fandomhigh | Iron Fandom, Wednesday, period 3

The workspaces this week were set up on . . . a beach? For some reason. The roar of the waves was faintly soothing, though the occasional call of seagulls might have made some folks want to protectively cover their food.

No reason. Raven definitely hadn't set this up to quietly troll Kathy. That'd be silly.

Suuuuper silly. And Kathy certainly wasn't glaring at her beloved roommate and ducking a little every time a seagull flew overhead. Because, again, silly.

"Welcome back, class," Kathy said, not kicking sand at Raven because she was An Adult. "And welcome to our newest judge, er..." She glanced over to Raven and mouthed 'What's her name?'

Raven, had you kidnapped another one?

Well sure! It'd worked so well last week, after all. Raven gave Kathy a not-at-all-sheephish shrug and elbowed this week's celebrity guest. "Introduce yourself," she whispered.

"Elbow me again and we're going to have problems," Verity muttered to the blue girl before turning a practiced smile onto the class. If she could grin at the cameras while her feet were bleeding into her shoes for Dance or Die! she could work up a smile while being 'temporarily kidnapped.' "Hi, Iron Fandom," she chirped. "My name is Verity Price and I like long walks on the beach, short walks on the beach, and other beach-related activities. This is my first time being kidnapped to a beach, but I hear there's food at the end of it?"

"We're not already going to have trouble over the kidnapping thing?" Raven looked impressed. "I like you."

Verity shrugged--a convenient cover for the small movements she needed to get out of the rope. "Are you kidding? This brings me back to my little sister Antimony's fifteenth birthday party."

...Look, the Prices were weird. Deal with it.

Kathy's expression suggested she certainly thought so. "What a, err, charming family story," she said, a little weakly. "So anyway, today's special ingredient is beets. You have to use beets in your three dishes: appetizer, main course, and dessert."

"Beets for dessert, huh?" Verity asked. "Interesting."

"We like to keep them on their toes," Raven said. She sat down next to Verity. "In the meantime, you're going to tell me more about your family's idea of a quinceañera. . . ."

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Verity shrugged. "My brother was the one who read the comics, not me. I was always busy dancing. But he read them all, ear lasers, tree-talkers, and that one girl with the devil wings who could heal people or something."

"Man. And here all we had comic book wise back home was aliens and rich white guys." Raven tilted her head. "So, not that I'm complaining, but even when I first ran into you, you didn't even blink at a blue scaled girl. You come from a world of weird too?"

"A lot of so-called 'normal worlds' have weird stuff going on in the shadows," Verity said with a small smile. "Have you ever heard of cryptids? Cryptozoology?"

"Like Bigfoot?" Raven asked. "Pretty sure a lot of people would probably consider me one of those. So . . . yeah."

"Like Bigfoot," Verity confirmed. "I'm a cryptozoologist. I grew up learning about cryptids, to try to help them however I could."

Because the Price family owed the cryptids a debt. They were part of the reason there were so few left.

"I was wondering what kind of cryptid you were."

"Not a cryptid," Raven said. "Just a weirdo. What kinds of stuff do you help them with?"

"What's the difference between a cryptid and a weirdo?" Verity countered. "And we help them with...survival, mostly. Humanity isn't a huge fan of finding out that they're sharing a neighborhood with something out of campfire stories. For a lot of history, cryptids were hunted down and killed. My family does what they can to help keep the remaining populations stable."

"That's . . ." Raven frowned, not actually sure how to pin down what she was feeling. On the one hand, yay for protecting people! On the other, well, just from her own history, she had to wonder how much of that protection was actually overbearing and restrictive. She'd grown up in hiding at Charles' house 'for her own good', after all. "That's cool," she said finally. "Cryptids are more like. . . secret species or something, right? There's only one of me."

Hence: weirdo.

Considering that Verity didn't know where half of the cryptids she spoke to lived, Raven's concerns were mostly unfounded.

She nodded. "Things like mermaids, jackalopes, bogeyman, madhuras, nagas, gorgons, chimerae...We study them when we can, we help those we can, and we police those that need it." Verity realized how that probably sounded and added, "The ones that are just animals, like church griffons and frickens and basilisks and stuff. We try to keep them from accidentally butting up against humans as much as possible. Take the ahool--if they start killing humans, people are likely to notice. So we tend to remove their colonies from settled areas if possible. Out in the wilderness, they can hunt at will, but in urban areas, they're dangerous to both human and cryptid alike. Whereas a nest of dragon princesses can be trusted to police themselves because they're people."

"Wait. If they're animals, why not just tell people about them so regular humans can be on guard, too? I mean, I know humanity doesn't have a great history with hunting perceived threats to them, but there are plenty of predatory species that most people are aware of that we haven't gone out and killed all of."

"Because there are groups of humans that will go out an kill all of them," Verity said and her voice was grim. "Dragons are extinct. Unicorns are extinct. Full-sized griffons are extinct. The Covenant of Saint Thomas has a sacred duty to exterminate every species of cryptid they can find, sentient or sapient." Verity pursed her lips and looked away. "Not to mention that humans would then take a great number of those types of creatures to study them, which is rarely ever good for the creature being studied. And humans are also inclined to think, 'Well, if this story is real, what other creatures from legend are?' and, again, that's not inclined to end well for the people on the other side of it."

Raven was getting the feeling that Verity and Charles would get along pretty well, actually.

You know, assuming she didn't kill him for all his mid-century boyish smarm.

"If you say so. I'm done pretending not to be a shapeshifter, though. I've actually gotten a lot less screaming and running away once I stopped trying to hide being primarily blue and scaly."

Verity blinked at her, surprised. "I'm not the boss of you," she said. "You can do whatever the hell you want, so long as you don't hurt anyone else."

"Wasn't saying you were going to," Raven said. Besides which, she was the one who'd kidnapped Verity, not the other way around. "Just saying, as a 'cryptid'-like person: being open about it has made my life way easier."

"You wanna talk to the crypid people about the joys of living openly, that's on you," Verity said wryly. "I mean, I don't think they're going to listen, but you do you. But even if it's safe for you to walk around blue in your world, it's not safe for cryptids in mine. A chupacabra isn't just risking his own life when he walks down a city street, he's risking the lives of his pups back home, his dam and sire, the rest of his litter mates, maybe even his whole species. There's a lot more riding on his shoulders than you have riding on yours, Miss One-Of-A-Kind-Weirdo."

Raven had a lot of thoughts, about hiding and education and how "people are afraid of what they don't understand" being a self-fulfilling prophesy, but she had no idea how to express them properly and get her point across, especially not when Verity was clearly getting all riled up.

So she changed the subject.

"So what kind of dancing?"

Iron Fandom, Wednesday, period 3

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