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Meeting

Whoo first chapter! meet my little beans as they meet each other.

Contains= Gun mention, usage of said gun, violence, attempted kidnapping, restraints, gag, swearing, minors using vapes

Tatiana

--- I felt a little empty. Like always.

Staring at the board, I waited for class to start, barely able to ignore the noise.

I heard the teacher yell for silence and stiffened, breathing in. My heart pounded in my chest and I had to resist the urge to run out of the room.

I gripped the edge of my desk, and my music blasted in my ear, and I practiced the breathing exercises my therapist taught me. 

I somehow heard footsteps in my left ear and looked out the corner of my eye to see a ginger with blue streaks in her hair. She was tall, her shoulders broad, and she looked like a confused puppy. And I found her beautiful.

She wore sleek black headphones, a black leather jacket, and black leggings, and her gray bag had a keychain of a white, plastic balloon animal, as well as a blue wolf with wings. Her eyes were a strange mix of green, blue, and gray, with one much lighter than the other, and a few fiery golden flecks were visible. 

I wished I were prettier in that moment, so I’d even stand a chance with her. I had blue beads braided into my hair, but that was only temporary. My olive skin was patchy and had darker discoloration, I was short, and my face had a beauty mark on my left cheek.

She looked at the teacher, who finally noticed her and told her to sit down next to me. I felt my skin burn and let her. 

“Alright, class. First product of the quarter, we’ll be doing partner work. Pair up with your seat partners, and if you have any grievances, talk to me,”

She looked at me and whispered, “So, we’re doing this together?”

I nodded, and Mr. Simmons explained the instructions. We’d be researching what an assigned country did during World War one throughout the whole quarter, and I pulled out my mom’s old work computer when we were assigned Brazil. The other girl pulled out a nearly shattered HP computer, and Mr. Simmons took attendance. 

Her name was Chamomile, and corrected him in a whispery, yet strong voice, “I prefer Cami,”

“Apologies, Cami. Also, please take off your headphones,”

Just as he had when he told me to take out my earbuds.

Cami pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from her bag and said, “It’s in my accommodations list,”

She handed him the paper, then took it back when he read what he needed to.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “However, I’m sure you don’t need it,”

He took her headphones, as he had with my earbuds, and set them on his desk next to my things.

“You can collect them at the end of class,”

She tensed, and when people started working and we’d been assigned Brazil, she covered her ears and didn’t talk for the rest of class, only writing what she wanted to say down on a whiteboard she pulled out of her bag. 

“Hey, are you alright?” I asked multiple times. Each time, Cami shrugged and wrote, ‘Could be worse.’

Eventually, the bell rang and she went and got her headphones as I got my ear buds, and she left.

I walked to my next class, where I saw my friend Ashley. I hugged her, and her feline pupils dilated to saucers. It’d been a week since we last saw each other, as she’d gotten covid, and while her voice still sounded scratchy, she wasn’t sick anymore.

As a kenomi, the last remaining kind of shifter, other than the dragon-folk, who refused most contact with society in favor of the non-shifting dragons, she was a tiny bit cat. She had cat ears, a tail, the amber eyes of a cat, while most didn’t have cat eyes, and all of them, but those afflicted by an illness that shifters could get, could shift at will. Those with the illness would randomly shift, and on full moons, they’d be too dangerous to be around. Most died after their first shift.

Ashley, thankfully, wasn’t one of them. 

We walked into our class and the teacher told us we could sit where we wanted. We sat next to each other, and a girl with light brown hair and blue eyes that came in almost late, sat on my right.

We had a getting to know you activity for class, in which our teacher asked for us to answer questions on a survey, then write a short paragraph on our summers.

When the bell rang an hour and a half later, Ashley and I went to chemistry next, and Luna came by and hugged us both. Many people called her Moon, including us, not because of her name, but because her blond hair looked like the moon. 

She was coming from AP biology and going to math class, as it turned out, meaning we had the same lunch, last lunch.

Ashley and I were not table partners, I had someone I knew from the psych ward, and their name was Bramble. Bramble was another kenomi, they had light brown ears and a light brown tail with a white tip, as compared to Ashley’s charcoal gray ears and black tail.

