on a tripod over a Bunsen burner, pouring the contents of a small bowl into its opening. “Last week it was a couple voles... Night before that, it was a big fat moth... A few of you guys prob’ly remember that.”
	July struggled to make sense of what she was seeing. The shiny, blue-skinned torso would have looked almost amphibian if it weren’t for the breasts. A red-and-white band of chevrons wrapped around them, apparently covering up where there should have been nipples. And its head certainly belonged to some bird of prey. And as for its choice of headwear...
	“Oh, yeah, I got Gulnar in here again! Say hi~!” A pale, thin feeler rose up from the aperture of the shell and wiggled back and forth in an almost-cartoony imitation of a wave before sinking back down, a wisp of steam rising from the shell as it vanished. The mouse rubbed her eyes. “Haven’t I seen something like this on a TV show before...?”

	While Mererna was focused on bringing a few gently-steaming pots into view of her webcam, her eyes snapped toward a message in the chat. She jerked her right hand away from a pot of extra-meaty chili and reached out to touch her screen. “Hold still.” 
	The comment that had attracted her attention flashed green, and the newer messages began to move around it rather than pushing it up out of visibility. The bird’s dark brown eyes hovered over the message for a couple of seconds, then went back to the chili. Returning to the task of arranging her pots, she continued speaking, lowering her voice to a couple of steps above a whisper.
	“Mhm. I didn’t forget. He’s down there. Hold on.” As soon as she finished placing a few bowls next to the covered pot of a slow cooker, she swiveled the seat of her carved wooden chair to the right and slid herself forward to jump down off the chair. A few seconds later, she climbed back up, using the pair of rungs between the legs of the chair as a ladder. She slowly turned herself around, back toward the camera, and plopped back onto her throne, grabbing the edge of the table to spin the chair back toward her camera. 
	“So...” Her eyes fixed on the lens in the middle of the plastic Yoshi egg on top of her monitor, and a soft chirp jumped from her throat before she continued. “Did you all get a good look at my butt before I sat back down?” Her gaze remained fixed on the camera as she smiled, reaching behind the monitor to bring a massive pizza box onscreen. “Because I~’m gonna be using it later.” The pizza box found its place next to a platter piled with a stack of thirty-inch tortillas and a pyramid of two-foot-long sub rolls. The bird brought her voice down to a whisper as she rested her elbow on a conveniently-arranged free space on the enormous counter of her computer desk, rested her beak on her hand, and laid her other hand on her mouse. “You guys’re gettin’ a twofer this morning.” 
	With a few well-placed clicks, Mererna’s face cam relegated itself to the bottom-left corner of her streaming window, filling the rest of it with the image of a nude, borderline-obese Irish stoat kneeling on the floor with his hands behind his back. On the light-gray stone-pattern vinyl in front of him sat what appeared to be a huge porcelain mixing bowl. Mererna cleared her throat and spoke up. “This guy down here is Gavril Hyades. Forty-eight. Heart attack.” She shrugged. “Go figure.”
	The bird’s eyelids drooped slightly, and some of the sparkles in her eyes seemed to fade as she announced his offenses. “He owned a chicken processing plant in the Midwestern US, where-” She opened her eyes fully, as if snapping out of a trance. “Where he oversaw employees denied breaks for meals or restroom visits, cruel treatment of animals, unchecked incompetence...” 
	The stoat lowered his gaze as he listened to the demon speak. Then he pointed his face down as if to hide it from the camera. His shoulders were shaking visibly. The demon paused, watching him through her live feed, and sighed softly. “Shit wages, top-down assholery… You get the picture. Gavril died on Sunday and is serving his first sentence in an industrial internment camp down on Level Four.” She leaned left, reached down over the arm of her chair and slapped one of its legs. “Say hi~!” 
	
	A few clicks of the mouse and the placing of a platter offscreen went by in silence before Mererna spoke again, more sharply. “Gavril. Say hi.” In the feed, Gavril struggled to lift his head, shivering. His face had been reduced to a defeated grimace with eyes on the verge of failing to hold back tears.
