Roar of Dragons

[Xander – 13 years]

"Xander?" Mom asks as she approaches the kitchen.

"Yes, Mom?"

"Why is the ice cream machine on?"

"I made ice cream."

"Aren't you preparing breakfast?"

Sig, Carter, and Tate spent the night here last night, the four of us sharing my bed. My bed is more than big enough for that. Sig snuggled Mr. Leviathan with me, Carter was on the other side of me with a solid line of stuffed animals separating us, and Tate was on the other side of Sig with a solid line of stuffed animals separating them.

It was admittedly weird to have other people sleeping in my bed and I'm not sure I liked it. At least it was people I know are good, and none of them tried anything bad. They all kept to their spots, even if they did try telling stories to each other.

Or maybe they did tell each other stories, and I just fell asleep before they said very much? The last thing I remember before falling asleep was Carter talking about his first solo horse ride.

Now, I'm preparing breakfast for all of us. That was one of the conditions Dad had given me for inviting them to sleep over last night: I make breakfast. I'm not sure why Mom's confused about me making breakfast, since she was there for the discussion and even came down later than when she normally does to start cooking.

"Yes," I answer.

"Waffles with ice cream for breakfast?"

Why does she think the ice cream's for breakfast? I'm not Greyson. At most, it would be a post-breakfast dessert. No special permission for ice cream with breakfast has been given, either. It wasn't even requested.

"The ice cream's for dessert after lunch," I tell her. "I'm low on ice cream so I made more. But I do have peach cobbler in stasis, so I don't need to prepare that."

"Ah," she says.

"I think the ice cream's done."

I check the ice cream and it is done, so I put it into containers while continuing to prepare large waffles for everyone. My friends come down from my room still in their sleeping shorts shortly before I finish, and Dad joins us right after that. Nobody complains about my waffles, which makes me happy.

I can even feel how much my friends are liking them! Sprinkles and blueberries was definitely the right choice to go with.

"You boys behave for Adrian King," Dad tells us all after we've all gotten dressed and ready to go.

"Yes, sir," we all say.

"And remember to be back here by five-thirty," Dad tells me. "That includes after dropping the others off at their homes."

I need to be back by that time to make sure we have enough time to go shopping to buy the stuff for the party. My gut tells me we won't be going shopping tonight and I'm not sure why. Will something delay me getting home?

Whatever it is, I'll do my best to make sure I get home on time so that we can go shopping tonight.

"Tate's getting dropped off at Carter's," I remind him.

"After you drop S.G. at his place and Carter and Tate at Carter's," Dad amends.

"I'll do my best," I tell him.

I give my parents a hug, then lead my friends to the street. Once there, I teleport us into the facility Grandpa Adrian gave me the location of. Teleporting directly inside is necessary because there's no other way to get in unless I break in through the walls or phase through them.

It has no exterior doors and no windows, either.

The structure is massive inside, with plenty of room for processing even wild wyverns and dragons. Grandpa Adrian also hinted there are beasts even bigger than the largest of those, which can exceed the size of blue whales just from shoulder to ass, not including the neck, head, and tail, nor their wings.

He probably butchers some of whatever those are in here, too. There isn't anything being processed that I can see right now, though I can see giant hooks, smokers, meat grinders, tanning stations, and more set up around the room. The butchering areas have specialized preservation spells – not temporal spells – to keep the meat as fresh as it when it entered while in them. The smoking and tanning areas have magics to speed up the processing time via temporal magics, allowing for things to be finished in under an hour.

No extra action needed, meaning we wouldn't even need to stretch the hides. Grandpa Adrian's setup handles that all on its own. This is all very useful information for me. So many magics and enchantment styles I haven't seen before.

"Hi, Grandpa Adrian."

"Good morning, Xander," he smiles. "How did you sleep last night?"

"Really good," I answer. "You said not to bring stuff for lunch as you'd have stuff here, so I brought stuff for dessert for after lunch."

"Alright," Grandpa Adrian chuckles, then looks at me friends. "Good morning to all of you as well. You may get close to watch, if you'd like, but be careful not to mess with things."

"Yes, sir!" They respond.

Grandpa Adrian leads me over to the butchering area and has me pull out the spatial wyvern. It's the main reason we're butchering stuff today, so it only makes sense for it to be the first thing we'll take apart.