They hugged me and said, “Long time, no see!”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“No, I’ve been out for the past- well, since you last left, actually,”

Three months.

“That is a shockingly long time for your parents,”

“Yeah- they tried, but I kinda ran away for two days, and they took the hint,”

Their voice broke into a song-like tone as they spoke those words, until they got to, ‘They took the hint’. There, it changed to a normal tone.

We’d exchanged numbers at one point, but we didn’t really use them considering Bramble’s parents put them back in the psych ward every few weeks when Bramble did anything vaguely ‘depressed’. Normally complaints about life in general. Bramble may have been actually depressed, but their treatments were working on them. Not like my treatment.

We weren’t doing much, the teacher just wanted to see what we already knew and getting to know us.

When the bell dismissed us for lunch, I introduced Bramble and Ashley, and they started talking to each other and exchanged information pretty early on.

They twined tails and we set our things at an empty table that seated eight, then saw Moon and waved her over.

Moon left her other friends and sat down next to me.

I saw Cami, and she sat at our table, the only empty spots. She didn’t interact with us, just stayed silent.

Moon tried to interact by saying, “Do you want to tell us your name or…?” 

Cami looked up and mumbled, “Um- no- sorry,”

“So, what are your interests?”

“Medieval history,”

“Anything else?”

“Um- wars. Especially the goofy ones. The lobster war, Emu war, Soccer war, things like that,”

“Never heard of any of those,”

She immediately went into a tangent on the Lobster War, “fought” between Brazil and France.

I added that much of my dead family was actually living in Brazil at the time of the war and we still had one of their lobster costumes.

Cami looked like she’d just had the best pie in the world as her first pie.

“Can I see it?” she asked.

I texted my mom for a picture of the costume, and said, “By the way, my family couldn’t really afford to do the schools for dance, so it's very…” I paused, searching for the right word, “...strange,”

It was dulled, moth eaten red fabric with a rusted, ruined wire frame to keep it up. Strange was an understatement, but it was all they could afford. I was glad my family was better off now.

My mom sent me the photo and I showed it to her, and even though it was essentially over glorified garbage, she looked even more ecstatic than before, practically jumping up and down in her seat.

She then showed me a picture of a helmet and said, “This is a brodie helmet, I found it buried in a trench when my mom took me to visit her hometown in France,”

“You stole the lobsters?” I jokingly said.

“What- no my mom isn’t a fisher- she was nob- she’s a doctor,”

“It’s just a joke, sorry I confused you,”

Her eyes brightened and she looked a bit nervous as she stuttered out, “Oh- um, okay,”

“From now on, you can ask me if I’m making a joke, okay?”

She nodded and said, “Thank you. I just realized- I don’t know your name,”

“Maria Tatiana, everyone calls me either Tatiana or Tati,”

“Oh, cool,”

Cami took out a book called A History of France and started reading.

The bell rang and Cami stood, as did I.

We went to the same class, me, Cami, and Moon. The door was locked, and there wasn’t a teacher, so we waited, and Cami and I somehow veered the conversation to the dynamics of a steam engine, then to crocheting in about two minutes.

The teacher arrived and opened the door, and directed us to our seats. He prefaced that he’d heard about Moon and I’s friendship and had us separated, then told us to take our earbuds and headphones out. He was much more understanding to Cami and I than Mr. Simmons when we told him we had the accommodations and let us keep them with the preface any music played had to be low.

I sat in my chair, and Cami was sat next to me, and other students slowly trickled in. I recognized a few, one of Moon’s friends, a girl named Marina, and her twin brother with the scars on his face I could never remember the name of. He sat next to us, and Cami stiffened and made an almost dog-like whine.

He sneered at her and snapped, “Not so wolf-hearted now, are you?”

“Leave me alone,” she squeaked. “It’s been five years, please,”

“Well, wolf-heart,” he said. He leaned in close and whispered something, and she abruptly stood and walked over to the teacher, tears glistening in her eyes, before a light blue paper was handed to her and she left.

“What did you say to her?” I accused. He didn’t answer.

The teacher moved him to a solo desk next to him and started talking, introducing himself, then having the small class of about fifteen people say their names and one fun fact.

Mine was that I was bilingual, while everyone else’s was something goofy like the time that one kid broke his arm when he was two.

