The horrors of sugar free rainbow sherbet Liquid IV

!!This is a lighthearted post!! Also, I'd appreciate any sugar free electrolyte drink flavor recommendations because I've been on unflavored Normalyte for about two years and never tried anything else.

I was at the drugstore last night and saw a stand of Liquid IV, so I thought, why the heck not? and grabbed a box. The box I grabbed happened to be their only sugar free option, Rainbow Sherbet. I was a little unsure of the flavor but thought to myself, how bad could it possibly be?

The first stirrings of dread began when I poured the packet into my dry waterbottle and a fine cloud of powder drifted from it like steam from a witch's cauldron. I hurried to fill it with water, but by that point the cloud of rainbow sherbet dust had surrounded me and all I could taste were gummy worms and a strange bitterness. I coughed to clear my lungs and tried to go back to preparing my bottle.

At the first sip, an emotion I had no name for rose in me. The unnameable flavor hit me like a semi truck--like a Lovecraftian horror, it defies description, though I will try anyway: it was too salty to be sweet, too sweet to be salty, and too bitter to be either. Every moving part of the flavor Tasted. This man made horror was truly beyond my comprehension. My eyes rolled back into my skull and I began to bleed from every orifice as the Flavor(tm), still drifting like smoke in the air around me, invaded every sense until I was tasting, smelling, breathing Sugar Free Rainbow Sherbet. I think I even saw it for a split second, a mass of writhing, otherworldly gummy worms, as intangible and transient as artificial sweetener itself. I am not a supertaster; I've never tasted bitterness in artificial sweetener, but something about this tiny packet of powder was too powerful to go untasted and in that moment, my friends, I knew bitterness.

The thing that scares me most, though, is that for such a product to be on the market, it must have customers. I picture them, creeping softly through the CVS in the wee hours of the morning, gummy limbs shining pinkly like one of Lord Licorice's unchristian creations, rock candy teeth clicking hungrily, strange sticky pastel hands reaching out to grab yet another box of Sugar Free Rainbow Sherbet Liquid IV...