Music Note Madness| Helen

[Zaeric Blackwood]

Math. An absolute abomination. The boy was skipping yet again, in his usual habit of leaving his homework on his desk, complete, and just skipping the class he hated. That's what internet could do for ya. Give you the right answers and let you roam the halls. Well, not really roam. He had to look like he belonged somewhere. Usually he was down at the pond, but he was pretty sure the photography kids were going to be crawling all over that place today. So he had looked for the safe solitude of the band room. It was a little crowded room with too many chairs and not enough space for the. How did anyone manage to fit an entire band in here? It seemed physically impossible! He shook his head and looked around.

Inside were all kinds of instruments, some weird, some the ones he was used to seeing. Horns and drums and such. Shoved in the corner was a set of chimes and a xylophone, and hidden under a cover a dusty piano. None of these were what he was searching for. Although Zaers friend had taught him to play the piano moderately well he was still better at guitar, and a melody was itching in the back of him mind. It was like a spark of insanity rolling around and catching bunnies on fire. That's right, burning bunnies. The multiplied and multiplied until his whole brain was afire with music.

It took him a few minutes, but he finally found an old guitar. The neck was a bit warped and the strings old, but with slight tuning he found the sound to be true. Trust his own ears to know the right and wrong sound of an instrument he had always loved. Zaeric ran through a few hand excersizes to get warmed up. Once that was done he started off with a slower song by Enya. Then he made the rounds through a few of her songs, throwing some Jack Johnson into the mix. He even managed to get one Nightwish song in there that sounded right with the other happy-but-slightly-mournful tunes. The music was definitely soothing, and he let his fingers drift off into a light saucy tune that had been so burning in his mind earlier. A new little song with no words, just emotion.

[Len Baker]

Clothes: Click!

Not being Len for the day gave her a chance to work her vocal cords. Ahh being a boy on occasion had its perks.... But that body just could not sing!! and Helen very much felt like belting out the music she had boiling inside of her. So she found her free period was a perfect time to wander on down to the band room and crack out that beautiful piano she'd spied last week while passing the class room. With a light patter of her feet, Helen skipped down the mostly empty hall way and hummed along the way.

She liked the band room. It always felt like all this inspiration actually lived inside the cracks in the wall. Some times she imagined what inspiration looked like, if it had a solid shape, and what it might say or do. Or what their houses in those cracks looked like. Very pretty she supposed. Maybe music inspiration had moved in with an interior design inspiration!! Wouldn't that be lovely? Helen had a tendency to get a little carried away with some of her little day dreams.

Approaching the door she heard music coming from within and cracked the door a little. He was really fantastic at playing guitar. Helen smiled to herself and listened for a while. With out realizing it she'd come more than half way inside and was now standing like a moron staring at him. Then the door shut with a bang and damn near scared her half to death. Jumping and putting a hand to her chest she looked back to be sure her dress wasn't caught in it or something equally embarrassing.

[Zaeric Blackwood]

It was only when the door snapped shut did Zaeric even realize someone else was in the room, he was so caught up in the music. All the colors that had been dancing in his mind flashed away like there had been a split second supernova and were gone. He stumbled over backward, guitar banging on the floor as he fell over from surprise. Honestly, it never failed that people were able to sneak up on him. When that boy started to really concentrate on something, he definitely concentrated. Carefully he took a breath in to calm his dizzy mind and try to get some sense of coherency. The floor was cold and definitely not a a place for heads to smack violently. Of course, try telling that to gravity and the laws of physics. They didn't exactly want to listen. A few moments later the spinning stopped and Zaer realized how confortably chilled the floor was. And odd thing to notice when your lying there like a dead deer in the road.

Slowly he rose. The girl was looking at the door as if expecting it to jump from the doorframe and eat her. Or maybe she was just a tad bit worried about it catching her blue dress. It was a really nice printed dress with some yellowy kind of flowers on it and blue at the top. In fact, her whole outfit was a really pretty blue color. Zaeric grabbed the guitar and chacked it to make sure it was unharmed, set it on the stand, and turned back.

" You alright? You kinda scared me there." there was no anger in his tone, only amusement at having been caught so woefully off guard in that wonderful wave of bright music.

[Len Baker]

Helen turned back to him when he fell on the floor in surprise and she gasped. Staring at him a little longer until he moved, when she looked back at the door once more. When he spoke she spun to face him and blinked her cheeks finding their usual color of rosy-ness when she was caught embarrassed or nervous. Which, of course, happened more than she would have liked it to. Stammering a little she took a few steps closer and sighed. "ummm..."" She moved a hand to brush her own hair away from her face.

Sighing she gave him a little smile. "Yeah.. I kinda scared myself a little." laughing a little she smoothed her dress and looked at the guitar. "You're both alright?? It looked like you bumped your head..." She took a few more steps closer to him and looked up in his direction. He was a fair bit taller than her and she found it a little silly the likes of her scaring him. "I can go get you some ice." Her big eyes looked up at him from under her soft lashes as she expected him to be upset or... something.

[Zaeric Blackwood]

The girl was obviously nervous, brushing hair out from her face and stammering a bit. Zaer wondered if it was how tall he was. He must have been at east half a foot taller than her, if not slightly more. After a moment he found it funny that this petite girl had startled him so much. Ah well, there was no real harm done so everything was okay. Her cheeks glowed rosy and then Zaer could obviously tell she was definitely nervous, or embarrassed, or both. Well, he was the one who had fallen off the chair. He thought it was kinda cute how flustered she was. She smoothed herself out, and Zaer knew the look of trying to collect your thoughts before saying something. His green-gold flecked eyes watched her with a merry twinkle as she inquired as to if he was okay.