Then came Marina’s twin, Hunter, and his fact was that he was attacked by a wolf five years ago, giving him the scars on his face.

Cami re-entered eventually, and said, “Guidance wants to talk to you, Hunter,” before sitting down next to me.

“Okay, so, would you like to stand up and introduce yourself?”

Cami shook her head with her eyes wide.

“At least your name?”

“Chamomile, but most people call me Cami,”

“Thank you, Cami,”

She breathed out a sigh of relief, and her shoulders relaxed.

When class was over, Hunter still hadn’t returned, so we left and I didn’t think much on their interaction.

Cami

----

I left the audition, left the school, and got in my cousin’s car. She’d lied to me my whole life about her name, at least until about three years ago.

Lyorna’s girlfriend was in the car with her, meaning I had to call her by her given name, and Lyorna immediately started teasing me.

“So, how was your first day of school?” she said in a very joking tone. Some people I could read more than others. Lyorna was like a book at this point, Tatiana, though I liked her, was like a stone wall I had my eye pressed up to. I couldn’t yet tell if she wanted to be my friend or was just a sweet person.

Lizzie smiled at me, looked over at Lyorna and mouthed with a sleepy grin, “We finish later,”

“Finish what?” I asked. Lizzie’s lipstick was smeared, I realized. “Oh… never mind,”

“Good, unless you want all the smutty, smutty details,”

I turned up my music as Lyorna started talking.

Lizzie pulled out a vape, and used it. It was sticky sweet- too sweet. 

I covered my nose and said nasally, “Please stop, it smells awful,”

“Oh. Sorry, Cami,”

She opened the windows and let the smoke air out as Lyorna started driving. I’d never understood why anyone liked vapes if they smelled like the embodiment of a sugar buzz, but that somehow worked for some people.

I looked out the window and eventually, Lyorna dropped me off, and I started up the long, windy gravel path to my house. My mother was an immortal being, and had bought this land roughly two hundred years ago when she’d moved out west. She had spent twenty years on the house and path. Twenty, long years. In those years, a friend of hers named Mary Magdalena Jones had died, and her husband at the time, a dragon-shifter named Balan, or Prayer, had been paralyzed waist-down by a tree collapsing on him in a storm. In the end, she had a house roughly five thousand square feet and eight bedrooms and she was pretty well off at the time for compensation of helping the union army with weapon supplies. The mansion had since been fixed up more and more until it resembled a big brick house, the only things that remained suggesting its ancientness being the cornerstone that said, ‘Est MDCCCXCVII,’ or for simpletons, 1897, and the inner walls being wooden slats.

Good ol home. I unlocked the door and set my bag inside, and my brother, Corey, ran up to me and gave me a tight hug.

He had no control over his shift, as he’d never been interested, and as such, he went to a private school that was all shifters. The same one I went to until I got expelled after I broke an asshole’s jaw after she called me the r-word and gave me a bloody nose. I still had to deal with her in my pack, and she still hated me.

I retreated to my room and stayed seated. Olivia texted me, and I went out to meet her.

She looked like what most people thought a dragon shifter looked like when in her hybrid form. Olive skin, big dark eyes, ears like an avali’s but scaly. She had white and gold scales in striped patterns, and serrated dragon-like claws at the end of her fingers if she wanted them out. Keyword ‘like’. Dragons’ claws typically weren’t serrated and therefore weren’t war crimes, they were more like a bayonet, triple edged. Just no gun underneath. But as we weren’t sure what she shifted into, she called herself a dragon shifter for simplicity's sake.

We walked along the path from my house to the hiking trail, and we walked along for a while. Eventually, Lyorna came by, and we talked and joked for a while, when Olivia squealed and said something amazing.

“Viper finally said I’m ready to be a healer!”

She was jumping up and down and her magic glow shooting everywhere.

“Funny, considering you still faint at the sight of blood,” I joked.

“We were twelve-!”

“I wasn’t,” Lyorna laughed, cutting her off.

Olivia stuck her tongue out at Lyorna and I heard a gunshot.

We instinctively hid under bushes, and in the earth; in Olivia’s case, and I felt someone grab me by the back of the neck and hold a gun to my throat.

