With so much perception...

errant_passage @ 2008-05-15T11:36:00

2008-05-15T16:39:22Z

Title: Where there is smoke, there is not always fire?!
Characters: Modegi Yusuke, Oi Ranmaru, Julia Tesni, Hatori Amanda
Scene: Ranmaru attempt to save a girl from a rather 'hot' room, only to find out she is the source of the problem!

The sprinklers continue to rain down throughout the dorm, but there is no sign of smoke even though things are certainly hot. Seems to get hotter near one particular room on the first floor.

Just then, there is a knock at that door. "Jaria! Jaria!" Why is she here? "Yuuu okai?" She is speaking her best Engarish, rmeembering the persona she created. Oh yes. And now she is here to rescue her friend from the almost fire she created.

There's no answer to that knock, though Yusuke is going to find that door frighteningly hot. What's amazing is there isn't any smoke coming from under it, or anywhere else that's obvious.

"Everything alright in here?" A few younger men ran over to the hallway, having noticed the strangely radiating heat as well as the fact that their computers just died. Among these boys was Ranmaru, looking a little out of place seeing as he was quite the bits taller than the others, and looked like a gangster of sorts. He remains silent as he takes in the situation while the three other boys run forth into the hallway, attempting to check what is going on and begin to knock on doors. Ranmaru himself begins to walk the hallway as well, slowly, noticing a small girl knocking on one of the doors. He begins to approach her, hands in his pockets. He doesn't say anything, and he is rather quiet, but one of the other young men makes his presence known as he rudely comments: "Oi-san, what are you doing here? Go back to your dorm or something, we don't need your help." Which simply gets a glare in reply, causing the youngster who had spoken so rudely to Ranmaru to twitch and walk the other way.

Modegi Yusuke is ignoring the heat, even though that door would be hot enough to burn a normal person. And, she's forgotten something important about basic human physiology, as she's not sweating from the heat either. She's just pretending to be concerned for Julia, and is ignoring Ranmaru. Again with the banging on the door. "Jaria! Yuu okai? Itsh yur freendo, Yusuke-chan!" she seems to think if she speaks 'engarish' she'll get let in easier, or soemthing.

Ranmaru walks over towards the girl, until he is standing right next to her. "You okay there?" He asks, kindly, before noticing the overwhelming heat coming from the door. He takes a deep breath for a moment, wondering why he didn't notice this before and completely seems to forget about the little girl that was trying to get in. After all, to him, this meant there was a fire in there!? Right!? He quickly grasps for the doorhandle, trying to see if it would open up on its own. The fact that the little girl was standing outside like that, apparently not being able to get inside, somehow completely slipped his mind.

The youngster quickly grabs for the doorknob and... YOUCH! He immediately brings his hand back to his mouth in order to blow on it. "Ite-ta-ta-ta. Shhh..." The youngster hisses, quickly trying to calm down so he won't be releasing his feline features before he rips off a piece of his shirt that's underneath his uniform and wraps it around his hand. "Don't worry, I'll be right there!" He calls out. Sure, Ranmaru is not exactly hero material here, but he can't let something like this happen and later feel guilty about not having saved this person right? He grabs the doorknob, now his hand protected by the cloth and begins to turn it and push towards the door, hoping it will open.

The door opens with no problem. The room feels more that hot enough for there to be a fire raging there, only there are no flames. Everything is soaked from the still functioning sprinklers, and steaming from the heat. Seated on the bed is a tall, red-headed gaijin woman, staring at nothing with green eyes wide with obvious fear. She's not even getting a chance to get wet, as the water boils away as soon as it hits her. Its amazing that the bed or soaked papers and books on it didn't catch fire before the sprinklers went off.

Paper burns at 451 degrees farenheit. So maybe it didn't get quite that hot. But the younger girl just comes in, pushing past Ranmaru if she can, still ignoring him. Besides. She has to get to you. She's forgetting to be plain right now, but .. well it's understandable right, if her friend was in an emergency!

"Woah!" Ranmaru immediately places a hand before his face to cover it from the severe heat. Okay, this was getting ridiculous. First people throwing water at him, then people draining energy from large groups of people, and now this! Unexplainable heat? Still, this is no time to be thinking about such things. The curiousity that boils ever so heavily is nothing compared to this heat, and that is exactly why instead of trying to figure out what is going on, he begins to move into the room, intent on getting that red haired girl out of there. However, when he notices the girl trying to run in, he quickly tries to grab for her arm in order to stop her, seeing as he believed her to be too young. He fails miserably however, being so heavily influenced by the fire, and ends up just flailing in the girl's general direction. "No, stop. Go back out, I'll deal with this."

Ranmaru felt sweat trickling down his back as his body started overheating due to the intense heat. The fact that the water in the room was disappating before it even hit the ground meant that it had to be quite a ways over 100 degrees celcius. His mind then suddenly connected something. The fact that the girl outside had been speaking Engrish, and this certain girl looked foreign, was enough for him to draw a good conclusion of where this girl came from. "~Don't worry, you'll be alright.~" He speaks in semi-fluent english, something rare among Japanese, and mainly due to his major focus on English for his studies. He then slowly begins to walk into the room, up to where Julia lays, still covering his face... not that it really did much good to him, seeing as the heat was unbearable one way or the other. This had to happen quick!

Julia Tesni blinks at the voices, though she only knows one of them. Paniced she screams out the first thing on her mind, in english. "Demon!" She reaches out for Yusuke, who will hopefully be smart enough to not let the overly toasty woman get her hands on her. All she wants is a hug, comforting, someone she knows to help her, but without explaining it all, who knows how it could seem.

Modegi Yusuke looks alarmed, starting to reach for you, but then you yell 'demon' and she wonders .. do you know? She's not quite sure, but she didn't expect it, so she does the first thing she can think of to do, which is scream and run away.

"Demon?" Well, Ranmaru knew quite well that he himself was not a demon, even though he did look somewhat dangerous in his black attire. His gaze dances quickly over to the smaller girl, trying to gather what her response to this would be. Her response isn't quite... what he expected though. Ranmaru however does not bother to follow her running with a gaze of his own, instead he inches forwards until he finally has reaches the gaijin, sitting there on that bed. It was strange, now that he thought about it, that the bed was not on fire due to the heat. "~Are you okay?~" He asks, reaching out his spare hand in order to pull her off of the bed and out of this room: quite under the impression that the room itself was the source of the heat.

If Ranmaru thought the doornob was hot, its nothing compared to touching Julia. The door is open to the hallway, so anyone can see in if they are braving the sprinklers and alarm. There's no smoke, but a whole lot of heat and steam. Julia herself is dry, the water going to steam as soon as it hits her. She blinks at Ranmaru with terror filled eyes, and returns to her native tongue in her fear, English. "No! Don't! It might get you too, its got me, its got me!"

"Ick..." Ranmaru retreats his hand quickly, clearly annoyed at this. He cusses loudly, seeing as he just burned himself, and begins to swear some more. "Fucking supernatural shit..." Oh how he wished he knew what to do right now. His sane mind told him to just run out and get the hell away from this lady and this heat, but at the back of his mind something was screaming for him to somehow rescue Julia. "~I want to help... how can I HELP you?~" Ranmaru keeps speaking English, but he has begun to stammer as the heat is getting to him more and more. His legs feel a little weaker, and the feeling in the hand he had used to try and touch Julia was starting to dim. "Grrr." He throws some more swears out of his mouth but begins to back away, not sure what to do, and not wishing to fall unconcious here where he'd surely burn to a crisp.

Hatori Amanda enters the dorm quickly, Baldr shielding her from the heat as much as possible. She literally remembers getting burned yesterday, but that doesn't matter. As she enters the building, she pauses for a moment, listening intently, carefully going just a bit further, listening as the sound bounces ...

Julia Tesni buries her face in her hands and starts to cry, which isn't much of an answer for poor Ranmaru. Who could blame him if he did leave? The entire scene is very weird after all, and all the smart people are outside waiting for the fire department.

Screw this, he could not deal with crying girls! Demons or not, he could not care, so he undoes his outer uniform and wraps it around both his hands in order to form really thick gloves. If he could get her out of this room, maybe he could somehow cool her down, or maybe find a fire-hydrant? He felt a sudden rush of adrenaline which allowed for him to actually carry on with what he was doing as he attempts to get a good hold around the girl's waist and hope to lift her up and carry her out into the hallway... if that was not going to work, he'd probably give up.

Hatori Amanda was never one known for being smart, and before the emotional overload gets to her, she begins to sing, as she's coming into the room, stopping just before she runs into Ranmaru, She says in a sing-song voice, "Juu-lii-aaa", and then she just seems to be humming something tuneless, as if nothing at all was wrong, and she backs away out of the door so Ranmaru can proceed if that is what he plans to do, and she will follow him. However, her magic is in those notes, and she is exuding the calm, most of it aimed directly to Julia, once she gets near her room entrance.

Julia Tesni doesn't fight being grabbed hold of, though any part of her that touches any unprotected part of him is not going to feel good. She then hears a familiar, calming voice and she starts to relax, though sniffling yet. And she is still quite hot, as it takes time to cool down, but at least it shouldn't get any worse.

Ranmaru notices the fact that the girl is cooling down. He's not foolish enough to believe its trough his doing though, as he hears a soothing voice call out for the girl's name. "Seems things are going to be fine." The youngster states, slowly wakling Julia out while he feels the insane heat landing on his body. The world around him was getting woosy, and just when he finally got Julia out of the dorm he began to slowly tip over and... faints. The heat had gotten to him, he was too dehydrated to keep his conciousness about.

Hatori Amanda tries to direct the stranger, "let's take her outside, and find a nice sunny place to put her." it sounds kind of ludicrous when she says it .. oh dear that can't be good. "Sir?" She's not sure what to do, because Julia obviously can't carry him in her state, and he shouldn't be exposed to this heat ... she is capable of a lot of things, but dragging a man through a dorm is not one of them .. although she does have a good handle on things .. if she has to, she will. "Julia, can you carry him somewhere cooler? Take him outside?" if not .. things will get interesting.

Julia Tesni catches herself as the man goes down. She's shaking yet, and still overly toasty. She grabs a wet blanket from the end of her bed, puts it around the man and picks him up that way. "We should hurry...."

Hatori Amanda says, "Of course. Let's go outside. Lead the way, and I'll follow." She sounds confident, sure of herself. She likes it when her sound powers don't utterly fail her.

Julia Tesni manages to get the man out of the dorm, leaving him where the firemen and paramedics can take care of him. But she doesn't want to linger and raise any more questions than they are already going to have.

Not too many qeustions, as he's obviously suffering from heat exhaustion. Mandy follows you easily enough, even though she's not quite sure what they're walking around or wehre they're going, that isn't important right now. Julia is.

errant_passage @ 2008-05-15T11:32:00

2008-05-15T16:35:53Z

Title: A new teacher? Strange teaching method!
Characters: Kaneko Noriko, Hanae Ruri, Oi Ranmaru
Scene: Ranmaru gets to know about magic, and shows that he is one of the strangest wannabe teachers ever...

Hanae Ruri sets her bag down next to herself and smooths her school uniform out, muttering something about stealing a boy's uniform and wearing it instead. It's obvious she doesn't wear skirts too often, but at least she doesn't flash everyone when she grabs her bag again. And from there, she heads for the gate

It would appear she was being followed though! A man dressed completely in black, wearing sunglasses and looking most suspicious, and being followed by a set of two gray kittens. Those gray kittens had been following that man for quite a while now, seemingly still wanting to be taken in by him. "Hmm." The man hums as Ruri bends over in order to put down, and pick up, her stuff. He doesn't look away, but neither does he try to peer underneath her shirt. After all, he is not some random pervert. During the time of Ruri resting and getting ready to enter the school, the young man catches up to her and soon is standing directly next to her, looking towards the school's plaza, not making a single sound.

Hanae Ruri gets that kind of "Eeeh!" look on her face and stops, looking up and over. "Um..." is all she can think to get out, besides you know, quickly backing away and crossing her arms. "C-can I help you?" Wondering why an older student suddenly just appeared next to her. Had she completely dazed out again?

"Greetings." The man slowly turns his head about, gazing at the girl. It takes him a little moment, but suddenly he realizes that he recognizes this girl! Of course, to others it would seem like he was stalking her or something, but this was just pure coincidence here. "Hmm." Could she help him? He turns his attention back on the school, which lay beyond the open gates, and brings a hand up to his mouth to release a gentle cough. "Maybe. But... don't I know you from somewhere? Weren't you that girl that was there during that park robbery?" He wonders if he is maybe just mistaken, confusing this girl with someone else. No, he is sure that this was her!

Hanae Ruri raises an eyebrow and shakes he rhead quickly, too quickly, "Erh no no, not at all, what robbery was that?" She's a bit of a horrible liar in all honestly so it's probably not too hard to raise the bs flag on her. But, for now, she suddenly asks, "Why were you following me out?" Whoops. Well, you know it could be claimed she's referring to now and not to last time, but... probably now.

"Hmm?" Was he mistaken after all? No, he caught on to the girl's obvious lie. "I'm pretty sure it was you." He turns towards her again to get a better look of her face. "Hmm?" However, the question she asks does surprise the youngster. Follow her? Well, he guess he did end up tailing her for a while, but that was because they both were going the same way. "I wasn't following you. I merely needed to go to the same place as you." With that dark, almost threatening voice of his, that sounded nothing short of suspicious!

Hanae Ruri blinks for a moment and steps another step away from him, now noting the kittens. Weird... really really weird. She brings her little bag around and clutches it in front of her, then asks, "Why are you here after having followed me last time then? You look too old to be in the high-school... and um, you have cats following you, you know?"

"Hmm?" Ranmaru ignores the first question seeing as the second one interests him more. He turns around for a moment and looks at the two cute little kittens, which immediately gets him a 'meow' in stereo, as they believe to have gotten his attention. "Oh... yeah. Apparently I do." How could he not have noticed!? The suspicious youngster turns back towards Ruri and then stretches out an arm aimed at the school. "I need to be in there. And I believe, so do you." Why would someone his age be needing to go into a high-school!? Suspicious! "I however have a question for you." She might notice that the gaze that rests upon her becomes more concentrated, even though she could not see his eyes from behind those sunglasses. "Did you notice, or do, anything suspicious during that robbery?" The 'or do' was just a whisper as light as the wind. The question why he had followed her prior to that, after the robbery, goes unanswered.

Hanae Ruri shakes her head quietly and crosses her arms, then says, "Why would you think I did anything strange at the robbery? As far as I know that stupid woman tripped over her own feet in an attempt to run away" Her hands twitch briefly as she continues, "And is that why you've been following me?" Good thing she didn't see him looking at her as she grabbed her bag or she'd probably just yell pervert and leave. She looks over at the school, then back to Ranmaru and asks, "And why do you need into the school?"

"~Thou protestest too much~." Ranmaru quotes in English in a most strangely fluent manner. "Why? Well, just call it a hunch." Although at that very moment, he had been strangely unaware of what had happened, the fact that his clothes had gotten a little wet and the fact that the back of the target had seemed wet... along with the fact that this girl had walked away immediately, had later given him the idea that something had been going on. Not to mention, he'd met up with someone who said that there were more than one 'water senshi'... whatever senshi were. So perhaps this girl was too? A lot of coincidental information, sure, but still he had come to this conclusion. "As for me following you? Well, I just had to go the same way. There's only one exit to that park... and someone with my looks? I better not get involved with the police, if you catch my drift?" He doesn't answer why he needs to be in the school. Instead, he just pockets both of his hands and lets out a tiny sigh.

Hanae Ruri looks like the reference in English went over her head entirely. She even makes kind of a "ew" face as he says it. Not because it was english, but because she doesn't like this guy, he's kind of creepy and he might be saying something perverted. She takes a third step back and says, "Why do you need to get into the school?" She asks again, she's not going to drop it and she knows she's fighting a losing battle, onee-san always said she was horrible at lying and it's kind of showing

"Oh?" He turns away from her and smiles for a moment. "I'll be giving an English class there." He chuckles for a moment, wondering if fate would be ironic enough to put Hanae in the class he was about to 'teach'. "Of course, the normal teacher will remain to be around, this is just a small internship for a day. To see how well I would do as a teacher." Something told him though, that he would not be doing all that fantastic, seeing as he already had one kid being suspicious of him. "Hmm?" He turns towards her again, peering at her. He realized that she was uncomfortable and lying, and it just secured his foot between the door as he then finally asks: "So how do you control water?"

Hanae Ruri wrinkles her nose in and says dryly, "I turn the tap on and off, is that really that hard for a sensei?" Of course, you know, she's showing the down side of it so at this rate he'll have plenty of ammo against her. She starts to try and slip past him into the school, figuring she can just blend into the crowd and call it good.

"You know what I mean. Your lies are a little too obvious, I'm sorry. Now..." He pauses for a moment and glances at her, trying to get a good feeling of what class this girl likely was in. "Are you in class 3-1? Because if you are, you are quite stuck with me." He hoped luck would be on his side on this. He follows, taking a few steps her way, and continues to ask questions. "How long have you been able to use magic, and could you teach me?" He was just trying to draw out an answer, because he himself was kind of running on empty here. The reason he was interested in magic was because he had felt powerless the day before, as he had witnessed people drawing energy from others. Ranmaru figured... if he could use magic, maybe he could do something about it? Of course, he was unaware that the person he was best off asking was Mikage... who would surely be glad to tell him at least about her own powers. But, seeing as he was perfectly oblivious to them at this point....

Hanae Ruri sighs and stops, "Yes I'm in class 3-1..." She puts a hand to her forehead and shakes it. "I honestly don't know how I use magic, I'm trying to learn it all myself. Matter of fact, I can't even use the same magic my sister uses" Her hands do that sort of twitch thing again, "Besides, I wouldn't feel right trying to teach a sensei anything, especially if he is in control of a grade, it may affect things good or bad" Seems she doesn't want to risk upsetting him and screwing her grade or giving it an artificial boost.

"Heh, I can't give you any grades. As I said, I am just here for a one-day internship." Maybe she had not heard him when he said so? Or had he forgotten, he could not remember. However, that did not matter as much as what she had just stated. He seems to be perfectly content with nodding at her and replying to her in a calm manner. "I see. Very well then." And there, he dropped it! He thinks for a moment about asking her about her sister, but instead shakes his head, thinking it would be impolite to immediately try to get more information now that she was not 'good' enough, or so it would probably sound like. "One last question. Is it possible for someone who knows nothing about magic to learn it?" The answer was probably no.

Hanae Ruri shrugs and says, "I have no idea honestly" in response to the question, "It's.. something that I've been trying to find out." She turns again and rubs the back of her head, "As far as the rest of it, just don't bring it up in public again and I'll see what I can do about helping you out alright?" She sounds exhasperated, but at least he dropped it. And for good measure she adds her own final question, "Why are those cats following you?"

"I don't know. Cats just... have a tendency to follow me around?" He pitches, which was absolutely true. Of course he knew more, but it'd take a really good empath to notice that there was more behind that answer than he was actually letting on. Not to mention, he basically had just claimed he had no supernatural powers, but asking for help, right?" The youngster turns about and looks down at the two meowing gray kittens and picks them up by their necks. "You two be nice now and stop bothering me, okay?" It was there, just for that tiny moment, that his voice dropped out of that dangerous tone and turned into a very kind and soft one. He walks off for a moment to put them behind the fence and then backtracks over to Ruri again. "Talk about /what/ in public?" He asks innocently, shrugs his shoulders, and begins to walk into the building.