	“H-Hi… Guys…”
	He bit his lip, and his head dropped back down before another audible click switched his camera feed’s place with Mererna’s. Mererna was smiling, eyes closed. “Okay! So, usual disclaimer; Gavril accepted my offer to shave some time off his current regimen. He did not know what he was in for until probably an hour ago now.” About five seconds, four clicks and some tapping on the keyboard later, She’d filled the space between the chat box and the stream itself with a second chat, with its text field outlined in red. “There you guys go. Say hi to him.”
	The stoat’s eyes widened as he looked up and saw a few messages popping up on the screen of the tablet set up on the small platform between the legs of the massive chair. He’d better be hungry. He was lucky he could just look up and stare at that ass. Casual reminder: he was a piece of shit. His jaw started to go slack. 
	Once the bird demon had found room for the lid covering the platter on her left, she grabbed the platter and held it up to show her audience a pile of two-foot-long hot dogs. Next came the pizza box. The top swung upward, and Mererna leaned around it to look at the pie inside, pointing at the chaos of toppings. “Hmm… Green olives, meatballs, sausage…” She giggled for a moment, going back to a whisper. “Garlic, salami… And extra anchovies!” As she placed the pizza back down, she pointed down at her seat. She smiled back at the camera, pinching her nose and waving her other hand in front of her face. “All right then. I think I’ll start with a sloppy joe.”
	Down below, Gavril was looking left and right, desperately struggling to keep his eyes away from the remarks and memes on the tablet screen, away from the dish in front of him, and the hell away from that ass. His face, at first showing nothing but dread and guilt, had now betrayed bewilderment, impotent frustration and indignance. 
	He should be bobbing in a churning ocean of sulfuric flames, indistinguishable from numberless other souls-- or rotting at the bottom of some dark oubliette, with no one to see his miserable state-- or vainly fleeing a hail of rubble and wreckage or an endless stampede of demonic hooves. This was not what Hell was supposed to be like.

	Microwave burrito in hand, Julya ambled back from the kitchen to her chair, still shaking a bit though her initial reaction to observe the spectacle that her guardian demon pointed out to her had mostly passed. She doubted she’d find the rest of this performance much more appetizing than what she’d already but it had been almost fourteen hours since she’d eaten, and like usual, she couldn’t find anything else interesting to watch while she waited for her hangover to fuck off.
	So far, this unnerving bird-thing had used three of the over-long sandwich buns. One was filled with a sloppy joe concoction made with five kinds of meat; the other two with oversized frankfurters and smothered with thick chili laced with cheese. Each had made its way through the creature’s smiling beak in less than two minutes, with little in the way of biting or chewing, but several deep throaty swallows, the bird holding her microphone close under her chin as she gulped her meal down inch by inch.
	Since the second chili-cheese dog, the sound coming from July’s speakers had returned to the voice of the blue demon idly talking about her thoughts and replying to the chat. Biting into her late-morning snack, July sat down to the sight of Merry spooning beef into a tortilla. She was making a goddamn burrito.
	Steam rolled out of July’s mouth as she sighed through her sodium-laden breakfast. Of course she was gonna eat a burrito now. Of fucking course it was gonna be colossal and overflowing with what looked very much like everything. And of course, the next thing out of her beak was going to be, “Anybody else up there having burritos for breakfast?”
	The mouse’s whiskers drooped as she worked on a mouthful of tortilla seasoned with pasty refried beans. Almost robotically, her hand reached out to nudge her computer mouse and knocked the cursor over the field of the main chat. She hit the left button with the back of her hand and started pecking keys with her left. 
	Julya knew how it worked by now. If a comment didn’t have a username above it, she would see a name there. And she wasn’t feeling up to making an account. The burrito flew a few inches into the air, and her left hand swiped it out.
	Julya Scrovegna 10:44 L3-V5cH					 		  Present. Also, Glazea Lo Balos says hi, i guess.
	Almost as soon as she hit the Enter key, the bird turned her head turned to look up at the screen, then leaned back, throwing her hands in the air, holding her freshly-wrapped burrito high. “Yay! Burrito sisters!” Then, for the first time in the stream, she took a bite. Nearly a third of the bird’s torpedo of a burrito came off, and then, something else took Julya by surprise. Mererna was chewing. With her beak closed.