I twisted before they could shoot, and flipped them over, then felt the bullet hit me in the foot. I shrieked, and Lyorna knocked out the other person, emerging from behind him and punching him in the back of the skull.

She lifted me and kissed my forehead, then called for Olivia.

Olivia emerged from the earth, the spaces between her scales caked with earth and grass. She shook her scales loose of dirt and put her glowing hand on my ankle and healed the foot over the course of an hour.

“Thank you,” I croaked.

I tried to stand and fell, and Lyorna giggled, “Oh, do you want mommy to come and kiss your little boo-boo-”

I stopped her and said, “Don’t finish that fucking sentence or I’ll take that gun down there and shoot,”

“Sorry,” she said, “Too far?”

“Too far,” I confirmed.

She carried me as a bundle in her red-mud wings for a while until I could stand again, and we walked for a while longer, when Lyorna’s ears twitched, and she pulled all of us off the path.

A blond girl I recognized as Tatiana’s friend jogged by, eyes filled with tears, an adult’s handprint on her cheek, and a small, half-filipino girl that looked about eight but talked like a ten year-old that followed after.

The little girl went ahead and Moon stopped, bending over and stretching.

The girl turned, and walked back to Moon, then Moon lifted her up, when came a gunshot, and Moon ducked to the floor, the little one almost completely hidden.

Someone walked by us, and I ducked further into the bush and closed my eyes.

“Where is Chamomile Malkom?” Hunter hissed.

“Hunter- What are you doing?” Moon whispered. I heard her backing away from the crunch on the gravel path.

“Luna, don’t play dumb. Where is she?”

“I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” she screamed.

I heard rapid footsteps, and dared to open my eyes. From what I could see, Hunter had wrapped a pistol around Moon’s throat, and her face was turning red from lack of oxygen. The child was trying to pull Hunter away.

I decided to act at that moment.

I howled, and he let Moon go, who rubbed her throat and sank to her knees, tears falling even harder.

I crawled out in my wolf form and nudged her with my snout.

“Cami, what are you doing?” Olivia hissed in the dialect of the shifter tongue we spoke.

“Relax,” I said. 

I nudged her again, and she took the hint and started running, when Hunter ran out of the bushes and laughed.

He shot me in the side, and I roared. Moon returned to me and I accidentally bit her. She collapsed, and Lyorna ran out of the bushes, grabbed her and the little girl, and flew upwards to get them to safety.

Hunter didn’t chase them.

“I’ve been waiting years for this,” he snarled.

I started laughing. “With your patience? You insist on using the scholar’s mate opening so the match is over quicker,”

He turned red and shoved his pistol into my mouth. With difficulty, as I was over a foot taller than him. And most people.

“Shut up,” he snarled.

I nodded.

He chained my wrists behind me, and I heard Olivia following us.

I didn’t really try to fight back, I have to admit. I was only playing a game with him.

He eventually settled for weakly punching me in the jaw, and I faked a blackout. He dragged me along for a bit, and I had to resist the urge to laugh at him.

---

Eventually, he stopped after dragging me down a flight of stairs and called, “I found a were-bitch!”

At that moment, I decided to open my eyes, and as the Critura of my pack, I was able to turn people into shifters if they made direct eye contact with me when I had my eyes glow gold.

One of them seized up, and they immediately blindfolded me and gagged me. I heard one of them approach me and kick me in the gut as I tried to spit out my gag. 

I doubled over, and roared loud enough to make at least one person’s ears bleed.

Someone tilted my chin upward, probably to make me meet their eyes, and I spat in their face, then threw out one leg, swept the other person and pulled apart the silver cuffs with brute force.

I pulled off my blindfold and immediately ran away, ignoring the pain in my side.

Three chased after me. My history teacher, Hunter, and my guidance counselor. Mr. Simmons had a rifle that he periodically tried to shoot me with, Hunter had his pistol, and my guidance counselor had a dagger that she didn’t throw.

I eventually threw them off, and the adrenaline caught up with me.

I was aware when my cheek hit the ground and less so when Olivia and Lyorna lifted me.

Meeting

Whoo first chapter! meet my little beans as they meet each other.

Contains= Gun mention, usage of said gun, violence, attempted kidnapping, restraints, gag, swearing, minors using vapes

Tatiana

--- I felt a little empty. Like always.

