Author's note:
Thank you to everyone reading, and thank you in particular for the very positive reception towards the previous chapter, if you're reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.
Asha was considered the popular girl at her university, she had a small army of people, mostly men, following her everywhere she went, a small army that constantly sang her praises, told her how great she was, and generally created a constant cloud of noise wherever she went.
She had no fucking clue how she'd become popular, and she dearly wished she could return to obscurity.
Asha had gone to high school in India, had few friends, and was very much a nerd by nature, obsessed with tabletop board games, Sci-fi movies, and other things that generally excluded you from the stereotypical popular girl image. To top it off she felt she was generally bad with people, so she figured she'd always have a minimal network of friends. When she moved out of India to attend university, she was terrified she'd end up alone.
It was with furious gusto that she attempted to make friends on her first day, she'd bounce between tables at lunch, trying to introduce herself to everyone she could, making small talk about anything she could think of, and laughing at every joke she heard, no matter how terrible, trying to cast as wide a net as possible, hoping she'd get at least one friend out of it, she believed that most of the people she spoke to would never really be interested in speaking to her again, they were only talking to her because it was the first day of university, and they were trying to find their feet, once they'd found it, they'd find a much more trendy clique to join, and most of them would leave her alone, Asha was fishing for the dregs, trying to find the people who'd stick with her out of a lack of options, so she spoke to everyone, even the people who gave off strong socially awkward vibes.
For example, this one Japanese-looking girl she met who was just staring at her tits the entire time they spoke, not even pretending to be interested in speaking to her, Yoshiko, Asha believed her name was.
Asha's wide-net approach to trying to find a friend had worked far beyond her wildest dreams, the people she spoke to approached her in droves during study breaks, but she didn't make a friend, so much as she inadvertently recruited a small army of male admirers, this popularity caught the eye of many girls who were trying to integrate themselves into the upper echelons of the pointless hierarchy that was University social life, and figured that the small army of men following her around meant she popular, this cycle became self-fulfilling, and within a week, she was known as "The popular girl."
Thus began her university social life, which consisted of being followed around by a small army of people, in a self-perpetuating popularity cycle, where being part of the group meant being popular, and it meant being popular because it was large, and it was large because it was popular... it was stupid is what it was.
Asha quickly found this to be a somewhat annoying situation, they weren't friends, they were admirers, there was nobody she could talk to, and it was often painfully obvious most of the men just wanted to fuck her, she'd tried to strike up conversations about stuff she was interested in, and often they'd just respond with "uh huh, uh huh." If she tried to invite some of them to play a table-top game, it was treated as this bizarre form of charity, as if she was doing something beneath her to appeal to plebians... she'd grown to steadily hate her entourage, loneliness and solitude was sounding good right about now, but she got the sense if she told them to fuck off, they'd follow her around taunting her, break her windows, and some of her more deranged male admirers might do something even more drastic, she was stuck, this was life now, being a figurehead for a group of better than thou socialites desperate for the appearance of status through association.
As time passed, Asha became increasingly more interested in vicariously living through other people's lives and had made a habit of following the drama that surrounded the other cliques in her school, and recently, she'd been following a particularly disturbing piece of drama surrounding a girl named Alice, a weirdo who'd been obsessed with an otherwise mostly unremarkable guy named Alex, to the point of espousing some downright psychotic views, she'd had a weird fucked up blog, where she said all women were just sex objects for Alex.
The weirdest thing was, Alex had begged her to shut the fuck up, many times in weeks past, but for some reason, the girl insisted, she'd been protesting outside the campus at a few months ago, arguing that women weren't people, and should be reclassified as Alex's property... much to the embarrassment of Alex, who looked like he wanted to curl up and die when he heard about her protest. She felt sorry for the poor guy.
The most recent drama she'd raised had been with another member of Alex's study group, the infamous Yoshiko, Yoshiko was nowhere near as crazy as Alice, but she had her own reputation, pushing people down the stairs for seemingly no reason on her first year.
She'd painted a picture of her art teacher getting fucked by three different people simultaneously, and put it up on display in the university walkway... she'd almost been expelled for that, but managed to argue it was a moment of hysteria, brought about by a rough childhood, Asha felt there was far too much pre-planning involved for it to be a "moment of hysteria."
Asha had been lucky enough not to interact with Yoshiko much, their only interaction had been when she stared at her tits for a full minute without saying a word on her first day of university, and that had informed her opinion on her quite nicely. But recently, Asha had found a reason to start being worried for Yoshiko's safety.
Alice had been targeting Yoshiko for the past few months, pestering her, at one point even attempting to forcibly strip her in the middle of class, she'd had made a massive show of screaming at Yoshiko the other day, telling her she needed to be trained as Alex's cumslut, and lots of other shit Asha didn't even fully understand or even want to think about... The guys who followed Asha around could be weird, possessive, and a lot of them couldn't give less of a shit what she had to say, but Alice was misogynistic on a level beyond what she'd seen any guy achieve, how the university hadn't expelled her and had her fucking arrested yet, she'd never understand, she was a constant terror to any woman on the campus who didn't have the luxury of being shockingly ugly, and a terror to Alex, her sole object of affection.
Asha felt Yoshiko's social isolation provided a potential for her to end up influenced by Alice. Asha didn't know what Yoshiko's home life was like. but assumed she didn't have a great support network to have ended as she had, as a somewhat self-imposed outcast with a penchant for violence.
Of course, it was none of her business, she and Yoshiko weren't friends by any stretch of the imagination, but Asha had remembered her time as a social reject, and even if Yoshiko's isolation was more deserved than hers ever was, she still felt she should do what she could to try and ensure she doesn't fall off the deep end completely.
