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Grace sat at the conference table ten minutes early, one foot bouncing under his chair as he tore open a family-sized bag of Sour Skittles with the practiced ease of a man who had done this far too many times. After him and Carl raided the Home Depot, he had many bags to spare for the project.
Across the table, Ilyukhina looked up from her tablet. “Those are the sour ones, yes?” she asked.
Grace tossed a handful into his mouth. “Mmhm.” He winced immediately. Then he nodded to himself and kept chewing.
Dubois stared at him with open concern. “You react like poison every time.”
“It’s part of the experience,” Grace said around the candy.
At the far end of the table, Yao glanced up from a stack of reports. “That does not sound like endorsement.”
Grace pointed at him. “No, see, that’s the beauty of Sour Skittles. There’s suffering, but like… consensual suffering.”
Dubois blinked. “I do not think candy should require consent forms.”
Ilyukhina snorted quietly. Grace slid the bag across the table toward her. “You want one?” She considered this with the seriousness of a nuclear treaty negotiation. “All right. I’ll take a red one.”
“Excellent choice.”
He dug through the bag and located a single red candy and placing it in front of her. Ilyukhina popped it into her mouth. Three seconds passed. Her face did not change at all. Then one eye twitched.
“Ah,” she said flatly.
“Right?” Grace said, delighted.
“It feels chemically aggressive. No way these things are legal.”
“Yes! They are, and people give them to their children. That’s how you know they’re good.”
Dubois leaned back in his chair. “Americans will eat anything if enough sugar is applied.”
Grace gasped theatrically. “First of all, rude. Second of all, these are culturally significant.”
Yao looked genuinely curious now. “How so?”
Grace sat up slightly. “Okay, so regular Skittles used to have a lime flavor, right? Green was lime. This was the natural order of the universe.”
Dubois made a vague gesture. “I sense this is no longer true.”
“Ha ha! kind of. Listen to this - It is not,” Grace said darkly. “In 2013, they replaced lime with green apple. They had green be lime from the original launch of the skittle in 1979 and changed it in 2013 for seemingly no reason. So everyone just woke up one day in 2013, and after 39 years of green being lime, it just changed to green apple.”
Yao frowned immediately. “That seems incorrect.”
“THANK you.”
Ilyukhina reached for another red one. Grace pointed at her. “See? She gets it.”
“I do not,” she said. “But I enjoy your level of emotional investment.”
“It was a catastrophe,” Grace continued. “Green apple completely wrecked the flavor balance. You’d be eating strawberry, orange, lemon and then suddenly your mouth gets hit with what tastes like a scented candle? WHO thought of that? I’ll tell you who was responsible: Aamir Owen.”
Dubois actually laughed at that. Grace leaned forward now, fully engaged. “But here’s the insane part. Years later, in late 2021, after enormous public backlash, they changed regular Skittles back to lime.”
“Justice,” Yao murmured.
“RIGHT? Humanity prevailed.” Grace pointed around the table like he was delivering a lecture. “Except - and this is where it gets weird buckle up - they never changed Sour Skittles back.”
The table went quiet. Grace took this silence not as a cue to stop, but as encouragement.
"Wait, wait, back up. What?" Ilyukhina said, actually getting invested in the lime vs green apple debate
“So,” he said, scooting forward in his chair, “Mars Wrigley, the manufacturing company, launched this whole campaign called ‘The Original Lime-Up’ to announce the greatest production change: the original flavor of lime was coming back.”
Dubois blinked once. “That is real phrase?”
“Oh, completely real.” Grace was speaking faster now. “There were commercials. Social media campaigns. People online celebrating. They marketed it like the return of a political leader from exile.”
Yao folded his hands. Listening.
“Because people were MAD when it changed to green apple,” Grace continued. “Like, weirdly mad. There were petitions. Think pieces. Reddit threads with thousands of comments. People took this personally because lime was part of the flavor architecture.”
“The… architecture,” Dubois repeated carefully.
“Yes!” Grace said, delighted someone was following. “Okay, look. Lemon and lime are complementary citrus flavors. You NEED both because lime gives you acidity and sharpness while lemon’s more mellow candy-citrus. Green apple is a completely different profile. It dominates everything.”
He was gesturing with both hands now, one still clutching a handful of sour candies.
“It’s too aggressive. Too tart in the wrong way. It hijacks the palate. You stop tasting a cohesive mix and start tasting”, he pointed emphatically, “green apple featuring occasional guests.”
Ilyukhina stared at him with deep concentration, like she was trying to determine whether this was satire. But the thing was: Grace kept going. With more passion than before.
“And here’s the thing! The kicker:” He slapped the table lightly. “Regular Skittles fixed the problem in 2021 with the campaign. Lime came back. Everyone rejoiced. Balance restored. Nature healing.”
Yao nodded solemnly. “A redemption arc.”
“Exactly.” Grace pointed at him immediately. “You understand narrative structure.”
Dubois pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why do you know exact year.”
Grace looked genuinely confused by the question.
“Because it mattered.”
Silence.
“And then,” Grace said, lowering his voice dramatically, “like i said, Sour Skittles just… stayed green apple.”
He opened the bag and shook it slightly for emphasis.
“No announcement. No explanation as to why. Nothing. They reverted the originals and apparently forgot Sour Skittles existed as a product category.”
Ilyukhina frowned into the bag. “So there was no… Sour Lime-Up?”