Staring at the board, I waited for class to start, barely able to ignore the noise.

I heard the teacher yell for silence and stiffened, breathing in. My heart pounded in my chest and I had to resist the urge to run out of the room.

I gripped the edge of my desk, and my music blasted in my ear, and I practiced the breathing exercises my therapist taught me. 

I somehow heard footsteps in my left ear and looked out the corner of my eye to see a ginger with blue streaks in her hair. She was tall, her shoulders broad, and she looked like a confused puppy. And I found her beautiful.

She wore sleek black headphones, a black leather jacket, and black leggings, and her gray bag had a keychain of a white, plastic balloon animal, as well as a blue wolf with wings. Her eyes were a strange mix of green, blue, and gray, with one much lighter than the other, and a few fiery golden flecks were visible. 

I wished I were prettier in that moment, so I’d even stand a chance with her. I had blue beads braided into my hair, but that was only temporary. My olive skin was patchy and had darker discoloration, I was short, and my face had a beauty mark on my left cheek.

She looked at the teacher, who finally noticed her and told her to sit down next to me. I felt my skin burn and let her. 

“Alright, class. First product of the quarter, we’ll be doing partner work. Pair up with your seat partners, and if you have any grievances, talk to me,”

She looked at me and whispered, “So, we’re doing this together?”

I nodded, and Mr. Simmons explained the instructions. We’d be researching what an assigned country did during World War one throughout the whole quarter, and I pulled out my mom’s old work computer when we were assigned Brazil. The other girl pulled out a nearly shattered HP computer, and Mr. Simmons took attendance. 

Her name was Chamomile, and corrected him in a whispery, yet strong voice, “I prefer Cami,”

“Apologies, Cami. Also, please take off your headphones,”

Just as he had when he told me to take out my earbuds.

Cami pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from her bag and said, “It’s in my accommodations list,”

She handed him the paper, then took it back when he read what he needed to.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “However, I’m sure you don’t need it,”

He took her headphones, as he had with my earbuds, and set them on his desk next to my things.

“You can collect them at the end of class,”

She tensed, and when people started working and we’d been assigned Brazil, she covered her ears and didn’t talk for the rest of class, only writing what she wanted to say down on a whiteboard she pulled out of her bag. 

“Hey, are you alright?” I asked multiple times. Each time, Cami shrugged and wrote, ‘Could be worse.’

Eventually, the bell rang and she went and got her headphones as I got my ear buds, and she left.

I walked to my next class, where I saw my friend Ashley. I hugged her, and her feline pupils dilated to saucers. It’d been a week since we last saw each other, as she’d gotten covid, and while her voice still sounded scratchy, she wasn’t sick anymore.

As a kenomi, the last remaining kind of shifter, other than the dragon-folk, who refused most contact with society in favor of the non-shifting dragons, she was a tiny bit cat. She had cat ears, a tail, the amber eyes of a cat, while most didn’t have cat eyes, and all of them, but those afflicted by an illness that shifters could get, could shift at will. Those with the illness would randomly shift, and on full moons, they’d be too dangerous to be around. Most died after their first shift.

Ashley, thankfully, wasn’t one of them. 

We walked into our class and the teacher told us we could sit where we wanted. We sat next to each other, and a girl with light brown hair and blue eyes that came in almost late, sat on my right.

We had a getting to know you activity for class, in which our teacher asked for us to answer questions on a survey, then write a short paragraph on our summers.

When the bell rang an hour and a half later, Ashley and I went to chemistry next, and Luna came by and hugged us both. Many people called her Moon, including us, not because of her name, but because her blond hair looked like the moon. 

She was coming from AP biology and going to math class, as it turned out, meaning we had the same lunch, last lunch.

Ashley and I were not table partners, I had someone I knew from the psych ward, and their name was Bramble. Bramble was another kenomi, they had light brown ears and a light brown tail with a white tip, as compared to Ashley’s charcoal gray ears and black tail.

They hugged me and said, “Long time, no see!”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“No, I’ve been out for the past- well, since you last left, actually,”

Three months.