Hanae Ruri slaps her forehead and mutters something as soon as she thinks he's looking away. She hefts her bag and starts to make her way into the school as well, hesitating again at the gate. Maybe she can call in and get out of class for one more day, her sister had just arrived in town so she could claim she has to go get her from the train station. But, that would be easy to disprove... One way or the other she's standing there at the gates for a few minutes

Ranmaru walks back up to Ruri and points towards the insides of the school a few times. "Don't worry. I may look like this, but I am not a bad person." He didn't know how well he'd do as a sensei, but he indeed was a nice guy... underneath that dark clothing and scarred face and those sunglasses which he refused to ever take off, even during night-time. "I'll be going to class now, don't want students to be getting the wrong idea, now do you?" And with that he walks off into the actual building and disappears amongst the students... even though he towers above most of them.

Hanae Ruri raises an eyebrow and says, "I don't think that's the main problem I have with you sensei..." She shrugs and crosses her arms again bag at her feet and asks, "Why don't you try not sneaking up on students, I bet you that would help out quite a bit actually" And yes, she still has sunglasses on, she only seems to take them off to sleep, though at least with hers they're also perscription so she can claim she lost her real glasses.

"I guess." Ranmaru replies, wandering a little slower seeing as Ruri was still walking next to him now, apparently ignoring what he had warned about. "I just tend to be sneaky by nature, as in, silent. People get startled too easily." He shrugs, trying his best to explain why people always thought he was 'sneaky'. "Anyway, I believe..." He begins to accend a set of stairs, intent on going to the third floor. "Third floor, right?"

Hanae Ruri nods and says, "Yes, third room on the left I think, still a little new here" Which is obvious because for now she's still wearing her old uniform, hasn't had a chance go get a new uniform, or she's been lazy. She runs her fingers through her hair, which is pretty short now that it's out of her hat, "Why are you only here for a day, aren't these sort of things usually longer?"

"Its because I am not in my last year of college." He pauses for a moment. Normally a person his age and in his class would not have gotten this kind of 'job' at all. But Ranmaru explains: "Actually, my teacher put up a bet that I could not teach a class English. I intent on proving him wrong." What was at stake for that bet is something the youngster does not explain. Instead he remains silent until they reach the third floor and they begin to approach classroom 3-1. "So my teacher called in a few favors and is making me teach this class... please tell me this is not the school's worst class?"

Hanae Ruri shrugs and smiles in a veiled way, "You know as well as I do sensei, I'm new here." She laughs and rolls her shoulders back, bag resting against her back now, "I guess we'll find out together won't we?" She adjusts her glasses and asks, "So what are you going to lose if you can't teach english hm?"

"I bet him about showing him what was behind my sunglasses, and I do not intend on losing this!" He raises a fist and shakes it a little, which looks somewhat amusing. He eyes the girl for a moment, trying to create some eye-contact. "Anyway..." He finally comes to a halt before the door. He hears some noise behind it. He knocks on the door, to which the reply is a door quickly opening and a geeky looking professor storming out, handing him a notebook. "Good luck! They're yours now!" And with that the man runs off! "Fantastic." Ranmaru sighs, looking inside as he sees a couple of punkish students throwing stuff around, the tables being a mess. "You wait outside here for a moment."

The youngster walks in and closes the door behind him, locking out Ruri for a moment. Suddenly there is a lot of racket and shouting... and after a short 30 seconds it becomes perfectly quiet. There's sounds of benches being moved into place. The door opens again, and Ranmaru... looking the same as before, waves Ruri in. Everyone was quiet and staring intently at Ranmaru. Some angry, some looking like they'd seen ghost, that's how pale their faces were.

Hanae Ruri leans against the wall while she waits, looking just a wee-bit self conscious about the whole, skirt thing. She leans forward and peels herself from the wall as soon as she hears the handle moving again and slips in, murmuring, "Bet it doesn't last" to no one in particular, looking around for a moment. Hey it looks like Ranmaru gets the honor of introducing her to the class and giving her her seating arrangement. And in response to all of this 'excitement' the hair near her ear kind of raises up like it's got a charge, making her messy hair worse

Yes, one could cut the tension with a knife. "Now that we are all here, and have calmed down a little bit." Ranmaru keeps his tone down in order to sound less treatening, as he does not wish for the students to riot against him. "My name is Oi Ranmaru." He writes it down on the board in Kanji first, and then underneath in romanji. "For those who care about meaning, Ran, as in Circle, Maru as in Chaos, not flower." He taps the crayon against the board a few times before putting down the little notebook he received from the fleeing teacher and places it down on his desk. "Now..." He sets his hands to either side of said desk and looks over his students. "How good do you think your English is, and who of you believe that they even need this class?"

Hanae Ruri stands up there at the front of the class, muttering to herself again as she holds her bag over her shoulder. She's got a somewhat aggravated look on her face, but then she shrugs and finds a handy wall to lean against, doing her best impression of holding it up. She resists the urge to say something somewhat rude seeing as how she knows taco and burrito in english, and the bastardized japanese words, but nothing actually helpful.

She's all... in class, and stuff. Surprised to see Ruri coming in like that, still Noriko raises her bandaged arm, and offers in fluent english (albeit british-accented),"Actually, I was raised mostly in Britain and later in America. I've got a bloody good hold on the language. But this class is required, so..."

Ranmaru turns his gaze towards Ruri for a moment and then turns towards an empty table in the way back near the window. "Miss Hanae, please seat yourself over there." He points at the empty seat for a moment and turns his attention back to the students as he begins to get some grumpy answers. "I think my English is pretty good." States one of the kids, and then proceeds to throw some English curses at him. "Ah yes, how nice." Ranmaru simply replies, having heard all of them before. "But do you even know what they mean?" The students ends up giving him a blank stare, and some of the students begin to laugh as the young boy who had just spoken turns quiet again. The entire class however turns quiet when Noriko finally speaks.

"Ah, excelent." Ranmaru smiles kindly at her. "~Well, I'm sure you could teach me a few things then, wouldn't you?~" Ranmaru shifts over to English, which he performs quiet excelently. There is very little apparence of the fact that he is Japanese when he speaks English. He quickly glances over his notebook. "~Miss Kaneko?~" He shifts back to Japanese. "So, who just understood what she and I said to eachother?" And he turns about in order to write on the blackboard.

Hanae Ruri quietly makes her way to the table which had been appointed to her, wishing she could find a way to sit next to Kaneko instead, for reasons outside of having a good friend to cheat off of. She settles down on her chair, sets her bag in front of her and prompty rests her head on her hands and watches the board, mostly catching maybe a few English words here and there. Her early language focus had been elsewhere after all. If she's close enough she'll probably start scribbling drawing and notes for a while

Kaneko Noriko offers right back in English, as usual,"~Maybe, but I'm sure my grammar could bloody well do with a bit of tweaking so I don't sound half so common, aye? There's a difference between speakin' a language, and speakin' it proper.~" Native-sounding? Definitely. Which explains her accent in Japanese. She still manages a tiny wave to Hanae, though attention is on the professor.

Ranmaru watches Hanae walk off to the corner and decides to leave her be, seeing as he had just bothered her so much outside of the school. He proceeds to nod at Kaneko, showing her that he had understood, then begins the actual class. After all, he had a bet to win. "~I'm sure you could teach me a few things.~" Ranmaru pauses with every word as he erases his own name and writes those words on the board. "There! Now, lets see what you guys can do." And with that he actually begins his class, where he explains the sentence structure, explains what things mean... and then continues on to attempt to teach his students how to pronounce that very sentence with as little of the 'Engrish' the Japanese are used to and more of the 'English'.

Hanae Ruri looks half out of it, hiding how out of it she is exactly by using those glasses of hers. When she finishes scribbling her note, she waits for Ranmaru to turn around to write on the board and looks like she's debating on throwing the note to Kaneko. She's interupted by her efforts to stifle a yawn and a sleepy look though

Kaneko Noriko starts scribbling down notes as well, though it's unlikely she even needs to bother, really. Still, she's nothing if not an attentive student, and she DOES have a gift for languages. Why, she even avoids engrish altogether! She seems quite satisfied to be the attentive student anyway, even if this means that people have suddenly decided to become her best friend, which apparently includes leaning over to 'check their work' against hers. So of course, she's totally oblivious.

Ranmaru simply continues his lessons, and is doing surprisingly well. As much as some of the students clearly don't want to be there that day, its likely one of the few chances for some of them to get an actual good English class, as their previous teacher was a wreck when it came to dealing with some of the more violent students. And this was a one-day thing only! "Now... for some of our different students. I believe you threw some swears at me? Lets see if we can discuss them, shall we?" And with that he writes the B* word on the board. "Now, can anyone tell me what this means?" Well, this was rather alternative for a teacher, wasn't it?

Hanae Ruri rubs her eyes behind her glasses and stifles a yawn again, muttering to herself about going to bed earlier and avoiding practice for a little bit. She doesn't ever put her head down and pass out and she does take the occasional note, but it's accompanied by random doodles branching from the various letters she's written down.

Kaneko Noriko refrains from raising her hand when she sees the word written on the board. She has to stifle a handful of giggles, and actually forces herself to look away,towards Hanae. This is funny! The words practically dance in her gaze. Still, she has decided that answering too many questions from her would be unfair to the rest of the class. Plus noone likes a know-it-all. She'll wait to see if anyone raises their hands, and only gingerly if noone does even then.

"I am glad you people are so amused by this." Ranmaru grins. "Seeing as our friend... Ryo-san." He had to look at the notebook again. "Could not tell us what this word means, I will tell you. It refers to a female dog, or so it was intended anyway. It is now-a-days apparently used to point out a lewd woman or girl. So... now you know. Keep in mind however, that this is one of the more ridiculous cuss-words out there." He chuckles as he states this and writes down a few more normal words that were simply suggestive. "Other words similar to that..."

He writes down words that had to do with animals, such as roosters and cats... each forming cuss-words, and each as non-sensical yet often used as the other. Ranmaru then proceeded to explain every single one of them, and wiped them off of the board in order to return to his normal English class. He picks up the book that the students are using to study and flips through a few pages, before deciding that it is not worth much and throws it to the side. "Okay! Grab pen and paper, we are going to work of sentence-structure!" Seeing as the students just had their 'fun', there was not much of a complaint at doing some actual work. This did not mean there were no sighs, but seeing as some of the people were still chuckling and laughing...

Kaneko Noriko beams brightly at her companion, offers a wink, and then draws up a fresh sheet of paper. "~Time to work... Sentence structure... Build your grammar, expand your syntax..." She just happens to catch Ruri dropping from consciousness, looks left and right, and when she thinks she can get away with it, tosses a spare pencil at the girl to wake her up. Immaculate.

Ranmaru begins to carefully, and most patiently teach for the many minutes to come like a real teacher would, however taking his time to ask input from the students and getting them involved in 'his' class. He is careful not to go too fast for some of the slower students, and towards the last ten minutes of the has given people an assignment to write ten good english sentences using a series of words he's written on the board, and the students are allowed to use any other words they may known to fill them up. And while they are hard at work, the Yakuza look-alike teacher takes his time to walk through the class in case anybody needed help.

Hanae Ruri does have her notes, there's gaps in the notes when she dozed off, and any slow points she filled up with doodles off of her sentances. But there are notes! This time though, she's really out and actually half slumps in her chair, cheek falling off of her palm ever so slowly.

Kaneko Noriko luckily has ALL the notes, which she'll be happy to share with Ruri. She's an attentive enough child, anyway. She's got ten sentences written down in no time... And then, when she realizes there's still plenty of time? She writes another ten. In fact, she gets so bored, she takes out an extra sheet of paper, and begins writing a short story in english. Sounds like poor attention span at the moment.

"Careful, people will get the wrong idea." As Ranmaru passes past Kaneko, he whispers this to her before heading on to the other students. He takes note of Ruri nearly falling asleep, but doesn't mention it, nor does he act upon preventing it. Instead he does his round, helps a few students, and when he arrives back to the front of the class, he announces that time is up and begins to do a second, much quicker round to pick each and every-one up. "Okay, that will be it for today. You've been a wonderful class, and I hope that in the future I'll have the honor of teaching a group such as yours. But, this is the first and last day you will be seeing me, most likely. A few 'huh?'s and confused sounds make their appearance amongst the class, not entirely sure what is going on. "Alrighty, that'll be it then." He waves at the youngsters, packs the papers, and begins to leave without another word.

Hanae Ruri hits her head on the desk as he turns to leave the classroom. She snaps awake, her glasses left on the desk and she tries to.. look like it was planned or something. It isn't happening, but oh well. She still looks fairly tired, especially without those glasses. A hand quickly grabs the glasses and she rubs her eyes, then shrugs and rests her head again, trying to stay awake.

errant_passage @ 2008-05-14T08:39:00

2008-05-14T13:56:38Z

Title: Fortune telling gone wrong
Characters: Gekido Kisho, Oi Ranmaru, Tsutsuji Kasei (Enyo), Iryuu Gyoku (Gyoku)
Scene: Ranmaru is called to a fortune teller, only to be drawn into a show put on only to sap the energy of those watching.

It is evening, the descending sun in the sky states as it lingers toward the horizon, casting the last of its golden rays over the bustling city of Tokyo. On the corner of this particular street, there is a little gazebo, known to those who frequent the city as a fortuneteller's booth. However, on this night, there is a lovely lady seated outside of it, dressed to the tea in exquisite crimson silks. As people walk by, she draws their attention and beckons them to her perch. From here, she hands them a hand-sized parchment, smiles, and waves as they go on their way.

And standing just down the street from this gypsy-like princess is a man dressed to the nines--to include top hat and cane. "You there, Miss! Care to have your fortune told?" He offers an OL passing by on her way from work; the woman just scurries even faster by. Unperturbed, the man rounds on another person, and then another, rewording his questionable offer. And finally, Ranmaru has the dubious distinction of coming within his range. "Ohhh lad, have I got an offer for /you/!" he leers, reaching an arm out for the young man's shoulders. "How, I say, how would you like your fates to be read--the very liiines of your future," he gushes, gesturing wide in a display of old-school showmanship. The wave of his hands halt in position to expertly frame Enyo's face within Ranmaru's gaze. "... by that lovely there? Five minutes with her worth some pocket-change?"

It is indeed a nice evening, one to be out for a walk in. Walking most slowly along the sidewalk, Ranmaru is making his way to who-knows-where. He seems to have companions, two little gray kittens that are following him on either side of him. They look like they don't have a home, and it is almost as if they are begging the man they are following to take them into his home. However, that specific young man would, to any normal and sane passerby, not look like a very good candidate to be taking in kittens. This especially since he seemed to be hurt somehow, as he was breathing heavily.

Even though it is late at night, this particular student is still wearing sunglasses, and adjusts them just as he passes by the 'Fabulous Fortunes' sign. He stops. The gaze which had once been set on the road ahead slowly flowed onto the sign, and then the lady who was standing in the gazebo, handing out those parchments of hers. It is then and there that curiosity takes over, as it does with many felines and their kin, and Ranmaru begins to inch forwards, into the direction of that gazebo. He normally is not one for fortune telling, but for some reason he felt inclined to visit this specific gazebo. Maybe it was because there was such a sudden and large influx of people visiting it? His approach is a slow and careful one however.

It would appear that he is however stopped by a man. It had not been this man he wanted to see, wasn't it? No. He turns his eyes towards the man and places a finger to the bridge of his sunglasses, tipping it upwards to his eyes... and simply stares at him, as if beginning a stare-down contest.

A group of giggling adolescent females has taken the attention of the beautiful woman, she holding the pair of her hands out towards them. All of the three girls, at once, hold their palms out to her. With an angelic smile and mirthful soft laugh, she takes one girl's palm, looks it over, leans toward her, and murmurs to her. This goes on for each of the bubbling teenagers. Before long, they are on their way, charms in hand!

The exotically appealing fortuneteller glances toward the man in the top hat, tilting her head to the side a bit. "Ano, Gyoku-sama," she says, her voice a melodic song of words. "Are you pestering the young men again? I thought my affections were all you needed." A pout, the lady in crimson displays, before she hikes her chin into the air, eyes closed in silence.

"Most certainly not, my dear!" Gyoku calls over his shoulder, gesturing Ranmaru forth with a hand hovering just behind the young man's shoulders. "Best to not keep the ladies waiting," he stage-whispers, his stalling giving the trio of teenieboppers time to depart. "Especially not one to whose precious caresses sing the harp-strings of fate!" The laugh rippling forth from his lips is at once three things: Lascivious, overwrought... and frightened.

"Hmm?" The young man turns his head about as he hears the female's voice chant above that of the others, calling out to the man in the top hat, who's name was apparently Gyoku. He quickly shifts his head as Gyoku lifts that hand up and has it so close to his shoulder. It would appear that Ranmaru is a little wary of the man, perhaps because of the fact that he had picked up the tone of fear within the top hat wearing man. 'Harp-strings of fate?' Those words go through the youngster's mind for a moment, but are forgotten as his curiosity takes over and he begins to approach the woman in crimson most slowly and carefully. He didn't know why, but his senses were heightening.

Ranmaru quickly concentrated on this, knowing this feeling, and ensures that nothing is 'popping' out. It appears he is successful, and begins to take in the scents, sounds and more importantly, if there was any sense of danger about. After all, as much as his curiosity had taken over, his mind of reason was still conscious because of the hat man's tone of voice.

The pair of young men approach the lady in damask, yet she remains seated with her hands resting by the wrist on her knees. Her eyes do open and gaze over the setting sun. Her back is poised, she sitting similar to a refined noble. "With the cooling of the fires of day," she speaks, her voice tranquil and harmonious, yet foreboding. "The shadows of the night spread their wings across the sky. Whispers words of solitude and calmity, they put the rays of light to rest."

"Behold, now," Gyoku stage-whispers, ducking and twisting away to regale a handful of small children and their mothers. "You bear witness to words of subtle power and great portent." He carries on, playing up the fortuneteller's past deeds--all of which are likely to have been made up on the spot. An application of stage magic keeps the passers-by interested, some merely slowing while others stop to watch... or at least see what the fuss is.

"Your words mean little to me." Ranmaru finally stands before the lady, his eyes set directly upon her. Both of his hands were in his pockets, as if he was already defying her. After all, he doesn't actually believe in fortune tellers. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered: 'what am I even doing here!?'. At the same time however, he wished for her to actually tell him what to do, as he was absolutely clueless. While he waits for an answer, he turns his head about to quickly glance at Gyoku as he entertains the other passersby.

"To each their own," the beautiful woman replies as she stretches an arm into the air. "Words should be forgiven, but never forgotten. Within words, there lie lessons and meanings. Akin to a link in a chain, words can be and are." Her fingers reach toward the heavens as she lowers her head, her eyes sliding closed once more. A flame bursts within the center of her palm, then trickles down her wrist. She isn't burned, not in the slightest, but a chain magically is traced along her forearm. The chain is a series of small bronze bracelets that spread like a web over her hand and wrist. "With words, the heavens breathed life into this world."

Ranmaru understood what the woman spoke of. He was an English major, and within his literature had often come across symbolism and imagery created by words. He understood that the words she spoke gave warning, spawned images within the mind, and made things more 'interesting'. If she had been a book, she'd be a mystic or fantasy novel. "I understand." He states, with a mysterious tint to it, as if reading underneath her words and trying to figure her out. It was one of those voices one would associate with danger however, but at the same time could not bind to anger or annoyance or anything even similar to that.

