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It had been interesting, getting a date request from the interesting and luscious Jada for a Friday night. Audrey's idea of a Friday night was some light gaming, scarfing her mom's delicious cooking, and then waiting for everyone to go to sleep before shimmying down the tree outside her window to take amazing advantage of the party crowd when the bars closed. After all, when you trafficked in human lives, you had better luck when they were drunk as hell. This was probably not a consideration that Tanzanite or Obsidian ever concerned themselves with, but they were a bit more than her hundred and five pound self. By far.

So when the doorbell rang, she hadn't been doing anything but idly paging through Wikipedia, legs slung over her chair in the most sloth-like pose she could conjure. Really, it was a talent. In less than five seconds, however, Audrey was up and flying towards the stairs, taking them two at a time towards the door. "DOOR. MINE." She hadn't exactly needed to yell loud, but she was excited and more than a bit curious, as were her parents. Knowing them, she'd never get Jada alone to interrogate her about what was up before midnight. Her mother had already started to come out of her back room, eyes welcoming and curious before her daughter started stuffing her guest up the stairs.

"Hi mom, this is Jada. She's staying for dinner, remember? Spaghetti. Tons of it. We'll be down later, promise." Didn't take more than hands on the small of her back to propel the lovely brunette into the bedroom and the door shut. All-in-all, it was strange as hell, but typically Audrey. After all, she hadn't forgotten the two hours Pasha had spent sewing star buttons onto his vest with her mom. She would never forget that tedium, though she loved her adorable little friend.

"Sorry about that, my mom has a habit of absorbing people. I think she's secretly a pod person, you know?" Grinning, Audrey flopped back into her chair and waved a hand at the room. "Bed, daybed, take your pick sit anywhere, be comfy!" She certainly was, wearing nothing more than a chocolate knit tunic and cream tights, a matching bow perched jauntily on her head. "So what brings you to the humble Collins abode on a Friday night? No hot date? I'm shocked. Really! Glad to see you though!" It was lonely sometimes, being Audrey.

Laughing, Audrey shook her head and flung her knees again over the arm of her chair, stretching. It was easy to be comfortable in your own surroundings, and she had luxury flowing from every pore, possibly because she'd finally got a decent night's sleep for a change. Apparently removing the accursed penguin from her bed was the way to go, even if she woke up feeling alone. Jada was here now though, and that was a vast improvement! "My mom? She'd kidnap you into the kitchen or her sewing room and smother you to death, or bore you, depending on your interests. Friends coming over is something still incredibly new for her, and she's giddy with the idea of me finally blossoming into a social butterfly." Audrey rolled her eyes with obvious love and exasperation. "But no, still the caterpillar. I'm glad you came over!"

Using a cream-stockinged foot, Audrey pushed herself away from the desk to reveal the statue of Sylvanas in all her glory, set beneath a small trio of hanging paper lanterns suspended from the ceiling and a heavily decorated wood base held the worshiped form. "There she is, my queen, in all her glory. I wanted to put her downstairs, but mom said she wasn't going to have anything that scary in her living room. I questioned her sense of aesthetics and design and then was made to help her sew one of her blanket things. Decorating hats." The teen shuddered but grinned, having obviously enjoyed the time with her parent.

"Dad didn't get it either, but dad never gets it. Dads never do. So you just came to check up on us, make sure we hadn't run away to Vegas yet? I admit, there was a close moment there...." Shaking her head, Audrey sighed dreamily. "You'll stay for dinner, right Jada? My mom is an amazing cook."

Oh ho ho, how absolutely unexpected! Audrey's mind immediately jumped to Jada trying to impress a gamer boy, but that didn't fit. Jada was pretty much your typical pretty girl. She had looks, she knew it, she cultivated them. Any man that Jada wanted she could have eating out of her palm in about five minutes, and if she couldn't, Audrey had a substantial amount of money to pay out to her bookie. Eyes lighting on the statue of Sylvanas, she smiled and remembered - Jada's sisters were gamers.