“That is a shockingly long time for your parents,”

“Yeah- they tried, but I kinda ran away for two days, and they took the hint,”

Their voice broke into a song-like tone as they spoke those words, until they got to, ‘They took the hint’. There, it changed to a normal tone.

We’d exchanged numbers at one point, but we didn’t really use them considering Bramble’s parents put them back in the psych ward every few weeks when Bramble did anything vaguely ‘depressed’. Normally complaints about life in general. Bramble may have been actually depressed, but their treatments were working on them. Not like my treatment.

We weren’t doing much, the teacher just wanted to see what we already knew and getting to know us.

When the bell dismissed us for lunch, I introduced Bramble and Ashley, and they started talking to each other and exchanged information pretty early on.

They twined tails and we set our things at an empty table that seated eight, then saw Moon and waved her over.

Moon left her other friends and sat down next to me.

I saw Cami, and she sat at our table, the only empty spots. She didn’t interact with us, just stayed silent.

Moon tried to interact by saying, “Do you want to tell us your name or…?” 

Cami looked up and mumbled, “Um- no- sorry,”

“So, what are your interests?”

“Medieval history,”

“Anything else?”

“Um- wars. Especially the goofy ones. The lobster war, Emu war, Soccer war, things like that,”

“Never heard of any of those,”

She immediately went into a tangent on the Lobster War, “fought” between Brazil and France.

I added that much of my dead family was actually living in Brazil at the time of the war and we still had one of their lobster costumes.

Cami looked like she’d just had the best pie in the world as her first pie.

“Can I see it?” she asked.

I texted my mom for a picture of the costume, and said, “By the way, my family couldn’t really afford to do the schools for dance, so it's very…” I paused, searching for the right word, “...strange,”

It was dulled, moth eaten red fabric with a rusted, ruined wire frame to keep it up. Strange was an understatement, but it was all they could afford. I was glad my family was better off now.

My mom sent me the photo and I showed it to her, and even though it was essentially over glorified garbage, she looked even more ecstatic than before, practically jumping up and down in her seat.

She then showed me a picture of a helmet and said, “This is a brodie helmet, I found it buried in a trench when my mom took me to visit her hometown in France,”

“You stole the lobsters?” I jokingly said.

“What- no my mom isn’t a fisher- she was nob- she’s a doctor,”

“It’s just a joke, sorry I confused you,”

Her eyes brightened and she looked a bit nervous as she stuttered out, “Oh- um, okay,”

“From now on, you can ask me if I’m making a joke, okay?”

She nodded and said, “Thank you. I just realized- I don’t know your name,”

“Maria Tatiana, everyone calls me either Tatiana or Tati,”

“Oh, cool,”

Cami took out a book called A History of France and started reading.

The bell rang and Cami stood, as did I.

We went to the same class, me, Cami, and Moon. The door was locked, and there wasn’t a teacher, so we waited, and Cami and I somehow veered the conversation to the dynamics of a steam engine, then to crocheting in about two minutes.

The teacher arrived and opened the door, and directed us to our seats. He prefaced that he’d heard about Moon and I’s friendship and had us separated, then told us to take our earbuds and headphones out. He was much more understanding to Cami and I than Mr. Simmons when we told him we had the accommodations and let us keep them with the preface any music played had to be low.

I sat in my chair, and Cami was sat next to me, and other students slowly trickled in. I recognized a few, one of Moon’s friends, a girl named Marina, and her twin brother with the scars on his face I could never remember the name of. He sat next to us, and Cami stiffened and made an almost dog-like whine.

He sneered at her and snapped, “Not so wolf-hearted now, are you?”

“Leave me alone,” she squeaked. “It’s been five years, please,”

“Well, wolf-heart,” he said. He leaned in close and whispered something, and she abruptly stood and walked over to the teacher, tears glistening in her eyes, before a light blue paper was handed to her and she left.

“What did you say to her?” I accused. He didn’t answer.

The teacher moved him to a solo desk next to him and started talking, introducing himself, then having the small class of about fifteen people say their names and one fun fact.

Mine was that I was bilingual, while everyone else’s was something goofy like the time that one kid broke his arm when he was two.

Then came Marina’s twin, Hunter, and his fact was that he was attacked by a wolf five years ago, giving him the scars on his face.

