Briony shook her head furiously -- the indignation of a child. More to the point, one who had just been asked ‘Is that all?’ She could have flown off into a non-stop instruction manual on how to scare someone to death with Fear as your only weapon, but instead she just pouted. “I don’t let go of meatsacks,” she said pointedly. And demons didn’t really die in the corner of an abandoned road or alley or whatever with the thing terrifying them the most stroking their hair and making their panic attacks worse ‘til they pull their eyes out. Like the guy who slept with his mom. Scrubbing at her face because it was still sticky with her real-fake crying, she took a moment to brush her hair back behind her slightly pointed ears. She wished Rachel had tied it back today, or at least left her with a hair-tie.
“I am Fear. Can’t feel it like everyone else does.” She looked up, completely seriously about something that amused her. “It feels minty, did you know that?” She wriggled her fingers like that somehow signalled the tingles. “But I’m an actual-kid not an old-kid and some react real badly to… me. So I don’t push it, even though Excess told me to. I wanna live past 5th grade.” There was a side of her that didn’t care what this lady -- or even Danny Boy -- though of her, but she was still nine and still stubbornly trying to steer herself in a direction she liked. She just assumed that direction would be universally ‘right’ in demonic terms. In the world according to Briony? Grown-ups were her textbooks. Or so she liked to think. Which meant that what this lady had to say suddenly seemed to be important. She was still absorbing the ‘acting together’ part. “... What, like a team?” This confused her for one huge reason: the little Fear had either been chosen last, or not at all, for every team or game since she had started school. Which was mostly fine, because they were nearly all just meatsacks. Except demons got uncomfortable around her too and many did not mind telling her so. “People don’t like putting me in teams.”