Waverly smiled, wagged her tail to say goodbye to the group she had just spoken to and slipped into the crowd.
Alright, this group had been super nice, but somehow, it was kinda just missing something. She had tried to carry the conversation, she really did, but eventually, it had just kinda petered out like the ones before had. Perhaps it was her fault? Her mom always told her she should tone it down a little bit, and she really tried to do that, but it made her feel like one of those teakettles her grandma had that whistled when the water boiled.
Mom and Dad had told her how important it was to make friends at Sinner DeSade, because there were super important people here, and Waverly understood where they came from, but she also kinda felt like that was a bit weird. She wanted friends to be friends with, not like connections or colleagues.
She approached another group, smiling broadly, tail wagging.
“Hi guys!” she said. “Enjoying the Mixer so far?”
One of them, an Incubus, nodded shyly. “Yeah… they got some great music, right?”
Waverly didn’t want to be a bitch. She really didn’t. She also wasn’t really picky and was happy to give people as many chances as they needed, unless they totally pissed her off.
But that was the moment when the DJ threw Spoken-Word-Country into the mix and the Incubus started bobbing his head along, and Waverly suspected that this group was a loss, too. That was weird. Was she a music snob after all? Shouldn’t she like this music, like everyone around her seemed to? She just really hoped he wasn’t going to ask her about her favorite songs because she always totally blanked on that. Perhaps she could force herself if she just listened to enough of it? Perhaps it was an acquired taste or something?
But she was spacing out again! The Incubus had asked her a question, and so she forced herself to cheer up a little, wagged her tail to show she meant no harm, and shrugged apologetically before she said: “Yeah, like, it’s not really for me, I guess?”
“Different Strokes for different Souls!” the Incubus said, bobbing his head along to the music.
To his right, a Mousekin rolled her eyes. “Ignore him. He’s been like that ever since Junior High. What’s your Major?” She wore her hair in a strict ponytail and wore heavy glasses that framed her eyes kinda like those black borders around an obituary. Waverly had seen one of those in a museum once, back from when people in Hell could still die. It had been super interesting to learn about what life was like before Death Inc. joined the Torture Chamber of Commerce and began selling respawns!
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But anyway, the Mousekin talked like someone at least twice her size, each syllable all clipped and precise and almost drilling. Waverly’s great-grandma on her father’s side had been a torturer until the start of the digital revolution, and she talked like that all the time, too, which was kinda intimidating, but Waverly’s great-grandma was also kinda cool, so maybe this mousekin was cool, too?
All those thoughts rushed through Waverly’s head in under a second, and as usual, it left her reeling a little.
“Oh, like, I haven’t decided yet,” Waverly said. “I really like poetry and stuff like that, but my Mom and Dad really want me to go into dungeonomics and become a Dungeon Boss, you know, because they like work super hard but they feel like if they had a college education, they could have earned a second class and become bosses themselves and really taken their Dungeon to the big leagues, and I kinda agree with them because I love them, right? But I also really don’t want to do their job because I don’t know, it kinda like, scares me almost, to go do the same thing in the same mid-level Dungeon all day every day, it just seems so boring, and shouldn’t there be more to life than just doing that, growing up, and throwing litters? Oh man, I’m babbling again, sorry, and I haven’t even, like, introduced myself.
“I’m Waverly. Hi!”
She wagged her tail in emphasis.
The Mousekin looked at her with those piercing eyes and said: “You’re a lot.”
Waverly’s tail drooped a little. “Oh, like, sorry, I…”
The Mousekin shook her head, stopping Waverly in her tracks, and said “No, it’s alright. You are who you are. I just don’t think you’d fit in this circle of friends.”
There was no malice in her words, just honesty, a little shy of cruelty, but Waverly didn’t even need to look at the other people in the group to understand that they wouldn’t contradict the Mousekin.
“Well, I guess I’ll like, see you in class,” Waverly said, trying to make her exit as smooth as she could.
“Yep,” the Mousekin said, and her friends nodded along. They were all a little sympathetic, Waverly guessed, but no one said anything else, and so Waverly turned and left.
It was totally weird, Waverly thought, because hadn’t she decided that she kinda didn’t want to be friends with this circle anyways? Then why did it feel so super bad? What if she couldn’t make friends with anyone here? What if she was just too much? She needed to learn to tone herself down, even if it gave her that teakettle feel that made her lips tingle and her toes curl. But what if she never learned how to do that? She’d never have any friends, and probably die alone under some sort of bridge somewhere, all sad, and no one would be able to pay for a resurrection for her and there would be rain on her funeral and no one would be there to say anything nice about her, and also they’d be playing this very fucking song that was playing now that she just couldn’t bring herself to pretend to like, just like everyone else.
She probably kinda needed to go somewhere quiet to try and calm down a little so she could make a better impression.
With a quiet sigh, Waverly slipped back into the crowd.