Cinnamon Bump

By VivettaVenray

(WARNING: Contains cell-vore/absorption, and gore, among other things)

(NOTE: This short story has about as much, if not more, "omni/powers" content as it does size. So, just a heads up there that this might not be as size-y as some of my other works. I hope the story is enjoyed regardless!)

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A “Cinnamon Bump” probably didn’t sound like the most appealing food. Susan thought the name sounded like some disease a gingerbread person would get in a cartoon show. Maybe the doctor needs to cut it out with his peppermint scalpel, then suture with some licorice thread. Then, he sends the gingerbread person home with the warning to see him again if it comes back. If the condition metastasized, then the icing eruption could cause his entire body to fracture into a gooey, sweet mess.

Susan’s mouth watered at the thought while she walked through the mall that housed one “Cinnamon Bump” franchise location. There were more in the city, and even a standalone one that didn’t require dodging the kiosks and perfume samples. Still, this mall was the closest to where she lived and worked. It was also the mall she grew up with. So, there was a pleasant hint of nostalgia that made sharing the space with “mall types” worth it for the young woman.

Well, that, and the trademark “Cinnamon Bump” cinnamon rolls. As Susan approached the brightly lit shop, she could see a few of the delectable things behind a glass display that could use a cleaning, further filtered through the dirtier glass windows of the storefront itself.

Even then, she could see the bumps well in their glory. There was the alluring tan tint all the cinnamon spice and sugar gave the doughy bread. The bread puffed out and upwards with thick sweet icing flowing over like snow down the layers of a circular ziggurat. The way the icing dipped into swirling crevices between those layers of the roll, with flakes of sugar and space hovering between--well, to Susan all this combined to a marvelous thing. It was more than a treat to her, it was a work of art.

Others saw the appeal too, given the line at the place. Rich, poor, fat or skinny, no one disliked a cinnamon roll and especially not a Cinnamon Bump. Susan took her place at the back of the queue. She realized the wait could be a few minutes.

A somewhat burly man was immediately ahead, and the young woman imagined just walking right through him, his body splitting in half with blood spurting all over her white blouse and navy-blue skirt. Bits of viscera would be caught in her medium length, auburn hair too.

Susan then saw herself walking right through the lumpy woman in front of him, then the others further in front who were too dumb to get out of the way of the woman who walked through people like paper. Their limbs would fly off from the force of her movements. Blood would spurt from broken bodies towards the cute couple eating their treats at the cubby to the left, while also drenching the small group of college friends to her right.

She’d walk up to the counter and squish a stray eyeball underneath her brown leather sandals that had too many straps for flip-flops, but not quite enough to enter the ‘gladiator’ tier of classification. The terrified, handsome young man working the counter would be smart enough to give her the Cinnamon Bump she asked for. His hands would fumble with her change as she insisted on paying.

She’d take a bite of it, swallow, say “thanks Kevin”, eyeing his obvious name-tag. Then, she’d yank his head off with two firm grips on either side of that chiseled, handsome jaw. She’d give him a smooch in the brief few seconds before his decapitated self lost its last bit of panicked, fading consciousness.

Susan sighed. She was certain that’s how things would go if she did them as she did in her head: but she didn't of course. That was just fantasy. She was in no rush. This was part of a little routine of hers. She’d visit a Cinnamon Bump store at least once a week, every Saturday, and that it was Saturday that day.

She was a patient young woman, and the store’s ambiance helped with that. Like any good eating establishment, they did their best to keep those on line happy. The fluorescent lights were pleasant. The sights within the store similarly so, with all the cinnamon rolls neatly arranged next to each other, but not so neat that it would seem too “corporate” or “sterile”: Cinnamon Bump PR and marketing made sure of that. Susan looked down at her feet a moment, eyeing the nail polish on her toes which was a darker dark-blue than those of her eyes. She checked her fingernails too, where the polish matched.

She smiled, and took a deep breath. The best part of the place was the smell. A bit of the air-freshener scent wafted in from the greater mall through the open-entrance of the storefront. It was present, albeit faintly, amid the far more overpowering scent of sweet Cinnamon Bumps resting just behind the counter.

