<div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/4b/02/42/4b024225317d660c10c1354e6c9c80be.jpg)</div><strong>Where:</strong>Nevermore Dining Hall<br/><strong>Who:</strong>Nyx, open<br/><hr/><br/>In stark contrast (and not only in color palette), Tara was fairly subdued when she wandered into the caf. Not that she was in a<strong> bad </strong>mood- that rarely happened. She was, though, a bit muddled and pensive, having hoped for a bit more from her first day of Psych class than a wordy variant on the old 'they're ore afraid of you than you are of them.' Sure, on the surface, it made sense: how could a normie<em>not</em>be afraid of someone who could turn into a big-ass wolf, say. Or who drank blood. Or could turn you into stone.<br/><br/>Or maybe someone who drowned and came back later, like some Wal-Mart Jesus.<br/><br/>On the other hand- there were<em>billions</em>of them, and while no one had been able so far to tell her exactly how many Outcasts there were in the world (and what a shitty name<strong> that</strong>was to be called, too, like they weren't Othered enough already), the biggest number was somewhere in the ball park of two hundred thousand. More than Hogwarts, but a lot fewer than, like, New Hampshire. And the normies had guns- and fire, which she especially disliked, as much as she had once loved toasting marshmallows. Fear plus boom equals nothing good. So it was like the old lady who crossed the street when she saw a handful of loud teens coming, with Outcasts as the old lady: sure, the kids might be perfectly nice people, but could you rely on that being the case? She was blowing things out of proportion, she was sure, especially after only one class, but she wasn't as cheery about the possibility for fun and peaceful and copacetic co-existence as she had been the day before.<br/><br/>She'd been hoping to snag an all but uncooked hamburg or three to nom on, but it was fish sammies on the menu, and a few other things, all  too cooked to be really palatable to her bizarre metabolism. So she grabbed a stack of cold cuts from the deli board, they being the least-processed stuff around, and a bag of chips for the hell of it, and a thing of jello (more meat byproduct, yum!), and looked around for Nyx's distinctive neon hair.  They weren't hard to find.<br/><br/>"Dude," she said as she slid into a seat across from the garish metamorph (a fun big word, one she hadn't known before that day). "Have you dealt with, like, normals much? On the outside? And why are you talking to your book?" Hearing a crunch, she cocked her head and frowned. "And did you put chips<strong>on</strong>your sammich?"<br/><br/><br/>