Yellow Jacket

Origins

EYNIOBB, the Everything-You-Need-in-One Bug Bar, is the corporate property of House Verdance. It exists for one purpose: to feed those who have no choice. The Legion marches on it. The Yellow Zones survives on it. Refugees and prisoners choke it down. Elites never touch it. Nobles would rather starve than swallow what they own. The Bug Bar was built for the miserable and the expendable.

On paper, it is perfect. Shelf stable for centuries. Hydrating on contact with saliva. Complete caloric balance in a single bar. Easy to ship. Easy to stockpile. No cooking. No preparation. For armies and slums alike, it was a miracle of efficiency. But one flaw remained unsolved: taste.

Food is more than fuel. It carries memory, comfort, ritual. Without it, people resist. Soldiers mutiny. Civilians riot. EYNIOBB knew this. If the Bug Bar could not be made tolerable, the monopoly would fail. So they built the Flavor Program, and with it the Flavor Vaults.

The Vaults

The Vaults are not kitchens. They are sealed laboratories and bunkers hidden under Green Zone cores and Yellow Zone distribution hubs.

Slurry 13C1, the biomass base of every bar, does not accept additives. It fights them. Flavorings mutate into hazards. Chemical reactions turn unstable. What begins as food ends as poison. Too dangerous to discard, too volatile to destroy casually, the failures were catalogued, sealed in reinforced canisters, and buried.

Every Vault is a quarantine facility. Chambers scrubbed sterile, air-locked, and wired with incinerators. Test subjects are restrained, electrodes fixed to their skulls. Every swallow is recorded. When a batch fails, the cell is sterilized and the remains packed away. What cannot be fed is stored forever.

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The Vaults are not experiments in progress. They are mausoleums of failure.

Doctrine

EYNIOBB does not market sadness. Advertising speaks of sustainability, clean energy, and survival. The Vaults remain hidden, their archives locked away. But inside the company, the truth is doctrine: sadness is not design, it is necessity.

Every sealed canister is a gravestone for joy. Every archive is proof that the slurry rejects hope. If sweetness were viable, EYNIOBB would sell billions more. If comfort could be stabilized, they would have built their fortune on it. Instead, sadness became the bedrock of their empire.

Rumors

The Yellow Zones lives on rumors. Smugglers whisper of contraband chocolate bars that made entire camps delirious before slaughtering one another. Savory variants that turned raiders into berserkers for a single night before their hearts burst.

Whether true or not, the stories spread because the truth is worse. There will never be chocolate. Never joy. Never comfort. Only sadness. Everything else collapses.

Cultural Legacy

In the Yellow Zones, bug bars are life itself. Generations grow up on sadness. Children learn the taste before they learn their letters. Communities trade in bulk shipments, measure time in boxes consumed, and pass bitter jokes about the Vaults. Imaginary strawberry or coffee or mint, forever locked underground, never meant for their tongues.

In the Legion, the bug bar is discipline. Issued as punishment, distributed on campaign, rationed with cruelty. Cadets gag but swallow. Veterans stop complaining. The taste becomes a truth: survival is sorrow.

In the Green Zone, elites refuse to eat it. They call it soldier's food, peasant's food, broken food. Not sustenance.

Conclusion

The EYNIOBB Flavor Vaults are tombs, not laboratories. They are archives of failed salvation. Thousands of sealed canisters testify that survival itself rejects joy.

The Bug Bar tastes of sadness because sadness is the only flavor that endures. Not chosen. Not engineered as cruelty. Simply the last taste left.

As long as EYNIOBB exists, the world will eat sorrow.