The line moved forward.

Susan took another look at the cashier, Kevin, with his name-tag large enough for anyone in line to easily see. He was a young man, clad in the Cinnamon Bump uniform that was about half a size too small. The thin sky-blue fabric of the uniform shirt clung to his body just enough for the musculature of his arms to be visible as an outline. She could tell there were abs hiding behind that shirt too. He seemed college-aged, not too much younger than herself.

Her mind went wild with imagination once again. She pictured the two of them in a bed with her sliding across his abs till release. Then, not satisfied, her fingers squeezed his chest then dug right in. Her hands would dip into his chest and rip it apart and open, reveling in her strength. She pictured the dumb look on his face as she did this and kept him alive all the while.

While in line, she briefly nibbled at her lower lip. It could easily be mistaken as nerves or impatience should anyone else in the store notice, but they did not and she knew they did not.

The fantasies continued. She imagined splitting his mind across hundreds of little Kevins, and letting them wander her taut tummy like a fair-skinned desert. Then, she’d divide them in two teams, one for each breast, and let them have a bit of tug of war. Whichever side fell into her cleavage first would be immolated on the spot, but, it’d all be in good fun. She’d bring him right back, in one normal-scaled body just in time for her legs to wrap around his head.

Her sex dominating his visage, she’d let him panic for a few moments, just a few, before clenching her legs together. His head would pop like a grape between her thighs right at the moment of a lovely climax. Afterwards, she’d let his consciousness thrash around in the confines of her clit to bounce across the sensitive neurons there like a ping pong ball with no where to escape. It’d titillate her as her after-glow and his awareness would fade in tandem.

The line moved forward again. It moved quick since people mostly came here for the namesake Cinnamon Bumps, which was a simple order. They also sold coffee, soda, and a couple of lesser spin-offs of the namesake cinnamon roll. Susan didn’t care for the chocolate Cinnamon Bumps, and couldn’t imagine ordering a soda with any cinnamon roll. It’d be sweetness overload.

She took another deep, subtle breath to suffuse her senses with the atmosphere of the store again. It helped further ground her out of her fantasies. If she got too excited, she could lose focus and that was always a hassle for her.

The smell of pastries entered her nostrils. The sweet scented molecules bumping into her nose hairs, rewarding her with the delightful scent even as many get stuck in her mucus, never again interacting with the light of day.

‘A noble sacrifice’, she thought.

There was also the faint odor of the mall again, mixing in. Then, Susan’s nose twitched. There was something else. A new scent which smelled like roses, only fake and concentrated to a sickly degree. Faint though it was, it was still in the realm of human senses, and enough to agitate her sinuses. She heard a voice behind her.

“Susan?”

The brunette turned to face the woman behind her. Susan saw that the lady was about her age, with long black hair and green eyes. She had on some jeans and a red T-shirt. Her skin was a tad more sun-touched than Susan’s own. She recognized the person at once.

“Meredith!”, said Susan, feigning niceties.

“It’s good to see you again Susan, how long has it been? Since high school?”

“Feels like it, but we actually went to the same college. We didn’t see each other much though. Different programs I think.”

That was a bit of a fib, they shared a dining hall but never really interacted more than a glance. They had met in high school, but even then the two never got along except in passing.

“Oh yeah, that makes sense. It’s a shame though. We should’ve talked more then, and in High School too. A shame.”, said Meredith.

“Ah well, I was something of a different person then.” said Susan. ‘Very different’, she thought. ‘Lesser’.

Meredith broadened her fake smile just a tad. “Well, what are you up to now?”

Susan started to wonder why Meredith was still talking. She had always thought the woman something of a birdbrain. Like a bird, she was pretty absentminded, yet petty. She wasn’t being rude though, which meant she probably wanted to sell her something. One didn’t need to be able to read minds to see that.

Susan answered anyways with that appropriate mixture of curtness and politeness.

“I’m a receptionist.”

“Oh nice.”, said Meredith.