"As with most things," Grandpa Adrian tells me. "You'll want to break its legs and hang it. See those two large hooks? Use those ones."

"Okay," I gesture upward, and the wyvern begins floating up, legs first.

Its legs snap before they fix onto the hooks, then I look at Grandpa Adrian. The next thing to do is drain the wyvern's blood, so I cut off the wyvern's wings and hang them up, then cut its throat and let it drain. Large metal barrels below catch the blood, the streams of it flowing into them regardless of where they fall down from.

"That's moving kind of fast, ain't it?" Carter asks.

"How's it moving like that?" Sig asks at the same time.

"Magic in the butchering area," Grandpa Adrian explains. "It's designed to quicken the flow of blood from the beasts hung within it, and the drums have magic which draw blood toward them. Useful when dealing with large beasts. Rather than waiting a long time for it to finish draining, you need only wait a few minutes. It's a much more thorough drain as well – the enchantment ensures every last drop of blood leaves."

Once it finishes draining, Grandpa Adrian has me remove the wyvern's hide. Cutting the wyvern isn't as simple as just using a knife like a normal person might. The hooks are made of a special alloy with an extremely sharp edge, capable of piercing into tough beasts. Knives of equivalent material and sharpness would dull fairly often when butchering creatures both as powerful as a wyvern and as large as one.

Because of that, it's better to use magic to perform the butchering. I conjured a magical knife when slitting its throat and when cutting off its wings, and I conjure another to remove the wyvern's skin. Grandpa Adrian has me cut in a specific way and once the hide is removed, he teaches me how to clean and prepare it for tanning.

Grandpa Adrian already has the magical tanning solution prepared for us, due to the amount of it necessary. That saves us the effort of using temporal acceleration to make something which could have been prepared ahead of time. The entire hide is tanned as one piece rather than broken down into smaller ones, which is a little confusing, but he assures me it doesn't matter. Not with magic tanning methods.

Once that's getting prepared, we begin separating out the wyvern's meat.

"Seeing Xander manipulating multiple magical knives around like that is so weird," Tate whispers to Carter as I cut. "He's not even touching them."

That's because this is more efficient than using just one knife in one spot at a time. Grandpa Adrian even told me to do that. He heard Grandpa Adrian say that, so I'm not sure why he's commenting about it.

"Most people can't simultaneously manipulate knives with precision in multiple locations at once," Grandpa Adrian telepathically informs me. "That's what he's referring to – how you're able to precisely control each knife to cut in exact ways."

I can do this from a lot of practice manipulating different items at once in the workshop. Is it really that unusual?

"Oh… why are you saying this telepathically?"

"I could tell you were confused," he tells me. "Assumed it was about Tate's comment, and felt it best if he doesn't feel bad realizing you'd heard him and got confused."

"Oh."

The first bone (set) separated from the wyvern's body is its skull, and Grandpa Adrian asks my friends if they want to help. Not in the butchering part, but in the cleaning-the-bones part. No special magical strength is needed for that – he has scrub brushes and cleaning materials for the bones. The gloves are just latex ones, but the plants the fluid comes from are extremely magically powerful, giving them great resiliency.

My friends aren't in any danger, it just helps to protect their hands just in case. If things go wrong and they do get hurt, Grandpa Adrian can heal them. It's best if they don't get hurt, though. I'd prefer that.

Even using multiple magical knives at once, it takes me nearly two hours to finish butchering the wyvern. That's only the part where I'm taking it apart. The meat is placed into bins based on what it is, the organs are sorted out, and the bones are sent to the cleaning station.

There's plenty more work to do. The meat will have to get cut further to make it suitable for eating. Cooking a piece that's larger than my torso is a lot trickier than cooking smaller parts. There are a lot of different things to think about when butchering a wyvern, including what the meat might be used for and what is planned on being used for something specific. Meat from different body parts can be used for different things.

"But I don't like bacon?" I say.

"I know you don't like pig meat outside of sausages," he tells me. "Wyvern bacon is different from pig bacon. Same with its sausage. We're not cutting bacon right now, though. We're doing wyvern meatballs for lunch, so we need to grind up some of its meat. I was just explaining that we weren't using that meat for it right now, and some of it will be used for making bacon. You're not getting all of it, remember?"

