The FK in the Coffee

Chloe entered the café with her old school’s uniform on, and an incredible number of shopping bags in her hands. There had to be at least seven of them, and that was after compressing the day’s finds into as few bags as possible. Several of the café’s patrons turned to watch her struggling to get through the door with all of her crap. Chloe recognized a few of them from her previous day at the school.

She knew that she looked ridiculous. But she actually did need to buy this much stuff. Most of the things that she used to own were stuck in another universe, aside from the stupid uniform she was still wearing. She set her stuff down by an empty booth, went to the front to place her order. Everything went perfectly smoothly, until she actually had to get her coffee.

You see, Chloe couldn’t wear shoes. She had weird, scaly, clawed toe-feet at the end of her digitigrade legs, and they didn’t always play nicely with wood floors. Her feet didn’t have the same kind of traction as a pair of shoes, and not even the extra balance from her tail could save her. On the way back to her booth, she stumbled, then slipped and fell. Half of her coffee was now in someone’s lap

“Crap!” She looked up at her inadvertent victim – a girl with very long, dark red hair. “I’m sorry! My legs are weird and hard to walk with and… yeah.” She scrambled to her feet, accidentally bumping her horns against the table on the way up. Hopefully that didn’t spill anything else. “Sorry,” she said again sheepishly.

Chloe took her now-empty cup back to the front. One short conversation with the barista later, she returned to the other girl’s table with a wad of paper towels, which she held out for her to take.

“These should work better than the napkins,” said the demon. “Better at… absorbing stuff.”

Chloe couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen this person before. Waist-length, dark red hair wasn’t the most extraordinary thing she’d seen, but it still stood out enough to be noteworthy. “So, uh… I think I’ve seen you before. Do you go to the academy?”

It might have been a little weird, talking to the girl she might have just given a minor burn, but neither of them seemed to have much better to do. At least, Chloe didn’t. She could either talk to strangers or sit by herself and think about how isolated she was from everything she used to know. The first option seemed less painful.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Chloe.”

Chloe was still hovering next to Morgan’s table. Her loneliness far outweighed her fear of looking awkward at this point. “You could probably say I’m new here. Where ‘here’ refers to this entire universe and not just the island.” She chuckled, nervous. This fact still made her incredibly uncomfortable, but it was a hell of a conversation piece.

“So… what’s supernatural about you?” Another fun conversation piece. Hopefully it wouldn’t have become too boring for the people who live here, but at least she wasn’t asking what Morgan was studying.

Chloe had absolutely no idea what that was supposed to mean. Something about three spirits and using their abilities? If that was the shortest way for Morgan to explain it, it had to be pretty complicated.

“It’s totally okay for you to ask,” Chloe assured. “I was… summoned here, I guess. One of the students here was playing around with a book he shouldn’t have, and tried to summon a demon. Only… he screwed up, and ended up with me instead.” She shrugged. “And now I’m stuck here.”

Chloe paused for a moment, before realizing that she left out a key part of her story. “…Oh! I mean, I’m not actually a demon. I don’t think. I went to a school a lot like the academy, in a slightly different universe with a slightly different history, less supernatural stuff, and a Captain Picard with a French accent.”

Chloe would never get used to English-accent Captain Picard.

The demon gave Morgan a blank look. Until that moment, she was worried that she was bothering Morgan. “Um… sure.” Chloe smiled. “Mind if I sit down with you?” She expected that Morgan would say yes, and was already slowly moving into the seat across from her.

“So… what do you want to know?”