“Sophia Pirelli was everything a girl like me could hope for: tall, beautiful, intelligent, editor of the college paper, a tall redhead with legs that went on for miles. I’d crushed on her for months, finally working up the gumption to ask her for coffee. She was perfect. She was glorious. And yet we had nothing to talk about.”
AKA the most awkward date ever/what happens when crushes and reality collide violently.
“Yes, my foster parents named me Daniel. Danny. They wanted a boy, but since they couldn’t tell, they went with a more… plastic name. How did you come by ‘Shayde’?” The lizard in a plethora of pink carnations - none of them flowers - twiddled nervously with her chopstick cheaters.
Rael had covertly turned on his vocoder ages ago, since Shayde was still a person of interest to many. He did his best to eat quietly. The recordings would never be distributed if he could help it. Just used for fact verification in a QNA file somewhere.
“Well, I was bouncin’ between some different dimensions fer a bitty while. Pillar to post, helter to skelter. You get the idea. And a lot of 'em were -ah- socially backwards. I got mistaken for a demon. A lot.” Shayde paused for a bite of something with the tentacles still on. “Anyway, after hearing 'avaunt foul shade from the blackest pit’ a few hundred times, I figured I might as well go by the name they kept calling me.”
“Oh I so totally get that! Like, when I told my folks I identified female, they started spelling my name with an I instead of a Y. I like the Y. It’s… me.”
Shayde smiled politely, if wanly. “Yeah. A lot like that. Only a lot different.”
Danny the lizard girl giggled nervously.
Sociology study. Cogniscents raised by humans. Better or worse off than children raised by animals? Rael decided that someone else would be better off doing that study. The humans had enough problems with prejudice owing to their species-wide recognized insanity.
“Um. Um. Is it a lot different? Y'know. Twentieth century versus twenty-fifth?”
“Well, there’s still no’ flying cars. Big shock.”
“Wait. That was sarcasm! I love the sarcasm. I just can never get it right.”
“…fab…” Shayde cleared her throat. “The computers that can argue are a shocker. I guess it’s only fair though. We were workin’ on parallel intelligence ever since we figured some behaviours could be programmed. Not my forte.”
“You don’t like music? I thought your home era was all about music. I mean, more works per capita were written in your era. So many artists. So much talent. So many tunes you can like, never get out of your mind?”
“Not forte-music. Forte’s another word for strength. My hobby’s music.”
“YEEEEEeeeeeEEEEE! What do you play? Can you do Stairway to Paradise?”
“I’m not in the habit of bringin’ my axe to a date.”
“This is a date? I’m not… of age.”
“I thought it was a date when I mistook ye for a fella. And thought you were older.”
Another nervous giggle. “I have a lot more time to think in text-space.”
“Aye, I figured that out.” Shayde snagged something made to look like a rose off of the conveyor. More for something to do than to eat. She sniffed it before eating it. “Do you have a career lined up?”
“Well. I am so into history it’s scary…”
“Aye, I figured that out, too….”