Flashfic #14: Accidental brainrot
"Sis, can I ask you a question?" Hortensia asked with a mischievous smile on her face.
Her elder sister sighed. "Ask away," she said, not knowing what plans Hortensia had.
"Can you say the numbers after five in order?" Hortensia asked.
"Six, seven, eight, nine," Ivy said. "What numbers do you even want?"
The younger sister could hardly contain her laughter as she pressed something on her phone. "That's all I needed!" she exclaimed as she ran off.
"I don't like the sound of that..." Ivy mumbled to herself.
Later that day, Ivy was having dinner with her friends as she was apt to do. This time, she was accompanied by Kagetsu and Zelkov since the Solmese were out doing some kind of party or something idk.
Kagetsu's face turned white when he was scrolling through his phone. "Ivy," he said, "when did you get infected with TikTok brainrot?"
"When did I what?" she asked.
"Why did you get into the 6-7 meme?" Kagetsu asked.
"Isn't this you?" Kagetsu then played a clip which showed Ivy saying "six-seven" aloud.
"What is the meaning of this...?" she asked with a shocked expression on her face.
"I believe that the children denote this to be 'brainrot'," Zelkov explained.
"No, but what does six seven mean? Why did Hortensia trick me into saying it?"
"It is the kind of humor that is *esoteric*. There is no *meaning* to it besides being funny."
The next day, Ivy happened to pass by Timerra as she was going to class. And Timerra leaned over to Ivy and said to her: "six-seven."
Ivy's face flushed red with embarrassment. "My sister tricked me into saying that! I don't even know what it means," she clarified while Timerra laughed out loud.
"It means nothing," Timerra said.
"Nothing? There's no hidden, inappropriate meaning?" Ivy said.
"Nope! Just good ol' brainrot," Timerra answered.
"What is this brainrot? Zelkov mentioned it last night."
"You have to use TikTok and find out," Timerra piped in.
"I am not using that app!"
"Says the person who said six-seven."
"I'm never going to be able to get past this, will I?" Ivy said to herself, exasperated.
After lunch, Ivy found her way to the lawn (which lawn? it doesn't matter) somewhere out on the campus. She decided to sit down and stare off into the distance. Unfortunately for her, somebody noticed her. At first it seemed that someone was talking to her but she couldn't make out the words. She kept staring until she realized who it was.
"Is something the matter, Ivy?" Alfred asked.
"Huh?" She turned around to see him behind her, and their friend Diamant not too far behind. "Nothing's wrong. I lost my dignity, but everything's okay. Please, go on to what you were going to do with Diamant."
"Clearly there's something wrong," Alfred said. "Do you want to share?"
Ivy sighed and looked down. "It's that stupid brainrot thing," she muttered.
"Oh, that? Céline showed me the clip today before we went to school. I rolled my eyes when I heard it. It didn't seem like something you would say."
"It wasn't. Hortensia tricked me into saying those numbers...those cursed numbers."
"It's just a silly video. We'll all forget about it eventually. Right?" Alfred said.
"Brainrot is certainly not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of you," Diamant added.
Ivy put her head down. “Go away,” she said to her friends.
Alfred and Diamant looked at each other and shrugged. “Okay! Have a good day,” Alfred said.
Ivy felt herself weighed down as she went to class, then went home. She couldn’t even put in a good amount of studying. No matter: Ivy was going to go to bed early and hide away under the blankets, away from a world where saying something as a simple as a set of numbers would cause people to laugh at her.
When Ivy woke up, her phone had a lot of notifications. She decided to ignore them though, rather choosing to drag herself through her morning routine to class. After her first class, she ran into Timerra, Alfred, and Diamant. She saw that they were laughing at something while looking at their phones. Ivy turned red.
“I’m never going to be remembered for anything else, will I?” Ivy wondered aloud to herself.
The three turned around. Timerra jumped when she saw that Ivy was there. “Oh, Ivy! Didn’t see you there. How are you? Did you see the video your dad made?”
Timerra opened up a video on her phone and showed it to Ivy. It was a campaign video for Ivy’s father. In it, he was doing some sort of juggling dance while saying “six seven days left until the election” or something like that.
“Is this about me?!” Ivy asked with horror in her voice.
“About you? How would it be about you?” Timerra asked.
“B-because of the thing that Hortensia tricked me into,” Ivy said.
“Pfft. Not at all,” Timerra said. “Honestly, I would have forgotten about it if you didn’t bring it up.”
“But then why did I have so many text messages this morning?”
“We were making fun of your father,” Alfred clarified.
Ivy opened her phone and read through the messages: all of them were about her father’s campaign video, not about hers. She couldn’t help but have a small smile at Zelkov sending “I’m sorry that you have a cringe father” into the group chat she had with him and Kagetsu.
“So, that means that everyone will be focused on my father now, right?”
“Yep,” Alfred, Diamant, and Timerra said in unison.
Ivy uttered a short prayer of thanks that her father made that silly commercial. Her friends laughed in a lighthearted way at that, but somehow she didn’t have a problem with it…she was just glad that they would think less about her accidental participation in brainrot.