I grimaced and took another tentative lick of my ice cream. "Ugh. Who eats this?" I shouldn't have been surprised that the taste of this almost phosphorescent green ice cream was so sour.

"It's not popular with banshees for nothing." Lineth commented, shrugging across the table from where we stood.

"Are banshees masochists?" I asked, leaning back in my chair.

Watching absently as what appeared to be a rabbit man entered the premises, Lineth replied. "Not really, but apparently they like sour."

I knew of the Banshees, apparently they were a rather reticent race. Their country was on an island near Asia, and apparently they were the most beautiful race in the world. —Which didn't bode well for me, given the weird aesthetics of beauty in that place — and they were also ugly. It was sort of like the stereotypical elf, but with a different name. And strangely enough, the elves had been relegated to the ugliest race on the planet. I couldn't help but find the situation amusing.

Lineth put her elbow on the table after answering, took a last bite of her ice cream and resigned herself to watching me try and fail to take more than a few bites in a row. I would have appreciated a topic of conversation to keep my mind occupied, but Lineth didn't seem to have the same idea, for as she looked at me, a slight blush spread across her face and she had an excited gleam in her eyes.

"C-cute."

I frowned slightly at Lineth, "What part of this is cute?" I was confused.

Lineth blinked a few times before realising that she had apparently spoken out loud. She coughed into her fist and cleared her throat. "Y-your expressions are cute." She confessed sheepishly.

I stuck out my tongue at Lineth, relishing the compliment at the cost of a little embarrassment, and continued eating, barely.

I sigh at my stupidity in choosing such a strange ice cream. It tasted like eating a lemon with its zest and adding some extra citrus. Despite what the girl said earlier, I really couldn't taste any strawberry flavor in this ice cream. If someone was a weird acid fanatic, they might find it pleasant, but they were always someone who enjoyed sweetness.

"You don't have to finish it if you don't want to." Lineth said, looking at me with a little concern.

"I can, this is nothing."

Lineth looked at me for a few more seconds, maybe feeling sorry for me. Then she stood and said, "I'll go get more napkins". She explained as she quickly walked back into the ice-cream parlor.

I just nodded at her. Although I could have gone and got it myself, my ice cream was melting at an alarming rate and I was really considering throwing it away. But at the same time, I didn't want to, because it was my fault for ordering the ice cream out of curiosity. Wasting food was never a good thing.

While I was trying to figure out what to do with my eyes glued to the demon ice cream, I heard the door of the ice cream shop open. Thinking it was Lineth, I looked up with a smile, but instead of the slightly bent girl with the nervous look, I found two wolf girls staring at me.

One gave the other a light nudge and smoothed her shirt before walking straight to my table with her companion in tow. One had black ears and a black tail, the other white. Needless to say, they were not my type.

The table I was sitting at was small and round, so when the black-eared wolf girl placed both hands on the table with a clatter and smiled at me as she leaned close to me, almost invading my personal space, I could do nothing but lean back, slightly startled by the sudden aggressiveness.

"You're fucking hot." The girl said, smiling at me.

"Huh..." I didn't know how to respond.

"I've been watching you since before," She commented, not at all creepily with her comment. "We were planning to leave when we saw you had company, but that loser isn't your girlfriend, is she?"

I frowned at her comment. "No but-"

"I told you, Adriana, there was no way that sissy had that much cuteness," the girl cut me off, turning her head over her shoulder and smiling at her friend. She moved again, grabbing the chair that had been Lineth's and pulling it over to my side, sitting down. "I'm Sofia, and you're?..."

"Alex." I replied, listlessly and looking at her with my arms crossed.

I noticed that the other girl, Adriana, moved to take a chair from another table and put it on the other side of me, leaving me trapped. "Why don't you join us, Alex? We're going to the cinema, but we can go to my place if you don't feel like watching a film." Said the girl called Sofia, and at the end of her sentence her hand slid up to my face to fiddle with a loose strand of my slightly long hair.

Well, active flirting from a woman is something I had to get used to. We looked so stupid when we tried to ask for a date... or was it just that they were overconfident because they were good-looking in some way? Also, is everyone always so indifferent to these situations? People in the mall could clearly see that I wasn't really interested, but most people didn't give us more than a glance. Can't they see I'm a damsel in distress? I could be raped here, hello.

"I'm sorry, but I'd rather stay with my date." I replied after a while.

The finger that was twirling a lock of my hair stopped, "Date?" Sofia asked, clearly confused.

"Yep" I said, popping the p.

The Sofia girl let out a mocking laugh, "Come on, you don't prefer that loser to us, do you?"

"Your ears work fine, I'd rather be here, but thanks for the offer."

Sofia frowned, her hand that had been playing with my hair moved to my forearm and squeezed lightly, which was actually a little painful. "Funny, really funny. You know how many Hueless try to have a chance with us, why don't you stop playing hard to get and come with us?"

"Yeah, don't play hard to get and you'll have a good time." Spoke the other girl, I thought she was mute.

This was starting to irritate me, they were behaving like typical teen movie bullies. Following that line of thinking, wasn't it time for a good-looking guy to chase them away? Ah, but instead of a guy, it should be a woman, preferably a pretty cat girl.

"Huh... everything okay over here?" I heard a female voice.

No way