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By now, everyone who knew him was very well acquainted with the Kankri Vantas Disaster Warning System.
It worked like this: every time there was so much as a drizzle in the college town of Beforus, Kankri Vantas threw out a mass text offering a place in his dormitory room for the night to any one of his friends whose dorm lost power. He was still working on getting a fold-out couch so they could have a nice place to sleep, but being a college student from a not-especially-wealthy family didn’t exactly lend itself to such spending. Mysteriously, no one had ever taken him up on his offer – and surely it had nothing to do with the fact that Beforus hadn’t lost power in several years.
Until tonight.
The storm was monstrous outside, and Kankri was sitting alone on his couch sipping an oversized mug of tea. The television was droning its news, moving from one tale of woe to another with completely non-alarming speed. The only show on mainstream television he could tolerate would be coming on in a few minutes. The storm was getting worse out there, and he was actually beginning to fear for his own electricity when his phone vibrated on the table.
From Latula Pyrope, “op3n your door!!!”
Kankri almost tripped over himself in his rapid attempt to get the blanket and tea off to a safe corner of the room, and open the door as instructed, before Latula got too wet out there. Of all the people he expected to actually lose power tonight… of all the people he expected to respond… Latula wasn’t one of them. Latula wasn’t the kind of person who asked for someone else’s help with something so minor as a huge thunderstorm that shut off all her power and left her cold and shivering in a dorm. That didn’t happen to Latula Pyrope! She was just too… rad!
“Latula!” Kankri all but squeaked when the door opened, showing one sopping wet girl in an oversized blue and red hoodie. “Latula, please forgive my borderline alivist language, but you scared me half to death! Next time, if you wouldn’t mind, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble for you, I would really appreciate it if you let me know that you were coming before you set out across campus in the rain! Why, if I didn’t know better and assume more of you as a person, I would even be led to believe from this incident that—”
“Dude,” Latula responded, placing one gloved hand on his shoulder. “I’m wet. It’s cold. Can I come in before you wind yourself up for the red miles?”
Stunned, Kankri stepped aside.
“Thanks so much!” She took off her wet hoodie and hung it off a chair, and then ran back over to give Kankri a tight hug. He attempted not to pay too much mind to the fact that their height differences meant that he found his face at a very unfortunate position is relationship to Latula’s chest, and as usual, he failed spectacularly. Not that he would ever let Latula know that. She had confided in him before about her many insecurities, height chief among them; to accidentally trigger the girl who he has harbored secret and very intimate feelings for since he met her two years ago would just make Kankri’s night way past horrible. In the girl’s strong arms, Kankri felt himself begin to sweat nervously, which didn’t help his situation at all.
“A-are you here because your house lost power?” he asked meekly.
Latula finally let go of him and nodded. “Yeah, it just went and knocked itself out about half an hour ago,” she said, laughing. “Thank God for you, Kanster! I didn’t screw up any of your plans by crashin’, did I?” Though he was trying his best to listen to her, Kankri couldn’t get his mind off the fact that his face was flushed and possibly had little beads of sweat pooling at the corners of it and Latula could see all of that.
“No,” he said after a too-long pause. “No! Of course not. In fact, you’re just in time. I just made some tea to warm myself up on this cold dark night – of course, all nights are dark and this is cold because of the storm outside, not because it’s reflecting any sort of internal poetic feelings of mine – and perhaps if you’re still feeling cold too, you could sit down and I can make you some??”
There was a pause.
“…Did you just say that in one breath?”
“I have big lungs.”
“Cool!” Latula turned on her heel and threw herself on Kankri’s couch, kicking her boots onto the floor as she went. “Well, if you’ve got something warm and yummy, I wouldn’t say no! Thanks.”
“No problem.” Kankri tried to smile, but then turned away before she could realize that when he smiled he looked like a vaguely-defined monster of probably European descent who had an unusual dental structure and therefore was viewed with a degree of contempt by primal humankind.