There's too much wyvern meat here for me to eat all on my own, at least in the near future. He's going to strip the spatial magical aspect from a lot of the meat so that it's just plain wyvern meat (which is still magical even without the spatial magics). Then he's going to put it up for sale as mystery meat, though he might also open up a "temporary" line of wyvern meat for some stores to sell.

"Oh," I say. "Sorry… I misunderstood."

"I know," Grandpa Adrian says. "Now let's get some meat ground up so we can make those meatballs. We'll also do cornbread and salad, and a couple of different sauces for the meatballs."

"Got a question," Sig says.

"Go ahead," Grandpa Adrian tells him.

"If the wyvern had around 2,000,000 mana," Sig says. "Can we really eat its meat? Won't it be too difficult? Or do you do something to it?"

"Not at all," Grandpa Adrian says. "And no. The durability increase to one's body their mana has can be influenced by two things. The first of those is simply how much mana one typically has. The second is whether or not there is actually mana flowing through their body. The latter doesn't affect things like skin, fur, scales, feathers, horns, and bones, but it does affect meat, sinew, and most organs. Once something dies, their meat becomes a lot easier to handle. Even ordinary people can work it.

"Because of this," Grandpa Adrian says. "I get rid of extra meat from my culling process by selling it through a couple of stores I own as 'mystery meat'. There's a label stating what temperatures to bring it to if it needs cooking. For jerky, it just lists the seasoning or marinade used."

Sig seems to feel really shocked at that for some reason. He feels even more shocked than when I found out Grandpa Adrian did that.

"I think I've heard of that," Carter says. "There are three grocery stores within your companies which sell it, right? One high-end, one medium-end, and one low-end?"

"It's all the same meat," Grandpa Adrian says. "If most people knew what it was, they would feel it should be more expensive. The most work involved for me is simply processing it, since it's merely a byproduct of something else. It's been assumed by most that it's meat from hunts, just that the company is choosing to keep its sources anonymous."

"And in the cheaper shops?" Sig still feels shocked for whatever reason he is. "You really put meat from beasts with millions of mana in shops where you can buy it at, like, super lower prices? Everyone just assumes it's low-quality meat. I didn't know it was assumed to be hunted."

"It being in a low-price store is the reason people don't flock to it," Grandpa Adrian tells him. "Despite it sometimes being from the same creature which provided meat to a high-price store. People assume the low price is from low quality, or a same-day use-by date. I make sure things are supplied at reasonable levels to each shop to keep people from really thinking too much on the difference. Those who buy it at a lower price point do so because it might be the only way they can afford meat. The reason I send some to those stores is so those on lower incomes can still afford meat more easily. Raising animals incurs costs, which contributes to the price of their meat outside of from just processing."

"I guess that makes sense," Sig says, then feels hesitant. "You're not worried one of us is going to leak that the meat's all the same? And that it can be really valuable?"

"I'm sure none of you will share it," Grandpa Adrian smiles. "The biggest risk is Xander saying it, since he doesn't like to lie or hide things and is already keeping quite a bit secret. This is something he's known for awhile, though, so the fact that neither you nor Carter knew about this until I revealed it means he's kept it secret."

"I didn't think they'd believe me."

"You don't lie," Carter says. "If you said it, I'd believe you. So some of your wyvern meat is going to stores and being sold as mystery meat from a hunt?"

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"I think?" I answer. "But some of it is also going to shops for societies of nonhuman people. Those also exist, too, they're just not as prominent as humans."

Dragons really like wyvern meat and their stores are where most of the wyvern meat Grandpa Adrian gets from wyvern goes. Not all of it, just most.

"Nor as known," Sig says. "Since they all apparently prefer to hide themselves from humans."

"I don't blame them."

All three of my friends laugh, and Grandpa Adrian snorts.

"Why don't we get started on lunch?" Grandpa Adrian asks.

[Sig – 13 years]

"Thanks for inviting me," I tell Xander as we reach my front door. "I had a lot of fun."

"Even though you were scrubbing bones?"

"That wasn't all we were doing," I snort. "I learned so much from that. No wonder Tate and Carter wanted to go. And your great-grandfather did let us help out with some of the butchering. Just… once the meat was separated from the bones."