His eyes then suddenly settle upon the lady's palm, and calmly follows the magically appearing chain. Although he did not quite understand the meaning of the chain, or its function, he still felt a strange attraction to it. Mainly just because it was kind of shiny, with the way the flames plained upon the bronze. "If one believes in creationism, you would be right." He comments as the woman speaks and quickly turns about to check upon Gyoku again. Nothing which indicated fear anymore... so he relaxed and turned back his attention upon the exotic looking woman.

The lady in crimson, Enyo, has her hand held in the air. Since Ranmaru is closest to her, he can see that when she snaps her fingers, this time the handle, and only the handle, of a fan is produced in her hand. "I am glad you can appreciate such imagery, Mister...?"

Kisho was just going for a walk as he always does. Nothing else for someone like himself to do. His white jacket slung over his shoulder as he was looking around at the other people on the sidewalk. He suddenly stops for a moment, and looks at a crowd up ahead. "Interesting. What's going on over here..?" He smirks a little bit and gets up closer, and starts to jump to see over everyone else. Well.... whoever is taller than him.

The blue-suited barker takes a breather, speaking in low, hushed tones with a pleasant old woman. As the small throng starts to get out of hand, he pats her arm and takes to the fore. "Gentlemen, gentlemen! Ladies, boys, girls and kittens, please!" He laughs, interjecting himself between the unconsciously closing people and the 'supernatural reading' going on behind him. "If you all, please, listen to me." His gestures are grandiose, just this side of flamboyant. "Take... two steps back," the man decides, glancing down as they do and nodding happily. "Humor me, if you will, and place both hands over your mouths. Trap in those spirits of noise, and open only thine ears. If you listen..." His voice is hushed now as he swoops his torso low, grinning at the wee ones, "you will hear the words of Fae-folk and Tengu whispered on the wind. The very voices my Mistress Enyo colludes with to learn her fore-tellings!"

"Gnnn..." It appears that Ranmaru is not one to just give away his name. "Oi-san." He refuses to give his first name for some reason, perhaps because of the lady speaking of there being power in words. And if there was power in words, there definitely was power in a name. His eyes fixate on the fan, giving it a good look, before turning his eyes back towards her. "As one may have noticed, I am new to what acts a fortune teller performs." There was a sense of relief in his voice? Indeed, the youngster was glad that the fortune teller was not showing signs of fear, as some shopkeepers tended to do. This lady probably saw many different kinds of people. The youngster makes note of what the top hat man shouts out... Fae and Tengu? This was ridiculous...

"An imagination, /Gyoku-san/ has," the lady claimed to be 'Enyo' speaks softly. She rises from her long-appointed seat and moves toward the top hat-and-cane. "Oi-san, it is a pleasure to meet you," she says over her shoulder, glancing at the young man from the corner of her eye. "Sumimasen (Japanese: 'Excuse me')." She directs her attention back to Gyoku, a grin curving over her dark-red lips. "/Gyoku-san/," she says, as if that wasn't his real name, "I wish for feathers." With the haste snap of her wrist, she spreads open her silver fan handle.

Kisho blinks a couple of times, and works his way around to the front of the crowd. "There.." He turns and looks up at Gyoku and tilts his head to the side a little bit. He then looks over at this so called 'Enyo' person, and senses the area around him for any unnatural energies. Hopefully that stupid Tokyo-tower that seems to block him from sensing anything else blocks him from sensing anything. He is more or less curious about this Enyo person anyways. So he does his best to focus on her as he was just the curious little demon.

"... eh?" It's hard to tell if the man's surprise is genuine or faked; of the former, he melds it well to his act. "Feathers... riiiight," Gyoku sighs, running a hand under his hat, though his hair. "I AAAM but a novice," he calls out, raising his voice on the first words to gather the crowd's attentions again. "A novice," The man repeats, throwing one arm fore and one aft as he droops in a low bow. "But if you close your eyes and listen, if you lend me your dreams of flight..." The man paces along the front of the cloud, fluttering his hands over children's faces and ladies' eyes--even the grown men, if they flinch not away. "Focus your miiinds on the feather, down and peacock, hawk and raven..." Something in his words pulls at the weaker minds, dragging them into semi-ambulant rocking. A freak wind blows, fluttering the hair of those whose swaying is the greatest--which ends up being a greater and greater portion of the peoples as the moments pass.

Ranmaru felt somewhat confused. "Imagination huh? I see." Why was she disproving of that man's act? Wasn't it all part of this? And why did this take so long? The others had walked in, showed their hand, and walked out again within seconds. Why was she taking so long with him? Its not that he minded incredibly much, but that unhealthy curiosity still commanded him to stay. He nods at the madam and nods his head most gently, excusing her. His ears easily catch what is being said between Gyoku and Enyo. Feathers? He swallowed for a moment, as his imagination began to run along and imagine him pawing at a feather-toy.

He shakes his head quickly in order to remove the mental image, causing his sunglasses to tip down while he followed Enyo with his head. Were she, or anyone else, to look in his direction, they could see his very oddly colored eyes. This moment was very short however, as he quickly tips back up his sunglasses and observes the sudden strange behavior in the people. "Hmm?" His instincts tell him something is amiss, but since he can't quite tell what exactly it is, he simply puts it out of his mind. He has heard about people getting into a trance during such entertainment shows before, so he ignores it and turns his attention back to Enyo... after all, he kind of wanted her attention back, so he could do his thing and leave.

The fan is spread open, and within the metal, the lady, Enyo, glances in the reflection. Within it, she spies on Ranmaru, who stands behind her, and takes note of his odd behavior with said sunglasses and it being night. An attempt to hide something - perhaps later she will further investigate. For now, her attention is sent forth, she whispering into the whipping gusts, "With feathers, wings are born." She glances to Gyoku and says, "We need wings, beloved."

Kisho just kind of stands there, and just keeps his eyes on Enyo. his eyes don't move off of her, and he really feels like calling out her BS at the moment. He just kind of takes in a deep breath, and lets it go. He then whispers to himself, "Wings...?" He tilts his head to the side as. He then just kind of mumbles, "This is a load of crap..." His face obviously showing that he is bored here. He does however notice the strange energy, and pockets his hands in his pants.

First one, then another and another of the attending crowd slumps to their knees. It is as though some imp were infiltrating the throng and sedating them as it passed. Fully half of the audience drops, while the other half shouts and moans in shock at what shews before their eyes: Glimmering, ephemeral feathers floating above the unconscious. Some of those still standing pass out on the spot, while others stagger weakly away as though running beneath the weight of water. From the fallen streams a current of spirit-feathers, the flow of them directed to Enyo's fan with the raucous laughter and operatic gestures of the man known simply as Gyoku.

"Hmm?" Wings? The youngster keeps his eyes upon what is going on, waiting in what looks like a most patient manner, posture wise. He believes to notice a small reflection while he was looking at Enyo, the remains of the sun hitting the metal, but once again the youngster ignores this. Instead, his focus is upon the crowd as they begin to move down upon their knees and appear to be... losing their energy? Were they too tired to stand up no more? This didn't feel normal, and something begun to set off his instincts, warning him of danger. The young man begins to wander forth, approaching Enyo in order to stand besides her, and tries to figure out the connection between her movements and that of those strange feathers.

This all just felt wrong, and Ranmaru's throat began to feel like it was thickening up. It was then, almost as if lead by another being, that his right hand suddenly shoots up and attempts to grab Enyo's hand which holds the fan in order to stop her from moving it about. "What is going on?" He whispers towards her, his voice a little more threatening, but still did not display hostility. After all, he did not want to be doing something stupid like ruining a show. But his senses were rarely off when it came to this kind of thing...

The unnamed people who slump over do so not in a violent way, but peacefully, as if the Sandman had swept down upon them. The feathers, glowing an iridescent, translucent blue, billow softly amongst the cool night breeze. Enyo lights up as she holds her fan toward the group people. The feathers hold form for but a moment before turning into willow wisps and being absorbed by the metallic fan. Ranmaru makes a swipe for her hand, and even though she makes no gesture to remove him, that doesn't mean someone /else/ won't step in. Either way, the fan continues to gather the feathers, now by the number. Slowly the fan starts to layer the feathers one by one within the clasps.

Enyo glances toward Ranmaru and whispers in return, though loud enough for others to hear. "Do not worry, no one is harmed. Everyone is but asleep, dreaming the most peaceful of dreams."

Kisho blinks hearing a little bit of movement... a little bit more than what he should. He turns to look behind him seeing people pass out. He then says clearly, "I should have noticed this... instead I was too busy looking at the sexy lady... I hate this..." He hangs his head a little bit and hasn't noticed any of his energy drained at all. He shrugs a little bit, and extends his right arm out. His index finger pointing at the woman. "CUT IT OUT YOU! Return that energy to these people! I don't wanna do anything mean.." He turns to look at Gyoku, and then to Ranmaru. "I definitely don't wanna have to do something stupid here.." He hangs his head a little bit as he is still just kind of pointing at her.

"Then don't," comes Gyoku's laugh as he bodily forces himself between Ranmaru and Enyo. "I certainly would recommend against anything rash..." An arm reaches around the 'gypsy' princess' shoulders. "Lest we do far more than /borrow/ these peoples' dreams." He laughs again, harsh and mocking. "Why, the fan looks large enough to fly on its own. The question is, I guess, just who will be in control: Yourself, or the fan?"

"Sorry, but I can't trust your words for that." Seeing as no explanation was given, aside from just the statement that people were falling asleep, the youngster knew for sure that something was wrong here. His gaze set upon that fan, which was drawing in those feathers. It was just too obvious. And when Kisho shouted out, it confirmed what he had believed was happening. As much as Ranmaru was fairly oblivious to the existence of magic, or its workings, he could still see what was happening in the 'now' and 'then'. His eyes had widened and shot towards Kisho's presence, settling on him for only a small moment, as this youngster clearly was aware of what was going on, and then turns back towards Enyo. He is just about to pull her arm upwards as Gyoku shoves into the middle.

He had expected something to come at him like a cane, but for the man to defeat him with simply words? Ranmaru takes a step away as he hears Gyoku's words, and a grimace appears on his face. After all, he couldn't do anything if what this man said was true. He stared at the people that had fallen down, and then turns towards Enyo again, completely ignoring Gyoku. "Tssk..." This situation severely pissed him off, one could tell as the eyes behind his sunglasses turned a violent feral yellow, although most likely only Gyoku was in a position to see behind his sunglasses.

"Fine!" He tears away his hand, which strangely enough seemed to have gotten a little furry, and black claws protruded there where the tips of his fingers once had been. For some reason, his tail and ears had not appeared at all. When he let go of Enyo's arm, his claws raked at the same time, uncontrollably, as he returned his hand to his side. He noticed the fur on his hand and the fact that it had transformed, and he quickly makes it disappear into his pockets. As much as the youngster was angry, still he held his dark posterior in the fact that he was not showing a grimace or anger in any other way. The youngster takes two steps back, feeling defeated. He knew nothing about this, and was therefor powerless.

The feathers are all collected and sway in the breeze, similar to treetops, as the fan is completed. "Oh, darling, you know who's truly in control," Enyo says as her eyes are transfixed on the accessory. A moment later and the feathers suddenly combust into a ghostly flame. "Beautiful," she whispers in awe. "We're one step closer, beloved," she directs to the man named 'Gyoku'.

The pointing and shouting coming from the head-hanging, distant Kisho causes the beautiful lady to merely smirk. "Adorable, ne?" she again directs to her cohort. Then there is Ranmaru. The appearance of the odd features does draw the attention of the 'fortuneteller', though she doesn't show any sign of fear nor does she try to pull her arm away. His claws jut out and rake across her forearm, though the skin isn't sliced. Instead, flames trail along her arm where the scratches would have been. "It's too late," she says, holding the fan to her chest. "I have gained my wing. I am the true sovereign of fire." In a sudden motion, she holds her extended fan high and announces. "Beloved! We fly!"

Kisho lifts his head back up as if he was a little bugged about something. People weren't answering and this wasn't good. He sighs a little bit and just kind of gives up. He looks to Ranmaru for a moment catching a glimpse of what had happened. He then looks back to Enyo, and hears her sovereign of fire comment. "Yeah.. Why don't you just go combust into flames... When your fire can get as hot as plasma. Come see me... I would wanna see proof... Maybe take a few pictures of ya too if you don't mind." He looks to Gyoku and holds up his right hand making a peace sign. "ja~ne~" He then vanishes from sight. Now he at least knows who to keep his eyes on... if he can.

Ranmaru takes another step back when flames suddenly emanate from where he had cut Enyo! His mind simply could not wrap around this! Quickly, he recalled how she had caused fire to move along her hand. Back then, he had thought it was some kind of parlor trick, but this was no trick... "I don't understand." The youngster admits in a most honest voice, directed towards the two. After all, Kisho had just 'happily' disappeared, throwing some comments at the two 'bad guys' as if this was the most normal thing in the world! What about those people? Sure, he probably should leave the scene, not wanting to answer questions to the police... but still. "Why?!" He calls out, expecting no answer.

He sighs, lowering his head a little and glancing over towards the fainted humans on the sidewalk and near the gazebo. He wasn't going to help these people... after all, it had nothing to do with him. "I am not foolish enough to believe I am special, that you put me to the side as to not get me involved in this. But I still don't understand." Another sigh escapes his lips as he calms down and the claws and eyes go back to their normal states, and he aims his gaze towards the two one last time, fully expecting them to fly off without a word.

A true lady, the derogatory tone and words that are shouted at Enyo by Kisho are simply ignored; sticks and stones and all of that nonsense. She smiles beautifully up at this Gyoku character and says, "Don't worry. I won't burn you. I promised long ago, remember?" The two don't necessarily 'fly' off; instead, a ring of fire flashes wildly about their feet as they start to turn translucent, as if they were... ghosts?

"Oi-san," Enyo directs to the young man. "You were nothing but a gentleman. You passed the test of not looking at us as a parlor trick, but as /people/. To answer your questions, all I can say is that only time will tell." She bubbles up, warm and kind, and adds before finally disappearing with Gyoku. "Take care, Oi-san! Our paths will cross again, this I am certain of." And then they are gone.

The young man was taken aback for a moment by still ever gentle demeanor of Enyo. "Very well." He answers with a sturdy voice. "We will meet again... but you owe me a fortunetelling!" A last sigh before he turns his eyes at the gazebo. He'd likely never look at that gazebo in the same way again. He picked up on the words shared between the lady and the hat-and-cane man, and took the words aimed at him to heart. "Time will tell eh?" The youngster rubs his chin, realizing that it was going to be more than just 'time' that would tell.

If he was going to find out what just happened, he'd need to actually find out more about the supernatural. He was given some pieces now, pieces to a really big puzzle... sure, he was nowhere near completing it, but at least he had some place to start now. And the people that were laying on the ground seemed to be okay, as he began to hear some light groans. So the youngster begins to wander off, making his way to a public pay-phone and calling in the police before leaving for his college dorms.

errant_passage @ 2008-05-14T08:30:00

2008-05-14T13:39:17Z

Title: Curiosity gets the cat all wet?
Characters: Naga Amaya (Phoebe), Oi Ranmaru
Scene: Ranmaru irritates Sailor Phoebe with a series of questions, ending up getting doused with water for his curiosity .

Phoebe was walking around on the lake seeming to be thinking. People in the park were walking along as if this was normal? Yes, she does do this frequently when ever she starts to think. The wind was not blowing making it comfortable at just the right temperature. The day was calm, and not a single cloud in the sky.

However, Ranmaru is not one of those common folks who had gotten so used to the weird things going on that they had begun to ignore things. No, quite the opposite. The youngster dressed in black was standing near the exit, looking around for something in particular, when he notices Phoebe from the very corner of his eye. He slowly gets up and turns his eyes towards the wandering woman in the, somewhat odd, half chain mail outfit... who seemed to be all too happy to be walking over water!? The Yakuza-looking young man rubs his chin for a moment, getting up from a formerly crouched position and puts his hands into his pockets. He has trouble believing what he sees, and believes there must be some kind of good scientific explanation for this. Was he on candid camera or something? After all, the Japanese did love to make fun of each other. So, having gotten up, he begins to walk straight towards the pond and rests only when he reaches the edge of it, quickly looking around if he could see any cameras.

Phoebe pauses as she sees someone from the corner of her right eye. The visor covering her eyes fades away as she turns to look at the guy. She just blinks a couple of times, and then wonders why someone has the balls to get closer to where she is at. Normally when she gets here in this form, people tend to keep their distance. Not this time though.

So then Phoebe turns and starts to walk in the young mans direction slowly as the water ripples as she walks upon it. The metal chain links can be heard clicking against what plate armor she has on. She then says in a somewhat bothered tone, "What is it..?"

"..." Ranmaru, a person normally very calm, remains that demeanor as the lady turns about and stares his way. He stares straight back from behind his sunglasses, as if holding a staring-contest which only he was playing. The youngster waits patiently, standing perfectly still while Phoebe approaches him, and when she finally speaks, and her armor's noises become apparent, Ranmaru finally voices himself. "How exactly are you keeping yourself afloat?" A straight, direct question. To the point, without any moment of stammering. Exactly the opposite, the young man didn't seem the least scathed by this entire thing, let alone the bothered voice. His voice shows the same dark and somewhat mysterious tone of voice one would expect in a criminal who had set his eyes upon a pray, a tone often held by Ranmaru no matter what the situation.

Phoebe shrugs a little bit, and should of expected a question like that. She sighs a little bit, and rubs the left side of her head with her left gauntleted hand. "Well... First off... it has something to do with my abilities. I can control water, and I can even control the density of it, causing it to compress. So technically... If you were to put your hand under neath my foot, the pressure would be that of the bottom of the deepest trench of the oceans on this world." She takes in a deep breath, and lets part of it go before speaking again. "Does that make enough sense to you, or are you going to ask more questions..?"

Ranmaru idly wonders for a moment whether or not Phoebe had ever attended physics, he drops the subject of correcting her. After all, with the way things seemed underneath her feet, it was more like she was increasing the tension of the water surface, allowing it to hold a larger weight, and increasing the attraction between water molecules. Those thoughts circulate through Ranmaru's mind for a few times before finally he blatantly states: "Control water? That's absurd." He is under the impression that Phoebe has to be lying and turns his gaze a few ways, his head following. "Where's the cameras?"

Phoebe grins a little bit, and holds her right hand out to the side. "Oh... Is it absurd..? Lets see..." A sphere of water emerges from the lake all at once. It seems to be about twenty feet in just its radius, and the sphere had not a single flaw in it. That is quite large. "So tell me... how absurd would it feel if I dropped this on you?" She completely ignored the camera question, because there were not cameras around at all. Except maybe on a few peoples cell phones, but that is about it.

Water? Yes, Ranmaru is dazzled for a moment, but he still is not showing it. His lips have not twitched for even a slight moment, and his eyes are ever so still, set upon Sailor Phoebe's presence. His mind traverses into memories of a few days ago, where a robber had been hit by what he only much later realized to be water, and of course the youngster makes his own conclusion. He brings up his right hand and rubs his chin for a moment, wondering what the correct answer would be. After all, he still wasn't entirely sure, but this was too much of a coincidence to be a hologram or anything like that. "So then, were you the only to pelt that robber with water last day?"

Phoebes right eye twitches a little bit as her question was completely avoided. This irritated her a little bit, but it passed quickly. She sighs yet again, and says, "No... I wasn't... I'm sure there is another one, or two water senshi around. Besides... it depends on what the robber is stealing for me to feel inclined to stop them. If it is food, no. Money, maybe as it depends on age, male, female, child, teen, old lady, friend, foe, etc..." However the sphere floats over head of the two, and water starts to rain down as if it was a light rain. Now she was just trying to get him to go away, if that was even possible.

