SSR Friendship Get
Idia Shroud x OC (yumeship)
Summary: The one where Idia gets held against his will but instead of it being by a Ghost Bride, it’s by his dream girl and instead of wanting to marrying him, she wants to be best friends (maybe? Idia can’t tell but if that’s the case, send Fs in the chat).
a/n: Yeah, I'm a Leona girlie but Idia has always been there too and I can't shake him so Lucy's also stuck with him. Or rather, he's stuck with her. Someone save him (it certainly will not be me).
*This is part of my Misadventures of Unlucky Lucy series which can be found on my Twisted Wonderland Masterlist.
Idia was sure he was going to murder Azul when he got back from the Monstro Lounge. He said he was gonna be right back after checking in with some chaos Floyd was causing or some bs over at the restaurant but like 30 minutes had passed now and Idia was stuck at their club booth as the sole representative of the Board Game club... Or he would be if it wasn’t for the fact that he was sitting under the table, curled up in in the little cave it and tablecloth created with his tablet in his hands.
What was Azul thinking of leaving the school’s #1 introvert alone at their booth at the activity fair? Idia? Talking up potential new club members and getting them excited to join their club? If he thought too hard about what he’d look like trying to schmooze incoming freshman, he’d simply die from the cringe. Or vomit. Or do both.
So for the last half hour Idia had been hiding out under the table to avoid actually talking to people while still holding his post at the club booth... technically, since he was still there physically instead of back in his room doing another dungeon raid. Not that he heard anyone approach their table or anything. Even if they did, Idia would probably clam up and be as quiet and still as possible like he was some poor horror protag avoiding a ghoul trying to eat him. All those extroverts looking to join new clubs could probably smell fear.
Just then Idia must have summoned one since he heard someone quietly walk up to the table, their footsteps stopping just outside his tablecloth cave. He froze in place and locked his tablet as if it’s glow would give away his position. He could hear the extrovert shuffle some things around above him- probably the too-fancy club flyer Azul made- and mumble to themselves a bit. Idia wasn’t paying much attention until he caught the end of the extrovert’s sentence.
“...gotta be more members of this club than Azul and Idia.”
The sound of his name made Idia jump which unfortunately made his head hit the table, which definitely made some stuff on the table fall over and crash to the ground next to him. And it hurt too. Idia slowly crawled out from under it, hoping that if he moved slow enough, the extrovert that said his name wouldn’t notice and move on so Idia could try to fix things in peace. But when he slowly peeked out from underneath the table, his eyes and nose resting just above the table’s edge, the girl that caused this mess was still standing there.
The girl? Oh, right. It was that girl that showed up at the welcome ceremony with that cat who made it a lot more interesting of a stream than the last two years. 8/10 watch with points deducted only because at the end of it all, Idia still had to go introduce himself to a handful of incoming freshmen irl later.
Wait a sec, how did she know his name?
“Oh… are you okay?” the girl asked and Idia couldn’t tell if it was out of concern or because she thought Idia was currently acting like a scared little freak. Which he kind of was atm but that was beside the point.
And that’s when Idia’s brain stalled out because he realized the girl was pretty. Like really pretty. With long blue-black hair and big brown eyes and… Idia made the mistake of glancing just a couple inches below her face and immediately took damage. His face started to feel hot and he watched in horror as pink started creeping into his peripheral since his blush was spreading to his hair. He guessed he deserved the humiliation for momentarily looking like a creepy perv.
“Ah, I-I’m fine!” Idia shot up because being crouched on the ground probably wasn’t helping him not look creepy. He stood stiffly as the girl crossed her arms in front of her and did his best to not look down again.
“Are you sure? It sounded like you hit your head pretty hard,” she winced (definitely out of cringe) and now Idia started sweating.
“Y-yeah! ‘S fine! I- uh- I was, um…”
Gods his stupid club uniform was hot. Between the overheating from the uniform and the overheating from embarrassment, Idia couldn’t speak, so he quickly dropped down to the ground to pick up his tablet and stood again. He typed into his text to speech program and held the tablet out in front of him in a way that would also kind of hide the girl’s face from view.
“Hello, my name is Idia Shroud. Are you interested in learning more about the board game club?” The voice program usually sounded just like him, but for some reason even that sounded kind of stiff and awkward and Idia frowned, wondering if he should start tweaking the program a bit.