Stronger knives were only really needed for removing the hide. After that point, it could be cut with regular knives. The issue was its size – Xander was far more capable of cutting things off of it than the rest of us combined.

As for learning things, Adrian King felt we should all learn a little about wyvern anatomy in regards to food. How different parts of it could be used. Even Tate, who's helped butcher cows before, learned some new stuff during that.

The wyvern was all that ended up getting processed due to time constraints – Adrian King didn't factor in Xander's post-lunch nap into the schedule. Had we another hour and a half of time, there probably would have been a few more beasts butchered.

Though I did get to see all of what Xander harvested. Adrian King wanted to take care of the rest for him so that Xander doesn't need to spend a lot of his free time on it. His catches from the big hunt were transferred to a spatial pocket Adrian King had, but it involved Xander pulling them all out of his pouch to give to his great-grandfather.

Some of the magic beasts didn't seem dead, but I was assured they were. How was that wolf still aflame if it wasn't alive? Did it really retain that property even after death?

I wanted to ask, but it was nearing time to go and Xander seemed to really want to stick to that. We just finished dropping Carter and Tate off at Carter's house, and now we're at mine – though I'm back in human form. Xander's not, though. I guess he didn't want to change back for such a short time even though we're in public.

"There was enough of the meat that y'all could help out and learn some stuff without taking away from me learning it," Xander says. "And you're getting some, too."

I want to protest that but know it won't go anywhere other than to upset Xander. I'm starting to realize that giving people food is one of the ways he communicates. This is probably him showing thanks to me for coming, and also to "pay" me for helping with the butchering. Rejecting this would probably make him feel like I was rejecting him, or that he messed up somehow. And it only feels like I should turn it down as I didn't deserve it, and because he does this so much.

But there's no real good reason to turn it down. Tate and Carter didn't, and I'm definitely not going to, either.

So I don't protest when he pulls out a large brown paper bag which has wyvern jerky, wyvern meat sticks, ground wyvern, wyvern stew chunks, and whatever else he stuck in it.

"Tha-thanks!" I try not to laugh at him pulling out a triple-stack of treat boxes after handing me the bag.

He only pulled out one treat box for each of Carter and Tate.

"I hope the rest of your night goes well," he tells me

Xander gives me a hug, which I can't really return due to the boxes and large bag he's handed me, so I awkwardly set them down before returning the hug.

"Bye," Xander says.

"See you in the morning," I tell him.

Xander leaves, and I watch until he teleports from the street before bringing my things inside. Aunt Rachel and Mr. Fuller are inside, and I raise an eyebrow.

"Stop that," Aunt Rachel says. "Derrick and Hunter wanted to know about the beasts you boys got to see Xander and Adrian King harvest."

"I don't see Hunter."

"He's out back with Turtle," Mr. Fuller tells me. "If you didn't hear them, they were probably taking a rest."

"I didn't go grocery shopping," Aunt Rachel tells me. "So either you can stay here and fix yourself something for dinner, or you can come with us as we go shopping, and we'll eat out."

"My treat," Mr. Fuller says. "Though I'd like to hear about the stuff you got to see processed today."

"It was just a wyvern," I say. "There were plans for some smaller things, but I think Adrian King had factored in temporal acceleration and hadn't factored in Xander needing a post-lunch nap into his times. And there wasn't any temporal acceleration used. The wyvern took most of the time which wasn't for lunch or Xander's nap. And sure! Let me put this stuff away… the bag has wyvern meat in it and some of it needs putting in a freezer."

Hunter comes in right as I say that, and he helps me carry my bag and boxes downstairs. Once the meat which needs it is put into the freezer, we head back upstairs and leave with Aunt Rachel and Mr. Fuller.

"-and they just gave you wyvern meat?" Hunter asks. "Ain't that going to be super expensive?"

He doesn't normally say "ain't", but I guess his accent thickens whenever he gets surprised. I really want to tell him that it's from a wyvern with spatial magic, and was twice as strong as normal wyverns we'd know about. His reaction would be really funny, but adding in spatial magic to something only increases its value.

By a ton.

But the meat doesn't have the spatial aspect to it. Adrian King apparently knows a way to remove various magical aspects from meat and leave it as just something magical. He did that for our meat as well, so that it's not as valuable.