Cami re-entered eventually, and said, “Guidance wants to talk to you, Hunter,” before sitting down next to me.

“Okay, so, would you like to stand up and introduce yourself?”

Cami shook her head with her eyes wide.

“At least your name?”

“Chamomile, but most people call me Cami,”

“Thank you, Cami,”

She breathed out a sigh of relief, and her shoulders relaxed.

When class was over, Hunter still hadn’t returned, so we left and I didn’t think much on their interaction.

Cami

----

I left the audition, left the school, and got in my cousin’s car. She’d lied to me my whole life about her name, at least until about three years ago.

Lyorna’s girlfriend was in the car with her, meaning I had to call her by her given name, and Lyorna immediately started teasing me.

“So, how was your first day of school?” she said in a very joking tone. Some people I could read more than others. Lyorna was like a book at this point, Tatiana, though I liked her, was like a stone wall I had my eye pressed up to. I couldn’t yet tell if she wanted to be my friend or was just a sweet person.

Lizzie smiled at me, looked over at Lyorna and mouthed with a sleepy grin, “We finish later,”

“Finish what?” I asked. Lizzie’s lipstick was smeared, I realized. “Oh… never mind,”

“Good, unless you want all the smutty, smutty details,”

I turned up my music as Lyorna started talking.

Lizzie pulled out a vape, and used it. It was sticky sweet- too sweet. 

I covered my nose and said nasally, “Please stop, it smells awful,”

“Oh. Sorry, Cami,”

She opened the windows and let the smoke air out as Lyorna started driving. I’d never understood why anyone liked vapes if they smelled like the embodiment of a sugar buzz, but that somehow worked for some people.

I looked out the window and eventually, Lyorna dropped me off, and I started up the long, windy gravel path to my house. My mother was an immortal being, and had bought this land roughly two hundred years ago when she’d moved out west. She had spent twenty years on the house and path. Twenty, long years. In those years, a friend of hers named Mary Magdalena Jones had died, and her husband at the time, a dragon-shifter named Balan, or Prayer, had been paralyzed waist-down by a tree collapsing on him in a storm. In the end, she had a house roughly five thousand square feet and eight bedrooms and she was pretty well off at the time for compensation of helping the union army with weapon supplies. The mansion had since been fixed up more and more until it resembled a big brick house, the only things that remained suggesting its ancientness being the cornerstone that said, ‘Est MDCCCXCVII,’ or for simpletons, 1897, and the inner walls being wooden slats.

Good ol home. I unlocked the door and set my bag inside, and my brother, Corey, ran up to me and gave me a tight hug.

He had no control over his shift, as he’d never been interested, and as such, he went to a private school that was all shifters. The same one I went to until I got expelled after I broke an asshole’s jaw after she called me the r-word and gave me a bloody nose. I still had to deal with her in my pack, and she still hated me.

I retreated to my room and stayed seated. Olivia texted me, and I went out to meet her.

She looked like what most people thought a dragon shifter looked like when in her hybrid form. Olive skin, big dark eyes, ears like an avali’s but scaly. She had white and gold scales in striped patterns, and serrated dragon-like claws at the end of her fingers if she wanted them out. Keyword ‘like’. Dragons’ claws typically weren’t serrated and therefore weren’t war crimes, they were more like a bayonet, triple edged. Just no gun underneath. But as we weren’t sure what she shifted into, she called herself a dragon shifter for simplicity's sake.

We walked along the path from my house to the hiking trail, and we walked along for a while. Eventually, Lyorna came by, and we talked and joked for a while, when Olivia squealed and said something amazing.

“Viper finally said I’m ready to be a healer!”

She was jumping up and down and her magic glow shooting everywhere.

“Funny, considering you still faint at the sight of blood,” I joked.

“We were twelve-!”

“I wasn’t,” Lyorna laughed, cutting her off.

Olivia stuck her tongue out at Lyorna and I heard a gunshot.

We instinctively hid under bushes, and in the earth; in Olivia’s case, and I felt someone grab me by the back of the neck and hold a gun to my throat.

I twisted before they could shoot, and flipped them over, then felt the bullet hit me in the foot. I shrieked, and Lyorna knocked out the other person, emerging from behind him and punching him in the back of the skull.