The girl giggled- it made Idia’s heart skip a beat even though she was probably laughing at his inability to talk to people- and shrugged, “I wouldn’t mind it, honestly. I was really into board games back home, but I didn’t really have anyone to play them with. My name’s Lucy, by the way.”
Lucy, Idia was still having trouble talking but he committed her name to memory anyway.
One of the game boxes on their table caught Lucy’s attention and she tapped it, “Wait, what’s this game?”
“Uh…” Idia mumbled and tapped out a response on his tablet, “Great Legacies? It’s a strategy game where you play as a member of the Great Seven and try to establish your legacy before the other players do. It’s got a lot of historic bits in it which can be pretty boring if you’re not into that sort of thing but they take some liberties to make it more entertaining. The strategy aspect and some game mechanics make them 9/10 though it’s only really after they started balancing out the gameplay when they released expansions for other historical figures and re-released the anniversary edition of the original Great Seven pack...”
For a split-second Idia wondered if he was rambling too much, but it looked like Lucy was listening since she nodded a few times.
“There was actually a game like that back in my world! It was of my favorites and I collected all the different editions,” she smiled and it was everything Idia could do to not drop his tablet since it stunned him so hard.
“Your world…?”
She shrugged, “I, uh, kind of got transported here from a world without magic. I have no idea how it happened though.”
“Like an isekai?” the words came out of Idia’s mouth this time and the surprise actually did make him drop his tablet, but he managed to catch it in a panic before it hit the ground, Stupid! Don’t make everything sound like it’s an anime! She probably doesn’t even know what that is;;;
“Just like an isekai.”
Now Idia had never fallen in love before and honestly, he didn’t even think that was a real sensation, but he guessed that the feeling tight feeling in his chest (something that he could only describe as what getting one-shotted in the chest by an FPS sniper felt like) was. Because what do you mean a really hot, super cool looking, nerd hobby inclined girl just spawned in front of him out of nowhere? What kind of super super rare drop was this? Was this the kind of pull that ate all his gatcha luck for the rest of eternity? RIP any future raids with Muscle Red in the future because they’d definitely be leaning on his luck instead.
Oh wait. Idia was staring. He didn’t realize he was just kind of staring, basically full system crash, at Lucy this whole time. There he was making an idiot of himself in front of who was probably the coolest girl he’d ever meet. Well, maybe it hadn’t been going on for that long and Idia had the slightest bit of time to recover.
Lucy made a cute little scrunched up face of concern (or more likely, annoyed confusion) and attempted to break the thicc awkward silence, “...um, Idia?”
Nope. There was no recovering from this actually.
Idia slowly started lowering himself back to his hideaway under the table as if the girl in front of him wouldn’t be able to pick up on the movement. But, obviously, Lucy did because she opened her mouth to say something that Idia didn’t hear because he quickly dropped back to the ground.
“Wait, Idia! I wanna know more about the club!” Idia didn’t hear what she said when he hid, but he did hear Lucy call after him then hear her dive across the table, probably to try to stop him from slipping away which was genuinely terrifying before a few more things fell off the table again.
Idia could hear the shuffle of Lucy quickly standing again, “Oh crap, I’m sorry! I’ll get that for you.”
But it was technically Idia’s fault the whole display on the table was destroyed and Idia really wanted Lucy to go away anyway so he very quickly spoke without thinking and went to grab the box on the ground himself, “N-no, don’t worry about it!”
And then Idia’s hand touched hers and for a moment it felt like his heart stopped. He scurried out from under the table and stood, clutching his hand close to his chest, staring at it just to double check he imagined the shock of electricity that coursed through his body and that this girl wasn’t carrying a taser or something on her. It took a second for him to work up the courage to look back up at Lucy since she could have been pointing and laughing at him or had actually just run off since he was obviously being a creep. But Lucy was still there, carefully organizing the pieces of the game box that fell open on the ground and talking as if she didn’t even notice Idia was acting strange.
“...this would be such a gorgeous display piece if it didn’t also have a million components to it. And there’s pieces to make multiple levels? That’s so cool! I love it when a board does that...”