Which I'm kind of grateful for, since I'm not sure how I'd feel about having meat worth over $1,000 a pound in my freezer. It was only the meat given to Tate, Carter, and me that had that treatment – Xander's was kept normal. The rest of it… I'm not sure. Some of it is going to stores for sure, but I know that wyverns without magical aspects not innate to all wyverns were among those Xander handed over.

Meat from those will be going to regular stores, as will some meat from ones which had the magical aspects removed. Shops for nonhuman people like dragons will probably receive some of the ones with magical aspects not innate to all dragons. Xander himself is obviously going to be getting some of the meat as well, probably with magical aspects kept in, or ones which are just regular wyvern meat.

"To someone like Xander," I say. "A wyvern is something he can easily crush-kill with just his raw strength. I mean, he did that on a stream when one attacked him by surprise. Or, well, what it thought was surprise."

I watched the video from that stream and it was ridiculously funny. Wyvern expressions make no sense to me, but it was obvious the wyvern was shocked when Xander suddenly turned and zoomed toward it. The whole creature froze for a second.

"Oh," I add. "Also, Adrian King said that since there's so much wyvern meat from their hunts, they'll be putting some in stores for awhile. This is basically just us getting it for free, though I wouldn't say it was fully free. We got to learn how to clean bones. And cleaned a ton of bones. A ton of bones. Might have actually been several tons."

I needed help moving them.

We talk a little more until we reach the grocery store Aunt Rachel and I use. It's not a "normal-end" one, but that doesn't mean it's crap. Aunt Rachel just has a limited budget (and refuses to allow me to supplement it), so we go to stores with lower prices. The goods here are probably a little bit lower in quality, made from the stuff which gets rejected for name-brand stuff.

That makes it more affordable for people like us.

It's also the store I went to when buying groceries while living with my parents. Junk food with my friends was at regular stores, but my regular grocery trips were to here.

The food tastes fine, so it's not like it's an issue. It's just not the higher-quality stuff saved for name brands or high-end grocery stores.

Or at least, so I thought.

"S.G.?" Mr. Fuller says, and I jump, startled. "That's the third time I said your name. Everything alright?"

"Y-yeah," I answer.

He looks at what I was looking at.

"Rachel showed me the binder of evidence against your parents," he says. "Including the receipts. You rarely went for regular meat when using money from your parents' safe, right? It was always this stuff?"

I'm in the mystery meat section. Now that I know what it is… well, I think I'm still processing it. To think that I might have eaten such expensive meats and it's marketed as being just the rejects for name-brands and stuff… it's insane. Some of it might even be wyvern or dragon meat.

The mystery meat sections are sorted by their cooking temperatures and meat color types, as well as whether or not it needs to be cooked thoroughly or not.

The pricing model is basically half of the standard equivalent in beef, chicken, turkey, pork, sheep, or fish. If it's something with a cooking equivalent to beef, for example, then it would be $1 per pound of ground meat.

"Yeah," I say. "I usually went with the stuff there, or there," the beef and chicken equivalents. "It was cheaper than regular beef and chicken, so I figured my parents wouldn't have an issue with me doing it. Well, I didn't do bird meat much… always messed up when cooking it. But doing ground beef or getting frozen patties was fine. Same with their franks."

Not that me going with the lower-priced meat saved me from getting into trouble, but at least I was getting the protein still. The reason I didn't have an issue with matching the flavors was because plain magic ingredients can apparently work fine with nonmagical ingredients for regular people. It's when they start having specific aspects that complimenting aspects are needed.

"Well," Mr. Fuller says. "If you want help learning how to cook chicken or other meats, you can always ask your aunt."

"Aunt Rachel overcooks chicken, too."

"I'm more than willing to teach you, too," he chuckles. "Just as I am with the other meat you've gotten. Though I'm not sure how to cook wyvern meat."

"Adrian King made sure there were cooking equivalent directions in the bags before he let Xander put them away," I tell him. "So I've got those. It's apparently not too different from beef, though not quite the same."

"Huh," he says. "Well, what's it like to have a guardian who buys regular meat, and to have the ability to hunt your own meat, rather than relying on cheaper mystery meat?"

"Honestly?" I ask. "Kind of weird. But also good. I mean, I knew the mystery meat comes from a company within the Lumaria Group, so I knew it'd be safe and all. It's just… a lot nicer knowing exactly what I'm eating."