	The gulp that followed wasn’t as loud or powerful-sounding as the ones before, but Mererna still leaned over the microphone before she swallowed. “...Oh, and tell Glaz not to be so huge of a bitch for a while for me?” She started raising her burrito back toward her face, but stopped. “To you, not to me.” 

	July almost smiled. For the first time since her attempted walk home after class, she hadn’t immediately regretted posting something on the internet-- but she didn’t want to press her luck just yet. She reached for her bottle, and she raised it to her lips to suck out the last of the golden potion in perfect sync with the bird lifting her burrito to her yawning maw.
	Now that she thought about it, she didn’t really mind watching this demon eat. She wasn’t loud or piggish or messy apart from those huge gulps, and the food she’d fixed for herself looked amazing, if not extremely unhealthy. Aside, perhaps, from the pizza. The pizza just looked unhealthy.
	Something poked out from the end of the burrito sticking from Merry’s beak. It was thin and pink, and wiggled for a moment before retreating back in. July put down the bottle and stared. Did she actually just see a worm? Another second passed, and it peeked out again, curled up, and a few tiny hook-like barbs folded up from its shiny pink flesh as it pulled itself back in, tearing a hole straight through the center of the burrito. 
	Merry spun to the left, and her cheeks began to puff. The steam drifting from the hole through her burrito darkened into black smoke. A few puffs billowed out, speckled with tiny glowing embers. Then, the inky cloud erupted into fluttering wings. Almost a dozen tiny black birds-- bats? Moths? --were swarming the room, leaving wispy trails of smoke behind them. By the time Mererna’s snack had vanished down her throat, the last of them were reducing themselves to ghostly black streaks through the air.
	July blinked a few times and took another bite of her burrito.

	Half-an-hour in, most of the spread was gone. All that remained on Mererna’s desk was a single bun, a couple slices of pizza, a handful of deviled eggs, a few nearly-empty pots, and the Bunsen burner with its low, flickering flame. Picking up the remaining pizza slices, one in each hand, she pointed a pinky at the chat to freeze another message. 
	“Mhm. You’re right, Bugs. Soon as I bring him back, I’ll be making a request to give him some treatment once he’s done with his current sentence.” Looking down at the floor through the hole beneath her, she scowled at the top of Gavril’s head as he whimpered curse words just loudly enough to be picked up by the tablet’s microphone. She then raised the pizza to her beak and smiled again as she popped both pieces in, chewed for a few seconds, and swallowed.
	“All right, let’s wrap this stuff up.” With the last sandwich bun in front of her, she started scraping the few ladlefuls of chili from the pot and dropping it into the bun. She did the same with the sloppy joe and burrito meat pots, and scooped the deviled eggs off their tray to line them up on top of the sandwich. Her eyes twinkled at the sight of whatever it was she’d made. “Go ahead and judge me. I’m eating this now.”
	The thing was gone in three gulps. Seconds later, the pots and trays and greasy cardboard were placed aside, and Mererna had picked up the shell containing Gulnar, slightly charred on the bottom, and tweeted loudly. “Okay, everyone. Gonna wait for this guy to cool down for a few seconds. I think next stream I’ll be hungry for loads of seafood. Sashimi, paella, slabs of bluefin, maybe some ceviche?” 
	A few comments popped up as she poured some liquid from the shell into her open beak. She swallowed it and immediately turned back to respond. “Am I gonna have a partner downstairs? None scheduled, but I’ll accept a volunteer.” She stuck her beak inside the shell, and pulled it out with her wormlike tongue wrapped around a chunk of steaming white meat. Her head reared back, tossing the strange escargot into the air and catching it in her throat. Finally, she dumped the remaining liquid down her throat before lowering the shell itself down, wrapping her tongue around it, and closing her mouth. She straightened her headkettle, beamed with delight at the camera, and held the mic up to her neck as Gulnar’s shell descended her diabolic esophagus with a final, resounding glrrrrm.
