Sha la la la la la la my oh my!

[Talen Trahan]

For once it was sunny outside, and he was loving the warmth of the day. Sitting under the tree with the sunlight dappled on his skin, iPod headphones in his ears, head bobbing to some music, he had a sketchpad on his bent knee and a pencil in the other, his eyes looking up every now and then to observe his surroundings.

Tal was sketching the courtyard, with its smattering of students and tamed wildlife that flitted around, hoping for a crumb from some student's lunch or snacks. The sun fell on leaves already turning gold, orange, and red with the coming fall, and the scene was awesome for a fall sketch. He himself saw the students dressed in various states, for he was wearing torn jeans, his sneakers, and a blue long-sleeved shirt over a white wife beater.

He smiled as two squirrels ran across his path, several feet from his shoes as one red one chased the gray one; it seemed the grey one had stolen the red squirrel's nut. For once he would have liked to have his sister Ali's power to talk to animals, to see what the situation was. His eyes dropped back to his lap, looking at the sketch, and he continued.

[L.C. Milliner]

It’s a good thing someone else could enjoy the sunshine, because L.C. wasn’t.

Just fifteen feet above the sketching male was a female who had climbed up and wasn’t in the mood to get down just yet. A jumbled pattern of circular holes, too big for a woodpecker to make and too clean for bullet holes to be blamed, went straight up the tree to the girl’s resting spot, back against the trunk as she sat lazily on a tree branch, trying to doze off. She had just threatened the holes of two squirrels, both of which had run down and away in fear for their lives after she took a swipe at the red one and grazed its tail, which would explain the big chunk of hair missing from it. As for her, she was okay. Her flannel tunic was keeping her warm; her fedora was pulled over her head to block out the sun. She was trying to nap, and she had been most of the day, skipping out of her last class in order to claim her spot before any squatters decided to come up and scratch her name off of it for their own pleasure.

Yes, she had dug her name into the bark with her spikes. Protective? Yes indeed.

As the breeze made the branches sway, L.C. frowned and pulled the brim of her hat up to stare at the leaves. With the bouncing patterns they were making, she couldn’t rest. It was annoying. She sat up and sighed, swinging her leg over so she could move to a branch in a shadier spot, preferably on the other side of the tree. What she hadn’t accounted for, however, was the branch she was sitting on cooperating with her move.

‘CRACK’

“Oh shi-”

Any other girl would’ve screamed bloody murder, but L.C. let out a stream of curses as her branch tumbled the twenty feet to the ground and she managed to stop herself at the ten foot mark, succeeding in stopping at the expense of her hat, her right shoe, and her dignity. She hung upside down from a tree as she reeled for a moment, arms flailing as she found that her upper half was no longer within the leaves. Around her navel the leaves had come to an abrupt stop, and she was left hanging by the backs of her knees (and the twenty or so spikes gouging the tree to hold her knees there). Blinking, she looked around and realized there was no one around. Everyone else had gone in and went to their dorms. School was over; there was no point in hanging around. (‘Hanging around.’ Oh, the irony.) Of course, she had not looked behind her, which was where the bench was located. She didn’t care, at the moment she was concerned with her upside-down state and the series of events that brought her there. After a few seconds of jumbled thinking, she summed it up with one word.

“FUCK.”

[Talen Trahan]

For several moments he just sketched the courtyard, watching the students leave to go back inside and pulling on a hoodie when the wind started blowing. The squirrels were disappearing into another tree when he felt...off. He felt like something was going to happen, and happen soon. He packed his sketchbook away in his backpack and stood slowly, taking off his headphones.

At that moment, he heard a sharp crack! from above him, and he looked up as he was showered in broken pieces of wood and leaves. Cursing, he brushed himself off just as a large branch fell to the ground, followed by a string of curses and more leaves. Feeling all the leaves in his hair, Tal looked up to see a girl hanging from the branches. His first thought was to help her down, but as she cursed loudly he smiled, and started laughing.

"What, the branch broke on you?" he asked in a teasing manner, moving so that he could face her. She was pretty, with all that blonde hair and her fce flushed from falling and landing with her knees hooked around a branch. With their predicament, Tal was reminded of a scene like this in a movie he once saw. He shook his head and looked at her, his eyes glowing with amusement. "Never mind. My name is Tal. Would you like some help coming down?" He held out his hands to support her if she needed his help.

[L.C. Milliner]

That’s right, laugh, everybody laughs at the girl falling from the tree. When they fall, though, they don’t ever find it-

Wait, who was laughing?!

She turned wildly, looking around as she realized the person was located directly in her blind spot- what a surprise. She couldn’t get too worked up about it, this was Hammel, and the person probably had seen worse, but still, it was embarrassing. She turned as best as she could as their laughter subsided, trying to take a good look, but only getting a voice in response. She snorted; what an obvious question! “No, I just chopped it down and decided I wanted to follow, OF COURSE IT BROKE!” She crossed her arms and huffed, looking very much like a child, but at the moment she didn’t care. When she saw the idiot she was going to punch them in the face.

At least, until she saw the idiot’s face.

She blanched for a moment and widened her eyes, realizing the boy was not half bad looking. She tried to remind herself that boys who looked good generally didn’t have half a brain to go with it (i.e. Vincent) but she was willing to overlook that for a moment, at least until he opened his mouth again and said something else to piss her off. She watched him for a minute or so, taking in his features from an amateur artist’s perspective- he wasn’t quite manly but he wasn’t ‘just a boy’ either. He was definitely stuck between the two.

