Jaleh Torkan tapped at the text notification on her phone. In addition to just being an odd message, the sender number wasn't listed where it normally was. Very slowly she typed out a reply, only to get an error message saying her reply was not received.
She had gotten her phone out of a general necessity for her job, but outside teasing students, she still didn't fully enjoy having the thing. Few of her actual family were big into social networking so she'd never really felt the impulse to use anything except mail and email. She'd search up pictures of museum galleries and colorful artworks, but she'd inevitably have to just move it over to a computer anyway to make a power point presentation with them. It was less convenient and more like an extra step that work-ified even her off hours.
Scrolling through her other messages she skimmed other weird promos and various boring updates on staff meetings she'd already learned the schedules for. A couple texts from her mom asking her to visit more often... she really didn't want to deal with home stuff right now. She was her own person and didn't need to hear about how when her mom was her age she was already married and raising her and teaching and getting higher pay and visited her own mother more often...
Jaleh remembered being in secondary school herself and thinking it was way too obtuse for the normal kids and way too easy for bright ones. She deeply wanted to change that but didn't know how. She was a distant, bitter teenager and it wasn't really until she moved for university and made friends that she realized how small she'd made herself focusing only on her studies. She found the text chain for one of those friends, Elizabeth Warren, who'd become a teacher in her same district but at the elementary level. They'd set aside this afternoon for a coffee date so they could relax and maybe compare notes on how to make work less hellish.
--Are we still on for today? I just got done and should be on time if I hurry.
--I've been here for a while already, LOL
Jaleh didn't enjoy text exchanges with Elizabeth. It seemed so irritating, like having a bug that won't stop landing on you. Of course she's already there, all she has to grade are glorified coloring books. And what's so funny, that I work harder?
--Oh I'm so sorry! Have you ordered yet?
The cafe was surprisingly empty and Ms. Warren was tapping out something pretty vigorously. Jaleh walked over to her and realized Elizabeth hadn't looked up once from her phone.
She still hasn't noticed me?
Thinking back to how she handled students in situations like these, Ms. Torkan took out her own phone and opened up the camera. When she did, she noticed that she actually had a bunch of new filters her phone had apparently installed in the last update. There were actually way to many here now. She cycled through a couple and eventually found a visually striking black and white one, 1950's Zone. From her standing position she could see Ms. Warren and some man raising his voice at a couple on a date down the row of booths.
"HI LIZ" [SNAP]
What Jaleh saw made every modicum of giddiness disappear from her mind. Before her was an entirely black and white creature in the vague shape of a woman. It was fundamentally hard to make the creature out, as if it had a lighting source of near perpetual silhouette, but in gleaming white light she could see the woman where her friend had been possessed grotesque compound eyes and the lower half of the face giving way to an insect's maw. But worse than the visage was the ominous, locust-like buzzing that was almost palpably enraged. No nightmare compared t-
"Give me that!"
The creature quickly snatched Jaleh's phone out of her hand.
Lizzy Vespa was furious. Despite a lifetime of having situational sensitivity, her friend Jaleh had somehow managed to avoid being seen by her large compound eyes or smelled by her antenna. It had always been a running joke between them that no one could sneak up on a Hornet Woman. She remembered hitting it off with Jaleh because of their 'other-ness'. Jaleh wasn't from Lake Point and most of her family lived in Europe, and Lizzy was a heavily sensationalized chemically-altered she-beast that struck fear in the hearts of all humanity. Both of them had mother issues, too. Jaleh's was overbearing and self-important and Lizzy's had genetically warped herself into a insectoid monster in order to gain eternal youth. They hit it off like sisters. But this little prank was too much and had pissed her off.
Jaleh was about to start crying. Her throat locked up and she couldn't even scream. If by some miracle she made it out of this alive, she never, ever would forget the shear trauma inflicted by thi-
"And this photo sucks too!" Lizzy said as she hit delete.
Jaleh was beyond upset.
"I'll never get another chance like that again, will I?" she sighed.
"Never." Lizzy had a hard enough time being respected as an elementary school teacher without undignified candid shots of her going around.
In the occupied booth down from Ms. Warren, there was a tense verbal altercation happening. Bethany Black and Gary Meadows were being confronted by Beth's husband Edward Black.
"You were always so distant, Ed. I feel like I never even had a husband after Karyn was born. You were just done with me after you got your daughter and could call yourself a parent while I did all the legwork. I just felt like a giant weight on your life, a big problem for you to ignore. Well now you're at least not ignoring me!" Beth hadn't ever actually said such mean things to Edward, the moment had really left her panicking about the impact this might have on their daughter, and she was trying to justify her decision but she was so angry too...
