“What does being a monster mean to you?”
Aster twirls a pencil between their fingers, notepad at the ready. Their starry eyes are alive with the thirst for Journalism. The question’s a challenge: Tell me something real.
Their subject slacks against the bar-counter in amused disengagement. She’s not exactly blowing the question off, but she’s giving Aster a look. Like she’s indulged a curious child with one too many plain-spoken answers, and now she’s weighing whether to cut them off before she’s sat here all afternoon.
This is fine. Aster has that effect on people. Maybe it would be going too far to say that it’s all part of the plan — Aster doesn’t have one and never has. But look: when you’re after the deets, you can’t help but be a little annoying. So if Aster can at least pull off cutely annoying, then all the better for their research.
Here’s what they’ve got so far:
Selené Serenity, age 30, she/her. Owner and head chef of Selené’s, a popular burger-and-fries diner on the corner of Boardwalk and Shady, not too far from the red light district. A hard worker; world-wise, sharp as a razor, but soft-spoken in conversation.
Height: 321 centimeters. (Just over ten and a half feet.)
Standing at over twice Aster’s height, Selené’s firmly in “giantess” territory, and that’s to say nothing of her horizontal dimensions. From across the bar she blankets Aster’s field of view from pole to pole: a snow-capped mountain of an otherwise human woman.
To Aster, it’s that “otherwise human” part that stands out the most. There’s an aura of charming mundanity about her — an effect that her hugeness only serves to enhance. She peers cheerfully through wiry full-moon spectacles, her hair tied in a neat bun; her apron is lightly dappled with coffee stains. From a distance, you’d probably peg her for a Norhavener, or maybe a Lydian if you knew your accents.
Yet here she is, in the City of Monsters itself — running a diner, no less. How could Aster resist?
The interview question hangs in the air unanswered for quite a while. Selené picks her dish towel back up; the coffee cup she’s drying looks like a toy in her hands.
Finally, she says: “You’re asking me why I don’t have tentacles.”
Aster almost chokes on a mouthful of coffee. “Wh—ghuh?”