::I want my innocents BACK:: -open-

[Kiyomi Yamanda]

Kiyomi sat on a bench outside Claires and looked around. She had been sitting there for a halnf-n-hour with absolutley no money and nothing to do. The little Japanese girl watched as a group of blond, preppy looking girls passed her. Each girl laughing, talking and drinking some foamy drink from Starbucks. She didn't know how people could drink that stuff, way too much foam and sugar for her liking. She wanted her coffee to keep her awake, not put her to sleep from too much sugar overdose.

With her legs crossed and a pretzel from Aunt Anne's pretzel shop, Kiyomi sat quietly eating and watching people walk away. Maybe she should have brought a friend. Well, maybe she should try making a friend before she invited one to hang out at the mall. Actually, she wasn't even sure what brought her here. Kiyomi hated shopping and hated malls. It was slightly nerve wracking.

"This is really salty..." Kiyomi muttered and licked the salt off her chapped pink lips. She tossed the rest of the pretzel into the garbage and picked up the Cola next to her legs. Bringing it to her lips and sucked the brown sugar water up the straw and into her mouth.

Clicky!!

[Alexandra Choi]

"There is no way I'm letting you get away with that! That's just shabby argument right there." Alexa said, laughing and waving her hand in a playful manner. "Besides, just look at me. Don't you think I know something about the subject at hand?" She said while humorously posturing as a Miss-Know-It-All.

"But it's so good!" One of the girls walking with her exclaimed, "You've got to try it out. And it's good for you too, you know."

"I know it's good for you, but the two things just doesn't mesh well at all! No matter how many times they process it, in the end it's just squeezed soybean water." The description made others exclaim their mild disgust. "You just don't mix coffee with squeezed soybean water."

Alexa suddenly felt her stomach growling. "Well, I should go grab something to eat. I'll see you guys later, okay?" Giggling and laughing while walking away, the group of preppy-looking blond girls sounded like they were still talking about the oh-so-sophisticated discussion of whether putting soy milk in coffee was as disgusting a practice as Alexa claimed to be since they were all in Starbucks.

'Huh.' Alexa mused. 'I don't think we exchanged names.' Not feeling silly at all for talking for half an hour with a group of total strangers about the merits and demerits of the ingredients of a Starbucks coffee, she went over to the pretzel place and exclaimed "Gimme something that'll make my heart explode!" After clarifying that she wanted the ones with jalapeños, she walked away contentedly eating her rather spicy snack. And that's when she saw a girl around her age throwing away hers.

"Yeah, I don't like those plain ones either." Alexa commented, so not minding her own business. "You should try the jalapeño one. Here, wanna try some?" She paused for a moment, then laughed a bit. "Oh, I'm not working for the shop or whatever."

[Kiyomi Yamanda]

Kiyomi looked up from her respective post on the bench staring at her jeaned legs when the girl said something to her. She swore the girl looked only slightly familiar and then she knew. She was the girl Kiyomi saw with the blond bimboes. The girl looked slightly out of place with the Barbie Doll pack but had the same laughter and hand motions the other girls seemed to have. The girl was pretty, not Barbie Doll pretty but human pretty. If that made any sense.

"Uh..." Kiyomi stuttered out, kind-of at a lose for words. The girl just randomly offered up her opinion, then her own snack and then explained she didn't work for the shop. Kiyomi was slightly bewildered, most people weren't so hyped up on talking to random people and sharing their food. 'Actually,' Kiyomi thought 'Most American born people are too selfish to share. This is quite amusing.'

Kiyomi smiled lightly and twirled some cocoa colored hair in her fingers. "No thank you. I didn't think you worked at the shop anyway. they normally have name tags." And that was her lame attempt at trying to make someone laugh. She wasn't one of the brightest people when it came to jokes or anything fun.



Clicky!!

[Alexandra Choi]

"No thank you. I didn't think you worked at the shop anyway. they normally have name tags."

Was that sarcasm? That was sarcasm! Luckily for Alexa, it was one of those not-at-all hostile, good-humored sarcasm that really made her laugh. Like the way she was laughing at the moment.

"You're pretty funny." Alexa managed to say in between the laughs, though even she would admit that it wasn't a difficult comedic feat to make her laugh. If her little cousins who were 6 and 8 could manage it, who couldn't? "Not to mention the uniforms and those silly hats, right?"

She sat down on the bench next to the girl, who would have been described by her brothers as 'See, Alexa? That's how girls should look like. We're just saying, maybe you should take notes.' It was their fault, Alexa would always exclaim, for making her hang out with them all the time as one of the brothers when she was little. She was dressed in jeans just like her, but something about her expressed 'feminine'. 'Kevin and Nathan are such hypocritical jerks.' She thought resentfully.

"I'm Alexa." She reached out to shake the other girl's hand while smiling. "I just moved here a couple of days ago to transfer to the Hammel Institute, so I've been just getting my bearing around the town." She let out a laugh, again. "I haven't been successful so far though."