The old acquaintance smiled a bit wider, genuine, at the idea that Susan’s place in life was worse than her own. Of course, nothing could be further than the truth. Susan just liked a laid back job where she could finish most of the work in a few minutes while faffing about on the internet for most of the day.

“I’m in HR, myself.”, added Meredith.

‘Of course.’, thought Susan. Her lips moved to say the words “I bet that’s a great fit for you!”

“Thank you!”, said Meredith.

Susan turned around to the front. The line was staled since the woman at the very front was deciding between a Cinnamon Bump with or without chocolate on it. Susan thought about nudging the decision along, but Meredith spoke up.

“Say, you know, I actually have a bit of a side-business too.”

‘I knew it. Here we fucking go.’, thought Susan.

She begrudgingly turned back around to face Meredith, who started to fiddle with her purse. She had figured it already, but it was clear to all once the bag was unzipped that the source of that sickly rose odor came from in there.

Meredith held a couple small vials between her fingers. Each had a pleasant and artificially colored liquid inside with a thin label on the outside, and a little plastic stopper at the top.

“Now, scented oils may not seem like much, but they can be essential to human health and wellness.”, said Meredith. “If you wanted to try one and think about acquiring a scent that matches your needs, I could maybe help with that.”

“Oh, no thanks. Those sorts of powerful smells can agitate my nose a bit.”

“Oh, do you have allergies Susan?”

Susan quietly scoffed at the idea that her health wasn’t perfect.

“No.”, said Susan. “No it’s just a quirk of mine. They make me sneeze.”

Meredith kept a dumb fake grin on her face as she put her hand back in the purse and leaned into it, searching for something in particular.

“Well I have to insist you try at least one. I have a ginger one that can help with inflammation and allergies. I just need to find it.”

“No, really I’m not allergic. And please, it’s not necessary and I’d rather not. Ginger especially just smells spicy. Please don’t.”

It was all for naught, as Meredith whipped the orange vial out anyways. A french-manicured fingernail popped the vial’s stopper. Susan winced and moved her head back in anticipation, but the scent reached her even before her old acquaintance waved the vial under her face like an exorcist with a talisman.

For a woman who could go anywhere, there was nowhere to go to escape this while still keeping up a facade of politeness, among others. Susan’s nostrils twitched. At once the delicious smell of Cinnamon Bumps was overpowered by the pungent aroma of ginger spice. The others in the store didn’t seem pleased, but Susan bore the brunt of this ambiance assailant.

Susan felt the sting of the concentrated scent in her nose and throat. She started to sneeze.

“Ah, ah,”

And in the moment, Susan lost her focus. The only remotely fragile part of her being.

“Ah Choooo!”

Susan realized what had happened, and she would be the only one able to.

It all happened so fast.

Meredith was closest to the direct impact of the sneeze, and was first pierced with super fast droplets of mucus and spit that ripped through her body into the line behind her. The tiny globules were far, far faster than bullets, and passed through bone like a hot knife through butter. In fact, they were traveling fast enough to pass through the steel and glass of the storefront with similar ease, but few droplets would make it that far.

That would’ve been enough to kill Meredith in a few moments, along with the unlucky people behind her; even though the impacts looked like tiny little needle points of red, the human body was not very resilient to its insides being punctured hundreds of times over. Meredith’s cerebrum looked like very finely holed Swiss cheese, but only for a moment.

It was actually a shockwave that finished off Meredith, the line, and everyone else in the mall. When Susan had sneezed, she did so with a force several dozen times that of a nuclear weapon.

A blast of force and air ripped out from Susan in a circular radius. It followed just behind the minute bits of sneeze matter, and it tore Meredith to pieces. It wasn’t the ‘ripped to bits’ kind of deal, but more along the lines of ripping molecules apart. While Susan’s sneeze only sent out a little, hardly visible bit of deadly spit and mucus droplets, the raw force of the sneeze was plentiful.

