Hot Blooded

Fernando received a bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce as a gift. It kicked his and his friends' asses a great deal when they tried it the first time, and for three or so months after its receipt it sat untouched in the back room, leering with derision at Fernando and his crew as they used other hot sauces.

One jolly evening, Fernando decided to man up on the weekly pizza, and he placed upon its surface a few drops of liquid death. Fernando's companions decried him as mentally deficient, as having ignored the Wisdom score rolled for him by the Great DM Above. But Fernando ignored their petty words and consumed the slice of pizza, and though his mouth seared with flames of habanero pepper, he did not perish. Soon Fernando's friends began using the Dave's as well, and it became the regular additive for pizza joy. Three drops became four, which then became seven or more, and the drops grew from tiny specks to small ponds, to the occasional, undesired, lake or ocean which Dave's, in its lust for carnage, would produce.

One evening pizza was had, and Dave's was passed around. Fernando's companion Cortez was selected as the victim of Dave's unending spite, for it placed its ocean of death in the worst possible location: at the tip of the pizza, on the first bite, where one could not easily flee to less-hot-saucy regions because the areas further in on the slice had hot sauce denizens of their own. He faced a conundrum. Should he scrape some of it off and deal with the mockery of others, who had braved such debacles and lived, or should he suffer oral agony unlike any other?

While Cortez ruminated on this life-changing decision, a cluster of four high school-age girls entered the Dominion. Fernando left the back room and its chaos to assist them.

As they are heading out, a sound not unlike a hobo being fed to a pack of hyenas fills the store. There is much cursing. It seems Cortez made up his mind. One of the girls, her face pale, looks to the back room. “What was that?”

“That?” says Fernando. “That was probably the result of Dave's.”

“Who's Dave?” another asks.

“Dave's Insanity Sauce. It is full of hate and torment, and that is what makes it delightful.”

“It can't be that hot,” says the first.

“How do you stand on Tabasco sauce?”

“Um....”

“Like, do you think Tabasco sauce is hot?”

“Yeah, it's pretty spicy. That's like buffalo wings, right?”

“Ish, yeah. So, Tabasco sauce has a Scoville of, ehhhh, three-kay.”

“A what?” she asks.

“Scoville units. It's a scale that measures the capsaicin content of things. Capsaicin being the oil which gives hot peppers their heat. It's different from the molecule that gives black pepper its heat, seeing as they're two different species of plant.”

Fernando notices that he's starting to lose his audience to infodump, so he forges onward. “Anyway, the kind of hot sauce we have back there is about sixty times hotter than Tabasco sauce.”

“That doesn't sound that hot,” says a third girl.

Time for a demonstration. Fernando keeps another bottle of hot sauce up front, El Yucateco, his go-to for balanced heat and flavor. He unscrews the cap. “This one's about ten, eleven thousand. About three times hotter than Tabasco.” He raises his eyebrows. “Who's feeling brave?”

Turns out none of them, as the pungency of the hot sauce sets them to sniffling from three feet away. They depart.

Fernando returns to the back room to see Cortez, face reddened and eyes brimming with tears. “It hurts so good,” he tells Fernando. Then he takes another bite of Dave's-laced pizza.