[Kiyomi Yamanda]

Kiyomi gasped. "Funny?!" Her brown eyes wide and she put her hand up in front of her mouth to cover up the openness of it... "Did you really call me of all people on this Earth funny?" Now it was her turn to laugh. Never in her life had she been called funny. Mostly she was too childish, innocent or just too sarcastic without noticing. "The hats are the worse. I always feel like I'm on a cruise ship where people wear weird sailor costumes for the 'full' effect."

Kiyomi took the girls hand and smiled genuinely. "Kiyomi. It's a pleassure to meet up, Alexa." Kiyomi soon took her hand back nad place them folded neatly on her lap as she turned to face Alexa just slightly. Alexa had the look Kiyomi wished she did. She had a spunky, slightly boyish look that Kiyomi would never achieve with her inability to shop in the boys section of department stores without seeing a pair of boxers and blushing like mad.

"Yeah, I'm pretty new myself." Okay that was an understatement. Kiyomi may have been there only a few days but it seemed like she just showed up yesterday with the weird looks she'd always receive and the fact she had no clue how to talk to anyone unless they started the conversation and at that it was normally pretty hard to do so.

[Alexandra Choi]

'Kiyomi is a nice, pretty name.' Alexa mused. 'I bet her dad didn't play around with her name and make her a living reference to his favorite book...' She thought, feeling the rising resentment against her own dad. She missed him, and still loved him to death... but that was that and this was this. 'No wonder Kevin, Nathan, and I are all bunch of pranksters... My name is like a lifelong prank!'

Kiyomi then told her that she was new to the town as well. 'Did that mean...' Alexa wondered if they both went to the same school. Kiyomi certainly didn't react to 'Hammel Institute'... did that mean she was going to a local school? Or maybe there was no local school? Did that mean those girls she just ran into a minute ago were all... 'special'?

The 'recruiter' from the school who visited her after she woke up from the hospital used the term 'meta-human' (while Kevin and Nathan chose words like 'X-men' and 'superheroes'). Was Kiyomi a 'meta-human'? The recruiter told her and her family that this whole 'meta' thing was supposed to be a secret...

"So, do you... you know... do you go to Hammel too?"

[Kiyomi Yamanda]

Kiyomi nodded. "Yes. I just transfered there not too long ago." Kiyomi replied with a shrug and took a sip of the foam killer. That is what she called her drink. She actually found it slightly gross and offered it over to Alexa.

"Would you like some?" She asked in her quiet voice. She kind-of just thrusted the cup of in front of Alexa, not really caring if the girl took the drink or not.

[Alexandra Choi]

"No, I'm okay." Alexa said casually, her tongue already stunted with years of eating spicy food. Besides, there was a more important matter at hand.

"So if you go to Hammel... then..." she gave the new girl a significant look, "Right?" she said, barely making sense to anyone else. "I mean, it hasn't even been a week for me, so I haven't really seen what everyone can do at the school... it's kinda amazing if you think about it, you know? When I found out about what I could do - well, after I woke up and stuff - I was a bit afraid. I kinda still am, I guess." She smiled sheepishly. "I just wish I can do... that without any side effects." Clearly, being subtle about the subject at hand without becoming impossibly incoherent was beyond Alexa's abilities.

"So, I can-" she leaned closer to the girl she just met not 10 minutes ago, "change things from chemical to chemical. Like aluminum to glass and stuff." She whispered, not at all paying attention to whether she was invading a stranger's personal bubble. "What can you do?" Alexa asked, curiosity overtaking her other, more socially sensible traits.

[Kiyomi Yamanda]

"Alright." Kiyomi nodded let the drink fall into the garbage after her pretzel. She twisted her hair and twitled her fingers as she tapped her foot. She wasn't impatient, no. Actually she was just nervous. Kiyomi wasn't the best person a stranger could hold a conversation with.

"Uh... Ye-..." Kiyomi finally just stopped trying to speak and listened intently on what Alexa had to say. She sat back and patientally listened. "I'm so-..." She was about to say sorry but Kiyomi soon came to the conclusion that Alexa either A: liked to hear her own voice or B: just talked. A lot!

Finally Kiyomi blurred out, "that's such an interesting ability." and backed away to gather her bubble again. Kiyomi took a deep breath and looked at the girl through coffee with creamer brown eyes and sighed. "Reanimation. I can make things come back to the living and heal things.... Quite a tiresome ability sometimes." Kiyomi stood up and looked around.

"Do you... uh... want to... Um... I don't know... go shopping? Or something?" She smiled sheepishly and let her voice take on the quiet, school girl voice it usely had. Her head tilted to the side and she wiped invisible crumbs from her light blue, denim jeans and unwrinkled the non wrinkled yellow T. She stared at her shoes as she waited patiently for an answer.