The shockwave carried with it intense motion, which meant heat. That meant meant Meredith and everyone else around Susan was essentially turned to dust after just a few minute fractions of a second of contact. Everyone and everything else fared similarly. The shockwave easily cut to the front of the line, breaking through people as it turned the tile beneath them and the ceiling above to ash all the same.

The shockwave reached Kevin, who’s somewhat pronounced chin was the first to break apart, immolate, and dry to dust in the merest near-infinitesimal moment. The rest of his face and body followed, with his charming uniform reduced to mere flakes of dust beneath an ashy pile which was now the totality of his mass.

Roiling waves of unstoppable force leveled the store as it burnt and ripped through the mall. The melting point of plastic benches was reached. Exotic body washes boiled out of their containers, scalding the customers who were already burnt from super-heated air. They didn’t suffer long, in fact they didn’t feel anything at all. This all happened far too fast for their minds to process. Not even those at the very edges of the mall had time to process their imminent, inexorable doom.

Susan’s sneeze leveled the mall with ease, and the shockwave ripped through the building to scrap and melt cars. The city of Boulder Colorado fell down to ash from the massive blast which appeared as a viscerally hot, blinding, warbling mass of air. Suburbs were blown apart, forests were scorched.

The impact of the sneeze kept going.

All of Colorado was ripped to bedrock, coated in ash, and smoothed by the heat and erosive forces of Susan’s sternutation. One measly little state was far from enough to contain such power. By the time the sneeze finally stopped, the wreckage was enough for a giant gaping hole in the continental United States. It extended into Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, the very northern top of Texas along with all of Utah: Susan was facing west when she sneezed, resulting in that last state being somewhat-literally blown off the map.

The resulting dust blew into surrounding areas. Even those safe from immediate annihilation had to contend with the sky growing dark with the ash-ified remnants of earth, people, and livelihoods that weren’t immediately vaporized. Even the safest outer edges of the shockwaves broke bones and burst eardrums.

Millions had perished. It all happened very, very fast. The shockwave traveled slower than light, but far faster than sound.

In the middle of it all, at the center of that deep depression where a mall once stood was a stark naked Susan. In her lapse of focus, she had neglected to protect her clothes, and thus the auburn haired woman was completely bared to the summer day among the gray and black dust: mostly gray. She was the lone survivor in the state, which was now a desolate wasteland.

Susan wasn’t shy at the moment. It wasn’t just cause the heat and force of her sneeze had terminated all microscopic life in over a hundred mile radius, let alone other people. No one could see her nude, but, no, she was simply too distracted to care about being naked. Her fists were clenched in anger as she stared at where the Cinnamon Bump store counter once stood. She was the only one on the planet who could tell what each speck of dust used to be. She knew which belonged to people, and which belonged to those piquant pastries.

All the Cinnamon Bumps were toasted to ruination, ash. The entire purpose of her visit was gone and reduced to parts near-indistinguishable from the worthless Meredith who had instigated this mess. Now, Susan had to clean everything up. Pretty soon, the military would think there was some sort of nuclear attack, which would prompt an investigation. The ensuing state of high alert would increase tensions with the rest of the world and, in general, make her weekend rather lame.

Susan was angry, and in her moment of anger she raised her bare right foot up.

“Dammit!”

And stomped.

Alas, in her momentary rage, Susan had once again lost her focus.

What happened next made the previous disaster look like a pittance. The damage that was could be seen as a bruise on the Earth, but what her stomp ushered in was more akin to terminal failure to the planetary body. It was fatal mass trauma.

The entire world shook with a quake hard to measure by any scale. Though a mere 5’5” tall, Susan’s phenomenal self carried enough force in her hasty stomp to crack every tectonic plate like an egg. Great rifts opened across the surface of the world like deep lacerations. Molten lava rush through the clefts like the blood of the planet. It overflowed, spilling into cities, towns, and once pristine nature.

It happened fast, but not nearly as fast as her sneeze. People were alive and aware as lava swallowed them up, burnt their flesh, and boiled their bones. Lovers saw their partners swallowed by the emerging rifts of rock and magma, falling out of sight and into the agitated fire burning within the anguished Earth.