Patting her hair lightly to make sure it was moderately presentable, for hadn't she just brushed it?, she turned the chair again to grin and point at the daybed not three feet behind her. It was a fairly tight squeeze in Audrey's room with the queen sized bed wedged up against the windows and the twin daybed in front of the sliding closet doors. "Just sit down, and I will teach you all I know. I am a definite Loremaster." Unwinding herself from the chair, Audrey clambored up onto her desk to pull down several very thick books with shiny gold emboss on the front and beamed. "Most of the information you'll need is in here. A lot of lore, what the factions are about, how the wars started and all that. I can give you the quick and dirty now and you can go in deeper when you get home if you want, or we can sorta just sit here and read while you ask questions?" Teaching people things was something Audrey loved to do. She knew a lot, she wanted to share!

And really, there was a huge debt to be paid, as eyes latched again onto the sleekly demonic form of the Banshee Queen. A very large debt.

Even if something had happened at the theater that night, everything would have been alright as long as she was with Audrey. Dark theater meant that her transition to Linarite would be unnoticed at best, and then that youma would give them a wide berth as it went about its work. Certainly a whole cadre of youma could descend with the General-King himself, and she'd simply tell them to sit down and shut the hell up so she could watch Star Wars.

Audrey loved Star Wars, and was an incredible fan of the lovely Padme Amidala, even if she had been more than a little idealistically naive. Drawing back from glee at the idea of her favorite movie trilogy, she remembered her books and turned to caution Jada about their conditional value. Opening her mouth, she closed it again slowly as she watched her newest friend page through lightly, careful to not leave fingerprints on the pages. This gained more points with the bluenette than any mention of a movie could have, and beamed.

"Movie sounds great. I love Star Wars! As for the quick and dirty, would you rather jump straight into playing and I will teach you, or I can do some backround on the series and the important lingo? So that way if you can't play, you can least understand what's being said." Some people were abysmal gamers and would never pick the technique up no matter how they tried, but it was possible to jargon up and understand if you tried. It was just about research!

Which one was better?! Was she asking about factions?! That was not even remotely a question, and Audrey wasn't about to treat it as such. Pulling the book lightly, she took Jada's hands and looked at her seriously like it was perhaps some kind of strange intervention. "Jada, listen, because this is important. There is only one faction at all worth playing, and that is the Horde. We do not ever, under any circumstances, play Night Elves. We certainly do not ever even consider playing dwarves or gnomes. If a gun is held to your head and you are forced to pick an Alliance race, you should perhaps make a Draenei. But it's possibly not worth living if you have to be on the Alliance." She was perhaps entirely serious about this, but you could never tell with her. To Audrey, being of the Alliance was perhaps worse than being a senshi.

Knowing her luck, Castor probably played a goddamn gnome warlock.

Sitting back again, Audrey propped her tiny feet against the edge of the daybed and grinned in a flash, serious was gone. "A squishy is someone who generally has crap armor, or wears cloth armor. You know, if you hit them, they go squish." Two hands were clapped together in a smashing motion. "Generally cloth-wearers are squishies. Mages, warlocks, priests. If you ever find a paladin wearing cloth, you should squish them on purpose because that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life." Seeing the slightly blank look on her friend's lovely face at this remark, she steepled her fingers and tried to explain. "Paladins can heal and kill things effectively so they get heavier armor. Take less damage. Some try to wear cloth armor so they can use more magic and heal exclusively. They die very fast. Totally screw your team, that's for sure!" Audrey Collins, World of Warcraft master. Could you even put that on a resume? Certainly not a college application.

Thinking of the barrage of information she was about to impart on Jada, Audrey realized that it would probably be better to ply her with sweets first so that she didn't try to kill the bluenette when things got intense. "Hey, sorry, my manners are awful. Did you want a drink or something? I know we have like, several kinds of snack downstairs too. Mom might be safe by now if she's busy."