And now that I know that most of the meat was actually from monsters of ridiculously high mana levels… damn. A part of me wants to grab some now because of that, but I refrain from doing so. The whole purpose of it is to help provide meat to people with lower budgets. Sure, some people probably get it on a higher budget, but I don't need to.

We have plenty of meat at home. Regular meat like beef is fine to buy some of, but for hunted meat? I can supply that, myself. Or I can go to a shop which sells meat from hunts and buy it at the regular price.

Besides, it really is nice to know what I'm eating rather than just "meat which might be from cattle, or might be from something hunted".

"I can understand that," he says. "You were staring at the meat for quite awhile after heading off to get snacks. I already told your aunt this, but I'll buy you up to $10 worth of snacks in addition to whatever she normally lets you get."

That's suspicious.

"And the condition is…?"

"You agree to go out of your comfort zone for dinner and not complain."

I just eat normal food for dinner and have no idea what he's referring to. There's not much I don't eat as far as I'm aware.

"Rare steak?"

"Asian-Kenzibri food," he says, and I make a face. "It's not that bad. And there are spicy things – you like spicy foods."

The last time he brought Asian-Kenzibri food over, it was stuff like black pepper chicken, fried rice (I don't like peas or cooked carrots), and something with green beans and I think asparagus. There were a couple of other things as well, but I didn't like any of it.

"Well, yeah," I say. "But I just know you want something weird. Calamari is not something I'm going to touch."

"Nothing like that," he chuckles. "But you have to try and use chopsticks."

"Ugh!"

"So?" He chuckles. "Want to give it a try in exchange for some extra snacks? We're picking it up as a group, and I'm paying, so you'll have a wider variety of things to pick from. I'm sure there are some you'll enjoy."

"Alriiiiiight… but you know I could just buy my own snacks, right? I've got a budget for it."

"Sure," he says. "I know Rachel won't force you to stick to the budget you set aside… and I guess if you'd rather spend your own money on snacks, you can."

"Yeah, but only $10?" I ask. "Psh! Who tries to bribe a teen with that little?"

"I'm also paying for dinner."

"You gotta pay for dessert, too!"

"Deal."

"…you were already going to pay for dessert, weren't you?"

Mr. Fuller just laughs, then ruffles my hair.

"Go pick out your snacks," he tells me as I try to fix my hair with my fingers. "We're in the cans and jars aisle right now."

"Alright."

I pick out my snacks, then join my aunt and her boyfriend in the cans and jars aisle. Aunt Rachel's looking at the different pasta sauces when I arrive, and I dump my chosen snacks into the cart.

"Where's Hunter?" I ask.

"Freezer section, I think," Mr. Fuller answers. "He hasn't been to this store before, so was wanting to look at the frozen treats."

"Oh!" I say. "I'll go tell him my favorites!"

I head over to the freezer section to find Hunter looking at a box of chocolate-coated ice cream on a stick.

"That one doesn't taste too good," I tell him. "The chocolate's fine, but there's too much plain ice cream in relation to it. And they don't have vanilla flavoring in it, so the flavor is… too plain. So it doesn't taste good. You'll want the one next to it, that one's got vanilla in the ice cream. Not too strong, but enough that it tastes good."

I open up the freezer door and grab a box. This one has strawberry pieces in the vanilla ice cream, and chopped walnuts embedded in the chocolate coating over all of it.

"This one's my favorite from their selection of the ice cream bars," I tell him. "And I like it better than the cone version of the same flavors. The cones themselves are fine… there's just not enough ice cream compared to cone."

"That's an issue for sure!" Hunter laughs. "So you've had these before?"

"I've tried all of the ice cream here," I tell him. "Mowed so many lawns, raked so many leaves, shoveled so much snow, walked and watched so many dogs and babies…"

It was used for other stuff, too, like essential things, clothes, and my computer. I did treat myself on my own, though, not just with my friends.

"Walking babies, huh?" He grins at me. "Do you use a leash for that?"

"Of course!" I grin back. "How else are we going to keep the babies from running off?"

We joke a little more as Hunter checks out the ice cream and asks my thoughts on different ones. Eventually, he settles on buying a box of vanilla ice cream bars with caramel inside and a chocolate coating.

