Delicacies on the Ocean of Oil (GLoGtober 4)

BLUEGRUBS. Those aren’t twinkling stars, but little blue larvae, letting off light as they pupate into stirges. If you harvest them, you get a little bit of salty, but not repulsive protein. The question is how to safely get up to the ceilings of the towering caverns they’re attached to without waking the broodmother stirges…

HAIRCAPS. The Ocean’s response to spaghetti. Anemone-like fungi that grow out of demon shit whose “hairs” are removed from the stalk and served with odiferous eel-sauce. The process of extracting the phosphorescent poison from its strands is one that demands intense culinary skill, meaning an innocent bowl of street noodles could be an unstable, even lethal, mutagen.

CRANIAL MUSH. Crack the skull of one of them Crik-Criks or Moodles or whatever’s handy and stir around the pinky-grey stuff in there. Toss in a couple of mushrooms, their eyeball/s, and their left big toenail, if you want that particular blue cheese flavor. Let sit over a campfire to warm and enjoy when lightly bubbling. Survival of the fittest, baby.

DIPSIES. Normally the Granny’s Lips, an oozing fungus reeking of sulfur and unearned sweat, induces the gag reflex in anything capable of it, but when dipped in oil, they become palatable enough to be safely eaten. “Dipsies” is also the name of a popular contest of fortitude: how many can you stomach before the oil can’t counteract the Lips’s natural stench?

TACKSLATE. Calcified minerals scraped off of the underside of limestone that’s been shit on by bats for many years. Often with a pinch of salt. It’s as utterly unappealing and liable to cause dental damage as eating a rock sounds, though post-scavenging societies often manufacture a stockpile in case of emergency or long journeys. Shut up ‘n eat yer stones.

SHADOW. In the most desperate of desperations, when hunger becomes all you can see and rage becomes all you can taste, you can eat your own shadow, if you can find yourself a scrap of light. It’s a dangerous position to be in, because hunger so ravenous doesn’t beget restraint, but those who grow fat on their own shadows inevitably succumb to become the pallid and cannibalistic Id, boogeyman figures in the Ocean’s mythopoetry.

GLOWSHOTS. A mix of haircap poison, oil, and moonshine, mixed into a dubiously luminescent shot. How people ingest this and still survive is a matter for theologians, not physicists, but it’s said that no one has ever drank more than 5 doses in their life and survived to tell the tale.

DREDGELETS. Information on a Dredglet nest’s location is valuable, but not as valuable as the skill required to spear and prepare them without being unceremoniously devoured. If you manage to catch one of these buggers swimming just below the rainbow-ripple surface, if you manage to drive the spear down at just the precise angle, if you manage to strip it of its spines and rip out its teeth and cut through the chitin to the stringy meat in the core, you can get the closest thing to a tasty, square meal the Ocean has to offer. But, and this is very important, you must be absolutely careful not to wake their mother in the process of fishing.