Gristrift

Grist

The boys' room looked like any other locker room and smelled of sweat and cologne. A few of the other clones stood finishing up putting on their suits. John noticed that Eridan and Cronus sat among them. "What's the deal with Eridan?" John asked.

"He sat on a stick once and never managed to get up. Very tragic. Cronus is the one you've gotta stay away from. I don't think we're quite old enough for him to hit on, but you just never know. Life is full of surprises," said Dave. "We got to hurry up and eat. Miss your grist for long enough and you lose your powers."

John followed Dave through the locker room and into a tiny cafeteria, still holding his bulky hazmat suit. Dave had dropped his by his locker, but John didn't know where his own locker was. The whole place looked grimy, like nobody had bothered to bring cleaning supplies down. Only a few clones sat at tables, most of them finishing up bowls of cereal by drinking the milk at the bottom. The floor felt sticky, like in a movie theater.

"We eat cereal?" asked John.

"Good ol' Frosted Flakes. It's the easiest way to mix the grist in," said Dave, who led John to the front of the room. A small table contained a stack of bowls; a drink dispenser with choices of full milk, skim milk, and soy milk; a cereal dispenser; and a mysterious black machine which looked like a ketchup doodad. The thing that squirted ketchup when one pressed down on the top. The, you know, ketchup dealie. John had never learned its name. A credit card reader was attached to the side. John made his cereal and waited to see what Dave would do with the machine.

Dave placed his bowl under the squirter of the ketchup thingamajig and grabbed an ID card from his pocket. When he swiped it, a tiny drop of blue, no more than the size of a mosquito, fell into his bowl and mixed with the milk.

"I don't have a card. What do I do?"

"I guess Condelle's going to give you one eventually. For now, you should eat," said Dave.

"What's that blue stuff you put into your food?"

Dave walked over to a table and sat down. "It's called grist and it comes from that Godzilla's wet dream over yonder. When you take it, it enhances your powers. When you don't, eventually your powers go away. If you're one of those dudes who loves killing things and knows the details on every single shitty gun, then boy howdy will you ever love grist because you get it by killing monsters on the other side of the gristrift. It's like this hormone for them. We basically eat basilisk estrogen."

"That sounds gross, man," said John between bites of cereal. "I don't think I want to eat stuff like that. I'm not so attached to my powers that I need to eat, er, basilisk estrogen to keep them going." He scrunched his eyes and stuck his tongue out to show just how 100% nasty basilisk estrogen sounded.

"Ah, so you're more of an ogre testosterone kind of guy. Understandable. I would consider myself a giant beast juice connoisseur. You have to look at the color and the clarity first, of course. Is it that mealy, sticky blue we've all come to know and love? Then you take a deep whiff and see how far you need to cringe away. The farther, the better. The best aromas smell more like battery acid than cough syrup. After that comes the attack phase, when the grist first hits your palette. This is when you-"

"Dave, I get the feeling that you are trying to pull my leg. Let me tell you something here: you cannot beat me in a prank-off. I am simply the best there is."

"Yeah, that was a bunch of bullshit. Grist is pretty much all the same and we have no idea what it actually does in the monsters' bodies. You'll find it in these tiny sacs near their brains. And I mean tiny. Imps and lesser titachnids aren't even worth killing because you can't even get an entire drop of grist. Anyways, we need to go get suited up now because we're almost the last ones here." He slurped the milk in his cereal, which John thought really wrecked his cool guy vibe. "I can't believe you brought your suit out to eat. I think I'm rooming with a giant, oblivious dork."