During Victor’s slow tour through the crowd, his [Courtly Intuition] unfortunately proved his worries right more often than not. His ears swiveled until they cramped, but all he got were conversations like these:
“Where has the Katzer boy gone, by the way? I wanted to get to know him better.”
“Right? He’s so dreamy… I hope we can be friends. Could be cool to get to know his mom, too, you know, for my career? He probably has all sorts of connections…”
Victor would almost have laughed out loud and dropped [Stealth].
Congratulations, for listening to things that you weren’t meant to hear, and generally being nosy as fuck, you gained 2 Catboy experience!
Sometimes, life had a way of being weirdly stereotypical. Oh well, at least he got some experience out of it. Not that it mattered all that much. At level 16, his [Catboy] class was miles ahead of his [Vampire] class at level 2, and most common [Catboy] actions barely gave him XP anymore. He would need to ask his dad for new XP triggers soon if he wanted to keep up with the rest of the students or wait until his mom found some time to teach him some [Vampire] triggers. She had promised she would, when he had reached [Vampire] level 2 and it had pushed him to Level 10 overall. But then the new expansion had dropped and she needed to be out and about, antagonizing adventurers.
While his Dad would probably suggest waiting, as was the Cat way, Victor wondered what his Mom would do in his situation. He’d never told her about his feeling invisible, because he didn’t want to worry her and distract her from work. He knew how important it was for her. She probably would give very good advice, because she had to interact with a lot of people all the time. Unlike what the people earlier had thought, being a Raid Boss was more than just issuing orders. It was mostly about trying to keep everyone happy enough. There were evil monologues to hold, of course, but also Wing bosses to manage and keep happy, and previous raids to appease.
As he exited the party in the back, and the door closed behind him, the music finally dulled to a distant thump thump scree thump scree thump. He didn’t drop [Stealth], just on the off chance someone came out here to look for him. He knew he should probably be more open to opportunities, but he just didn’t feel like having another conversation about his mom, or being hit on.
As he climbed on top of a bench to sit cross-legged on a windowsill that was still warm from the evening infernolight, a tension he hadn’t even noticed fled from his shoulders. He started massaging his ears with the flat of his wrist. First the left one, then the right.
But even with this age-old cat tradition to soothe his thoughts, the question of what his Mom would do stuck in his mind.
She certainly wouldn’t wait around, that was for sure. Victor wasn’t dumb. He knew that just waiting for good things to happen set him on a certain path in life. But it had worked so well, so far. There had always been people who gave him what he needed, when he needed it, and he was super thankful for that. To run around demanding more would have made him an ungrateful brat, and that was not something he wanted to be.
But perhaps… perhaps this wasn’t about demanding, but giving.
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Perhaps Waverly should just give in.
She was just so super done with this Satan-damned music that made thinking so hard. Listening to it felt like flossing her ears with barbed wire, and it was all she could do to not flatten them against her skull. To her, it went from A to B without any sort of logic, beyond buildup->bass drop, and that made her feel super on edge. There had to be better music than this, right? Something that was more constructed, but not like minimal techno, because that was cool, but kinda boring. Why wasn’t there Music that made her feel like poems made her feel? Hadn’t someone once told her that music was like math? She couldn’t see any math in this noise.
It could be that she wasn’t appreciating it well enough. She was a lot, and perhaps if she calmed down and took her time to understand the rhythm, she would find some sort of pattern that she liked and could wait for. But no matter how much she tried, it was just disorienting to the point that her trek through the crowd to the back door took her almost twice as long as she had planned.
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When she finally burst out of the back door and onto the cute little terrace she had spotted earlier, she let out a deep breath that she didn’t even notice she had been holding.
For a while, she just stood there, panting. She even shifted halfway to wolf form to pant better. That always felt good and was one of the reasons why she had spent so much time mastering her [Shapeshifting]. When she felt cool enough, she shifted back and made for a bench in front of a window sill. It was old wood, but well cared for, and looked kinda comfortable, actually. It didn’t look mass-produced, and she wondered who had built it. Perhaps some sort of carpenter before the Industrial Revolution, when there was still coin to be made with that sort of stuff. Or perhaps a college professor, as a hobby. Waverly probably needed a hobby, too, like carpentry or painting or something. Perhaps that would calm her down and she wouldn’t so Satan-damned too much all the time.