" Well, the guitar is okay, but I may not make it through the night. You know, I'll get head crab cancer or whatever is this months designer illness that the doctors can think of." He joked. When she looked up he found himself taken with her soft eyes. They were very expressive and........expectant. Like she was expecting him to rant and rave and rage or something. He hadn't done that in a while, since lately he had been to tired to bother to do much. The summer heat was killer for him and he hated it almost as much as he hated lightning. He didn't want to scare her, and with her standing so close he could definitely tell there was a large height difference between them

" It's okay, really. I'm, not hurt. Just a little bump on the head. I think getting hit with a soccer ball hurts a little more, although don't tell that to whoever turns on the gravity. They may contrive to really get me next time." He was trying to lighten the mood a bit because he could tell this girl was seriously worried, nervous, and maybe even a little scared.

" I'm Zaeric." He said, cutting through the silence that had replaced his last statement.

[Len Baker]

Head crab cancer?? Helen thought that seemed a little serious until she realized he was kidding. She smiled only a little by her eyes continued to hold the same waiting in them. The waiting for something to...explode or crash or...just something worse to happen. Helen was always expecting the worst of things to happen. And when nothing else came down upon them she shifted her eyes away for a slight second and then back up at him.

When he joked again she felt her shoulders drop a little and a smile nip at the corners of her pink lips. Blinking a little her eyes shifted from the searching worry to a lighter gaze. "I'll keep my lips sealed." Her voice had a sweet thickness to it. As if her rhythmic tones were coated in a little bit of honey. It came out in her songs as well.

"Zaeric....That's a nice name." She let it rattle around in her brain for a while as she held out her dainty soft skinned hand. "I'm Helen...And I'm awful sorry I startled you." She gave him a much less tense smile than she had before.

[Zaeric Blackwood]

The tenseness in her body melted away a little bit with each joke. Good. He didn't want her to feel like he was some scary person who was going to go crazy or whatever just because he fell off a chair. He didn't worse than that all the time! Her eyes darted away, but when she looked back her entire posture had changed. She really was becoming more comfortable around him, which was a good thing. Her eyes were no longer so worried and she was actually smiling abit. Definitely good. Well, at least he knew that the idea of head crab cancer made someone laugh. She promised not to tell, and her voice had a sweeter, thicker quality to it like she was more self assured. Zaeric chalked the beginning of the conversation upto a bad case of nerves and then let the idea of people being afraid of him take a flying leap of faith into a dark hole where all the other silly ideas his little neurons and synapses put together went to rot away until they were no more.

Zaeric took her hand and gave a sort of short bow, the kind of thing you would only see in a move. Of course, he was trying to be funny so he thought that it fit quite nicely. He was glad she liked his name, because usually if you didn't like someones name you just didn't like them in general. So they were off to a pretty good start on that. And Helen was a very nice girls name, one you didn't reall hear all that often anymore. At least. he didn't anyway.

" So what would you be doing wandering around the music room at a time like this. I'm know I for one, am definitely skipping a class I should probably be in." He told her, not at all afraid to say it. It was kind of a well known fact that there was a fifty fifty chance of him being in that class or not being in that class. It usually depended on his mood, and what the weather was like. Today he was in just too good of a mood to turn his brain to strange colored jello with formula and math symbols and a completely different language that he honestly didn't understand. [And didn't think he was ever going to understand either.]

[Len Baker]

Helen cracked an even bigger smile at his little bow and let out a giggle. The theatrics that were Zaeric amused her a little. Watching him a little, Helen memorized his mannerisms. She did this with almost everyone. Helen was a perfectionist about how she was perceived and copying things others did was something she was very careful about. When he spoke to her again her eyes lit up for a brief second and she smiled a little brighter. One thing about Helen was that she often fidgeted just the slightest bit. At that moment she had her right arm tucked behind her back, grasping at the ends of her hair handing over her shoulders and down just long enough for her to wrap her fingers up in the tips.

"I was hoping to get a little look around. I hadn't noticed until recently that there was a piano in the corner." Her eyes darted to the dusty instrument that was now used as a place to set papers and books and things. "I usually just play the key board in my room but I'm always afraid I'll be bothering someone in the dorm." She paused and then looked back doey eyed at him again. "I'm not skipping class though!" Helen laughed and shook her head. She understood the lack of interest in required classes. "I just have a free study hour right now."

She shifted her weight around and let the wavey tresses of her hair unravel from her fingertip as she brought her hand around to push a little bit of it out of her eyes. "It's an awful good place to come for skipping class." Grinning she looked to the guitar then back to him. "And it seems you've had plenty of practice. I'm terribly sorry to the rest of the world for startling you and stopping the music." Music was her life. If it weren't for that, Helen wouldn't have a thing to care about in the world.

[Zaeric Blackwood]

Yeah, it was a pretty good place to go for skipping class. He had only really come here a few times before, once with Lucah, but he had discovered no one would really think to look for you here. It was out of the way and the band was usually in here playing loudly. Or those people who were just here to make lots and lots of disrupting noise. Well, he wasn't making disrupting noise, just noise in general. He liked noise.

" well, it's not my place to deny anyone a look around the band room. And ya, I do have quite a bit of practice skipping class. Math is my worst enemy and we tend to gravitate away from each other." He had to give a small kind of wry smile at that statement. That was....lsightly less than true. the truth was that he preferred to avoid math at all costs if possible. it just was something he hated and didn't understand. Unlike music and poetry, math hated him and he hated it.

" The world hears my music enough, although i think it accepts you apology. Besides, it's not like i won't be escaping class again to play somewhere else. It's quite common for me." He only ever skipped math, although he had been sorely tempted to skip science a few times. That could get to mathematical and he would have to get huge amounts of help.