Ranmaru however, was annoyingly persistent on finding out what exactly was going on. One must realize that he knew nothing about the world of the supernatural, aside from a tiny little set of experiences of his own. Magic was completely beyond his belief, and he'd never even heard of senshi. "Soldiers?" The young man blinks for a moment, confused about Phoebe's note on there being (water) senshi around. "What are senshi? Because, with your description, I doubt I am imagining the army here." His questions seem to be unending, and everyone knows what killed the cat. That's right, curiosity. The young man doesn't even bother to tip his head up as he starts to get 'rained' on, instead he tips up his sunglasses as to ensure he is not showing his eyes and puts that hand back into his pocket. "In case you are even remotely interested, the case I speak off was a robber stealing money from the hot dog vendor. She was threatening people with a knife."

Phoebe takes in a deep breath. That's it, she can't stand the questions. She put up with this enough when she was held prisoner in the bottom of the god forsaken mansion. "Sorry about this, but I'll just make you leave forcefully without asking you to leave at all." She smiles a little bit, and starts to step backwards as the water stops falling. A torrent flies out of the sphere of water circling around, and heads right at Ranmaru. Hopefully to just send him flying backwards without much damage at all. This is just to show that she is a little bit irritable, and it wasn't any more forceful than a hose hooked up to a hydrant. Which still hurts.

The young man seems to be somewhat confused about the whole thing as the lady states that she is going to forcefully make him leave. He isn't too sure about what is going to happen, being oblivious to the limits and abilities of magic, and ends up only at the last moment noticing the sudden stream of water shooting for him and hitting him square in the chest. It takes a good moment to get his hands out of his pockets, and by the time he has done so he is already a few good feet away from Phoebe. He finally ends up placing his arms before his chest to stop the water from hurting him too much and when he finds that one of his feet hits the ground for a short moment he pushes himself out of the way and comes to a rolling stop quite a few ways back.

Ranmaru blinks, confused about what just happened. He knew he had not been in danger, he tended to feel those kind of things ahead of time, and slowly gets back up and takes a moment to re-adjust his sunglasses, which strangely enough had not fallen off of his head. His entire attire was soaking wet, something Ranmaru was not exactly pleased about, and his ribs hurt, but that all still didn't not stop him from taking a few steps forwards into the direction of the pond. Gazing around, he wonders if anybody just saw that, or was coming to help, but it would appear that everybody in the park had pretty much either left, or were not paying any attention to his general direction. Was he the only one uninformed here? The Yakuza lookalike rubs his chin for a moment and decides to trust his instincts. As much as he hated water, he was going to approach Phoebe once again, walking calmly in her direction, attempting to get to where he had been standing where he once was, simply to say: "That was not very nice." ... Ranmaru must either be incredibly brave, dense, or foolish.

Phoebe sighs a little bit, and says, "Just go away and leave me to my thinking. You've asked enough, and I'm not going to answer those kinds of questions." The sphere of water floats back over the lake, and falls into it. "And your not going to get another warning. Trust me." She kept walking backwards until she was a good thirty feet away from Ranmaru. She had been doing good here lately, but the past couple of days she has been misbehaving again. She turns her back to Ranmaru, and then just kind of waits for him to leave as she crosses her arms over her chest.

"You could have just asked nicely to begin with." Ranmaru utters at her, but doesn't seem to have lost any of his calm temperament. His voice still sounded exactly the same as when he had first spoke to Phoebe, although his breathing was a little bit more heavy seeing as his chest hurt. "Also, you would not have to give warnings, or deal with such questions, if you simply were not walking on top of water. Its only natural for you to get such questions." He was not attempting to ridicule her, merely to help, but somehow with that dark tone of voice, it somewhat sounded like a threat. The youngster however turns about, heeding Phoebe's advice and begins to walk off, hoping that his senses were right and that he indeed was not in any danger.

Phoebe was starting to count down in her mind as she was giving the kid some time to get out of here. She could feel her blood start to boil as well. Though she did hear him talking, but she was also ignoring his words. She eventually moved to sit down on the water, and a dome of water surrounds her helping her deal with the stupid kids talking. Eventually things were quiet as she liked it. Her fuse burnt down to almost nothing but a nub from that little encounter. Oh well, hopefully she can build it back up before someone else decides to irritate her any farther.

errant_passage @ 2008-05-09T12:54:00

2008-05-09T17:55:25Z

Title: Holdups and Hotdogs
Characters: Oi Ranmaru, Hanae Ruri
Scene: Ranmaru encounters Ruri during a quite surprising stick-up at a hotdog vendor.

It was a nice day out. Birds were hopping about on the green grass and some of them even dared to come close to the hot dog vender, who was visually annoyed by this fact and kept shaking his fist at them. The youngsters were spending this rather nice weekend playing in the park, hopping onto the jungle gyms and pestering some elderly couple who were trying to have a nice and calm walk in the park near the water.

Somewhere near the water as well, walked a young man dressed fully in black. Black shades, black clothing, black hair. The only thing that did not appear to be black about him was the fact that the tips of his hair were frosted. However, most could not deny that this particular young man looked quite a bit like a Yakuza, a member of the Japanese mafia. He didn't seem to be bothering anyone, but he did seem to glance suspiciously towards the hotdog vender quite a few times, as well as the old lady that was just coming into the park, holding a rather big handbag. Other than that, nothing seemed out of place in the park... except... did that man just reach for the inner pockets of his jacket!?

Hanae Ruri is wandering the park quite curiously, you know, the looking around kind of curious. She's new to the area and this is a pretty nice place, especially since she prefers the quiet over the bustle of the city. She spots the rather questionable male from a distance, especially as he starts to mess around in his pockets. She kind of walks forward with hands in her pockets just to get a better look

It would appear the young man noticed Ruri having set her eyes upon him. He glances towards her from behind his sunglasses and immediately removes his hand from the inside of his jacket and closes it a bit tighter. The dangerous looking man uses his other hand to tip up his sunglasses and turns his head about to show that he had noticed her, before turning about and beginning to approach the hotdog vender further along the same path.

Hanae Ruri grins at him and tugs her hat a bit lower to cover the top of her glasses, then turns her head and stretches out. She seems unsure if he's really a treat or if he's just playing up a badboy image. Either way, it's kind of weird. At least in her eyes. She does make an effort to make a round about trip to the stand

"Hmm." The young man hummed as he noticed her greeting him and ends up standing at the hotdog vendor. "Two hotdogs please, everything on it." His voice sounded somewhat hushed and dark, but anyone even slightly empathic would feel no hostility in it. The man seemed a little fearful at first, but did his job without question. And while Ranmaru waits, he turns about and stares off towards where he last had seen Hanae, wondering if she was watching him.

Hanae Ruri is, in a sly way behind her glasses and in a different place. She shrugs it off though and was in the process of continuing on. Still... kind of looking back at him since curiousity still gets her. That and if anything she can claim country girl in a city kind of thing.

While Ranmaru waited patiently for the hotdogs to be done, a few other customers joined in, seeing this as a good opportunity to grab a hotdog too. They kind of blocked the sight of Ranmaru for Hanae, but she most likely could still see that the moment Ranmaru went for his inner pocket again, the hotdog vendor suddenly raised his hands into the air as is being held up by a gun-robbery! One out of the two customers near Ranmaru took a quick step back, while the other seemed almost as if frozen.

Hanae Ruri sighs and mutters something to herself, then walks forward, trying to get a look at the situation again. She doesn't really have the abilities to help herself, not enough to not get seriously hurt at least. She shivers, pulls her coat closer and continues to observe...

It would almost seem as if Ruri's senses were enhanced for a moment as she could pick up whispers being shared between the customers. It was when she noticed something shiney, much like a knife or blade, reflecting light. She could even tell that it was not being held by the more suspicious looking man, but rather by 'frozen' customer. She was a girl with red hair, with a piercing through one ear. "Just hand me the money, old man." Was the whisper which Hanae could pick up. "And you guys, you better act as if nothing is going on, or I'll stab you."

Hanae Ruri mutters something to herself and rubs her fingers together. Wrong place to try andything, especially her magic, it's not necessarily flashy, but it would be obvious. She glances around at the others and begins to set herself up to follow the girl... Maybe she can snap her on the way past then.

The girl stayed near the hotdog vendor, waiting impatiently for the stumbling and bumbling man to take out all of his cash. He was having trouble opening the tin that contained the money as he was so nervous that he could not get the key in, and the girl was definately getting nervous as well because of the long wait. She started treatening the boy next to her, Ranmaru, showing her knife and bringing it up to his face. "I'll add you another scar if you do anything funny... to which she just got a blank stare from behind those sunglasses and the silent treatment. This short moment of the girl being distracted however, the hotdog vendor shot a begging glance at Hanae, as if trying to inform her of what was going on.

Hanae Ruri mutters quietly to herself and rubs her fingers together again. She can try to help out, but that'll get her caught and she figures that's pretty stupid. She doesn't like leaving the robber alone right now, but... as it stands, what can she do. Besides, this town is supposed to be full of heroes, why haven't any of them shown up yet.

Its then that the girl notices what the hotdog vendor is staring at! It would appear that the hotdog vendor had been really bad at hiding that he was looking for help and the girl quickly shouts out: "I saw that! Gimme that money!" The tin opens just as she says that, and the girl grabs whatever she can reach with her hand, stuffs it into her shirt and prepares to run off. Her shouting immediately gets people distracted and all looking at her. A few people come running to see what is going on, just in time to notice that the girl falls straight forward onto the floor.

Although it had been rather sneaky, Ranmaru had moved his foot out in order to trip her and not let her get away. What he did not count on however, was that the girl would roll on, grab the knife and aim it straight at him and the other customer, who was shaking in fear, hugging his suitcase to his chest. Everybody's attention was at the girl as she began to shout out treats towards the both of them, not having noticed who tripped her. Clearly, her former will to keep things quiet has gone out the door as she was overwhelmed now by anger.

Hanae Ruri mutters to herself and starts to rub her hands together before using her left hand to make a gesture, her right hand is making a slightly modified gesture, then she points at the girl, most of this done as quickly as possible to avoid drawing too much attention. A little blue ball of water forms at the tip of her finger, then flings itself at the thief, splashing into her with a surprising amount of force, by the time it hits her it had been the size of a watermelon and when it impacts water splashes out and she /should/ feel like something hit her pretty hard from behind. Ruri, well she was starting to walk as soon as the spell was off, trying to look like it wasn't her that cast it.

Ranmaru appears to be too concentrated on what is going on in front of him to notice what happens. When the girl suddenly falls forwards towards him as if something had just struck her, he quickly maneuvers out of the way to ensure that she is not going to stab him... but, there seems to be no need. The knife fell out of her hands and she even falls unconcious. He blinks for a moment, trying to figure out what just happened and looks around. He manages to oversee Hanae completely, even though he had noticed her much earlier, and turns towards the girl again. "What the..." He mutters and begins to sneak off, not wishing to be involved in this. And seeing as a large crowd had just gathered around the unconcious thief, this was not that hard of a thing to do. He just happened to walk in the same direction as Hanae, as there was only one exit to this park.

Hanae Ruri is shaking her hands for a moment before she balls her hands up into fists and stuffs them into her pocket, calmly walking the other way. Just for good measure though, her hat comes off and gets stuffed into something under her coat and she shakes her hair loose, pulling the glasses on top of her head. Sure the jacket is noticeable, but it can't be the only jacket so plausible deniability might work

Its finally then that Ranmaru notices that he is walking behind someone. He had thought everyone would be milling about near the hotdog vendor. He recognized her because of the hat, but as it disappeared it was almost as if he would have been unable to recognize her without it. Of course, she still wore that same jacket though, so at least that helped. And her being the only one walking away, at least to him, it was a /little/ suspicious. How ironic, first she had watched him, now he was watching her.

Hanae Ruri runs her fingers through her hair stiffly and sighs. She makes it to the exit of the park (Unless she's stopped) and stops, looking left and right as though debating on which direction to go, or maybe she's just lost, who knows

No, Ranmaru was not going to stop her. He ends up standing right besides her and gives her a mysterious look, as if he /HAD/ seen what she had done. However, he said nothing. Yet, some would say that silence says more than anything else. However, its not uncommon for such silences to be read wrong. He keeps giving her that mysterious look for a while longer, tipping up his sunglasses, before suddenly turning about and walking off into the direction of the university.

Hanae Ruri was just getting that eerie feeling that she was being watched and turned around, muttering, "This city gives me the creeps" In an osaka accent. She missed who was watching her, but, wasn't he at the scene of the crime. "Hey" She calls out simply enough, wondering if he'll actually stop

"Heh." Ranmaru replied to her comment on how the city gave her the creeps. He turns about and stares at her for another moment, giving her that 'I know what you did' look, while meaning a 'don't bother me' look, and turns about once more to leave the scene. He just kept on walking and soon disappeared into a large crowd of people crossing the street.

Hanae Ruri mutters to herself and continues leaving the scene herself. Good luck proving she threw a ball of water at someone, especially when no one else seems to have seen her to back the story up. Well, they saw the ball of water, but not the caster. She hopes.

errant_passage @ 2008-05-07T11:09:00

2008-05-07T16:09:33Z

Title: Conversation over Icecream (Sorbet!)
Characters: Kaneko Noriko, Kita Mikage, Naga Amaya
Scene: Random introduction and conversation Rp between three young ladies at the Furihata's Place ice cream restaurant.

Ice cream has been a little weird since her operation. But that's okay! She can eat with her left hand! Sort of. She's currently seated in a little booth with a cup full of sorbet before her. Her unbandaged hand holds the cup still while she eats. A bit of the rainbowed ice cream and she smiles... then winces. She reaches with her good hand to rub at her bandaged shoulder. . o O ( Well that's no fun... ) O o .

Amaya works her way into the front of the icecream shop, and the workers there seem to give her kind of a weird look. Considering about a month ago she was screaming and yelling, because there was no beer in her rootbeer float. Though that is the only thing she gets when she comes her. She works her way over to the counter and sits down on a stool and waits to be helped out.

There are always people who somehow manage to get around without even bothering to look up from what they are doing. Sometimes it's celphone drivers, but today it's Mikage, walking into the restaurant with her nose shoved firmly between the pages of a book. She even manages to get all the way to the counter without wasting a single page-turning moment. However, Miki is forced to set the book down, at least momentarily, to find a place to sit. Look right, look left, then she finally settles herself at a stool, folding the book only long enough to make a quick order with a passing waiter before contently burying herself back into the pages of whatever the hell she happens to be reading.

'Kay. Amaya she doesn't know. Mikage neither. Buuuuut... Noriko does know one thing... no book could be /that/ good, right? She reaches for her sorbet, immediately regrets it, switches it to her good hand, and rises to claim a stool seat, thus trading out her nifty booth seat. "It must be a very good book for you to be missing out on the world around you, yes?" Well, that's odd. Perfectly fluent Japanese, except... there's an accent. Maybe a bit of British? Something western, anyway. Anyway, she bends to try to get a peek at the title of the book claiming Mikage's attention (and in a few years, possibly eyesight?).

Amaya turns her head to look at the person that is disturbing the silence with speaking. Eventually a rootbeer float was set infront of her without even having to order it at all. She sighs a little bit and then says, "So.. What is wrong with reading a book?" She turns to her rootbeer float and leans over taking a drink from the straw. She is a little thankful they are off to her right and not her left. Atleast she can see them ok. "Also... there is no greater story than what is going on in the outside world. Am I right?" She smirks a little bit at her comment right there.

Blink. Like someone waking from some sort of dream, Miki looks up from the pages of her book and seems to glance around as if she were noticing other people for the first time. "Mmm?" She looks first towards Noriko, tilting her head in a quizzical, cat-like manner. "Oh, it's not that good really." She looks down at the book for a moment, folding the cover closed. "I just need to finish it for class tomorrow. I don't want to fall behind." The cover identifies the book as a textbook on early Japanese mythology. As she rubs at on eye with the palm of her hand, and then seems to straiten a bit, glancing towards Amaya. There is a momentary pause, as she seems to recognise her. "Oh, you were in the bookstore earlier, right?" She asks, finally seeming to wake up from wherever the book had taken her. "How is your English studies going?"

Kaneko Noriko taps her bandaged fingers on the counter-top idly as she offers almost apologetically to Amaya,"I never said there's anything wrong with it. But you do tend to miss a lot when you involve yourself so fully in one. Anyway, it's not really important. And if it's not good, then why... Oh. Class. Ew. I get it." She takes a few more bite of ice cream, then perks up at the mention of english. "You're studying English? Nice. I lived in Britain and America for a while. Nothing like the textbooks."

Amaya laughs kind of sheepishly at the question of her studies with the english language, and replies, "It's not going so well. It's just not sticking at all I'm afraid.." She turns to look at Kaneko, and blinks a couple of times and says, "Then I miss-understood ya." She takes in a deep breath, and lets it go befor taking another drink from her rootbeer. She has nothing else to add at the moment so she just sits there kind of quietly for the time being.

"I would have had it finished yesterday, but I fell asleep at a friend's place." Miki avoids saying a 'boy's' place, although that's really the truth of it. However, she didn't need more rumors than those swirling around the otaku portions of the boy's dormitories about one yakuza boy having a girl in his room. With a small sigh, she pushes the book to the side, seeming somewhat thankful for the distraction. "I've heard that some people pick it up better from watching English movies or television with Japanese subtitles." She seems as if about to say something else, perhaps another suggestion, when the waiter arrives with her icecream cone. So, she cuts herself off and takes that instead. Mmm. Icecreamgoodness.

Kaneko Noriko obviously enjoys the sorbet herself! Sorbet-lover! Blasphemer! "What parts are you having trouble with? I think the problem with English is that it's so grammatically strict and exacting, but there are still usually about a half-dozen words to express the exact same concept in any given context... And I'm babbling again. None of my business." She stifles a yawn for some reason, then nods in agreement with Miki,"She's right. That's one of the main things that helped me with Mandarin. Lots of subtitled Jet Li movies."

Amaya blinks as they both just kid of lost ther there. She seems to be a little dumbfounded. She then goes on to say, "Well... For me.. I guess I would say it would be lack of motivation. I want to learn it, but there really isn't much of anything causing me to really want to." She looks over at the two of them for a moment as she smiles a little bit. "So... if you don't mind me asking. What is the both of your names?" She rubs the back of her head a little bit.

Mikage calmly takes a lick off of her icecream cone, somewhat kittenishly, quite enjoying her not-sorbet. Whatever she might have added to the conversation on English gets buried out by Noriko's explinations. "I'm not sure what to suggest on motivation. My grandfather taught me when I was little... so that 'I'd be better prepared for the business workplace.'." She rattles off the last bit as if it were something she had heard from her grandfather a few too many times. "Oh. I'm Kita Mikage. Miki usually. Student and bookstore jockey."

Kaneko Noriko opens her mouth to suggest something, then closes it. Actually, she doesn't have any suggestions either,"Huh... Er... I'm Nori... Er... Kaneko Noriko. Sorry. Still getting used to introducing myself the right way. They do it backwards." 'They' being the English. "I'm just
a student. Highschool. Super-fun." This last said with a bit of sarcasm.

Amaya blinks a couple of times again. She presses her right index finger to the center of her forhead, and thinks for a moment. "It's nice to meet both of you. I'm Naga Amaya. Have any trouble with Yakuza, Triad, or any kind of street thugs. Just come and get me." She doesn't mention that if someone mentions that they are Yakuza infront of her, they more than likely will suffer disembowlment on the spot. She does smile and goes back to drinking on her rootbeer. She could be put more along the violent type of person, but atleast she was friendly.

