Survival Of The Fittest

> be me
> worlds least interesting man
> at least my name wont get me deported
> the dos in dos equis really refers to the amount of other people he helped smuggle over the border
> currently getting free healthcare and gay bar vouchers somewhere in san francisco next to all the homeless gender studies starbucks workers
> back to me
> still a loser
> somehow ending up with a one on one setup with a female humanoid
> this is legit this is not a drill
> she is not a vocaloid
> she is not a hentai drawing printed onto a pillowcase
> you kinda wish she were that busty though
> but that kinda aesthetics always weirded you out
> its either like welding snow globes onto a stick
> or being arrested for statutory
> its kinda cool that she looks like a legitimate human being to be honest
> keeping it real
> unlike her permanent resident status
> thats right
> youve gone full on yellow fever
> you check your closet to figure out what youre going to wear
> you realize everything you own looks exactly the same
> youre going to show up to meet her and shell wonder if you even changed out your pants
> “like yeah i get youre not the fashion sort but could you at least have avoided showing off the cum crusts”
> you put on your best suave voice
> when did mickey mouse show up to this shindig
> “baby i made them just for you”
> fresh
> unlike your linen

Mercy was some kinda evil genius.

((Demetri Futscher continued from Jawbreaker))

Thing was, he could have spent the whole of Saturday locked inside the house working on his Marceline/Bubblegum fic and lurking SA. He would have let himself out on occasion to take out the trash at Dad’s orders, or maybe even to stare slack jawed like a Downs at the soccer pitch near the house, promising himself he’d someday tighten up his practice schedule and shape up before Junior Varsity tryouts when summer vacay started. He had two months before the last day of classes and he was pretty sure he could slack for a bit. /pol/ was tempting at all hours of the day nowadays, with all the dox of Conman shills constantly being blasted on repost. Lib kids all across America were getting spammed with porn ads, and Demetri was doing his tiny part for the cause.

Would have been a decently spent weekend, but apparently he somehow had a date to attend. Hannah and Mom had been about as surprised as he’d been.

Probably wasn’t even a ‘date’, was the thing. According to Mercy it was just a friendly get-together of friends where it just so happened that she’d planned for it to be the three of them and then she’d had to cancel last second due to other plans. Totally not suspicious at all. Demetri had always liked Mercy for being low-key tricky when she needed to be. A get-shit-done type, she was, and there were too few of those in this day and age of Insta influencers and other shit that provided no value to society.

It was a bit of a sting to be on the receiving end of one of her schemes, though.

Like, when Mercy had first FBed the both of them and claimed her rain check Demetri had been very back and forth on also cancelling. Last minute family getaway, someone in the hopsital, violently explosive food poisoning, whatever Demetri could have done that would have won him that sweet home alone fap time, ‘alone’ as in bedroom door locked while Hannah’s innumerable shitty slam-poetry friends raided their fridge the floor below. It had low key been a bit intense, actually. He’d felt the burn of an adrenaline rush when he’d first realized it’d be two people of the opposite gender, one of whom was enough of a loser that he had to take special note of the difference in chromosomes. Demetri with the extra 21, so on.

Like yeah, he’d been nervous. Still was. But Kelly wasn’t backing down, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to go out like a bitch himself. If he was going to be humiliated he might as well be humiliated in person, he guessed. Something like that.

Man, he needed to stop feeling so on edge. He was nervous just sitting here out in the open, the crowds of Harrison Central probably judging him as they meandered on by. It’d be nice if the girl showed up and he managed to not yet have brined his shirt with the pit stains.

It was maybe a year and a half after the disaster with Ariana and he was still pretty sure he would be keeping the REEEE levels on his V-card topped off. He was trying his best- focusing on himself, improving his own lifestyle and skills, but he guessed girls just didn’t appreciate the grind or something. Even now he was still pretty sure nobody of the two people involved really wanted to be here.

Kelly Nguyen, that was the person he’d never expected to ever have a reason to meet with outside of school. She was nice and she looked pretty good- he’d Facebook stalked her the moment Mercy had mentioned her name, something about her tiny nose was pretty A (for Asian) in his opinion. They’d shared a math class Freshman year, maybe. There must have been a Kelly sitting in the back somewhere, or maybe it had been a Kenny. She’d had a cool profile set of photos showing off volunteer work, and for the most part they hadn’t looked too faked for the photo ops. She seemed pretty genuine, and anyone far along in their math was Demetri was earned his respect.