The military was mobilized, though much of their gear had plummeted into the emerging fissures in the ground. The rifts varied from finger width to the width of cities. Indeed, entire metropolises collapsed into the shifting gashes of a cracking Earth.

“Fuck”, said Susan.

She rolled her eyes, and knew well she had made things worse.

But, still fixable.

The young woman took a deep breath to calm herself. Her outfit reformed on her body, instantaneously. Her sandals, top, and skirt were back. Then, also instantaneously, she left the surface of the planet.

Susan hovered now in the cold dark of space; it didn’t make her so much as shiver. Her hands reached out as though to cup the planet, which was bursting into rocky chunks.

At about 100,000 miles in height, with auburn hair and casual garbs flowing in the void, Susan looked very much like a god on break. Though her powers were godly, divine play was more of her hobby than a job. She still was but a humble receptionist by week-day, yet, as she was now, the whole of the Earth seemed about an orange in size.

Susan somewhat literally had the whole world in her hands. She hadn’t touched it yet though, and it was hardly whole.

One chunk of the planet started to float away from the planet. It contained Japan, the Koreas, and some eastern lumps of China and Russia. What few people still breathed there saw their sky fill up with Susan’s fingers. A large chunk of Canada was also flying off, and her left hand tended to that.

It was possible to make out that the flesh-colored wall in the sky was part of a hand at first, albeit hard for many to believe. As Susan drew her fingers closer though, eventually her hand seemed so near as to seem alien to mortal eyes. They could see the minute pores, and the wrinkles seemed like rifts of their own to rival those currently splitting across the surface of the globe. The patterns on her palms, once subtle, now seemed to mark some other world to their smaller perspectives.

Susan pressed her fingers against the planet, trying to press the pieces back together. Of course that wouldn’t work, no matter how frustrated an expression she made. Yes, if divine play could be a hobby, it could also be a chore. She didn’t get that much joy from fixing things, but pretending to be able to press continents back together, via force, like it a 3D jigsaw puzzle was a quirky little way of lightening her own soured mood. The corner of her moon-swallowing mouth twitched slightly to reflect that quiet bit of joy.

The people on the planet didn’t see things that way, as the pads of her fingers snuffed out what was left of the cities and lives existing on those broken chunks. Her very touch was catastrophic at her size, even with her focus iron-clad. Her fingers slammed down across land and ocean, and the latter impacts sent towering waves circumnavigating the globe. It actually served to curtail the lava floods and fire storms from her stomp, but at a cost of flooding entire regions and drowning some of the few remaining millions of human lives.

Fragments of the remaining militaries made the decision to attack, hopeless as it was, as humanity’s last stand. They didn’t exactly find the giant entity’s actions helpful, after all. So, they launched every single thing they could at her. It wasn’t much, but it was more than enough to destroy a small country. Alas, they couldn’t even chip the tip of her dark-blue-painted fingernails.

Though all on the planet was currently in her notice, the humans were beneath her attention at the time. Many were also beneath her palms as they briefly touched down. The impact flattened all but a few of the remaining germ-strong mortals.

Susan sighed again, willing her sounds heard to her ears and, as a consequent, those last few humans still left alive. They expired thinking they had heard the voice of a god. It sounded very disappointed and a tad antsy.

‘So fragile.’, she thought of the world.

She could put the pieces of the planet together, but they wouldn’t stick unless she utilized more of her expansive powers than brute size and force.

So, Susan decided to stop messing around and do the actual work of fixing things. She closed her eyes, and the entire universe flashed a bright white for but a moment. Less than a sneeze’s worth of time.

During this time, which Susan could view as eons if she so chose, the young woman was intent to make sure to put things back to where they were before she sneezed. Although, she’d do so with one enjoyable exception.

--==--==--==--

Meredith didn’t know where she was. Looming far to her right and left were gently curving cliffs of some strange pinkish rock. At least, it seemed like a rock, even though it had a little bit of give under her sneakered feet: the ground seemed to be made of the same stuff. Wherever she was seemed other worldly, as the sky was a shade of brown, dark, with just enough light filtering in that she wasn’t quite sure she was walking on and between rock at all.