Audrey wasn't sure whether she should be amused or slightly irritated by the fact that Jada looked like she'd made an especially dirty proposition and the buxom teen was considering it with extra questions. Deciding that this was just a byproduct of being gorgeous, the bluenette went with amused and grinned back. "Pick up the red book, sorta page through it. I'll be right back." Heels down the hall, down the stairs, and not more than a minute and a half passed before Audrey was back upstairs, a large glass full of crystal clear water and ice balanced in her hands before passing it off.

"Alright now, the difference? The difference is racism!" A fire lit in her eyes as she started this impassioned speech, back straight like she was some sort of crazy patriot. Little did they know! "The Alliance frontrunners are humans. Boring old humans like us. The other members are the dwarves and the gnomes, which are basically really freaking short humans. Night Elves are your original racial purists, and it's their fault the whole world is messed up! But then you've got the minorly acceptable race of the Draenei who are blue aliens and really haven't done anything wrong. They were like, slaughtered by the Burning Legion, but that's a whole lot of lore we don't need." Hands waved as the girl tried to pare down the information into something easily digested.

"But the Horde? They're trolls, orcs, the former slaves of the evil Lich King who broke his mind control! Tauren, who are big freaking cows, Jada! I mean, until the expansion, there was no real pretty Horde race. Blood elves are ok, but they're traitors. Started out as Night Elves, over time became obsessed with their status and their magic and were corrupted by it. The Lich King destroyed their home and their power, so they abandoned the Alliance to war against them. Humans tried to enslave every race except the Night Elves, and that is just unacceptable!" Never mind that the Orcs had enslaved the dragons, that was totally immaterial and Not Relevant. "So really, the Horde are the good guys because they just want to be left the hell alone, but nooooo the damn humans and bloody tree-humping elves..." mumbling under her breath, Audrey trailed off and then snapped back to look over at Jada.

"I mean, do you get where I'm coming from?" Probably not, very few people actually understood the struggle and just liked to be a badass orc. Which was really okay, in Audrey's book. But sometimes, just sometimes, she wanted someone to think like she did. God forbid she ever actually find someone!

Oh God she actually had picked it up! Audrey could've kissed her for getting it right and not asking her to repeat herself. Repeating was the devil's tool and if you weren't smart enough to generally pick up what was being said on the first try, you weren't ever going to get it. Period. Hugging her knees up to her chest, Audrey shook her head and kept going. "Four point war. Sort of. The neutral stance is that there is no good guy, the Horde and the Alliance each do bad things to preserve their way of life. But the Alliance does awful things to its own members, so they are the worst. Each faction fights against the Burning Legion, under Sargeras' control. But there's also the Lich King and his Scourge. At any given time you can be fighting the Scourge, the Legion, and the opposite faction." It sounded horribly depressing and was a fairly rich parallel to being a Negaverse agent. Fighting the police, the senshi, and god knows what else that decided it didn't like you today.

Disconcerted by this thought, the bluenette wiggled her toes inside her cream stockings and continued on. "The Lich King is the one who held Sylvanas, and you can assume that because he is very much a bad man, he's working for Sargeras. But Sargeras doesn't give him direct orders, and Arthas (that's the Lich King, came the aside) only controls what undead he pulls from the ground. The demons of the Burning Legion go to uhm...gosh. I don't think anyone is even alive anymore. Kil'Jaeden was downed at the Plateau, and Archimonde was done up on Hyjal. So right now nobody controls the Legion? It's so weird. They're trying to do stuff with the old dragons too, it's a whole lot of mixed-up lore that they're smashing together and sometimes it makes no sense." When did life ever make sense? Sometimes Audrey wished she did live in Azeroth, for all its hardships. You could just barrel your way through things, and then enjoy the scenery when you'd cleared the area. No having to hide in secret, you could actively change the world.

Audrey wanted so badly to change the world.

"Why they're doing it, is just to survive. Sargeras wants power and dominance over all life. The Lich King wants to enslave all life as his Scourge. The Alliance just wants a workforce. But the Horde? They just want to live. And that's why they are the best race." A firm nod and a bright smile, she was solid in her convictions that usually the best people were the ones who only wanted to live in a better world. She wanted the better world, the power to change it, and then the will to keep it that way. It would happen, one way or another.