“NO.” Grace looked personally betrayed by this. “That’s what I’m SAYING.”
Dubois was openly smiling now despite himself.
Grace continued, fully incapable of stopping.
“So now there’s this bizarre flavor split in the Skittles ecosystem where original green is lime, but sour green is apple. Which means if you grew up liking green apple Skittles, the one of the ONLY remaining source is Sour Skittles. The other is gummy regular skittles, but don't get me started on the gummy skittles.”
“A black-market scenario,” Yao said thoughtfully.
“YES.”
“And if you like green apple,” Ilyukhina added, “you are punished by eating sour candy.”
Grace pointed at her so fast he nearly launched a Skittle across the room. “THANK YOU.”
No one even reacted. Because the sincerity in his voice made it abundantly clear that this was not a joke anymore.
A pause.
“Wait,” Ilyukhina said slowly. “So the green apple still exists only in the sour version?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Grace spread his hands. “Nobody knows.”
Dubois frowned. “Perhaps different manufacturing—”
“No, no, listen,” Grace said, increasingly animated. “Imagine being in the factory meeting for that. Some executive just goes, ‘All right, revert the originals.’ And then everybody collectively forgets Sour Skittles exist.”
Yao nodded thoughtfully. “A bureaucratic oversight.”
“A candy-based administrative failure,” Grace agreed.
Ilyukhina looked into the bag. “So currently, if one desires green apple flavor…”
“The ONLY officially sanctioned route is Sour Skittles,” Grace said. “Which means somewhere out there is a population of green-apple fans being psychologically tortured. I, however, love green apple on the sour side. Don't tell the internet that, they'll come for me. But in a regular non-sour standard, lime clears. But since I usually only eat sour skittles from the green bag, it has been growing on me more and more.”
Dubois rubbed his forehead. “This is the strangest conversation I have ever participated in. How long have you been thinking about this?”
Grace paused.
“…years.”
The conference room door opened.
Eva Stratt walked in carrying a tablet and three folders.
She stopped, looked at the candy spread across the table. Looked at Grace mid-rant, gesturing with a neon-green Skittle pinched between his fingers.
Then looked at the rest of the international scientific task force silently listening to him.
“…Why,” she asked carefully, “are we discussing fruit candies with same intensity as astrophage?”
He lowered the neon-green Sour Skittles slowly to the table and sank back in his chair a little.
“…we weren’t,” he said weakly.
Dubois immediately betrayed him.
“We absolutely were.”
Grace shot him a wounded look.
Stratt narrowed her eyes at the table. “I heard phrase ‘flavor architecture’ from hallway.”
Yao nodded once. “Dr. Grace has strong opinions regarding lime.”
Grace rubbed the back of his neck, visibly embarrassed now that he was suddenly aware he’d just spent ten uninterrupted minutes passionately lecturing some of the world’s foremost scientists about candy history.
“I mean,” he muttered, “it just came up.”
“It did not ‘come up,’” Dubois said. “You delivered manifesto.”
Before Grace could defend himself, Ilyukhina spoke up.
“But if Skittles changed recipe,” she said, looking thoughtfully at Stratt, “you can obtain anything we require for project, yes?”
Stratt blinked once. “Within reason.”
Ilyukhina pointed at Grace with complete seriousness. “Can you get discontinued candy?”
The room went silent. Grace looked up immediately.
Stratt slowly turned toward her. “Why.”
“I wish to compare flavors.”
“You wish to compare—”
“The green apple.” Ilyukhina gestured vaguely toward Grace’s candy pile. “Dr. Grace has described it with enough emotional intensity that now I must know.”
Grace looked simultaneously horrified and thrilled. Stratt stared at both of them for a long moment.
Then, flatly: “What year candy.”
Grace answered instantly. “Pre-2021 original formula. Ideally 2013 to 2021 production range.”
The entire table turned to look at him. Grace froze.
“…I hear how that sounded,” he said quietly.
Yao looked impressed. “You answered without hesitation.”
“Yeah, well.” Grace shrugged helplessly. “I know things.”
Dubois laughed into his coffee.
Ilyukhina leaned forward now, genuinely invested. “Were there textural differences?”
Grace’s eyes widened.
“Oh my god, YES.”
Stratt closed her eyes briefly.
“The shell composition changed slightly over time. That’s a... a fun fact,” Grace said rapidly, already spiraling back into the topic despite himself. “Not enough for most people to notice, but the older batches had more citric acid coating before they toned it down because apparently people were experiencing ‘mouth irritation,’ which—”
“People were being WEAK,” Dubois guessed.
“Exactly.”
Stratt opened her eyes again and fixed Grace with a stare powerful enough to halt tectonic activity.
“Dr. Grace.”
He straightened immediately. “Yes?”
“You are leading astrophage research initiative.”
“Yes.”
“You have access to greatest scientific resources on Earth.”
“…technically yes.”
“And you are asking me for obsolete fruit candy.”
Grace looked around the table.
Every single person was watching him.
Even Yao seemed curious now.
Grace folded his hands together defensively. “In my defense, I was just trying to share American culture.”
Dubois lost composure entirely at that and barked out a laugh.
Ilyukhina nodded solemnly. “It has been educational.”
Stratt pointed at the green candy still sitting in front of Grace.
“That one tastes bad?”
Grace leaned forward immediately, all embarrassment forgotten.
“Okay so HERE’S the thing—”