The last thing she remembered was walking through the doors to the Cinnamon Bump store. Then, she was here. Meredith didn’t remember a transition or anything, and somehow she knew she wasn’t in a dream. She was too alert; everything felt so real, even if it was conceptually surreal.

Thankfully, she kept her belongings. Her jeans and red shirt were intact, and her trusty purse was still hoisted over her shoulder. Her first instinct was to rummage through the bag and find her smartphone. She pulled it out and thought to call for help, but not only was there no signal, the darn thing didn’t even turn on. It was a dead, black screen.

Meredith lamented, but soon started moving. A bit panicked, panting, she ran through this strange canyon that towered for miles. It stretched on and on. Strange smells reached her. It wasn’t unpleasant. It smelled a little familiar actually.

‘Leather?’, thought Meredith. Also, strangely, just a hint of soap.

She ran, and ran till she couldn’t run anymore and had to move slower. The woman started yelling.

“Hello? Is anyone here? Can anyone help me?”

She kept going. More than an hour had passed and she grew desperate.

“Anyone? Please!”

For awhile she stopped moving and just kept shouting, hoping she’d be found. That didn’t work. She did it for 2 hours, with no sight or sound of anyone. There was noise, like a rumble, but very drawn out and faint. It was easy to tune out.

So, Meredith went on the move again. Running at first, then walking. She realized that the canyon ever so slightly seemed to curve around, like a spiral. She figured that might mean she was making progress, but it was still so slow. The curve was near imperceptible, though it increased with distance. She had only noticed cause she had walked an entire day.

Then two days, then three. Then, a week.

Meredith learned fast that she didn’t need to eat or drink. She never felt hungry or thirsty either. Although, that boon aside, her body felt exhausted from all the movement. It was a shame she couldn’t sleep, no matter how hard she tried. She could stop to rest though, and would regain her strength that way.

‘Is this the afterlife?’, thought Meredith not far into her seemingly endless journey. It was the only explanation she had: that this strange realm was some sort of strange torment. She didn’t find a single other soul, though, so she was still confused. Distressed.

A year had passed.

Meredith kept her sanity. She couldn’t lose it, even if she tried. She had long since lost track of time, but it definitely felt like more than a year to her when she noticed something else. Thinking back to her memories of this place, she realized that the ground she walked on, the canyons surrounding her: they had moved! She felt the softest, most faint vibration under her shoes once or twice. That was how she knew the brown sky wasn’t simply flying away from her.

As a consequence, the faintest bit of additional light trickled in. She wondered if she was on another planet, with special rules, and maybe the super long day was progressing?

Her mind was alight with theories.

--==--==--==--

Susan wiggled her toes. In particular, the big toe on her left foot. It’s there a shrunken Meredith wandered the whorls of her toe print like a spiraling maze. That was the woman’s punishment for irking her, provoking a sneeze, and forcing her to fix a mess she never intended to make. She figured a sentence of 60 years would do, since it was about as much time as Meredith would’ve had left on the planet otherwise.

However, Susan didn’t want to suffer a world where Meredith was alive that long. She also didn’t like the idea of a tiny disgusting Meredith scurrying about her toe for decades. So, the powerful young woman dilated time so that one second to her was 100 years to Meredith. By the time Susan finished wiggling her toes, Meredith was dead.

Yet, in the moment’s before Meredith’s planned demise, Susan reached out to her old acquaintance. Susan let the microscopic Meredith know exactly where she was and what her life had amounted to.

The brown ‘sky’ was just the leather of her sandals, the smell of soap from her shower this morning. Most of Meredith’s life was spent being less than a mite on Susan’s toes. Meanwhile, time was rewound to before she sneezed, and everyone and everything put back in its former place: except for Meredith. Meredith was, in Susan’s words, put into her “rightful” place.

Susan reveled in Meredith's horror and despair. She feasted on the sweet revulsion that this was her fate for simply provoking a sneeze. That wasn’t all, though. Susan didn’t just blink Meredith out of existence.

