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.
Contacting Yoshiko was difficult however, seemingly nobody really knew her outside of university life, and she usually went home immediately after lectures ended, while rarely attending Olivia's study group, that last one was the easiest point of contact, but the members that made up the study group were largely absent, and so Asha felt she had no way to talk to Yoshiko, they didn't share any class times, so while Yoshiko was theoretically quite close to Asha, in practice, she might as well have been on the moon.
That was how she had felt before today, but she'd heard from an acquaintance who hung out in the science annex that Yoshiko had stayed behind after lectures today, and that she'd been going around, approaching seemingly random girls and asking to take their photo.
Asha had no clue why she was doing this and could write it off as Yoshiko being Yoshiko, but she saw it as an opportunity, she'd placed herself in one of the major school walkways and was awaiting Yoshiko to pass by, so she could check in on her mental state, and make sure she wasn't listening to Alice.
It'd taken an hour, a miserable hour that she spent fending off advancements from the lovely members of her entourage... the only reason she hadn't told them all to fuck off, is she understood they had no life outside of following her around, accumulating imaginary "importance" points by snubbing each other, if she did anything to make them hate her, they'd still follow her around, they'd just be even more sociopathic about it.
Eventually, she saw Yoshiko speed-walking through her walkway and stepped out to intercept, her entourage initially seemed to want to move with her, but once they saw who she was approaching, most of them stepped back and gave her space, most people heard of Yoshiko, and most people knew what she looked like, so when they saw Asha step out to talk to her, they made one of two assumptions.
The people who didn't know or believe most of the stories about Yoshiko saw it as an act of charity that Asha was talking to her, the popular girl taking time out of her day to talk to the lesser folk.
The people who did know Yoshiko by reputation were making an effort not to talk to her, the nicer accounts of Yoshiko's university tenure portrayed her as an unsociable creep, the less nice accounts portrayed her as a sociopath, someone with anger issues, a tendency to keep weaponry close to hand, and a lack of any real ethical compass. While this view was somewhat exaggerated, it wasn't wrong, Yoshiko even now had a switchblade in her pocket and was wandering around with malicious intent.
There was also a third group, who had made no real assumptions, and largely knew Yoshiko was bad news, but kept their distance primarily as a means through which to ogle her, while many in the group thought of Asha as the hottest girl on campus, a few found Yoshiko to be more their type, she was more petite than Asha was, and the intensity of Yoshiko's expressions and body language was a turn on for some. Of course, few would be stupid enough to ask her out, they'd seen the canaries that had gone in before them, and the battered remains of what might once have been a canary had told them the mines were a touch unsafe. Yoshiko was hot, but functionally unapproachable, even if you were just going to grab her and try and force yourself on her, you'd likely end up dead from stab wounds, she had a mystique of being the extremely hot girl on campus who was truly unapproachable, there wasn't even a theoretical way to form a relationship with her, aside from maybe joining Olivia's study group and approaching you there, but getting her to like you felt impossible, and getting her to like you well enough to fuck you felt impossible.
Yoshiko had fans despite her general demeanour for one simple reason, she was beautiful by most definitions of the word, near perfectly proportioned and a somewhat slutty dresser, giving most a tantalising glimpse of what they could never touch. add to that, for some guys, red flags were a fun bonus to collect when dating.