So essentially she seemed like a cool human being. She was thus way out of his league.

But the fact remained, this wasn’t a date. Just a human male and a human female and a day planned out with…

What the fuck was it that they were even supposed to be getting up to, again?

And this was the part where Demetri slowly started to phase through the ground into the hole where he’d curl up to die and rot. Mercy had probably had the timetable or even the purpose in bringing them all together. So, with her out of the picture what was he doing here? What the hell was he going to tell Kelly? He didn’t even have enough loose cash on him to afford most of the things she’d probably actually want to get up to. Holy fuck, was he really this unprepared? He had come this far, had even ironed his own shirt- it was harder than it looked, by the way. Women had drawn the short end of the stick on the whole ‘kitchen plus sandwich’ meme when Chads slowly growing out their mid thirties beer guts didn’t have to deal with the monotony and the bullshit. Demetri guessed that was, like, the exchange for all the natural dating pool advantages women were born into without earning and all.

Demetri was on high alert all of a sudden, but none of his limbs seemed to have a clear and easy path to freedom. He was stuck here, sat on this bench, a gangly awkward and only kinda pubescent teen. His one good shirt was an eggshell speckled tee and these jeans were still ratty and he looked like a skateboard punk but he wasn’t nearly as cool and damn he was totally going to F this all up.

He’d probably be getting back to his room sooner than he thought.

((Kelly Nguyen, memories start.))

Such were the ways of the world that Kelly had to spend 60 minutes doing her makeup to make it seem like she had spent only 5. Awful, really, but she had an image to uphold and a duty to be followed, which meant that she'd be damned if she was about to go out there and not look her best.

Well, her best, if only a little more conservative. She certainly wasn't about to give Demetri Futscher any ideas, after all. She wasn't any kind of idiot, indeed, which was also why she told her parents she was hanging out with the person who had left her to go on...whatever this was now, with someone who didn't only have a proven track record of being awkward with women, but also someone who certainly couldn't been seen as anything other than a pity date. Of course, that was using the word date loosely, though, and she was fairly certain that Mercy hadn't intended it that way. At least, she hoped so. There were no commonalities, besides perhaps a single math class for them to bond over, which wasn't really an issue, but perhaps there was a larger image issue at play there.

Was it that Mercy saw her as that desperate, or that yielding? The latter was infinitely more preferable, of course, but still not exactly an idea worth cultivating. Honey always attracted flies, but all the honey in the world wouldn't matter if all the flies it caught were the helpless runts. Still, she could help make things a little better, and if she wasn't going to be able to go to a shelter this weekend, this still seemed like a nice piece of charity work.

As long as it remained a one-off thing, however, it would be fine, and with that affirmation, she breathed in and took a look in the mirror.

There was always a fine line to thread between being lazy and appearing to look that way, which was precisely why Kelly had gone for something a little more simple today. A cornsilk yellow blouse tucked into white shorts and matching sandals was nowhere near the height of fashion, but a lot of effort had to be put in into ensuring that Demetri didn't think she had. Maybe, she could have settled, truly been lazy, let her hair hang loose instead of tied up with a bright yellow scrunchie, but appearances still had to be kept up, and if there was one thing she was still sure she knew how to do, it was keep up.

That included keeping up on schedule, but just once, it seemed a bit better to let Demetri shiver in his boots, or another idiom meant to be tossed off and forgotten. Still, she had not to pull up too late, because that'd result in bad feelings all around, or at least feelings spreading from him to the entirety of the school, and seeing how quickly news traveled, it was best to nip any risk of that right in the bud. Too hard to contain something like that.

"Oh, hey Demetri!"

Smiling, thankfully, was as easy as it always had been. Easy as always, because that's what they saw, what they knew, and there was no need to change that. Wax on, wax off, just like the movie absolutely everyone had loved to compare her to back in the first grade.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," the honey-coated things slipping from her mouth fouler than bull excrement, dishonest that they were. Smile shrunk, just enough to give someone a view inside. A pretty much entirely fabricated inside, but that wasn't the point. "Didn't get up to anything excited waiting around?"