"Nice to meet you, Kaneko-san, Naga-san." Mikage replies, nodding her head to each of them politely in turn. "Luckily, I don't deal with many Yakuza." With the exception of that strange boy who looked like one but wasn't one. "We get strange folk all the time at the book store, but thugs usually don't target little shops." With a pause, she eats a bit more of her icecream thoughtfully. "Ne, Kaneko-san? How come you traveled outside of Japan?" Curiousity is one of her traits, especially about such unusual things.

Kaneko Noriko offers her hand to shake (yes, the one that's all wrapped up),"I plant to steer clear of any of those guys. I'm sure they have no reason to be screwing with someone like me, but just in case, you know? Anyway, I traveled and lived outside most of my life because of my father. He works for a music company, one that signs a lot of foreign acts." She starts ticking off on her finger,"I was born here, but I've lived in America, Britain, China, and France... So we didn't get to stick around much. But he got promoted recently, so we finally get to stay put." She seems decidedly relieved at this. "Even if this area is a bit weird sometimes."

Amaya looks at the two for a moment longer. She finishes up her rootbeer, and pulls some money out of her jacket pocket and sets it on the counter next to the glass. Obviously she had over paid as well. "I'll see you two around." She stands up from the stool and walks on out.

For a moment, Mikage seems surprised as Amaya makes her quick exit. Then again, everyone has their reasons, and she had already accepted that the woman certainly is a bit weird. So, with only Kaneko remaining, she turns back to look at the girl's injured arm. "I'd shake hands, but I'm afraid I'd hurt you?" She offers her own hand out, but seems tenetive about it, tilting her head again in that cat-like manner. "I've only ever lived in Japan, but I moved to this city for college not long ago. We used to live near Mt. Fuji, my grandfather and I." Finally down to the crunchy part of her icecream cone, she takes a bite out of it, and hrms. "Weird? I mean, I had a friend mention something about giant ducks, but I've never seen anything too odd." Other than finding another person who happens to be a cat-person like herself.

Kaneko Noriko grasps Mikage's hand. The soft white bandages conceal a surprisingly firm, strong grip. "Don't worry about it. Burns. I'm mostly healed, but because of the severity, they're not supposed to be exposed to open air. Even if you could actually hurt me, most of the nerves don't actually function anymore. So shake away!" Well, at least she's friendly. "Mt. Fuji! Oh, I want to go there, but dad's always so busy and... Well, anyway, it's a pretty weird place." She finishes her sorbet, then sets aside the cup to be cleaned up. "That's a lovely collar you've got there. Love the kitten." And Amaya's exit? Well, she merely watches her go.

"Burns?" Surprise edges in Mikage's voice as she gently returns the hand-shake, still trying to be careful regardless of what is said. "How did that happen?" There is some worry, and concern on the young woman's face. Still, she tries to carry on without dwelling on such things too much. "My grandfather is the keeper at a shrine in a little village. It's pretty, but sometimes a bit dull compared to city life." She nods her head slightly, but doesn't really seem to understand the 'pretty weird place' comments. Afterall, she's only seen a few odd things in her time... and for someone who grew up as a catgirl, such things aren't -that- unusual. She takes another bite out of her cone, and then looks down, as if she were going to see her own collar over her chin. "Oh, thank you." She chuckles a little bit, shyly. "I found it in a cave in the woods, years ago. It's kind of my good luck charm."

Kaneko Noriko nods to Mikage,"Good find, that it still fits after all these years. Or that it still looks to be in such good shape. Anyway, I was burned in an apartment fire. I still limp a bit, but that's a bit better than the original prognosis. They actually said they thought I'd probably lose all usage of that arm and my left leg. And now look at me! There are rough days, but all things considered, I got off light. And hey, it gets me out of doing anything in gym class." She rises now, stretching languidly,"It's nice talking to you... I hope to see you around. Right now though, time to exercise."

"Un. I think it's made of some sort of metallic fiber or something. That's why it holds up as well as it does." Mikage shrugs her shoulders a little, never having actually gotten the collar appraised or looked into. To her, it was just a keepsake with a deeper meaning than most could understand. She listens, with that continuing worried expression on her face, perhaps picturing what sort of fire could cause such damage. Still, she tries to give a timid smile. "Well, I'm glad you're doing okay, all things considered." She nods slightly, looking at the remains of her icecream cone. "Nice talking to you too. Good luck." She offers, and then pops the bottom of the icecream cone into her mouth, crunching it for a moment before digging out some money and placing it on the counter. "I think I'll try to finish this book before dark." Picking up the textbook, she thumps it on the counter once, and then flips it back open to the page she was on.

Kaneko Noriko nods ight back,"Good luck to you too." Considering the fire consisted of a youma as its main source, well... it's not entirely surprising all the sudden. Still, with a little limp and a wave, she makes her way out the door and down the street, humming quietly to herself as she does so. . o O ( Well... that was actually pleasant! ) O o .

errant_passage @ 2008-04-25T15:34:00

2008-04-25T20:36:57Z

Title: A Cat's Tail
Characters: Oi Ranmaru, Kita Mikage
Scene: Waking up in Ranmaru's dorm, both Mikage and Ranmaru are trapped into revealing more about themselves and their powers. However, the strange feelings that draw them together are enough to unsettle both of them, leaving many questions in their wake.

As one may have predicted, the rain had not stopped. Mikage had been right when she had thought that it /looked/ like it was going to stop, but it would appear that nature decided that it wanted to be evil and let it rain even heavier than before during the entire night. Ranmaru had put a blanket over Mikage before falling asleep on the floor besides his own bed, laying on his back. The young man groans as a beam of light creeps over his body and hits his eyelids. He takes a moment to open his eyes, trying to realize where exactly he is, and why exactly there is no comfortable pillow beneath his head. "Gnn?" A sound escapes his mouth as he slowly sits up straight and turns his gaze towards his own bed. 'Did I fall out of my bed?'

Well, the answer was 'no' of course, seeing as there was an adorable white haired girl laying there. Ah yes, that was right, he had invited a girl into his dorms last day. Ranmaru takes a moment to stand up and looks at the curled up 'kitten'. He takes a moment to memorize this moment, causing a smile to appear on his face. "How adorable." He whispers to himself before walking over to the window and gazing outside. It was a off-day today, so he was not worried about having to get into classes. The young man even takes his time to take up the scenery outside. After all, the college's outside area was always pretty after a big rainstorm, especially since the sun was shining now, creating a beautiful rainbow in the sky as well as showing off the lush green of some of the plants. "Hmm." The young man turns his head about, patiently waiting for the girl to wake up.

It might seem strange for the pale girl to have slept not only the better part of the afternoon, but all the way to the next morning. However... such things had become a bit commonplace for Mikage since her 'change' years ago. The rain always made her want to curl up somewhere and wait it out, and like any cat... she had an unusual ability to sleep in when it was raining, trying to avoid getting wet at all costs. So, she barely stirs when the young man wakes and begins to move around the room. The only reaction that comes is a little moan of sound as she pulls the blanket up over her head. That blanket is, however, a lucky thing... as if it were not covering her, a fluffy white and grey tail would be quite visible at the moment. One of the odd side effects that goes along with a cat-nap, is the tail to go with it. "Stupid rain..." She murmurs, obviously still in her sleep.

"Heh." Ranmaru sounds amused as he hears the girl utter her dislike for the rain. He gives her a good look and gazes over the blanket, noting that something looked off, but he could not put his finger on it. So the young man shrugs and turns around, gazing at the outside again. He wondered if he should wake the girl up? The young man expected to be hit in the face if he would do that... yet at the same time he'd feel guilty if he'd let her sleep too long and she'd miss something she would normally have done today. And with that descission made, Ranmaru gets next to the bed and kneels over. It is at that point that he seems to be caught in a waking dream for a moment as one hand stretches out for the girl's head. He catches himself doing it just as he spreads and places his fingers on the white bangs near her forehead that just barely were visible above the blanket. He however does not retract his hand, but instead decides to just go with the flow and see if him touching her like that would wake her up. Just to be sure however, he calls for the girl's name, half expecting to get a protesting 'mrow' or something cute like that. Maybe he's been watching too much anime lately. "Kita-chan?"

At the first touch, the girl's dreamy voice mumbles something very obviously in a foreign language, although familiar, perhaps Chinese or Korean. Then, she falls silent once more until her name is spoken. Blinking, her pale blue eyes open and adjust to the light. Unlike some who might panic in such a situation, lashing out or wondering just where they were... Miki seems quite calm. She looks upwards towards Ranmaru, and then gives a waking yawn that extends into a sound that seems almost like a kittenish 'nyo'. "It's morning... isn't it?" She asks, trying to push herself up lightly with one arm. "I hate that... rain always makes me sleep like a rock." Or like a cat. In either case, she begins to rub at her eyes, stretching slightly.

"Like a rock? Rather like a cat, the way you were curled up at first." Ranmaru chuckles as he says this, apparently quite amused by this fact. "Looked kind of... you know." He shrugged his shoulders for a moment. "Cute?" The 'nyo' was definately cute, or at least it was in his opinion. After all, he did love cats. And it is not every day that he gets girls in his dorm that fall asleep on his bed and act much like a cat. "But yes, you are right. It is morning. At least it has stopped raining, otherwise you'd have slepted for another day." He chuckles for a moment, but felt that such a thing would probably have been bad. He gives her some room to sit up completely and sits down on his office-chair. The inescapable urge to yawn now that she had yawned came, causing him to stretch his arms, ball his hands into kittenish paw-like fists, and his mind to finally realize that... his sunglasses were not on him. He quickly looks about, trying to find out where his shades went, but he could not find them. He figured they had dropped under the bed. 'Don't panic now... your eyes are fine. Just... calm down and stay calm.' But he was wrong. Although it was not far, his mismatched eyes were slightly yellowing in their shade. The iris had luckily not changed yet, and Mikage might just downplay it as a play of light, or maybe downright not see it at all. However, with Ranmaru thinking he was fine, he shoves himself a little closer to her. "I hope my bed was comfortable."

"Rock, cat... sometimes they're really the same thing." She laughs slightly, although it's one of those half-awake laughs that probably is more exhuberant than it would normally be. Looking downward as she stretches, Miki catches sight of a bit of fuzz beneath the blanket, and barely manages to avoid going into panic mode. Luckily, Ranmaru had made the comment about her being 'cute' just at the right moment. Her cheeks turn slightly pink, and she shifts to cover her waist with the blanket, "I guess..." It's only then that she notices something different about him, as well. No sunglasses. Her eyes move immediately to look at his, blinking as she tilts her head curiously. "So that's why you cover up your eyes?" She asks, "Because they're different colors?" Of course, she'd never seen them before now, so she has nothing at all to compare them to. Then, she blushes once more and gives a shy smile. "It was comfortable, yes. I'm sorry you had to sleep on the floor. I mean... I normally don't do this sort of thing."

"Hmm?" Ranmaru gives her a curious look as she stares directly at his eyes, giving a 'is there something on my face' look. In reply to her asking about his eyes, the young man reaches two of his right hand's fingers towards his right eye, almost touching it, and then places them near his ear and spreads his fingers out to rub his skin there. "Hmm, yes. I guess its a reason." He doesn't sound too sure of himself, his voice sounding like there was more to it than that. Mikage could probably hear it, as could most others. "I got some flak on it from some teachers, much like you have white hair." Although he'd gotten into more trouble by insisting he had to wear his sunglasses. His excuse is a claim of being very light sensitive, which is true to some extend.

The young man then removes his hand from his face and waves it about a little. "Don't worry about it. As wrong as this may sound, it was kind of nice to have you around." Ranmaru speaks his mind, and wonders how Mikage is going to take such words. "Anyhow..." He gets up and gives her a mysterious look as he turns his head towards her and gazes at her with just his right eye. "You must really like that blanket huh?" Had he noticed the fuzz!? The way he just said that sounded like he was implying towards something. He crosses his arms for a moment as he looks outside again and hums to himself for a moment, seemingly in thought about something. As if trying to figure out a right course of action. "Are you cold? Seeing as you keep it wrapped around you?"

Yes, indeed, Mikage could hear something in his voice implying more to the situation. And thus it seems like true irony that they were both hiding something from each other at the moment. "You guess, it's a reason?" She asks, her natural inquisitiveness taking over as she tries to figure out exactly what the issue is with it. Sure, it isn't exactly -normal- but neither is white hair. "I mean, you've got really nice eyes." And there that blush goes again, only tempered slightly when he starts asking about the blanket. Ut oh. Okay, now the self-control part of things goes a bit out the window for Miki as she stammers slightly. "Err... Not cold really... no." She tries to think of a way of explaining out of this, or forcing herself to make it go away. Unfortunately, the only thing that had ever worked with her transformations, was time. Everything her mind comes up with ends up being something gross, so what choice does she have in the matter. "Umm..."

"That's okay." Ranmaru hears the stammer within Mikage's voice and nods a little. He seems to be letting her hide her tail for the moment, seeing as he was not forcing her to take it off. "As for my eyes. I am a sensitive to bright light. That's what I keep telling my teachers anyway. The main reason however, is that people tend to ask questions when my eyes change colors depending on my emotion." He knew of some people who made claims of their eyecolors changing depending on their emotion, but in his case that went to a whole new extreme. He wasn't going to explain further than this however, for now, he already had ensured that he was not lieing to this girl. "I have enough trouble with the assumptions people have about me when seeing my scar."

The young man turns about and puts his hands into his pants' pockets while still giving her that mysterious look, as if he knew something he was not letting on. "Now, you must understand that we don't allow for cats in these dormitories. But I am a cat-friend, so I won't say a thing." Wait? Did he believe she had a cat with her, hiding under those blankets? Or was he just toying with her mind? "Here." And with that he begins to reach out towards the blanket, apparently intent on reveiling 'the cat'.

The girl's mind moves too quickly, trying to figure out some means of escape from this situation. Okay, he has weird eyes, that isn't all that weird, but certainly a girl with a tail -is-. "That's not so weird, changing eyes that is..." She tries in vain to change the subject, in vain, and ends up just sounding like she's grasping at straws. She could use an illusion? What good would that do, though? She can't illusion -away- her tail. She couldn't force it away... "I don't have any ... " And then he moves to take the blanket. "... cat." So like someone about to get slapped, she says nothing and just ducks her head, closing her eyes tightly and looking away. And, when the blanket is moved, the fluffy white and grey tail is there in all it's glory, curled tight against the girl's side with the fur near the top slightly puffed as if she were frightened.

The room becomes perfeclty silent for a moment. Even the sounds of animals outside seems to disappate completely for a moment, like nature is holding its breath. Ranmaru stares at her tail, first suprised, but quickly accepting. "Hmm... I guess weird things do happen around here lately." No slap, no shouting. Just Ranmaru's kind voice is what breaks the silence, although it was not hard to hear the slight sound of discomfort in his voice. But then, finding someone has a tail like this isn't quite the most comforting sight. He reaches over both of his hands and very carefully places them onto her shoulders. He bends over and kneels so that he will be at the same height as hers and looks her straight in the eyes.

His own have altered the way they look, a beautiful yellowy color, the iris much like that of a real cat. "I guess we are alike then, huh? This must be why I felt so strangely comfortable around you." Finally he also had a chance to look at her from a different point of view, causing the young man to blush as an intimate image popped up in his head. Stupid teenage mind. Ranmaru felt comfortable enough knowing that they shared something similar in at least some way to let his black feline ears pop out, and his poofy tiger-like tail soon follows as well. The now somewhat feline looking boy chuckled, somewhat glad that his hands were not transforming too, and greets Mikage with a definate 'meow'.

When the initial response from Ranmaru is nothing more than silence, Mikage peeks one eye open, still ducking as if she were somewhat afraid of what she might see. Then, the other opens, looking at the strange boy as if she were waiting for him to start screaming. Even when he comments about weird things, she goes to open her mouth... perhaps trying to explain all of this, but nothing comes out more than a squeek of sound. When his hands come to rest on her shoulders, her eyes look even that much more frantic, her arms trembling slightly. And then... her eyes are caught up by the look in his own, and his words wash over her with a mixture of confusion and comfort. "..A..alike?" She manages to murmur, and then -stares- as the boy infront of her begins to transform. She claps a hand over her mouth, seeming... stunned. "Impossible." She whispers, and then shakes her head, but her own powers seem to respond to the call, two small white and grey ears appearing from within her hair and folding backwards. "When did? How? This... doesn't make any sense..." She seems to sway a bit, perhaps overwhelmed by what just happened. "Murr..."

"Murr? Well, I guess that would be one way of describing it." The youngster seems to be taking all too well, while in reality he is quite confused himself. After all, for the longest time he too had believed to be the only one. Ranmaru had acted without really thinking too much about it, so readily having given away one of his biggest secrets. It was a little weird to him, how he could be so calm and reserved in a situation like this. The young man then very carefully takes one of Mikage's hands and tries to lead it to one of his furry ears. "Its not impossible, I am afraid. Here, you can touch them, see that they are real." The young man alters his voice a tad bit to sound soothing, even though somewhere he realized that this girl was not going to suddenly run off. "About a year ago, as an answer to 'when'." As to how, he was not going to answer now.

He motions his face a little closer to hers, giving her a most confused look with those yellow eyes of his. They were perhaps the only thing that betrayed the apparent calm demeanor he had, and did this very much so. He gazes into her eyes from up close and keeps his head hanging there before letting his gaze escape towards her ears for a moment. There was this immediate feeling of wanting to touch them, see if they were indeed for real as well, but he decided it would be rude to do so without invitation. "Nya~." He lets out a meow and begins to blush, realizing suddenly how close to this girl he was. "Oh..." And having noticed, he backs away a little, giving the girl more room.

Once more, the girl's mouth opens, and nothing comes out. But Mikage seems to be calming down, accepting that this isn't just some dream. This is real, this boy is as real as she is, and all too similar. Of course, it made sense that she felt comfortable with him. They were alike in some way, although exactly how deep that similarity goes she has no idea, at least not yet. She takes a deep breath, and finally seems to find her voice. "I didn't mean impossible, I guess. Just..." She sighs slightly, gazing up at him with a glassy sheen to her eyes. "I always thought I was alone." And it is a comfort to know that there were others like herself, even if only one other in the world. The tips of her fingers, drawn to his ears, gently trace along the outer rims of them, feeling the fur and verifying what her other senses had already confirmed.

Her mind finally begins to process everything going on, trying to make sense of it even in an abstract way. "I first... changed... when I was fourteen. It was the same time my hair changed color." She admits, drawing her hands away from his ears slowly. Like him, though, Miki doesn't say that she believes her collar is the source of that change. Although her cheeks seem to have settled into a permanent rosy tone, she doesn't seem shy of his close proximity. In some ways, the cat-like part of her nature was taking control, interested in this stranger like herself. So, Miki reaches out to take one of his own hands, reaching it towards her own ears to return the gesture.

"Murr." A strange shivering sound came from Ranmaru, surprising even himself, as Mikage's fingers trace his ears. His body shivers for a moment, showing that the touch had definately registered in his system, and his head leans back forwards again when she returns her hands, following it for an inch or two before giving up. He realized that the weirdness factor of life just had gone up a few notches, especially since he now indeed was not the only one. The school had rumors about there being a 'catboy' around, but he had always believed that to be a hoax. But perhaps, knowing that Mikage was also feline like him, there could be truth to this?

