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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"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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