	Two large green ceramic jugs at the end of the bird’s legs knocked loudly against the top of the desk as Mererna rested her feet. She leaned back, bringing the mic with her. “All right. Showtime number two, everyone.” Her hand went up into the kettle on her head and emerged holding a tiny remote. A button press switched the demon’s camera with the stoat’s just in time to catch him looking upward, lips trembling. The remote returned to its place, and Mererna fished around in her kettle a few seconds more before producing a ring-shaped piece of plastic with a suction cup attached. She slid the microphone into it and reached down between her thighs, sticking the microphone to the bottom of her seat.
	The next noise it picked up was a booming but muffled burst of flatulence. Gavril gazed at up the source of the sound, mouth hanging open in horror. The thunderous release of gas continued, and after a few seconds, a blue, ballooning orb became visible at the top of the screen. It grew and descended lower with each puff of flatus from Mererna’s bowels, and its surface seemed to glisten as it visibly reverberated with the burbling of her anus, amplifying the bass of the hot gas. Gavriel’s eyes followed it down between himself and the tablet, his mouth still gaping as if expecting a word to choke out. Finally, once the tablet’s camera refocused, sharpening the image of his bewildered face cast in cobalt blue, he found one. “W-Whuh…?”
	Even if he looked, Gavril Hyades couldn’t see the mocking comments in his chat from knowing viewers, but that didn’t stop them from coming.  By this point, it had mostly devolved into shitposting, but two small factions of users were ribbing each other about how they should be treating Mererna’s victim of the day and a third had called for a show of hands from those who would elect to have his name changed to ‘BOB’ until he reached Level Three. All this came to an abrupt end by another bassy fart which quickly became a deep, wet crackling sound. 
	The mongoose folded his ears back as a firm, girthy log oozed down into the bulbous, inflated membrane. It began slowly coiling up at the bottom, causing the membrane to droop lower. Mererna’s anus pinched it off a second later, causing the bubble to bounce up and down once it all dropped to the bottom. Another, softer turd followed, then another. Finally, a spluttering mess erupted from her demonic asshole, flecking the inside of the bubble. The splattered excrement oozed down its inner surface, pooling around the mucky heap and leaving the rest of the bubble spotless. As the diarrhea settled, it began to drip through the bottom of the rubbery poop sac. A tiny opening stretched wider, and the massive mound of shit gradually slid downward, the elastic orifice of the bubble yielding to its contours. Then it dropped into the white bowl below with a wet thud. A few brown flecks flew, one visibly landing on Gavril’s belly.
	He trembled, his mind having given up on comprehending the abjection he’d hesitantly signed himself up for the day prior in favor of simply resigning itself to acceptance. His countenance had returned to one of defeat.
	The hanging bubble tensed, and the dense fumes within it sputtered through the loosely-clenched hole at the bottom, polluting the room with a pungent, eggy stench. Some of the shock from earlier returned to Gavril’s eyes as he laid eyes on the mess of creamy brown in the bowl before him, and he nearly doubled over gagging, barely stifling sobs as he groaned with revulsion.
	Mererna yanked the microphone out from under her chair with a pop and held it up as she looked down through her seat. “I’ve set a couple timers up here. If you finish all that before twenty minutes is up, I’ll have a week taken off your sentence; just long enough to get the taste out of your mouth. If you don’t, I’ll start adding time. If you haven’t finished in thirty minutes, you’ll return to your barracks wearing whatever’s left.”
	Merry would have been content to watch her guest squirm as he tried to build up the courage to start eating, but a dark-yellow gleam around some text in the corner of her eye pulled her attention back to the chat.

	Julya Scrovegna 11:16 L3-V5cH					 		          The fuck kind of methed up deepweb shit is this? 
	“Pfffff, you think this is fucked? I should show you some of the stuff I do down on Five.” The demon pointed her finger at July’s message, stopping it in place. “Oh, I kinda forgot. You’re still kinda fresh here, right? Kinda surprised you’re still here.” 
	She picked up the Bunsen burner and blew out the flame. An egg timer she’d set behind her keyboard ticked softly. Down on the floor, Gavril had quieted down somewhat. In his chat, memes were flowing again. And the comment Mererna had suspended displayed a single additional word at the bottom: Typing...