a demon gets bored

Joz expected the girl to get bored of her new "friend" and dismiss him within the first hour, or within the first day. When that didn't happen, he resigned himself to providing her companionship. At least he could consider this an extended vacation to the human realm. He expected it to be at least somewhat entertaining.

Cue three hours of the girl talking to her stuffed animals. The girl, whose name Joz still did not know, somehow spent three whole hours introducing him to her stuffed animals.

Joz hoped this would be the end of boring days, but what he didn't expect was for the girl to go to school the next day. Listening to the teachers go on and on about basic math or reading books was enough to make Joz bang his head on the wall. Unfortunately, his head went through the wall. During the next six hours, however, Joz managed to find a loophole in the order he'd received. Due to the very unspecific command, he could go anywhere he wanted- as long as he came back when she wanted her friend. Teleporting sure came in handy sometimes.

The girl, whose name was "RIn" as Joz had heard from her teacher, (and wasn't that a great way to learn someone's name), decided to introduce him to her school friends. They waved, and he waved back, just to be polite, but they couldn't exactly see him. As far as Joz could tell, everyone so far thought of him as an imaginary friend. "Imaginary friend" seemed to be a common phenomenon in human children. At least this meant he was safe from exorcism, for now.

That evening, Rin began to talk to him (more).

"I know everyone thinks you're imaginary but you're definitely real! Can we get ice cream? You don't really look like my other friends though. You like ice cream right? Right!?! Of course I'm right, everyone likes ice cream!"

Joz helpfully did not mention lactose intolerance or certain peoples' dislike of sweets.

"Hmm, what do you do for fun? Ice cream? Let's go get ice cream!"

Rin managed to convince her mother to take them out for ice cream. As they waited in line, Rin leaned over and whispered loudly, "so how come no one can see you? Also, why do you look like smoooooke?" Joz made a shrugging motion, which didn't look like anything as he looked like a blob of smoke.

"I don't know," he said, even though he did know.

"Okay."

She was getting quite a few stares as she talked to thin air. But she just shrugged as if that were an answer. Joz decided he should feel glad that she wouldn't pester him for a "real" answer because he wasn't sure how he was going to lie his way out of this one. Maybe he'll tell her in the future.

Later that night, Rin suddenly became a self-proclaimed artist. Her target? Joz. This basically involved her taking a pencil and scribbling on the page into a vaguely circular shape. It wasn't wrong, per se, but Joz had to admit it did not look very flattering.

(But luckily, being a demon came with a few perks, so he came over and drew a beautiful artistic rendition of himself. Of course that was an objective opinion, not a subjective one.)

Rin cheered. "Pretty!"

She added herself onto the drawings and hung them up on the wall. What a great start to a wonderful new friendship.