Always the thought that counted, after all.

Oh fuck she was here

Okay, damage control- the precise thing he needed to be leading off a date (it was not a date) with, probably, though he of course wasn't sure because of his many talents in life appealing to the opposite gender was not one of them. Jury was out on whether he could attract those weird 'neither of the above' genders but his pool there was tiny as in both senses of the word because Blaise D'Aramitz was almost comically tiny, as much as they were disturbingly good at seeming larger than life in a tryhard and edgy kind of way.

Kelly seemed larger than life at that exact moment. She looked really good- like, Demetri probably stared at girls in classrooms that weren't even his own way too much to develop the sort of opinions he had on color matching and whatever. Palettes and swatches and fuck-off, the curtain is blue because its blue types of an understanding. He didn't know what made it look good, it just looked good. She also wasn't wearing makeup, as far as he could tell. He liked that kind of detail- made girls seem less fake and gross, unlike that walking Cabbage Patch kid named Ivy Langley.

Was he staring at her too much already? Like he'd been trying to count how long he could just silently observe her in his mind, and he'd gotten past one and up to two, but maybe the adrenaline in his veins was juicing him up to where he couldn't perceive time normally? To where his sweat glands were starting to extract more oil out of him than (((globalist))) ops in the Middle East?

He had maybe half a second before he hit a danger zone to figure out what to say. How to say it. Small talk. Witty observation. Ruffle his own hair like one of those soyboy Korean boyband dudes. Invite her to sit. Stand. Smile. Don't smile. It'd be creepy one way. The other way. How did he talk? How did he breathe?

His time was up.

"No problem. Didn't even notice you weren't here yet."

Wait had he just insulted her? Was the clammy sensation on the back of his hands because the mall's central heating was on the fritz or was he already preparing to jump away from the bench and run into the nearby herd of elderly shoppers to make a quick getaway? Too many questions to answer and not enough time- this was no fucking SAT.

"I mean like, you know."

A pause. She probably, in fact, did not know.

"Mercy, uh, tell you what we were going to get up to?" With all the money burning a hole in his pocket, if the dollars were lava he'd probably keep all his denim intact. He lurched forward as if he was about to stand. Stalled out in the midst of the motion and continued to sputter there, his engine without impulse. "Sucks that she cancelled on us. Guess we don't matter to her, huh?"

He was like, hearing the words only after they already got spit up out of his gaping maw of a nervous smile mouth.

((Cicada adopting Kelly Nguyen))

Later on, sweet ran fallow. Sour fermentation, spoiled food. But lunch had been okay. Quiet, but okay. Quiet, thus, okay.

Demetri hadn't noticed the thought put into her prophylactic attempts at hair and care. Suited her just fine. The effort had never been on his behalf, so in a way his ignorance of the mathematics of social poise had actually underscored her grim self-satisfaction. She'd been playing a game of inches and he'd been off and over in the galaxy furthest from their own. She contemplated the idea of pity, then discarded it. Pitying a man like that, that reminded her of something important she'd learned in the early days she'd been pouring her soul into the miserable of society, the charity cases. To know where enough was enough. Full stop and end of story.

He'd been overly mindful of what he'd said, which was allegedly a rare reversal from a prototypical denizen of the weird parts of the internet. No talk of dark web exploits or cats in ovens had leaked out of his lips. Not much had. Talking to him had been like trying to pry open a locked door with fingernails. Better things to be done with her time.

All things cut short, but nebulously enough that he had no reason to hate her. If he knew what was good for him, anyways.

Overall a memory worth a cheap laugh, then prompt discarding. She moved on, and noted to herself to not trust Mercy quite so much in the future. These things had a way of speaking to character that wasn't so innately obvious from the superficial walk-and-talk. Kelly liked to pride herself on being the weary sort. Learning from her lessons- she hadn't gotten this far in life on a pretty smile and hot air alone.

((Kelly Nguyen continued in All the Power in the Universe Conspires to Carry You, Demetri Futscher continued in Blaise))