She sat down and spread her arms over the backrest of the bench, leaning her head against the wall behind it.
As she looked up at the white clouds of Elysium, glittering so unlike the sulfur smoke back home, she thought about her Grandma and her kettle and wondered if that was really the solution.
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Perhaps, Victor thought, that was the solution. Maybe it wasn’t about demanding people get to know him, but giving people a better impression of who he was. It could be that approaching people wasn’t pushing himself onto them, but giving them a sign that he was interested.
But what if that wasn’t the case, and he drove away the people he really wanted to meet?
It was one of those problems you could think about for years, and so Victor decided to wait for a sign.
He got a panting werewolf instead.
She wasn’t too tall, perhaps a nail or so taller than him. But then she shifted back to human form, and she easily lost a nail of height. That meant she was one of those Weres that grew as they shifted.
Still invisible, Victor tilted his head. The girl was wearing a colorful shirt with a floral print, but there was a slight droop in her ears and a little slump in the set of her shoulders. Something about that contrast made him feel bad for her. Clearly, she wasn’t having the great time she planned to have.
Then the werewolf, oblivious to his stealthed presence, sat on the bench right underneath him. When she leaned back and stared up at the clouds, Victor followed her gaze. He didn’t know what was going on with her, but it was clear that she needed someone to listen to.
A friend, perhaps.
And as it happened, Victor was looking for one of those himself.
Well, this was about as clear a sign as he could get.
So he smiled and said “Yo.”
And that single word counted as an action and that dropped him out of [Stealth].
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It all boiled down to a single idea, didn’t it?
Did Waverly really want to feel like she was going to explode for the rest of her life? It sounded so boring, too. How did people ever get to know each other if no one ever talked? Perhaps it was because she totally talked too much and steamrolled people, and she definitely didn’t want to do that. She also knew she could listen well, but only if the stuff people said was interesting. She always had this issue where if she got bored, words went into one ear and out of the other, which had been trouble in school until she learned just how much she loved learning new stuff. Even then, classes had been super boring but she had just taken the textbooks and read them front to cover and taken notes and when the teachers called on her in class it usually wasn’t that much of a problem to get stuff from context, right? There had only been like 59 times where she didn’t know the answer, but when she’d gotten her grades back they had always been kinda good and so the teachers were never mad, even though she never really listened to them.
Come to think of it, what would have happened if she had done what her parents told her, and paid more attention? She would have learned less, right? Because the teachers never went over everything in the books and that was totally okay because they didn’t have the time Waverly knew because she had done the math on that. So by doing what felt right, she had actually gotten out ahead, right?
She was already doing that though, wasn’t she? She talked a lot because she wanted people to talk a lot. She asked so many questions because she wanted people to ask questions.
But did she say the things she really wanted to hear? Did she ask the questions she wanted to know the answers to?
Not really. She talked about stuff that she thought people wanted to hear so they told her what they thought she wanted to hear… Which was a bit dumb now that she thought about it. But also, to be honest, she was a little bit scared that if she talked about what she really wanted to talk about, what she really wanted to say and hear and experience and know, people would find her weird or too much.
But what if she talked about what really mattered to her? What if she showed people how much she wanted to get to know them? Would they be scared? Would they still think she was too much?
Some of them, sure.
But not the right ones.
The ones who liked the endless tempest of truths that frolicked in her heart.
The ones who liked these truths so much, they would be there for her when things got really hard.
Waverly sighed and smiled. Okay. She had made a decision. The next conversation she had, Waverly would just begin by saying something she really wanted to say.
So when a Catboy with dark hair dropped out of stealth directly above her and said
“Yo,”
Waverly said:
“Oh! Hi! Like, sorry, I didn’t mean to steal your spot, but the music in there fucking sucks.”