Okay, so she genuinely seemed interested in talking to him. At least if he were to continue engaging in this interaction, Lucy would obviously be doing most of it. Idia had been dragged into plenty of unwanted, unskippable cutscenes with extroverts in the past and he’d survived them, albeit with sapped HP by the end of it. He was already running on low at the moment so fully engaging in any sort of conversation was gonna be an uphill battle, especially with this girl since every time he looked at her Idia was sure he was going to have a massive panic attack. But Lucy was really pretty and seemed nice...
Maybe he could push his luck and hope his complete and utter lack of charisma stat wouldn’t shoot him in the knee.
“God, I dumped out like half the box, I’m sorry. You can double check if that’s all the pieces, but I think I got ‘em all,” Lucy turned a figure from the game in her fingers, admiring the details on it with a cute, soft look on her face that brought back the embarrassing pink to Idia’s hair, “I love the design of these.”
Okay, so never mind. There was no way he was gonna be able to talk to this girl without spontaneously combusting or drowning in his own sweat. Why did he wear all the stupid layers of his club uniform again? He thought about retreating to safety again but it looked like Lucy also must have had ESP or something because she immediately closed the game box in front of her and put her hand out like she was talking to a scared animal.
“So board game club, huh? What do you guys do?”
It was a stupid question, but an easy answer, “Um, play board games?”
“No, silly! Tell me about your club,” she relaxed once she figured Idia wasn’t going to run away (though every molecule of his being was screaming for him to sprint back to Ignihyde) and shrugged, “I’m not exactly a sporty person and my friends both ended up down the jocks’ row. Since walking around by myself I’ve ran into a couple of, lets say, overzealous pitches to join clubs.”
I’m sure the sole hot girl at this school would get some losers to act up. Cringe... Idia thought to himself then panicked because he wasn’t sure if he said that out loud or not, but Lucy was sitting there waiting for him to talk so he guessed was in the clear for now.
“Oh uh, well I-I wouldn't beg you to join my club or anything! What kind of loser would do that?” Idia’s voice came out a lot more strained and kind of squeaker than he wanted it to and also he was word vomiting and couldn’t stop, “It’s embarrassing, like what are you? Desperate? Just because a pret- girl! A girl walked by your club booth.” He caught himself just before receiving critical damage and cleared his throat with a loud, gross hack.
Idia shrank, begging the universe for an opportunity to abscond, “I mean... I’m sorry.”
“Nah, it’s not your fault. Besides at least the Journalism Club actually seemed interested in getting me to join, but mostly because I have one of these,” Lucy grinned and held up a little box that had been dangling from a strap across her body, “It’s a camera obscura and it’s really the only compensation I got from the stupid headmaster for all the trouble of staying in dusty ol’ Ramshackle House.”
Yeah, it definitely looked like something that would be found in some corner of that old creepy house, with a giant lens on the front and just a viewfinder with no screen to see what the pictures looked like before you developed them. It was crazy low tech in a way that made it just convenient enough to be a game mechanic built to send the player into a panic when trying to protect themselves from ghosts and monsters that drop by.
“Lol, you some horror game protag?” Idia mumbled then shot up straight with an embarrassing yelp.
Lucy paid no mind to Idia’s random noises again and instead scoffed, dropping the camera to her side, “The writers of my life bust be experimenting with genres.”
Idia nodded awkwardly and quietly shifted in place, feeling like he was an NPC and waiting for Lucy to pick the next dialogue option or to at least select a “Goodbye then!” and run off so he could try to survive the rest of his activity fair with his sanity intact. But, amazingly enough, Lucy kept the very one-sided conversation going even though Idia definitely looked like he was still thinking about crawling away.
“Oh, speaking of genres, you mentioned isekai, so I’m assuming there's anime in this world unless that’s called something else here,” she tilted her head in a very adorable way that felt like a stab in the chest to Idia and continued, “Like animation made by a specific country? In my world, it’s from Japan but I’m also assuming there’s no Japan here, right?”
Gods, between the very intent and chipper look she was giving him and the general fluffy cute aura she was emitting, Idia was feeling his health bar drain with every second he stood near her.
“N-no we have anime- yeah, from a group of islands to the east of here...” Talking felt like suffering though a surprise underwater level in a platformer, but her eyes lit up when he spoke so he persisted, “Uh, it’s, um, cool you have it in your world too.”