She lifted me and kissed my forehead, then called for Olivia.

Olivia emerged from the earth, the spaces between her scales caked with earth and grass. She shook her scales loose of dirt and put her glowing hand on my ankle and healed the foot over the course of an hour.

“Thank you,” I croaked.

I tried to stand and fell, and Lyorna giggled, “Oh, do you want mommy to come and kiss your little boo-boo-”

I stopped her and said, “Don’t finish that fucking sentence or I’ll take that gun down there and shoot,”

“Sorry,” she said, “Too far?”

“Too far,” I confirmed.

She carried me as a bundle in her red-mud wings for a while until I could stand again, and we walked for a while longer, when Lyorna’s ears twitched, and she pulled all of us off the path.

A blond girl I recognized as Tatiana’s friend jogged by, eyes filled with tears, an adult’s handprint on her cheek, and a small, half-filipino girl that looked about eight but talked like a ten year-old that followed after.

The little girl went ahead and Moon stopped, bending over and stretching.

The girl turned, and walked back to Moon, then Moon lifted her up, when came a gunshot, and Moon ducked to the floor, the little one almost completely hidden.

Someone walked by us, and I ducked further into the bush and closed my eyes.

“Where is Chamomile Malkom?” Hunter hissed.

“Hunter- What are you doing?” Moon whispered. I heard her backing away from the crunch on the gravel path.

“Luna, don’t play dumb. Where is she?”

“I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” she screamed.

I heard rapid footsteps, and dared to open my eyes. From what I could see, Hunter had wrapped a pistol around Moon’s throat, and her face was turning red from lack of oxygen. The child was trying to pull Hunter away.

I decided to act at that moment.

I howled, and he let Moon go, who rubbed her throat and sank to her knees, tears falling even harder.

I crawled out in my wolf form and nudged her with my snout.

“Cami, what are you doing?” Olivia hissed in the dialect of the shifter tongue we spoke.

“Relax,” I said. 

I nudged her again, and she took the hint and started running, when Hunter ran out of the bushes and laughed.

He shot me in the side, and I roared. Moon returned to me and I accidentally bit her. She collapsed, and Lyorna ran out of the bushes, grabbed her and the little girl, and flew upwards to get them to safety.

Hunter didn’t chase them.

“I’ve been waiting years for this,” he snarled.

I started laughing. “With your patience? You insist on using the scholar’s mate opening so the match is over quicker,”

He turned red and shoved his pistol into my mouth. With difficulty, as I was over a foot taller than him. And most people.

“Shut up,” he snarled.

I nodded.

He chained my wrists behind me, and I heard Olivia following us.

I didn’t really try to fight back, I have to admit. I was only playing a game with him.

He eventually settled for weakly punching me in the jaw, and I faked a blackout. He dragged me along for a bit, and I had to resist the urge to laugh at him.

---

Eventually, he stopped after dragging me down a flight of stairs and called, “I found a were-bitch!”

At that moment, I decided to open my eyes, and as the Critura of my pack, I was able to turn people into shifters if they made direct eye contact with me when I had my eyes glow gold.

One of them seized up, and they immediately blindfolded me and gagged me. I heard one of them approach me and kick me in the gut as I tried to spit out my gag. 

I doubled over, and roared loud enough to make at least one person’s ears bleed.

Someone tilted my chin upward, probably to make me meet their eyes, and I spat in their face, then threw out one leg, swept the other person and pulled apart the silver cuffs with brute force.

I pulled off my blindfold and immediately ran away, ignoring the pain in my side.

Three chased after me. My history teacher, Hunter, and my guidance counselor. Mr. Simmons had a rifle that he periodically tried to shoot me with, Hunter had his pistol, and my guidance counselor had a dagger that she didn’t throw.

I eventually threw them off, and the adrenaline caught up with me.

I was aware when my cheek hit the ground and less so when Olivia and Lyorna lifted me.

Any recommendations for Homestuck fan artists?

:33 < hmmmm.... well im not too sure but youcould check out gewbz, saradiation, methvapes, autisticaradiamegido, stridersword, joyusanarchist, and disabled-stuck !! if you already know these artists, please tell me !! these are all some amazing homestuck artists im following on tumblr !! :33