Unfortunately
I'd finished off two drumsticks and was about to put the lid back on when the chat erupted into an uproar. Just how badly did they want to feed me something?
"You guys are exactly like grandmas. When you go down to the countryside, they keep handing you snacks, and the second you finish those, they bring out a full meal."
So I put on a little pout. When I was little and visited my grandmother's house, she really never stopped putting food in front of me. We used to joke that she was stuffing us until we burst just so we'd leave faster. And when I talked about it with friends, I heard that most grandmothers loved feeding their grandkids like that. That was all I'd meant by it — but the viewers latched onto something else entirely and lost their minds.
Well, I'd only said it offhand. Maybe they were reacting because they weren't actually that old and didn't appreciate being called grandmas. Still, it wasn't anything serious. Those were just playful jabs. Even without hearing their tone or seeing their faces, chat at that density was obviously joking. If someone were genuinely upset, internet etiquette dictated a long, earnest wall of text.
"Look. I ate more than the length of my own leg. Isn't that enough to stop?"
Dodging with jokes wasn't going to cut it. There was one of me, and on their side roughly ten people leveraging the hive mind to pressure me. There was no logic here to begin with. Once both sides were dealing in sophistry, a war of attrition always favored the side with the numbers.
"Mmm, then maybe just one more."
So I made a show of compromising and picked up another sauced drumstick. I'd figured one fried and one sauced would be plenty — but honestly, I still wasn't full. One more wouldn't hurt. Three a day for two days, and on the third day… well, I could ease off a little then.
The chicken was still warm, still cradling that juicy chew inside its crisp shell. With every bite, it was almost a shame watching the drumstick shrink. That, and the fact that there was only so much I could eat. You know the feeling — how bittersweet it is when the time you get to spend on something good keeps getting shorter.
"You know, everyone. Isn't the feeling of wanting more actually a kind of happiness?"
Even that sensation was a joy to me, so I tossed the thought out playfully to the viewers.
By ordinary standards it was a non sequitur, sure enough. The viewers clearly weren't following, so I sucked the last of the meat off the bone with a soft little pull and explained.
"Think about it. When you were a kid and they told you bedtime was ten, you had to play as hard as you could right up until that second or it didn't feel right. Then you went to bed with that leftover wanting still in you. But now that there's no restriction like that… even if I game all day, it's just not as fun as it was back then."
It wasn't a hard idea, so the viewers fell into easy agreement. There was a brief, awkward joke in there, but it wasn't anything truly catastrophic, so I just laughed lightly at it and kept going with my thought.
"Same principle. Because I get full so fast, the chicken tastes better. Because it's harder to fit more of it into my stomach, the drumstick I'm tearing into right now becomes that much more precious. If I ate like those competitive eaters — ten servings in one sitting — I probably wouldn't be able to savor each drumstick the way I am now."
Collective monologue never got old. Everyone said whatever they wanted at the same time, and whenever a topic caught enough interest, the conversation simply flowed over to that. Which made it a perfect window for saying things that were hard to bring up when every eye was locked on me.
"In that spirit, I think it's time to put the chicken away while I still want more. I'll finish it deliciously tomorrow."
The moment I said it, everyone's attention snapped straight back onto me. Unfortunately. It did feel a little like overeating, but I picked up one more drumstick anyway. One fried, two sauced — that felt unbalanced somehow, so I threw in another fried one for good measure. Only then were the viewers satisfied enough to stop demanding more.
Three days might have been a stretch, but two days of savoring it slowly seemed fine by them. And once I started chewing through that extra piece, it went down surprisingly well. Was chicken just a smaller volume food than pizza to begin with? Or had a few days of pizza somehow stretched my capacity?
"Everyone. If you stripped all the meat off a whole chicken, would the volume be about the same as a pizza?"
I swallowed the meat in my mouth and floated the question.
"Yeah, figures. I couldn't manage two slices of pizza to save my life, but with chicken I can go four drumsticks and just land at comfortably full."
That tracked with what I'd been thinking. Strip the bone out of a drumstick and the meat probably shrank to about two-thirds. Gather all that meat together and it still wouldn't come close to a pizza, where the dough alone took up so much of the bulk. There was a reason people loved boneless chicken. That was how I'd managed four whole drumsticks and still been fine. A little bloated, sure — but nowhere near needing to throw anything back up.
I had no idea what they'd made of my little observation, but the viewers had suddenly launched into a plan to fatten me up. And why was Celesty getting dragged into this?
"Wait, hang on. Why are you dragging poor Celesty into this when he hasn't done anything…"
I'd been worried I was about to make trouble for someone who had nothing to do with any of this — but a message from Celesty came through almost immediately, so maybe I didn't need to feel too guilty after all.
Well, that was nice of him. But was it really okay to keep receiving this much affection from people?
It made living while waiting for the day I die start to feel like such a shame.