“It’s truly a universal art form,” another laugh and another damage dealing flash of a smile that made Idia’s head spin as she continued, “You know, for a magical world with fairies and ghosts and magic powered tech, it’s always surprising to me how much this place is like back home.”
“I can give you recs!” Okay, so Idia must have been losing it because he didn’t mean to talk at all let alone say that out loud so loudly it surprised him but at this point he was feeling so light headed he wondered if he was dreaming anyway so he might as well have kept talking to the hot girl that he totally imagined spawned in front of him, “And I can lend you stuff to watch it on too if you need it. Wait, does Ramshackle even get wifi? I-I-I could check if-”
“Or we could watch your recs together sometime.”
Oh, Idia knew what was happening here! He hit his head so hard on that table earlier that he fell into a coma and was currently dreaming that this very hot girl had just asked to hang out with him alone while partaking in an activity they both enjoy. Because the alternative was a reality where this very hot girl may or may not have just casually asked him out on a date.
Fuck, he really shouldn’t have been talking to this girl anymore. He should have dived under the table and dug a tunnel away from there all the way back to Ignihyde’s dorm portal the first moment he could. She was going to kill him at this rate! What Idia really needed to do was to shut up, grab his stuff, and escape this interaction before his health reached a critical point and he died on the spot. It didn’t matter what Azul would say if he left his post at their club booth.
But despite every attempt to move, his body wouldn’t listen. Instead, he let out a quiet, short reply, “Yeah. We could.”
Lucy nodded and picked up one of the club flyers before eyeing it over, “So this has where you guys meet but not when.” She glanced at him through her lashes.
Meanwhile, Idia’s heart skipped a beat, and he tried to nonchalantly check his wrist for his pulse, “...tomorrow at 6.”
“Great! I can make that right after the Journalism Club meeting. Oh, by the way,” Lucy leaned towards Idia, ignoring his small squeak at the closer distance, “I love romance and paranormal and mysteries- easy on the fights and battle scenes unless they’re animated spectacularly. I’m expecting a list of recs tomorrow, okay?”
She stood back and a tiny flash of something crossed her face before she smiled that cute little fluffy smile and again as if Idia didn’t just clock that she may or may not have just low key checked him out. Not that he wanted to dwell on that because his life was in danger at the moment.
“Anyway, I gotta go gather my friends and make sure they didn’t lose my cat, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow!” she folded up the club flyer and stuck it in her shirt (and Idia struggled to avoid looking at that for too long too, mostly because he was already at like 5 HP), before laughing softly, “It’ll be nice to have a friend of culture around here. Bye Idia!”
And just like that, she finally walked away, leaving Idia in a stunned silence and waving as she disappeared into the crowd of students. Gods, Idia felt like he just survived an unexpected bullet hell level irl.
“Why look at that. You’re making friends in real life.”
Oh, now Azul wanted to respawn after the attempt on Idia’s life! He jumped and turned to Azul with a start, “AZU-SHI WHA THE HELL?! I-I mean, where were you?”
“I told you I’d be back after I checked in on the lounge,” he said with a shrug though his eyes followed Lucy as she weaved through the crowd, “So did she ask to join the club or ask you out on a date?”
Idia balked, “NO! N-no! W-wh-wh-why would you ask that?!”
This just earned an eye-roll in return, “Oh please, you’re bright pink and she was eyeing you like you were a five star meal. It was disgusting to witness honestly.”
No, that’s not what happened. Idia was just struck by the aura of a hot and cute and cool nerd girl so that’s what he thought was happening at the time. And Azul was always looking for a leg up on others so of course he’d read into whatever Lucy was doing for an angle.
As expected, Azul pulled one of his classic smarmy little smirks and cooed, “You know if you’re in need of assistance wooing the girl, I’d be happy to provide it to you, at a low cost of course being that we are clubmates after all~”
The thought was ridiculous. Lucy was just being friendly... really friendly, but still.
Idia silently grabbed his tablet and shot Azul a glare, “Fuck you. I’m heading back to Ignihyde...”
Honestly, he’d probably need at least a week alone to recover. Too bad he already pinned a task to talk to Lucy again the next day. He made a mental note to update his last will and testament with Ortho since he’d need that soon.
