Prompt: An Eye For Making Friends

Summary: A cyclopsian alien girl is new on campus, and somehow stumbles onto a study partner stranger than herself. She wonders if they could get along, but she needs to use some hypnotic power of suggestion to get her to focus. This is a prompt for AltrixWrites for November '22. 

[Story Listing]

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Aika Glassman never considered herself an extrovert, nor an expert on social situations, but after a strange incident with an alien life form, she never had any issues presenting herself however she chose. In high school, she tried her hardest to hide her true self, but she eventually got over her fears. When she got to university, she'd try a fling with introducing herself as she truly was.

She certainly attracted attention, though not in the way she would've liked. Her true form was kind of scary to look at.

It was the eyes, mostly. Where two normal eyes should've been, there was one cyclopsian eye that took up most of her face, a stark shade of yellow filling the whites of her eyes. This wasn't terrible on its own... if not for the other identical eyes that dotted the rest of her body, along her legs, and arms, and even her breasts, all nestled in her inky-black skin. And even more eyes were growing out from her long black hair along tendrils, constantly swivelling and looking around.

So she usually spotted anyone muttering about her or pointing her out. And not a lot of people wanted to hang out with her. University was proving to be a lot more lonely, and she considered going back to her old ways of mass hypnotizing the entire student body to like her...

...Well, she could cover up most of the eyes along her body with long leggings and covering, but the tendrils weren't as easy to rein in.

But her first sociology class had mandatory group work, so she was momentarily distracted by that. She needed to track down her assigned partner. Aika actually wanted to learn something here, and not simply brainwash the teachers into giving her straight A's, so she went to track her down.

Thankfully, she was able to track her down in the cafe. Aika spotted a lithe woman sporting a ponytail in the corner of the campus cafe. Clutching her knapsack, the girl approached.

"Elise Wilson?" Aika asked. "We're in Sociology 101. I'm Aika Glassman-"

"That's Countess Elizabeth. Everlasting Matriarch of the Forgotten Realms." 'Elizabeth' countered, not raising her eyes from some weather tome she was clutching. "Address me in the proper manner."

"...seriously?" Aika groaned, massaging her temple.. "Listen, I stopped playing make-believe in high school, we're adults now..."

"You dare to question me!?" 'Elizabeth' raised her head... only to lock eyes with half a dozen eyes hovering about, staring back at her. No matter where she looked, an eye would spot her. Stranger still, they had an otherworldly glow, and the way they swayed was entrancing...

"Knock it off, Elise." Aika growled. She kept her voice low, so as not to cause a scene, but from Elise's perspective, the rest of the world seemed to drown out, so that Aika comprised the entire world. The eyes seemed to draw in the light from the rest of the world, leaving nothing but glowing eyes piercing through an impenetrable blackness...

"R... right. Sorry." Elise sat at attention.

"Okay." Aika huffed, her hair tendrils relaxing as she took a seat across from Elise. "I wanted to get in touch sooner, but I never saw you in class, soooo... you give any thought to our sociology project yet? It's 30% of our final grade."

Elise didn't seem to be giving thought to much of anything other than Aika; the cyclops girl squinted with the one large eye on her face, studying Elise's expression.

She's not THAT dumb, is she? Aika thought to herself. ...No, that book she had looks complicated. Maybe it's...

"Ugh," Aika raised a hand to brush back her reared-up hair tendrils. "Sorry, I think I put a spell on you... stupid eyestalks."

"Eyestalks?" Elise squinted. "What eyestalks...? H-hey, what sort of spell!?"

"...Right, they did the thing again..." Aika shook her head. She ran a hand through her hair. "Hey Elise, what colour's my hair?"

"...Uh, blonde? Is this like the stupid dress meme?" Elise's eyes narrowed.

"Nooo... not quite." Aika massaged her forehead. "Anyway, it's not important, so we should just-"

"No, no, back up a bit, what sort of spell did you cast on me? You mentioned a spell!" Elise was getting wound up again. "There cannot be other summoners on campus!"

"...What the hell are you talking about?" Aika's one facial eye squinted. "It was a figure of speech, not actually... wait, you're not actually a..."

Aika glanced at the tome Elise was clutching once again. She didn't understand Latin whatsoever.

"You can read Latin?" Aika blinked. "What's that book even?"

"It's a compendium on demonology... I run a lot of it through Google Translate, but it's illustrated, see?" Elise opened to a random page. There was certainly a lot of fire, and monsters, and crude illustrations of piled up, naked, dead human bodies...

"Ch-charming." Aika grimaced. "Well..."

Aika wasn't sure if she should explain to Elise from the getgo that she was a half-human half-eldritch monstrosity that can enchant everyone around her with an errant glance. Kind of getting off on the wrong foot. And despite her attitude, Elise was pretty resourceful. She'd be good to keep around. Necessary too.

"The spell thing is... kind of a secret. I've only let a few other people know about it..." Aika started. "But maybe we can be... friends?"

Her eye began to glow suggestively, and the tendrils around her body writhed in turn, fixating on Elise. Elise's curious mind was focused on one, persistent thought that grasped her imagination.

"...Friends?" Elise nodded slowly. "Friends... that sounds nice."

"Mmhm. Gotta make friends at university..." Aika was still pulling tricks here and there—she wasn't above sneaking in a scholarship with a little otherworlldly persuasion—but she did feel a little bad about pulling the wool over Elise's eyes. But she couldn't just drop the truth right in the middle of a bar. There'd be a lot of broken mugs, probably.

So Elise determined that she'd reveal her true form to Elise later. Preferably somewhere discreet. Maybe her dorm room.