“No, don’t use water,” Jujy cries. “You’ll melt the candy.”
“But aren’t you going to shower them off anyway?”
“Not with water,” she says.
In a cabinet, Jujy pulls out a hose that ends in a head similar to that of a hand shower unit. It does not spray water, but hot air.
“This is how you bathe?” Franklin asks.
She turns it on and uses it like a hairdryer on his skin.
“We only use water if we get muddy or have dried blood on our skin,” she says, “This is much safer.”
She still needs to wipe away a lot of the ants, but most of them are blown away by the hot air. She tries to get as much hot air into the crack as possible, but it doesn’t remove any of the ants. Instead, she melts the candy inside with the hot air, smothering the ants in sugary goo. Then she melts the candy around the crack in his torso. The melted sour apple fills in the crack as well as his open wound. When she is done, his candy glistens as if brand new.
“We normally don’t have too many problems with ants,” she says. “They tend to feed on the candy vegetation and only bother you if you sleep outside. I’ve never seen them go under the skin.”
Franklin nods his head. He can still feel ants crawling inside of him, but he isn’t sure if that is because of the infection, internal bleeding, or because there are still some alive in there.
Jujy agrees to take Franklin on a walk. Since he is already chained to her waist and because he has just gone through a traumatic ordeal—although Jujy doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about—he is able to persuade her into taking him outside of the house for a while.
“We’ll go into outsider territory,” she says. “Nobody who matters will be in that area. Licorice definitely avoids it.”
“What is the outsider territory?” Franklin asks, as they step outside into Jujy’s chocolate flower garden.
“It is where the undesirables live,” she says. “The people who are too gross to mate with.”
Franklin stops her.
“My cane . . .” he says.
“What?”
“I need my cane from the house,” he says. “It will help me walk.”
Jujy gets it for him.
“I can’t balance very well without it. Especially with my new legs.”
Really, Franklin just wants to have a weapon in case he needs to defend himself against candy people.
After a few minutes of trekking through some rolling cupcake hills, Franklin’s prosthetic candy leg becomes difficult to walk on.
“Your muscles are weak,” she says
“It takes a while to get used to walking on false limbs.”
“You didn’t need to remove my leg,” he says. “You could have just coated it in candy like the rest of my body.”
“It is common for submissives to have their limbs removed during the early mating periods,” she says. “It is easier to dominate one with a false leg or two.”
“You did it so that I wouldn’t be able to get away?”
Jujy nods. “It is also common for a dominant to want to eat pieces of their mate. Dominants claim their mates because they like the way they taste, so it is natural for a dominant to want to eat some of their mate. And most submissives enjoy watching their mate eat them.”
“Enjoy it? Why?”
“It is flattering,” she says. “Wouldn’t you love to see your mate enjoying your flavor? Wouldn’t that make you feel like you taste really good?”
“I don’t care if I taste good,” he says.
“But everybody wants to taste good.”
“Humans don’t.”
“Then how do humans show their affection for each other?”
“They tell them, I guess.”
“That doesn’t sound very intimate.”
Jujy looks at the ground and frowns, as if she feels sorry for Franklin because he’s a human.
Over the next hill, they pass a small cottage. It is just big enough for one person. On the other side of the hill, they see a candy woman working in a garden, planting tootsie rolls like carrots.
“That’s Minty,” Jujy says. “She’s one of the grossest women in the cave. Nobody would ever mate with her.”
Franklin looks carefully at the woman. She is actually very attractive. She has tan skin, long yellow hair. Even though she’s a candy person, she is one of the most beautiful women he has ever seen. She is far more beautiful than Jujy.
“Why do you think she is gross?” Franklin asks. “She isn’t very ugly.”
“Her flavor is peppermint and peanut butter.” Then she sticks out her tongue as if just thinking about the flavor makes her gag.
“So?” Franklin says. “She still looks attractive. She has a good body and a cute enough face.”
“Who cares about what she looks like?”
“Most people are attracted to good looks,” he says. “I’m surprised she hasn’t been able to find a mate.”
“But nobody cares about what she looks like,” she says. “Flavor is the only thing that matters.”
“Are you saying a fat wrinkled woman that tastes of strawberry shortcake would be more attractive to mates than her?”
“Of course,” she says. “Aren’t humans the same way?”
“No,” Franklin says. “Physical attraction is everything.”
Jujy pulls them in a different direction before the peppermint woman notices them.
“You humans are really weird,” she says.
“I’m weird?” Franklin laughs. “You have gumdrop nipples and you think I’m weird?”
Jujy laughs with Franklin, but she doesn’t really seem to understand what he’s laughing about.
By the end of the walk, Jujy agrees to take Franklin outside more often. She found walking and talking with him to be strangely pleasant.
“It is very unusual,” Jujy says. “Most dominants and submissives do not go on walks or have conversations with each other.”
“Because submissives are supposed to keep silent and do what they are told?”
“Well, yeah, but it is also because submissives and dominants rarely have anything to talk about.”
While they are out on their walk, Franklin is able to memorize everything he’s seen and store it within his super brain. With picture perfect clarity, he has every detail of the area they have been exploring stored in his memory cells. He knows that if he continues to go on walks with Jujy in different areas of the underground, he will eventually be able to map out the entire territory. Not only will he be able to learn the way out of this cave, but he will also be able to return to the human world with a completely accurate map of this place. He will be able to show the authorities exactly where every candy person lives, exactly where they can be attacked.
He realizes now that he doesn’t need to escape right away. He is in the perfect position to work as a spy, gathering intelligence so that he can one day prove the existence of the candy people and make it possible for the military to wipe them off the face of the planet.
After three straight sessions of mating, Jujy takes Franklin to a high peak overlooking the village.
“We can see the center of the village from up here,” she says. “But nobody will be able to see us.”
The village center is where most of the candy people live. The streets are paved with toffee bricks, the buildings are tall candy cane palaces, the gardens are well-manicured works of artwork filled with rainbow-colored flowers and chocolate statues of long dead candy sports heroes. Franklin records everything he sees into his computerized brain.
“What is that?” Franklin asks, pointing at the fanciest of buildings in the center of the square.
“That is the courthouse,” Jujy says. “It is where our leaders live and make laws. I hate keeping track of all the new laws.”