That thought does not remain long in his mind however. The moment Mikage touches his hands and leads them to her ears, his mind goes completely blank, and registers only Mikage's close proximity and the words she is saying. When his fingers finally touched down uping her soft and shorter fur of her ears, and as much as he was used to his own ears, a second shiver went through him. He rubbed them for a moment, cupping the back side of one, before realizing something. Touching another's feline ears, as well as being touched /by/ another... it was completely different from the times he had touched his own. Ranmaru concentrated however, trying not to get too distracted by the physical nature of what was going on, and eventually manages to nod a little. "A year ago. My physical appearance did not change... although sometimes I wonder if my hair turned even more black than before, and my senses heightened." The latter he stammers, inching his face even closer to hers, gazing still into those eyes of Mikage's. "I was surprised at first when I spawned feline bits to my body. I thought it was just me going nuts. But, I guess I can't say that anymore now." His nose was almost touching hers. "I guess this is real after all. Its... kind of enchanting, in some way." He admits, letting the hand that was on her ear move to the girl's shoulder. Ranmaru realized what he was doing, he definately did. However, care about it? Not really. He was not going to force anything, and there was enough space to escape for Mikage.

Such a strange feeling, another's hands on her ears... Mikage closes her eyes for a moment, breathing slowly as if she were trying very hard to maintain her composure while the rest of her responds both as human and feline. Her pulse quickens slightly, making her heart thud against her chest and leaving a strange, echoed longing there that is beyond her understanding for the moment. When her eyes open again, she can't help but look back at the boy with the cat ears with a mixture of curiousity and wonder. "I'd thought that I'd had one test too many and finally had lost it." She admits with a somewhat strange laugh in her voice, as if her own nervousness were escaping along with her voice, beyond her control. Her face leans forward slightly, her nose softly coming into contact with his in a very feline way of gretting. However, as she does so, her eyes slip closed again, and a soft purr echos itself from the pale girl.

This girl was not escaping his hold, and even closed her eyes as if she was accepting what was sure to come. "I still feel a little like I'm losing it." Ranmaru replies and extremely slowly inches closer towards Mikage. His other hand which had been empty for a while now goes up to the girl's other ear and settles at its back, pulling it very lightly downwards. The youngster then finally leans in far enough for their lips to touch, at which moment his eyes close as well. It was an exploring kiss, trying to see if all of this was truly real. During its duration, many thoughts passed through Ranmaru's mind, but seeing as they were so many, he did not have much time to go through them all. He'd sort it all out later. Instead he concentrated on the kiss, in which he sunk his soul. However, he kept a concious mind on what was going on.

In the end, the kiss didn't last all that long. Ranmaru seperates his lips slowly from Mikage's and opens his eyes again, trying to gaze into hers. He takes a moment to make some distrance, giving her a surprised look. "I... I don't know what came over me." He claims truthfully, a little surprised. Were it just his hormones playing up, or was there more at play here? In the end, it didn't matter, he'd just kissed Mikage, the girl he'd only just met.

Surely, if Ranmaru was losing it, Mikage was going right along with him. It seems almost like Alice going down the rabbit hole, but there's a certain point where you stop fighting against what is around you and just accept that as strange as the world might be, it is all too real. Her ears, both the one Ranmaru is pulling and it's opposite, tilt downward in the same motion, seeming to know that the kiss is coming even without seeing it. As their lips touch, that strange feeling in her chest seems to magnify, threatening to beat it's way out of her if it were allowed to run wild. But the kiss doesn't last forever, and slowly the feeling ebbs as Ranmaru moves away from her.

Slowly, Miki's eyes open once more, looking as if they were lost in some distant dream. The purr in her chest goes to silence as she seems to realize just what was happening in the more sensible part of her mind. "Go...Gomen ne." She murmurs, ears still folded back, seeming as if she were frightened of herself, or at least of her own reaction to his touch. "I... don't know what's wrong with me." She turns her head away from his gaze, pulling her tail up next to her as her eyes seek to look anywhere but at the boy. Unfortunately, most of what she has to look at are posters of white tigers, which only seem to bring her mind back to the same thing... she'd kissed a boy she'd only just met.

Ranmaru and Mikage had just both shared a kiss. Ranmaru found himself to be a slight bit confused... scared of himself having reacted in such a manner. What would be the word for it? Instinctive? Feral? He wanted it to be the first rather than the latter, as it made more sense to him. He slowly lets go of the white haired one and moves a bit away from her so that she can have her room to move around. "I don't know..." He starts. "I mean, nothing to appoligize for. I began that kiss." Sure, he had expected her to just pull away, or place her hands to his chest to push him away, but she had not. But he didn't have the feeling there was anything really wrong with them, and thus he voiced that opinion. "I don't think there's anything wrong with the either of us. Maybe its just because having been thinking we were alone, the only ones with this... whatever it is." It seemed like a reasonable explaination.

The young boy stands up for a moment and then sits down next to Mikage, getting himself more comfortable. Only now that he sat down he realized how heavily his heart had been pounding to his chest, and how hot his body had gotten. Sure, he was slowly cooling down again, but his cheeks were still burning. "Pheeewww..." He raised a hand up and touched his lips with a single finger, immediately remembering that kiss. On top of his burning cheeks, a blush appeared once again. "You know... I think that was my very first kiss." What was he being so embarassed about? Wasn't he supposed to be cool, dark and mysterious!?

Reaching a hand up towards one of her cat ears, Mikage rubs at it distractedly, as if trying to will it to go away, perhaps will all of this to go away. Then again, although she knows a great deal about her powers, whenever the girl's emotions got in the way, it made controlling her extra features a bit... difficult. Certainly she'd never been -that- close to a boy before, at least not since her more innocent childhood days. "Maybe." She seems to try and accept his reasoning for it, that all this was was relief for finding out that they weren't alone. But... that didn't explain the thumping in her chest and the fluttery feeling in her belly. "I'm sorry anyways... I can't control this, when my emotions come into play." She looks down at her hands, which have gotten a little fuzzy around the fingers. She clenches her hands for a moment, then lifts one to rub the palm against one eye. Was she ... crying? "I hope, you don't think I do this a lot or anything. I mean, I've never even kissed a boy before..." Instinctively, she grabs one of his pillows and clutches it to her chest, burying the bottom part of her face into it.

"Maybe." Ranmaru chimes, repeating what she had just said. "But really, there's no need to be sorry. I had trouble with my feline features as well. I can't control them that fantastically either." He lifts a hand up and puts his index finger and thumb around the tip of one of his ears. He pulls on it slightly, before putting both hands onto his lap, not sure where else to put them. However, when he notices that the girl has begun to cry and has hold of one of his pillows, worry fills his eyes. He realized suddenly that this had indeed been this girl's first kiss, and there was a definate importance about this with Japanese girls. However, something in the back of his mind told him this might not be the reason. "Are you... okay? Is it because I kissed you?" He scootches over and instinctively wraps an arm around her back and pulls her against him. "I'm sorry if I hurt you." He sounds desperate. If he wasn't sure what to do previously, he definately was not now! "There there." He uses his other arm to secure the girl were she to try and lean against him. Now that he was sitting he could feel how his tail was nervously swinging about, but there was nothing to do about it.

The chaos of emotions wells up within, threatening to drown out reason. But Mikage hasn't lived this long without learning some semblance of self control. She certainly didn't break down the first time she popped cat ears and a tail, and from somewhere deep within herself, she finds some light to focus on. "No..." She murmurs, although it isn't because of his arm around her or the comfort he offers. "It's not because you kissed me." She shakes her head, and once more rubs at her eyes, allowing herself to lean just slightly aganist him. "I'm just... confused." She looks at him with one eye, the other still hidden behind her paw. "I'd convinced myself... that I was the only one of my kind. And now there's someone else like me... and I go and do something stupid." She sighs, and then lowers both of her hands nervously to her lap. "You didn't hurt me, I just... Gods I'm stupid." She hangs her head slightly. "Murr.." This sound comes completely in a kittenish nature, as she looks again towards the window. "I don't know what I'm doing, but you make my heart feel strange. Like a kitten playing with string, giddy and leaping." She places a hand at her chest, and seems to refuse any eyecontact.

"Strange." Ranmaru listens most patiently to Mikage's explaination and places a hand to his heart. Although it was not as colorful as the girl worded it to be, he had felt something very similar this entire time as well. Like a cat that had found back its favorite toy, and it had been filled with catnip. Of course, he isn't going to speak his mind on that. After all, this situation itself is weird enough already as it is. "I mean, I have a very similar feeling as well. Now that I think back to it, I had a similar feeling when we first met at that bookstore." The youngster pauses for a moment, moving his chest and head forward a little to get a better look of the white haired girl. At least he was relieved that it was not through his fault that the girl had been crying just moments ago. After all, her feeling of confusion was something he could much better relate to. So he moves the hand that is not on her back to her hands and lets his fingers wrap around them.

"I understand the confusion. I don't know how I can actually stay this calm in the face of something like this to be entirely honest with you." He uses his one hand to rub her back, trying to cheer her up a little. "Don't worry, we all do something stupid sometimes. But, to be honest, I didn't believe that kiss, or these feelings, are necessarily stupid." After all, as much as that kiss had been surprising to him, he /did/ enjoy it. Ranmaru wonders for a good moment if, just maybe, he should kiss her again in order to convince her that it was okay. But he realized that such a thing may just drive her away, or make her think he was some kind of pervert. "Maybe..." He begins, seemingly trying to think of something to do in this situation.

He then pulls Mikage closer against him and lets the hand that was on her back slip down and very carefully stroke over the entire length of the girl's tail, wrapping his fingers around it as he brings it upwards. He had no clue what this would feel like to her. "One way or the other. What happened, happened. This is definately real." A small pause. "Also, I note, you are not stupid. Let it go, as I don't think badly of you. Nor do I think you are acting like an idiot. Quite the contrary actually. My mother always used to say that, if your heart or feelings told you to do something, go for it." Unless the mind is screaming 'don't do it!' of course, but he figured the girl knew that herself well enough. "Now I'm just prattling..." He lowers his head a little, but keeps aiming his eyes at the girl. He lets go of the tail as he reaches the tip and seems to be a little lost on where to move that hand now. "I did enjoy the kiss..." He finally recovered enough of his normal demeanor to say this without blushing.

There are always some feelings that words just cannot express. Whatever part of us it is that feels those chaotic mixes of emotions, there simply is no way to describe the depth of it. "You did? I mean... feel something back at the bookstore?" Mikage's eyes look back at him now, seeming to have regained control over her own waterworks, but there is still a glassy sheen to them. She had felt something when he walked in, but... she passed that off as simply having a moment of panic over a yakuza in her store. "I just thought it was me thinking you were creepy." She replies, her ears folding back as she seems to be a bit ashamed of that first impression.

Still, Mikage goes somewhat silent as she listens to him speak. It seems that while he is quite calm in such a situation, it takes her a bit of effort to keep herself under control. The touch of his fingers against her furred hand causes her to move her own fingers slightly against his, feeling how the fur felt against his skin. This is followed shortly there-after by Ranmaru, himself, stroking her tail. A small shiver runs through the pale girl, causing another of those soft purrs to slip out from her chest. Then, with a nod of her head, she sighs slightly. "I know this is real, even if it's strange. Like something out of an anime or something." She murmurs, and then looks shyly away once more, the tip of her tail twitching lightly. "I enjoyed it, too."

The young man does not comment on her thinking he was a Yakuza, instead he talks about what he believed to be important. "Well, it was faint I guess. But..." He ponders for a moment, trying to remember what exactly it had been that he had felt that day. "I dunno. To be honest, I was going to go to the bookstore that's on the other side of the street, but when I walked into the street I noticed that I was standing in front of your door, rather than the other one's." That's how it happened. Of course, he had not given it much thought at that time really, but now that he thought of it. "Maybe I somehow smelled you or something." Ranmaru jokes, immediately adding: "Not that you smell bad or anything! I mean, you have somewhat of a pleasant air about you actually." He makes a sniffing sound, taking in the girl's scent, before placing his hand back on the base of Mikage's tail and stroking it again. After all, he found that purr he heard so awefully cute, not realizing that the shiver he had felt was because of him touching it. Maybe he'd notice the second time.

"Oh..." It was finally now that Ranmaru realized that the girl's hands too had turned to be a bit furry. "Eh... lemme see..." He raises the hand that is not on her tail up and seems to focus for a moment. Seconds later, just that hand becomes furry and gains what look like rather sharp claws. "Careful with the claws." He states, asuming she'd probably want to touch it. The hand keeps up in the air for her to take it to whatever part of her body she'd want to feel the touch to. "But you are right." While waiting, he continues to talk. "I'm glad you enjoyed the kiss, to be honest. I was afraid I tasted bad or something. Anyhow... yes, it does seem like something out of an anime, doesn't it? After all, the only catgirls I've seen were the drawn kind. Not... you know."

The fingers on her tail found themselves at the end, and moved back to the beginning where he innocently scritched the very base of her tail before holding onto it a little tighter and stroking it again, as if grooming the fur with his hand. "A real one. But then, I am a real one." He chuckles for a moment as a dirty thought passes his mind, something he had thought off a long time ago, and quickly discards it. "Murr." A kittenish sound escapes his lip. "Anyhow... do you..." He paused, he was going to ask her if she wanted to drink something, but waited to see if she wanted to say something first, and moves his head a little closer to hers.

With her eyes drawn towards the window and the blue skies beyond, Mikage settles into listening, thinking back to that first day that they had met at the book store. Did she feel something? Or is it just her mind looking back now and trying to seek out some sort of connection to explain why she is behaving so oddly. Logic and emotion are not always on the same page when it comes to how they view a situation. She makes no comment on her scent, good or bad, her mind still trying to wrestle with everything she'd discovered in a very short period of time.

Her eyes manage to catch sight of his hands, looking so much like her own when she was in this level of transformation. As if in some sort of daze, she reaches out and touches her fingertips to his, tilting her ehad with a bit of a confused expression on her face. Her mouth opens slowly, as if she might say something... but then the boy goes just a bit too far into his kitten play and it seems to snap the more logical part of Miki's brain back into place. "Err..." Her tail draws back closer to her, and the purr in her chest cuts off abruptly as she shakes her head, getting to her feet. "Listen... umm... I should go." She reaches down and grabs her bag, reaching into it to pull out a sweater and a light jacket. She ties the sweater around her waist, pulling that tail up until it's hidden beneath. Then begins to don the jacket as well. "I need to get my head on strait." She replies, sighing to herself as she moves a few books around in her bag, seeming to still be looking for something else.

A little animation of a car coming to a screetching halt played within Ranmaru's mind as the tail moved away from him and the girl showed hesitation due to what he was doing. It would appear that the horrid curse of being a feline, and with it the endless curiousity, had run its natural course, and just got him into at least a small piece of trouble. "Ah.. hai. I think so too." The youngster remains seated for a while as his features begin to disappate, and he closes his eyes to get his own mind straight. Surely, the shock of their sudden behavior-changes should begin settling in around now as well. "Gomen, I went too far. I think it is indeed best to get both of our heads straight without eachother around." That said he slowly stands up, bows his head to her and turns about to look outside of the window. The air about him returns to a normal state, as if his mind had been shocked by a cattleprod and been forced to return that very moment. 'Told you so' a little voice in the back of his head tells him, causing Ranmaru to show a small smile. Yes, his mind had warned him of this to happen.

"Hmm..." His tail is the only thing that has not gone away yet, and it is twitching a little restlessly. Ranmaru crosses his arms while looking outside the window, gazing at the same blue sky Mikage had earlier. He doesn't look at her when she is getting dressed up, not wanting to acidentally be looking while she possibly could be undoing anything. "A lot has happened this past... morning and night. A lot of things to think about." He nods and turns his head about, having noticed that Mikage is no longer moving around clothing. He hasn't gotten his sunglasses back yet, so he feels a little strange as he is looking over his shoulder. "I felt strange. I normally don't behave like this." Ranmaru doesn't strike the tone that would be associate with looking for pity, or making excuses. Instead, those words are merely meant to explain what he felt, to his best extend that is, seeing as he really can't understand what exactly was going on. "I'll try to get these... feelings under control." He turns his eyes away from her again and gazes at one of the posters on his wall, showing a tiger roaring at whoever looked at it. "Gomen." He excuses himself once more, feeling quite embarassed about the whole thing.

While Ranmaru may have the mental image of a car screetching to a hault, Mikage has the image of a cat in a cage... trapped. In many ways, since she first discovered her powers, she'd felt trapped by them and the effects that they have had on her life. However... this situation seemed to be making it feel even more dangerous. Afterall, her heart was her own, right? Her powers couldn't -make- her care about someone, that would mean she had no freedom at all... trapped. "Gomen." She replies, echoing his own words slightly. Her own features were probably a good half-hour and a bubble bath away from disappearing. Unfortunately, while she may understand her own abilities quite well, control over such things is not her strong point.

She finally seems to find what she's looking for in her bag, pulling a loose fitting baseball cap down over her head, hiding her ears beneath it. Amusingly enough, the team on the cap is the 'Tigers' but that isn't too surprising since they were quite a famous Japanese ball-team. She seems to avoid eye contact, as if somehow the two-toned eyes of her companion might catch her again in that dazed and strange world of the unknown. "I don't think this is normal for either of us... but we're not exactly normal, are we?" Mikage sighs to herself and pulls her bag over her shoulder, taking one more look towards him. What is she running away from, anyways? "Gomen-ne, Ranmaru." For some reason, she leaves the honorary off of his name, although the girl doesn't seem to notice at all. "Thank you for being so kind to me... I'm... going to go home now." And with that, she reaches towards the door, opens it, and moves to leave.

"Indeed, we are not exactly as normal as we believe others to be. But, mind you, this does not mean we are wrong by being what we are." Ranmaru stares at Mikage from the reflection in the window, not looking directly at her eyes for the exact same reason she evaded his. "Just, don't be too sorry. If you didn't somewhere in your heart want something like this to happen, it would not have happened. The fact that you pulled away from me proves this, I think. I wish I had as much control over my feelings as you do." Was there envy in his voice due to his own lack control? "I don't know if that even is the right explaination, but it somehow feels at least a little bit 'right'?" Uncertainty.

"Ne? Mikage?" He too does the same, in automatic reaction to hers. Ranmaru then finally turns around, but keeps his eyes away from hers as he is still a little too ashamed to look at her directly. "Just... don't run away, okay? You are the only one like me, and... I think I would be sad if you disappeared." He lets out a little sigh, shakes his head, and seems to be ridiculing himself within his mind as he thinks about those words. "Tssk... that sounded so mooshy... I can't believe those words actually came from my lips... but I can't lie to you." He continues it with a whisper: '~it is what I feel~'. It wasn't really meant for either of them to hear, it was just smacked on there without thinking. "I guess... I'll see you again then? Some other day?"

Whatever her thoughts were on the issue of controling feelings, or if she had 'wanted' any of this to happen... remains somewhere in the silence that lies between. As much as she may have been more outgoing towards Ranmaru since meeting him, Mikage still remains a somewhat shy, and reserved girl. Thus, she has learned to keep some feelings hidden from others, at least on the surface anyways. "I don't run away." She replies finally, keeping her hand on the door knob as she does so. "If I was that sort of person, I'd have never gotten this far." She sighs to herself, her fingers trembling slightly. Her lips move as if they were mouthing out towrds, but nothing comes out, except a small utterance at the end, "Un... see you around." And with that, Miki makes her way into the hallway and out of sight.