Aunt Rachel isn't quite done yet, so Hunter and I pick up some of the other things on the list, then we all check out. Hunter and Mr. Fuller go to another line – Hunter so he can buy his ice cream, and Mr. Fuller to check out after him to buy the snacks he promised me.

While they go through that line, I help Aunt Rachel put our groceries on the belt. Once we're done, we head to the truck and put everything in, all of the cold stuff going into Mr. Fuller's coolers. He apparently keeps some in the bed of his truck just in case he goes shopping while he's out.

I don't think I knew back when he took me hunting – or I forgot if I did – that they're magic ones. They don't look magic, but they keep things cool without ice packs, and only really need ice packs to freeze things. If the stuff being put in is already frozen, and there's enough of it, then they don't need ice packs at all.

We were freezing stuff which wasn't already frozen back on the hunting trip, so ice was needed then.

Our next stop is the restaurant to order food. It's a semi-fast food place but they still make things somewhat fresh, and I take a few minutes to look at the selections. We're shortly after the dinner rush now, so I can take my time.

There are so many options here. I can even get sushi if I want, but I'm not fond of uncooked meat. Fish is meat.

In the end, I go with noodles for my side (there's so much of that); a spicy beef with bell pepper and onion pieces, and their sweet-and-spicy chicken which has bell pepper, onion, and pineapple chunks.

With all of that acquired, we head to a bakery, where Mr. Fuller buys a set of large cupcakes for us for dessert. There are different flavors, so we can pick which one we want from the pack.

Now that all of our purchases are finished, we head back to mine and Aunt Rachel's place and put the groceries away. Only then can we finally dig into dinner.

"Hold on, S.G.," Mr. Fuller says as I reach for a fork.

"What?" I ask. "I'm starving!"

"You agreed to try and use chopsticks."

"Uuuugh!"

"I bet Xander would use chopsticks," Mr. Fuller grins at me.

"That's not-"

"Ask him if he uses chopsticks," Mr. Fuller's smile widens.

"Argh!"

I send Xander a quick text.

[Sig]: do you know how to use chopsticks?

It takes a few moments, but Xander responds with a picture of him holding a pair of chopsticks. He's sitting at the coffee table in the living room at his house, with his dad, Ms. Katie, and an elderly couple I don't recognize there. The older man looks Asian, but I don't know the different Asian ethnicities well enough to know where from.

They all have bowls in front of them and a pot in the center of the table, on some sort of warmer or portable stove, I think. Dishes of uncooked ingredients sit on the table in front of them, but it looks like there's something in the pot, too.

[Sig]: who are the older folks? When was this?

[Xander]: Those are Grandma and Grandpa Caldwell, and we're eating now.

That picture's from right now? That's some insane coincidence on our meals.

I didn't know his grandparents were visiting. That must be why Xander had a strict return time of 5:30 PM. I don't think I've met them before, since I don't recognize them. They look nice, and Xander seems happy.

Also hungry, judging by the amount of food in the bowl in front of him.

[Sig]: What are you guys eating?

[Xander]: This is hot pot.

[Sig]: It looks hot.

[Xander]: Yeah. That's how the food gets cooked.

"Ah, crap."

"What's wrong?" Aunt Rachel asks.

"I think I confused Xander," I tell her. "He told me he's eating hot pot and I commented that it looks hot because I figured that'd get him to tell me what hot pot is. Kind of forgot it's Xander… and he responded by telling me that it's how the food gets cooked."

Hunter laughs pretty hard at that.

"Hot pot depends on where you are," Mr. Fuller tells me. "But it can be where you pick ingredients and put them into a communal pot of water or broth to cook. Once it's cooked to your satisfaction, you pull it out and eat it, either plain or after dipping it into sauce. Some places, everything goes into the pot and you pull things out as you want them. Or you get your own pot with water and broth, rather than a communal one."

"Ah," I say. "Have you had it before?"

"Just once," he answers. "It was actually why Hunter and I learned to use chopsticks. A coworker who'd been to Japan took us to a hot pot place up north last year. So? Will you try chopsticks this time? I'm betting Xander confirmed he was."

"Yeah," I sigh. "He does… alriiiiiight. I'll give it a try. But I'll go back to a fork if I can't manage it!"