“I want you to realize just how insignificant you are.”, spoke Susan directly into the woman’s mind.

“What do you mean? Just stop.”

“I’m about to make you small, smaller than even the tiniest bug yet still far bigger than you deserve to be.”

“Just stop! You can’t do this.”

“I can.”

And Meredith began to shrink. The tiny woman’s further pleas answered only by Susan’s telepathic laughter. The dark-haired woman shrunk so small that she passed through Susan’s skin. She entered into one of Susan’s blood vessels, able to breath as another one of Susan’s “boons”.

Still, she shrunk further.

The pumping fluids carted her along. Everything was a bit too hard to comprehend. Blood looked clear to her, given that she was smaller than the red blood cells floating by. It was disorienting, but the real pain, her end, hadn’t begun yet.

She was pumped a little ways till she stopped shrinking and saw a great white leviathan. It was spherical in shape, and heading straight towards her. She knew what it was: a white blood cell. A single one of Susan’s cells was a monster to her, and she was an invader to the body she was stuck in. She was a germ to Susan.

With Susan’s derisive laughter still wringing in the background, the cell went upon Meredith. Though the “waters” had calmed, the shrunken woman had no chance of being able to swim away. The lady made contact with the outer membrane of the cell and was sucked right in.

Meredith screamed in agony as she was ripped into her composite proteins. She was made into a cell snack. Each one of those delicious molecules was savored by the cell as one would savor a desert.

Like a Cinnamon Bump, for instance.

The line moved forward. The older woman from earlier, who couldn’t decide whether to get the original or chocolate, ended up getting the chocolate Cinnamon Bump and stepping out of the line. Susan watched her take a bite and look somewhat disappointed.

‘Dumbass’, she thought. ‘Everyone knows they shouldn’t mess with the success of the original.’

Susan reflected on the unfortunate nature of that situation. Obviously that woman had an original Cinnamon Bump before, so she knew their quality. She knew at the moment of the bite that the chocolate one was worse. But, you can’t just go back to the cashier and say “wait I changed my mind!” You can’t refund bitten food. Even then, are you gonna be the idiot who gets back in line to order an original again? Everyone would know.

What do you do with the chocolate one then? Just throw it out? If you do that, you seem spoiled and shameless. On the flip-side, if you you go back on line for another while eating the chocolate one, you might look and feel like a shameless sweet-tooth.

No, in such situations you had to just accept the fact that you chose the lesser of two options. For that customer, the sweet flavor of the treat was punctuated by bitter knowledge that she could’ve had a slightly more appreciable pastry if she played it safe. Susan knew all this.

The line moved faster, everyone seemed to know what they wanted to order. Without Meredith behind her, Susan was at peace once again.

It was her turn to order. She looked into the eyes of that handsome cashier, Kevin, and asked for just an original Cinnamon Bump. She flirted with him all the while, determined to get his number.

Susan didn’t tweak his mind to instantly fall in absolute love with her. Consent was important to Susan, after all. It was one of the rules she abided by to help keep her humanity in her eyes. However, she did deduce the right things to say based on absolute knowledge of his likes, his personal history, neuron signals, current mood, thoughts, and hormone concentrations among other things. That was ok to her.

Of course, once he actually agreed to a date, there’d be no more restrictions. Everything was ok in her eyes then.

He handed her the bag, and a receipt with his phone number written on it. Exactly as planned.

Susan’s mind was once again rife with her earlier fantasies. She’d call when she got home, after the time she knew his shift ended. Then, she’d arrange a date for tomorrow where they’d watch some TV at her place, and she’d push his senses of pleasure and pain far past the limits of human comprehension. Naturally, just because a human couldn’t comprehend it, didn’t mean they couldn’t *feel* it.

Susan stepped out of line and fished the Cinnamon Bump out of the bag. She took a little bite on her way out of the store. That delectable dough, icing, and cinnamon spice hit her tongue. She shuddered with a quiet “mmm”.

Life was sweet.

Fin