"Hai, you are right. I'm glad you are who you are." Ranmaru calls out while walking over to the door and following her with his gaze as she walks down the quiet hall. He can see her tail hidden, but that is just because he knows where to look. "Thank you." He whispers, believing her to be able to be able to hear him with those ears of hers, even though they are hidden underneath that hat. A smile then finally appears on his face again as he closes the door and flops down onto the bed, reaches out, and grabs his sunglasses from his desk. "Something tells me, our lives are going to change quite a bit..." Ranmaru hovers his sunglasses over his eyes, and just when he puts them on his face he repeats himself. "Our lives are going to change... that's for sure. I just feel it."

errant_passage @ 2008-04-03T15:57:00

2008-04-03T21:00:46Z

Title: Cats in the Rain
Characters: Oi Ranmaru, Kita Mikage
Scene:
Somewhat introductory scene between Ranmaru and Mikage. After meeting briefly at the book store, Ranmaru drops in on Mikage as she's reading a book. As they start to talk, a storm begins to roll in, threatening to douse the two in water. Evil water.

A few clouds hang lazily in the afternoon sky, darkening slightly in the distance as if suggesting a storm that might roll in in a few hours time. Still, for the moment, things are comfortable, and quite a few students are spending their free-time between classes and study sessions out in the courtyard of the school campus. Mikage is among these, althoug somewhat appart from them as well. Rather than joining in groups playing games, smoking, or otherwise socializing, she prefers her solitude in the shade of a tree. In her lap, is a dusty looking hard cover book that probably is far older than the girl herself. She carefully turns pages now and again, but then returns to propping her chin up on her hand. The wind plays somewhat with her hair, but the majority of it is tied loosely back with a few clips, keeping it out of her face.

Ah, the so lovely and multi-purpose tree. Used to hide under for shade, as a general point of direction... or, for some, to climb in! There are some rough sounds of shoes scraping against the side of the tree, and seconds later, another shadow casts over Mikage's person. Ranmaru had approached from the other side, quite intent on climbing into the tree, something he had loved to do ever since he was a kid. Of course, now that he is an adult, there is not as much fun in it anymore as there used to, but the youth still enjoyed it. "Oh?" His voice sounds softly. He is laying on a really thick branch, looking down at the white haired girl. "Its the bookstore girl." He whispers to himself, blinking for a moment and squints his eyes in attempt to read her book.

As soons the boy begins to climb the tree, there is a faint twitch of the head from the girl below. She takes in the sound, but there is no sense of danger in the situation. So, she simply returns to her reading, turning a yellowed page slightly. The book itself seems to be some sort of old book of stories, including painted pages showing traditional artwork. One such painted page shows opposite to the text she happens to be reading. In the image, there is a woman with an orange cat's tail, seducing a wandering traveler with a flower. For the time being, she doesn't seem to notice the tree-boy-romance-novel-lurker. Instead, her eyes and her hand follows the flow of text down the page.

"Aha! So its some kind of literature major!" Ranmaru comments, not speaking too loud, but well enough to allow Mikage to overhear him. "And here I was thinking catgirls came from Manga only." He noted, however there was a slight tinge of dishonesty about what he said. He was trying to joke about it. "Good morning, Miss Bookstore." The young man kept his balance quite well on the branch, looking down on her from his vantage point. One hand was on his sunglasses, to ensure they stayed before his eyes, while the other was tightly grasping the wood beneath him. "Or afternoon, rather? Seems bad weather may be coming." He straightens himself to look into the distance. Ranmaru figured he'd warn her, just in case... seeing as he was used to people really getting into their books and not noticing the world around them.

Slowly, the girl's head tips upwards, and her green eyes blink as she looks through the leaves up at the boy. "Mythology, actually, but I suppose all myths are literature of some sort." Miki comments blandly, pulling a small red peice of string down through the page she was on, marking it. "And cats have been part of the mythology of many cultures. They're as infamous as Kitsune or Tanuki in Japanese mythology, you just don't hear of them quite as much." Perhaps because they lack the excess tails or the huge boy-parts of those particular mythical creatures. That, and it's hard to respect the magical power of something that poops in little clay boxes and goes insane for catnip. "Anyways... Goodafternoon Creepy-romance-novel-guy." She returns his own sort of greeting in kind, although there is a faint joking tone to it. She makes no comment on the weather, though, only glancing over her shoulder slightly towards the clouds and nodding.

"Creepy-romance-novel-guy?" The young man blinks for a mooment. "Hey hey now... Creepy? Sure... Guy..." He sits up and looks down at his crotch. "Last I checked... But Romance Novels? Never!" He shakes his fist into the air randomly, attempting to be humorous, before remembering that Mikage had blushed so easily previously and quickly looks down again, wondering if him 'checking' whether or not he was still a guy had triggered any blushes. However, this becomes a mere glance as he turns back towards the sky and gazes at it. If Mikage looked in the right way, she might just catch a sign of his odd-colored eyes. "Hmm. Well, I was joking to be honest. I had heard of mythology having to do with cats. Byako, for instance." He waves at the air with the hand that had previously held his sunglasses. He was trying to point at the general western direction.

"Well, if I recall correctly, you were making quite a show of pretending to be looking at our selection of romance novels at the store." The girl replies, seeming slightly amused. She doesn't catch any sight of his eyes as she turns her head back upwards, perhaps simply not looking for such details. She does, however... give a small sign of color on her cheeks, although exactly what it's in response to is hard to tell. "Byakko is the white tiger of the west... a constellation. But Tigers were thought to be a king of beasts in ancient times, and only seen when a king ruled the land with virtue." She shrugs her shoulders a little bit, apparently having far too much knowledge on the subject. "Now the only place you hear about those sorts of things is in manga or anime... and half the time it's messed up versions of old stories..."

"Hmm, you are right there. I was pretending. I dunno, I guess I had nothing to do. That, and I didn't know how drunk that lady was." Was he trying to tell her that he was there to protect her? "I've been reading the book you sold me. Having a hard time with some words, but luckily someone already made notes in them. But I sometimes feel a little like I am cheating." He hums gently and nods as she explains Byakko. "I do like tigers though. Or have lately. Must be the cats." He gazes over the area and seems to look for something. "But you are right. Manga and anime are full of mythical creatures and... catgirls and catboys. Stuff like that. It amuses me, but does get at least some people interested?" He wondered if some of the people doing the same kind of major as Mikage were there because of Manga...

"We get drunks in all the time." Mikage shakes her head slightly. "I only started working there a few weeks ago, and we already had a businessman come in... drunk off his rear... and try to sell me training manuals from his job." She doesn't go on to note that she had bought the books from him, for a handful of illusionary money. The man had come back the next day, and she had returned them to him, claiming he left them at the store in a daze. She looks back down at her book for the moment, and then glances at the clouds. Folding it closed, she pulls her bookbag over to her. "There's people in my classes who got interested in mythology because of it. But most of them don't take it very seriously. Half of them are really just aspiring manga artists looking for a cheap source of storyline so they don't have to use their own heads." There is a pause, and the girl turns a bit pink in the cheeks again, for no real apparent reason... other than perhaps that she was speaking more than she normally would outside of class.

"You okay there?" The young man turns sideways and puts his legs around the branch, testing at first if it is stable enough to hold him, before dropping himself slowly and hanging upside down from it, holding his sunglasses with one hand most religiously. His other hand, when he finally let go of the branch, he reached out and attempted to point, not poke, at her cheeks. His arm is long, and if he wanted he could probably reach for her shoulder, or slightly lower. "Do you maybe have a fever, your cheeks getting red." He teases her carefully, not knowing this girl that well, or how she'd respond to such things. He looks back down at the book again, seeing if he could find anything else had she moved pages around. He was looking for pictures, rather than words. "And I'm sorry you have to deal with drunks. I guess its true what they say, Japanese people can't hold their liquor."

"I'm fine." Miki says quickly, pulling out a plastic covering for the book. As she tries to arrange it, a few pages pass by, showing more scenes of cats or cats disguised as things, which suggests the entire book is made up of all sorts of stories about those trickstery felines. "I don't usually talk this much." She admits, finally closing the book fully and starting to slip the plastic cover over it. In the process, she doesn't notice him swing down and ends up poked in the cheek. Blinking, she turns her head and goes slightly cross-eyed looking at his finger. "Err... what are you doing?" She blinks, shakes her head slightly, and looks up at him.

"I'm just... hanging around?" He chuckles for a moment. "Well, at the moment I am poking your cheek, apparently. And making you go crosseyed." He may normally act quite serious, but it would appear that the youngster somehow felt playful today. "Ahem." He pulls himself up again and seconds later lets himself drop from a distant branch to the ground and comes around. "Don't talk this much normally?" His mind raced and went past a thousand lame pickup-lines, and in the end none were actually approved for him to state. "So how come you are now?"

"Hanging around? What are you, part monkey?" Mikage asks, although she seems genuinely amused by it. Perhaps he had been a bit creepy back at the book store, looking like some yakuza about to shake her down for protection money or something, but she really doubted that there was much danger from a boy playing around in trees. She seems to pause in mid-packing of her book, giving the clouds one more look before shrugging her shoulders and looking up at the boy. "Don't know. New place, I suppose. And you're one of the few people who's bothered to talk to me outside of work or class."

"Part monkey?" The youngster rubs his chin for a moment. "No... ~ part cat ~..." The last part was whispered extremely silently to himself, and unless Mikage was really listening well to him, it was unlikely she could hear. "Hmm, but you are right. New places do tend to be different, or sometimes even change people." Whether or not she had meant that didn't really matter to him, he just made a conclusion. "I came to Tokyo only a small year or so ago. Moved here from Osaka. Things were different here too." He barely had an accent anymore, something he had gotten rid of quite fast. He grabs his suitcase which he had placed on the other side of the tree, and just when it felt like it was going to rain, Ranmaru took out a pocket umbrella and unfastened it. "Just in case its going to rain."

It's hard to tell if Mikage actually hears the boy's comment to himself, but she does raise an eyebrow and glance at him as she pushes the plastic covered book into her backpack and zips it shut. "I don't know if places change people, but things certainly do." It's a bit ambiguous, and it's clear the girl has her own meaning behind those words. Still, she listens to his story about coming to Tokyo as she gets to her feet. "I just moved here at the start of term, from a little town near Mt. Fuji. It's a lot quieter there than it is here." She nods to herself, and then swings her backpack up onto her shoulder. She frowns slightly and looks upwards, taking a step back against the tree as it slowly begins to rain... starting with a trickle, and then growing steadily more heavy. "Some legends say cats cause rain..." Is the comment in reference to him saying he was part cat? Or because of her book? Or for some other reason entirely?

"You've got that right." Ranmaru replies to her saying that 'things' can change things. After all, he had quite a similar experience. "Hmm. I lived in Osaka most of my life. I know my parents moved at some point, but don't really know where from. 'was too young, you know?" He shrugs and opens the umbrella and steps close to Mikage so that he can cover the both of them. "As for those rain causing cats... what is up with that? I thought cats hated water. Or most of them anyway." He noticed from the corner of his eyes, a cat running away from the rain and into a door to get away from that nasty and evil falling water. "Seems we both moved here from somewhere else huh? Figures." He points towards the dormatories. "Wanna get out of this rain? Or maybe you like to watch it?"

"My grandfather raised me. He ran the Shinto shrine in our village, so obviously we weren't one of those families who moved around a lot." Mikage shrugs slightly, returning a bit of information about her own past. "As for cats and the rain... it probably goes back to them being tricksters, trying to fool humans and catch them out in bad weather." She doesn't seem certain about that one, and makes a mental note to research it herself when she has the time. As he steps closer with the umbrella though, the girl accepts graciously. "Arigatou. I don't much like the rain, at least not when out in it." She shakes herself a little, like a kitten trying to rid herself of water droplets. "I don't mind watching storms though." She glances across to the dormitories, and then nods slightly. She doesn't live there, but they were open to visitors, so there's no problem with waiting out the worst of the rain, there. "Come on, let's go."

A little smile appeared on Ranmaru's face as the white haired girl shakes herself dry. Luckily not much had fallen on either of them as he had gotten the umbrella out in time. He waits a little for the girl whom he had only just met, giving her time to get completely ready and ensures that his briefcase is locked before slinging it over his shoulder with his unoccupied hand. "Alright then. Shall we?" He asks walking off into the directions of the dormitories, under the impression that was the place this girl was staying. "I don't mind watching storms either, although I am not one to love getting wet either." He turns about his head to ensure that the girl was following him at some point while he keeps up the conversation. "So, raised by your grandpa huh? So what is that like? I mean, there's at least a gap of one generation, so things must have been a bit different, right?"

Mikage walks along with the young man, keeping pace reasonably well even if she is a bit shorter. The rain drops plunk down on the umbrella surface, threatening to get heavier as they get closer to the dormitories. "It's not as bad as you'd think, really." It's clear that a lot of people have asked her about life with her grandfather. Social workers, friends, school authorities... afterall, it's a strange family situation when -neither- parent wants to take responsibility for a child. "Of course, you learn things a bit in the old-fashion way, but he always took care of me. More than I can say for my parents." Sure, there is a bit of resentment there, but at least time has stewed it into slight anger instead of into emotional turmoil like some face. "So... do you live in the dorms?" She asks, looking upwards, and then realizing that she doesn't even know the boy's name. "What -is- your name anyways?"

"Hmm. Well, I asume that being raised the old-fashioned way isn't that bad. After all, it worked for my parents, and many others besides them. Although I can't quite imagine it myself. I had to take care of myself most of my life, even though my parents /were/ around." He lets out a hum and turns his eyes back towards Mikage, half to get an even better look on her, half to be polite. "Ah right, sorry for not having introduced myself. Oi Ranmaru. And yes, that is indeed my last name." He has had people giving certrain responses beforehand as well, it would appear. "And yes, you are indeed right, I do live in the dormitories. I asked my parents to send me to this University, and they agreed as long as I stayed in there instead of going to some appartment." One could wonder why this young man would come to this area, all the way from Osaka, just to study. After all, if he really wanted to go to Tokyo for something like that, could he not better have gone to Tokyo-U?

"Well, just imagine not being allowed to date until you're sixteen. Oh, and don't forget that you aren't allowed to go to any parties with boys." Mikage laughs a little bit, as if the whole thing were terribly amusing. "Other than that, I guess we were pretty normal." She turns her eyes towards the dorms, nodding her head slightly as he speaks about raising himself, but she doesn't really comment on it. "I'm Kita Mikage. Everyone calls me Miki usually. I live in the appartments near campus, but not in the dorms." Even so, it isn't as if she isn't -allowed- in them or anything. "I just wanted to get out of the village, myself. It might sound silly, but it always felt as if something were drawing me somewhere else."

"Un, un." Ranmaru nods as the two continue on towards the dormitories. "I think I can imagine that. Of course, my life was quite opposite to that. I dated here and there... but~." He chuckles for a moment. "Only when I was a kid. I don't think one could really call that dating. In which case one can say I never did to begin with." Ranmaru shrugs for a moment, wondering what life would have been like if his parents had been (over-)protective. "But I've been to a few parties though. But nothing yet that involved any sake. Bleh, most adults can't even hold the stuff." He wags the hand he is holding his briefcase with and chuckles. "Like that woman who came into the shop. Although of course I don't quite know if she was really drunk, or was just acting weird. After all, from what I understood from the little conversation she had with that one kid, she runs an Orphanage. Kinda bad if you think about it, isn't it?" He lets out a sigh and shakes his head. "Some people these days. Anyhow, I do hear you on the drawing part. Although it wasn't really to this city per-se." After all, he came here because of the collar. The young man had however not realized that he was still here because of something else other than wanting to study.

"Well, it isn't as if granpa's rules really got in my way much." Miki laughs lightly, showing a faint twinkle in her eyes of pure amusement. "But... I wasn't much for the dating scene anyways. There were boys who liked me, but most of the time they just wanted to make a name for themselves by dating the 'weird' girl." She reaches up, and twirls a bit of her white hair as if that might somehow explain what she meant. As she steps into the safety of the dorm entranceway, she gives herself another small shake, as if she could still feel water droplets. "You'd be surprised the odd people you run into around here. Yourself and myself included." She smirks lightly, and then looks up towards him. "So, if it wasn't the city or the school, what did bring you here?"

"I can understand that one. Although I guess I never was one of the weird boys, girls did approach me at times for looking... cool? I dunno." He rubs the back of his head, clearly somewhat embarassed. He too had now entered the dorm-hall and was shaking his wet umbrella about to get it to lose some of the water. From the corner of his eyes he noticed how Mikage was once again shaking about. "Hehe. Weird girl huh?" He shows her a gentle smile. "I don't mind weird. It makes people interesting. Normal people are boring." Ranmaru quickly sticks out his tongue as he says this and makes a face. "Hmm." He binds the umbrella up and shakes it one last time before picking up his briefcase again, which he had initially dropped to have both of his hands free. "But then... weird? Me? Neveeeer!" He chuckles, giving a mock-innocent look at her. "What makes you think am weird?"

"Well, everyone thought I was going for the 'punk' look, with my hair 'n all." She glances over at him, watching as he puts the umbrella away. "Everyone, even teachers said I was a liar when I told them it just started -growing- this color. The principal even made me shave my head to get rid of it. He couldn't do much after that, since it came back the same color." She sighs slightly, and runs a few fingers through her hair, then manages a small smile. "It's just a hunch, I guess. There aren't many guys around here that look like they're members of the Yakuza, but troll around the romance novel section of bookstores and climb trees." The combination, in and of itself is a bit silly. She does, however, note that he had avoided her previous question... still, she doesn't press the issue.

The young man nods as she speaks of her going for a 'punk' look. "As much as I can see that, the principal at my high school would never have made you shave your hair." He shakes his head a little and adjusts his sunglasses again. "We had some weird kids at my school back then, so I guess it would not have made any difference if they had. But still, to shave one's hair for school is ridiculous." He ponders for a moment and looks at Mikage's hair, eyebrows and then at her clothing. His mind does a few spins and seems to come onto a subject that makes the young man suddenly look away as a red contrast touches upon his cheeks. "Ahem. Well... anyhow. Yeah, I guess that's true. Although I wasn't trolling the romance novel section! I was just... pretending. Yeah." He places his arms over eachother and puts his umbrella to his should seconds later as if he was wielding a sword. He bends over and picks up his suitcase. "But you are right. I guess I do look like a Yakuza... or so people keep telling me." He brings a pinky up to his face and strokes the top of his scars. "Though this may have to do with that. Silly people." Ranmaru shrugs and lets out a relieved sigh. "Hey, at least you don't run away, or have ever thought I was going to shoot you."

"Unfortunately, it was a -very- strict school. The dress code was ridiculous. No fancy hairstyles, no hair coloring, no bracelets, no nothing. Just little drones in uniforms marching one by one." Mikage walks her fingers forward infront of her, as if imitating the motion. She sighs somewhat, and looks out at the rain as it still beats down on the pavement. "Well, you do look as if some sort of big cat tried to take a chunk out of your face... and wearing those sunglasses all the time certainly doesn't help." She shakes her head a little bit, reaching one hand up to tap the edge of his sunglasses. "As for... that." She looks a bit sheepish and blushes slightly. "When you first came into the book store, I thought you were got to pull out a gun and demand cash." She admits, not one to really lie about such a thing. "Gomen ne. First impressions aren't always the best ones."