"Listen pal, I'm father enough for both your kid and mine. And Betty's smart, so she can tell. She doesn't need anyone but me, and I don't need anyone but her." Gary was really, really trying not to cause a bigger scene with this emotional trainwreck of a husband. It took everything in his power to keep a calm facial expression and an even voice.
"I... why are you two doing this... don't you care about anyone?!" Edward had found out his wife was cheating a while ago, and it had taken him a lot of courage to confront them in the act like this. He wasn't a violent person, or even a particularly passionate one, but he felt like his world was never going to be the same after tod-
[SNAP]
"I am very happy to see Burakon tamed by love!" The entirely black and white form of Dr. Emiri Kimura had a wide smile plastered on her face. Her mouth movements didn't evenly match up to her words, and the words themselves were a very clumsy English overwriting of her feelings on the situation. After many years of study on the nature of the two-headed destructive monster Burakon, she had finally managed to lure it into a shrinking ray that compressed its molecules to roughly human size. No longer would the beast rampage through Lake Point, unwittingly endangering the lives of her community and her daughter. She hadn't done it alone, but she was the only one checking in on Burakon's date.
Gabriella was feeling very annoyed. She had a very rocky history with relationships. Her creator had made her as an unthinking mechanical wife, superficially indistinct from a human woman. But in a raid on the laboratory by police her creator was killed and the mold of her face was entirely destroyed, revealing the tangled mess of wires in her skull and distorting her voice emitter. She did her best by her foster daughter, but more often than not she felt like useless scrap and was seen as a hideous, unfeeling beast. Then she met Burakon, who had never told her an unkind word or looked at her judgmentally. She'd never had a need to use a diner, but just watching Burakon happily devour plate after plate made her genuinely contented.
"CouLd y-you l-leave u-us? WE-ee're tr-tr-y to c-c-celebr-ate.
Burakon roared at the doctor while its other head swallowed an entire order of the grand slam. It was very thankful for everything the humans had done for it and had never been so genuinely happy.
Sarah McMillan was being walked home by her boyfriend Biff Meadows after a less than stellar date. Sarah really didn't care for Biff anymore. It had become apparent that he had some deep seated daddy issues that really put her off what she thought was just a simple, strong muscle man. She didn't hate him, but there was no reason to spend her high school years playing therapist to a guy who really should've been an emotional bedrock for her. She didn't really have anyone in her life she genuinely wanted to hang out with anymore. She felt she was simply too valuable to be hanging out with vulnerable types. Looking over at Biff she saw a colorless imitation of what they used to be. She wished something could actually improve this so she didn't have to break it off with him. Doing stuff like that could be fun but it was work.
Biff was thinking about his Dad's constant pressure on him to excel at football. He liked his dad, or at least he figured he did, but it was never enough. She wished Gabriella would just acknowledge that she's the superior model and stop dragging down the mood of their house with morose sobbing. Beatrice sighed and looked down at the part of her torso and upper arm mold that had been lost after the raid on her creator's lab. She wasn't looking forward to going home.
Sarah's feelings about her friend Beatrice were pretty complicated. They essentially had the same personality and grated against each other, but Beatrice was a freaky robot whose partially exposed metal wiring was really good at deflecting propositions from dates without Sarah having to do anything. Sarah thought maybe it made her look weird to hang out with Beatrice, but she reasoned that she could just use their friendship to explain how amazing she is for being able to put up with gross black and white monster people. Besides, she didn't dislike her nearly as much as she disliked Tiffany, who's reputation alone was more damaging than hanging out with a million ugly freaks.
"So Sarah, why do you feel like you're so much uglier than your mother?" Beatrice asked.
Sarah stopped walking.
"Wh-what?!"
"You're really insecure about that aren't you? It's annoying to me. I don't really have any reason to hang out with basketcases." Beatrice smiled.
Sarah felt cold.
Jon was still bored. His interesting wish sure was taking its sweet time to have horrible, disastrous consequences. He yawned, struggling to stay awake through the sheer boredom he felt. He remembered growing up with Karin Kimura, and how genuinely strange she seemed when they first met. He'd never really met anyone who was Japanese or black-and-white before, but what was actually weird about her was that she seemed to find him just as interesting, even before the stone and the wish for her to have Sarah's assets. There wasn't anything interesting about him, and he really didn't feel like anything romantic existed or was brewing between them, so he just couldn't really get what she liked about him. Eh, maybe you don't really need a reason to like people.
Jon fell asleep.
