What's That Devil's Deal? (Max)

The Cafeteria, as always, was a hive buzzing with conversation and the smacking of lips on eating mouths. Cliques congregated in clusters around round tables and small booths. Queen bees held court with their drones at long, rectangular tables. Chloe nodded to Marina as she walked past.

Not two years ago, Chloe would have seen a buzzing hive like this and found it full of vile insects. She would hide in the corner, alone, excluding herself from their buzzing symphony, safe with distance from their verbal sting, rationalizing her solitude as superiority and not self-defense.

That phase of her life was on the way out, but she still saw kindred spirits in the ones who sat alone. That one, for example: black horns, prehensile pointed tail, aloof; if his legs were weirder Chloe would think he was some sort of gender-swapped doppelganger.

Say... she still wanted some more members for the Demonic Student Union. This kid looked like a demon who wasn't cursed with an overabundance of social engagements. Maybe she could just...

"Er, hi," Chloe said, holding her lunch tray and standing across the table from him. "Mind if I sit here?" She was already starting to set her food down and sit across from him.

As if he would say no.

"I'm Chloe," she would introduce herself. "You?"

"Likewise."

Chloe returned the smile, then took a sip of her water.

"I think I've seen you around before. Someone pointed you out and asked if you were my brother." A chuckle. "Politics being the way they are in my hell, I think I said something like 'Jesus, I hope not.'"

She chewed her food, then realized she might need to elaborate on that so it didn't sound like an insult. "I feel like having someone skulking around and plotting against me would hurt my GPA. Or chances of living past high school. One of the two. Hashtag: just demon things."

Chloe suddenly found herself wondering if Rufus would be able to relate to this, or if he would just be horrified.

Rufus's mother ate her brother. That short story, by itself, told Chloe a lot about him. First, that he was a completely different sort of demon from a different sort of hell, and secondly, that his species of demon had a lot of natural intra-family conflict.

She nodded.

"I'm starting to feel lucky that having a family is such a new concept for my dad, then." She chewed on a few bites of her food, then realized that she might need to explain this.

"Goetic demons like him don't usually reproduce. I'm his and a human woman's daughter, making me... sort of a freak of nature, I guess." She snorted. "At least, as far as the giant eldritch monstrosities of goetic hell are concerned."

Rufus was trying to reassure her that she wasn't a freak, wasn't he? Chloe laughed. "One of the Goetic demons is traditionally represented as a lion head wreathed by a wheel made out of legs. I sometimes like to imagine it rolling around through hell like some kind of leg-wheel. That's the kind of thing that would think of me as a freak, and he looks like something you'd see on a bad acid trip." She grinned. "Everything's relative, I guess."

That could give her a decent segway, she realized.

"A lot of people don't really appreciate that, though. It's all black and white for them, and demons have a bad reputation, so in their heads that means we're all automatically horrible monsters who desire nothing other than suffering."

She took an aggressive bite out of her lunch. It got her all worked up to think about it. She hoped it would get Rufus all worked up, too.