"Heh." Ranmaru rubs the back of his head. "No no, I should appologize. I guess I really should stop putting my wallet on the inside of my jacket huh?" The young man seems to be a bit embarassed, yet in some way relieved about the fact that this girl was 'just human' like every other person out there. He kind of was afraid of someone who thought he was just a cute little young man... aside from those grannies that sometimes do that. "But... myes. First impressions." He nods sagely, pausing for a short moment as he thinks of what else there is to say at the moment. "First impressions are never the best ones indeed. Like, I once met a teacher at my highschool. Everyone thought he was the nicest person... until I found out he was... well, doing not so nice things with some of the students. I guess it was that kind of neighbourhood or something. I don't know." He shrugs. "Although." He places his finger to his chin. "I don't quite think that counts as a FIRST impression. But I did really think he was a good teacher in the beginning!" Ranmaru defends his point of view before sighing and shaking his head. "Never mind. My mind sometimes wanders and gets off track in a trail of thought. When something is supposed to go to school..." His hand holding the suitcase makes some motions like a car suddenly swinging the wrong way. "And ends up at the Arcade. I can't help it." He begins to walk into the directions of the male dorms, very slowly, wondering if the girl would follow him.

"It would probably save others a lot of anxiety." Mikage replies with a nod of her head, knowing just how easy it was to get shaken up by such things. Afterall, no one wants to really run on the wrong side of someone who looks as if they have mafia ties. "Still, even if first impressions aren't always correct... we can't help making them one way or the other." She looks out again towards the rain, as if hoping that it might clear up soon. She hadn't brought an umbrella to class today, and it certainly wouldn't be nice to have to get home in all that wet mess. She glances back over her shoulder at him, Miki lifts her eyebrow curiously and gives says in a joking tone, "I'm surprised you find your way anywhere, then. Like a tanuki with something shiny." For a moment, she pauses, as if considering if it were prudent to follow a boy towards the male dorms. Then again... when the alternative is getting soaked outside, it seems to be a fine solution. So, without a second thought, she moves to follow.

This was probably the first time in years that someone had willingly followed Ranmaru, especially when one conciders that the destination were the male dorms, and Mikage was clearly one of the female version of the human race. "Well, it is not as if I get distracted /that/ easily. Just sometimes, when I /talk/ about something." He chuckles, figuring his explaination indeed had been sketchy at best. "Anyhow. If you want to join me to my room?" He pauses for a moment, and a sudden blush appears on his face again. "I mean... I have a spare umbrella I can miss there!" His voice shows his anxiety a little. It was kind of weird to see a young man who looked like a Yakuza member so flustered, but non-the-less it was true. He turns his eyes away from the whitehaired maiden and pretends as if the corner between the wall and the ceiling is the most interesting thing in the world as the pass through some hallways. "Many people would think you were crazy for following me. If anyone sees us, I'm sure to get to hear of this later..."

"I don't get distracted that easily, not usually anyways." Miki seems like the type to have a good head on her shoulders. Afterall, she has gotten this far in her education and manages just fine to live on her own in the city. "Sure, I'll join you if you don't mind." She seems a bit confused at what might fluster the dark looking man so much, but then realizes that girls probably were not a common occurance here. Living on her own and living in the dorms certainly had that as a major difference. "It can't rain like this for too long." At least, she hopes not. "If it'll get you in trouble, I can just wait here... and I'll borrow the umbrella. That way you don't have to worry about anyone getting on your case for having a girl in the dorms." She pauses, and leans against one of the walls, crossing her arms lightly over her chest as she watches him.

"Nah, its okay. You can come along." The young man states. Somehow he feels that he is used to, or maybe just likes, having this girl around him. A little nagging feeling at the back of his head whispered this, but being so busy on moving to the dorms and getting himself settled and less flutered, he does not notice. "And if you feel like the rain won't last long. Well... you can always stay at my dorm for an hour or so." Ranmaru does his best not to get embarassed by his own words and voice himself as honestly as possible. After all, everything he said /could/ be seen as having a second meaning, but to him there was no other connotations. He was just inviting this random girl he rarely knew over to his small non-shared dormroom for an hour or so to wait out the rain. "..." What the heck was he doing? Ranmaru turns his head about and looks at the girl that is presumably still following him, and shows a kind smile. One not many people got to see. They were coming up to his dormroom pretty soon now.

Her pause against the wall doesn't last long, as he re-iterates his invitation to come along. With a small shrug of her shoulders, the girl is on her feet and walking again with barely a thought to the consequences. Why -was- she following this boy to his dorm room anyways? It isn't as if she couldn't just sit and study in the lobby of the dormitories. Still, something nags at Miki, making her feel as if she could trust him, at least as far as this was concerned anyways. "You don't get girls up here much, do you?" She asks, glancing at the closed doors of other dorm rooms, one or two occassionally showing a scantily clad woman. As her eyes turn back towards him, she catches the smile and returns it with a shy one of her own. "No one would even bat an eye if I brought a guy back to my appartment."

"Heh... Don't get girls up here much? Miss Kita, welcome to the hallway with the biggest Otakus about." He points at a few of the doors, showing anime girls as posters. "I believe you are probably the first in this entire year to even dare venture through this hallway. You are lucky most students here still are at class. And..." He pauses as he comes to halt in front of a door that is absolutely empty and without poster, and proceeds to unlock it. "When it comes to me. I have never had a single girl come to my dorm, or to me in general in the last few /years/." The door opens, giving access to the young man's room. "Come on in and get comfortable."

"Ahh, I thought I caught the scent of dork in the hallway." She laughs slightly, the tone showing that she isn't being totally serious about it. Afterall, Mikage herself is a bit of a dork, especially with all her weird knowledge of legends and mythology. "Most of the boys in my classes are like that, but they're usually really nice." Except for the rare few perverted ones who thought the ultimate rush was panty raids. As she steps into the room, she certainly comes to an understanding of why he had mentioned 'part cat' before. She sets her bag down near the entrance, and takes off her shoes to be polite. "You must like tigers, huh?" She asks, leaving questions about why he hasn't had any girls come to his room before for another moment.

"Hmm?" As the white haired one comments on his posters, he takes a moment to look at every single one of them. "Yes... yes I guess I do. Mainly since last year though." Ranmaru makes his way to his bed and takes off the top piece of his uniform. "Was getting a little warm." He explains, reveiling a black cotton shirt underneath. He then wanders off the the closet and opens it only partially as he takes out what looks like an electronic coffee-maker, but seeing as he also takes out a pack of milk, a can of water, and a pack of Cocoa-mix, one can asume it is used to make chocolate milk. He neatly puts them on his desk. "Do sit down on my bed or anything. Don't worry if you mess up the blankets." After all, it wasn't as if the blankets were laying all neatly to begin with. "Want some chocolate milk? I promise I haven't put any ganster-drugs in there." His mind added 'or any party drugs', knowing that some of the students on his dorm-hallway may well stoop that low with girls, but he did not say it... not wishing to make things uncomfortable between him and Mikage.

Mikage's eyes stray towards Ranmaru as he takes off part of his uniform, watching him with almost a distracted look on her face. Then, of course, she quickly looks away as if she had done no such thing, stacking her shoes neatly before standing up, dusting her hands off. She gives a soft bite to the bottom of her lip, looking at the bed for a moment before heading in that direction. Well, weren't we moving fast, being invited onto a man's bed and everything. Her mind argues with herself over a gesture that was just meant as a kind one. "Sure, I'd like some. And I'm not worried about those sort of things. I can hold my own." And, well... she could smell them. Of course, she isn't really about to say that sort of thing. Afterall, most people didn't have a heightened sense of smell.

"Hmm." Ranmaru had 'noticed' her watching him, but not in a most concious way. That did not stop him from smiling a little though as he had grabbed the stuff. "Alright. This will only take a minute." He ensures that everything is plugged in and begins working the machine. "Milk? Water?" Whichever would be the answer, he'd fill the liquid container with that, and would put the cocoa in its seperate slot. Soon enough it would be warning up. "So..." He walks back to the closet and takes out a cup of sugar, and also a can of whipped cream. Had Mikage been listening carefully, she could probably hear that he ran a small fridge in that closet. "So..." He puts the sugarcup on the desk next to the chocolate-milk machine, and begins to shake the can of whipped cream. He realized that he had just invited her to bed, and already had out the whipped cream. So a somewhat embarassed smile appeared on his face. He was trying to keep himself busy, to make sure he would not make a fool of himself. Only Mikage knew if that was working or not. "I'll let you put as much sugar in there as you want." The chocolate milk started coming down into a round glass pitcher, and steam came off of it, showing that it was very hot. "And put the whipped cream anywhere you want." He meant either at the top or the bottom of the cup he now just grabbed. As some people prefer to pour the hot chocolate after the whipped cream.

Slowly, the pale girl settles herself on the corner of the bed, looking up with her head tilted slightly as she answers, "Milk, please." She seems somewhat oblivious to any further references to anything more than a friendly gesture, having decided that there couldn't be anything more meant by such things, right? "Whipped cream on top is fine." She says in a distracted tone, eyes still looking around rather than at the strange young man. Her fingers run over the blanket with the white tiger on it, seeming as if she were thinking of something far away. Then again, the sound of rain on the windows can do that, take one back to times long ago.

"Un." Ranmaru takes his time to pour the chocolate milk into the two seperate cups and decides he'll do the same as Mikage. "On top you said?" He confirms, and grabs the can and begins to spray... royal amounts visit both cups, one could wonder if he just ruined half of that can, as a nicely made pyramid of cream ends up sitting on the chocolate milk. "Here you go." He grabs the cups and holds it out. They seem to have a strange metalic texture to them. "They are those special cups that don't get hot on the outside as fast...", the young man explains, "... but be careful non-the-less, as you might still burn your fingers." He waits for her to take the cup to her hand and settles in front of her on his office-chair, which had been sitting in front of his desk previously. He hunches over a little as he begins to lick the cream off of the chocolate milk, and doesn't notice that after a few licks, a little bit of whipped cream gets stuck to the tip of his nose. "So..." He asks obliviously. "..." Dang, he didn't know what to talk about. "Ehhh." He turns his eyes and head away, so that he is directed at the window. "Ehmmm. So what was that like, living in a small town?"

Mikage's eyes look over towards Ranmaru as soon as the hot chocolate is finished, brushing a few strands of hair behind one ear as she reaches out to take the metallic cup from him. "I'll be careful." She says, blowing softly on the surface before slurping some of the whipped cream unceremoniously from the top of the glass, and then taking a drink. Looking at him over the surface of the glass, she can't help but laugh a little when he gets whipped cream on his nose. "Ne? You have some on your nose." She wiggles the back of her hand against he own nose, trying to illustrate where. Whatever was filling up her mind, she manages to set it asside for a moment as she shrugs her shoulders. "A little lonesome, sometimes. Not as many kids lived up near the forest. The only one anywhere near my age moved away when I was little. But there wasn't as much crime, or weird happenings like you see in bigger cities."

"As for your story... that sucks." He lifts his head up and turns back towards Mikage. He was refering to the little kid moving away, and as much as he felt as if that story sounded strangely familiar, he was not going to pry. "The little kid moving away that is... I mean, it must indeed be lonely not having anyone around in your age-range." He pauses for a moment to lick off some of the cream again, his motion of licking much like that of a cat. "So what was he like?" He takes a moment to ask another question, and a rather ironic one at that. After all, Ranmaru was asking about himself without even realizing it. "The kid that moved away? Or never got to know him? Since you said he moved away at a young age?"

"It happens, I guess. I mean, how many of your friends when you were little do you still talk to? People move appart." As much as Miki tries to hide it, it's clear that she is a little saddened about such things. The way that people you once knew and cared about as a child, drift away from your memory given enough time. She rubs her hands against the warmth of the cup, seeming thoughtful, as if she were searching for something... "His parents and my grandfather used to trade off babysitting us, and we'd get into all sorts of trouble." A wry smile quirks her lips, as if such things were somewhat fond memories. "We'd wander off into the forest sometimes, having adventures." Her free hand reaches up and lightly touches the collar at her neck, although the reason for it falls short of her words.

Unknowingly, Ranmaru seems to have done exactly the same thing. It takes a little while before the young man realizes that he had grabbed the necklace that was underneath his clothing, and immediately lets go, brings that hand up to his mouth and coughs softly in the fist he just made. He wondered if Mikage had just seen that? He hoped she didn't think he was trying to make fun of her by mimicing her movement... but at the same time there was the realization that this girl was unlikely to think like that. She seemed to be too kind for such things. "Hmm, I see. Kinda like my parents, or so I think.' He rubs his head. "I don't know what my father used to do, but I know they have been busy my entire life." The youngster admits, and ponders some more o what Mikage was saying. "A forest huh? I haven't gone into a forest for a long long while now. I do like climbing trees, as you may have noticed. Trees in forests are the most fun to climb up though, as they grow so big and tall. I think I must have driven my parents batty sometimes when I did that." He chuckles and, not having anything else to share, he puts the cup of hot choco to his lips and begins to drink from it... the heat having melted most of the cream now.

Somehow, Mikage does catch sight of him touching something beneath the clothing of his chest. She seems momentarily confused, tilting her head briefly before trying to pass it off as nothing. She lets her own hand drift down into her lap again, pursing her lips as she nods her head a little bit. "Grandfather was home a lot, so it wasn't as if he was never around. I sometimes saw my father at family affairs, but... he doesn't understand that sending money isn't the same as being a real father." Oh, there is certainly some resentment there for the girl's deadbeat dad, but probably more-so for her mother. "I used to go up and walk in the forests sometimes to get away. It was quiet, and always reminded me of simplier times."

"Doesn't sound like a very smart father." He decides not to pry about her mother, seeing as she had not mentioned her. "But you probably don't want to hear that from me, now do you." He laughs uncomfortably and takes a sip of his drink to shut himself up. He let his eyes wander across the room for a moment, it was strange, it was almost as if he remembered something. He closes his eyes to try and concentrate on it.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a little scene played itself out. A little girl sitting on a bed in a house he could not remember having ever seen, even though there was a sense of familiarity about it. Next to her, he could see himself. And strangely enough, that girl looked very familiar. Just like the one from his dreams. He opens his eyes again and looks at Mikage for a moment, giving her a very thorough look. Did the little kid have white hair? He could not remember, but for some reason he did not believe she did. And Mikage's hair was naturally white. Yet, for some reason he felt like he needed to ask something.

"As much as you said your hair was natural that way. Well... I don't think~..." He sighs, apparently this was hard to him, "This will probably sound stupid to you." He laughs nervously, shaking his head. He almost ended up not asking, as his conscience told him he'd seem like an ass, but he ignored it. "Did you ever have a different haircolor?" He blinks as he asks this. This was stupid. She'd probably think he was some kind of asshole after him having said that he believed her hair was natural that color, and had even said that the teacher who had made her shave it was an ass.

"It's alright, it doesn't bother me." Mikage shrugs her shoulders, taking another drink from her glass as she manages to drain down about half of it or so. "My father was business man who should have never had kids. If it wasn't for grampa, I'd have ended up in an orphanage somewhere." And for that small grace, it appears that Miki is emmensely greatful. As he falls quiet, she does as well for a moment, listening instead to the rain on the window as her eyes look towards it. Afterall, you don't have to talk -all- the time, right? When he begins to stammer, though, the pale girl looks back towards him curiously. Most would wonder if it was some pervert asking if the 'carpet matched the drapes' but Mikage seems... more than a little stunned. "Well... not always." She takes another drink of the hot chocolate, as if trying to figure out the best way to explain it. "It just -turned- that way before highschool. After my grandfather and the school confirmed that it wasn't me being a delinquent, they had me checked out. The doctors called it... " She pauses, as if searching for the right term. "PDNOS... Pigmentation disorder not otherwise specified... which is just a fancy way of saying 'We don't know what's wrong with you, go away now.'"

Ranmaru hums thoughtfully and rubs his head. No... couldn't be... but it would explain why he felt so comfortable around her. He decides to keep this for a later time, maybe call his parents? They might know more than him after all. "Hmm. So I was right. I mean... just a feeling. Ever get those?" He asks, curiously in attempt to ensure she's not going to ask why he asked that, seeing as he didn't want to lie with her. "Hehe, we don't know what's wrong with you. That sounds very descriptive there. Did they have idiots running the hospital at that moment?" He jokes, trying to adjust his tone so that he did not sound too insulting. After all, he knew that not everything could be diagnosed anymore in this day and age. He takes another sip and glances over to where Mikage was sitting, and looked down at her legs and very slowly moved up to her eyes and suddenly his cheeks gather a reddish tint to them. Ranmaru doesn't even seem to notice it as he keeps staring at her eyes, drinking his chocolate milk while listening to the rain tapping against the window. He didn't like rain falling on him, but it was kind of hypnotising to listen to it.

"Strange feelings?" She laughs a little bit, then nods her head, finishing the last of her hot chocolate before setting the mug to the side on a nearby table. "Un. I grew up most of my life thinking I was a little strange. But I know what you mean about odd feelings." She looks towards him for a moment, her eyes giving the same appraising sort of look that he had given her only a few moments earlier. "Heh, not idiots really, they just couldn't find an explination, that's all." She shrugs her shoulders slightly, drawing her eyes away from him to look at the window and the rain. She doesn't notice his gaze really, or if she does, she shows no real sign of it. "I guess there's a lot of unexplainable things in this world." She seems to stiffen, and then stiffles a small yawn. "Oh geeze... the rain is making me sleepy." Miki murmurs, rubbing a hand at one eye.

"You can lay down for a while if you want. I won't stop you." The light crimson that sits underneath Ranmaru's eyes darkens a slight bit as he says this. One could tell that even though his intentions were innocent, he realized how other people could take his words. "I really don't mind." He adds onto it with that calm and kind voice of his. It was a voice that had surpised quite some people in the past, as many expect a rough and dangerous voice. And he could, if he wanted, and he often did sound at least dark. But they way he spoke now was still something not many others had heard him use. And that voice was the one he had directed himself to Mikage with the whole time.

"As for what you said about the strange things. I am afraid I have to agree with you. There is a lot of strange things out there, although I sometimes have trouble believing some of them." He rubs the back of his head for a moment as he remembers something and feels somewhat nervous or embarassed about it. "I met a kid a few days ago who was convinced he saw huge ducks attack people. I guess it was on the news or something. I don't know." He points at his desk. There was no television on it.

For a moment, Mikage seems to really consider the notion. Odd, because the normally sensible girl would never have even thought of sleeping in some strange boy's room prior to today. For some reason, probably that same strange feeling that lead Ranmaru to ask his leading question... she feels safe here. "Maybe just until the rain lets up..." She murmurs quietly, letting herself sink down to lay lightly on the bed. Her arms criss-cross slightly, resting her head on them. "I never heard anything about giant ducks, but then again... I don't get much time for television. I'm usuall working or studying..." Or experimenting with her abilities, but she leaves that particular one out of the conversation.

"Un..." Ranmaru nods. "That's fine. Just close your eyes, I'll wake you up if the rain stops. I'll... let you sleep if it keeps going till the night?" He offers against knowing better. Why was he even suggesting this stuff? But at the same time, this girl seemed to be okay with all this. The young man could not quite grasp what was going on here. His hand reaches to his chin and he rubs it for a moment. A gaze is cast at the girl now laying down there, and a smile appears on his face. He places his feet on the desk and leans back, entwines his fingers and places his hands on his belly, and finally closes his eyes while waiting for an answer. For some reason, he was expecting a final 'no thanks', but at the same time he knew she would probably not get angry or anything. "The rain is soothing." He claims before she can answer however, even though he is not intending to interupt her.

By the time that Ranmaru even offers to let her sleep till nightfall, Mikage is already half-asleep. She only manages some sort of murmur that sounds like a kitten giving a contented purr. She turns, curls herself up slightly, and is then out cold. Afterall, what better way to wait out the rain than to sleep through it? Better than risking getting... ick... wet. About the only other thing that happens is the collar at her neck gives a faint jingling sound, then all is still except for the rain.