Still blinking, she shook her head, thought about extending a hand, and decided against it. “Odd time and situation for introductions.” She noted, but she shrugged. “L.C.” That was all the introduction she needed. If anything he’d probably know her by reputation and would run away, she was the one that caused half of the injuries and property damage across Hammel. She was fairly certain she was in the introduction spiel, something about ‘messing with her always ends in disaster’ or something.

“Help down? Errr…” She looked up, noting she was hanging by her spikes, and shook her head. There wasn’t much he could’ve done anyway. “ Back up, I think I got this.” Swinging upward, she caught hold of a branch and sent spikes out through her hands to hold her there while making the spikes in the backs of her knees disappear. Her knees slid off of the branch, revealing gouges across the bark and through the wood that looked like a mutant bear combined with a wood chipper had mauled the poor thing. Letting go of the other branch, she dropped to the ground took damage control. The backs of her jeans were in shreds across the knees and down to her mid calf. She had panicked and ruined yet another pair. She sighed, trying to figure out how she could get more jeans without Sean seeing and asking questions. She’d figure it out later, she decided. Right now, she wanted to get herself back in order, or a semblance of it. She stood on one foot, realizing she had lost a shoe and didn’t want her socks to get dirty (-er), and looked around.

“Have you seen my right shoe? Or my fedora?” Turning to the boy, she blinked and pulled her hair from her face so she could see better, revealing a nasty cut she hadn’t realized she had gotten from the fall. She didn’t feel the blood yet. She knew she had hit it sometime on the way down, but not that it had broken skin.

[Talen Trahan]

Her response elicited another chuckle out of his mouth as he watched her. Her name was unusual, only consisting of two letters, but he overlooked it, since his nickname was only three letters. He had heard her name around campus, but he didn’t judge people by rumors; he wanted to get to know them before his mind judged them.

Her request humbled him, and he knew better than to help her; girls around here wanted to save themselves. It was darned that his Southern chivalry would come to bite him in the ass like it did now. Nevertheless, he backed up a few steps and watched as she swung up and then down, standing on one foot. He noticed she lost a shoe, but not the hat. “I’ll go look,” he told her, and ended up finding her hat in the bushes, and her shoe on the bench. He handed them to her silently.

It was then he saw her injury, and his fingers itched. His eyes became unfocused. “Here, let me heal that,” he told her, his fingers already touching her skin. Her cut closed up, leaving a smaller scab than what it would have been a year ago, but his skin hurt with the opening of the cut on his own skin. He hissed a little as his self-healing went to work on the small cut, leaving a small scar. He smiled at her. “There, all better.”

[L.C. Milliner]

She stood there on one foot, brushing off her arms and back and front, as he found her hat and shoe. She slipped the shoe on (it was one of those cool kinds without laces) and was about to put on her hat when he stepped forward. “Wait, what’re-” She almost instinctively took a step back, but she paused and blinked as His hand went to her forehead. Was she hurt? She grabbed his wrist and was about to pull him away when she caught sight of his face, seeing a wound open up there and she sucked in a breath. She didn’t even breathe as she saw his face heal.

Christ. It was like she attracted all the people that couldn’t get hurt. Could she meet and acquaint herself with a single person that didn’t heal themselves? Anyone? Hands up, please! Nope, nobody. Vincent and this guy, Tal, were the only two people she had bothered to talk to (aside from Sean, he didn’t count) while she was in Hammel. She wasn’t a conversation person. In fact, she wasn’t a ‘friend’ person in general. She couldn’t blame people, she was a risk. She let go of his wrist and let her hands hang limp for a few seconds.

“Thanks man.” She muttered, touching her forehead lightly. There was no pain. She almost wanted to bang her head again to restore it. “Don’t suppose you do this to get all the girls?” She chuckled, shoving her hand into her tunic pockets as she put her fedora back on. Lyra wasn’t flirting, at least in her mind, but she wouldn’t mind a few advances on his part. She could use some spice in her life. She looked around at the empty courtyard, at the branch on the ground, and at the windows, a few of which held staring faces that disappeared as quickly as she saw them. “Shit, I could go for some coffee.”

[/color] She said, watching the windows still. She felt a headache coming on and she had to get to Sean by six and she had to change her jeans and she really wanted to snap something in half if she had the time. Coffee made everything much better, in her book. It was warm, it was caffeinated, and it tasted bitter, all of which gave her a nice jumpstart and put her in a better mood. (‘Better’ being synonymous to ‘less annoyed’.) She scratched the back of her head and closed her eyes, letting out a sigh of frustration. She couldn’t get coffee, of course. Coffee cost money, which she did not have.
[/blockquote]

[Talen Trahan]

The look on her face was one he most likely expected to see; surprise, then grim resignation. He couldn’t help his ability to heal others; it just came when the time was right. Sometimes he could heal small injuries, like this one, and sometimes he could heal larger wounds. He hadn’t the mastery yet to control what he could heal, and so he just went with the flow, however troubling it was. Her thanks was not needed, but he blushed a little all the same.

“No, no I don’t,” he answered, in reply to her question. He was fifteen; ten more months till his sixteenth, not that he was counting. “I do it to about everyone, but it’s not appreciated to most people.” Feeling shy again, he looked away, wringing his wrist. “It was no trouble, really. Sorry if I scared you or anything.”

Her next statement made him look at her, his head tilting curiously. “I’ll buy you some, if you want,” he offered, smiling slowly. “To make up for…healing you, ya know?” His eyes warmed, no longer cool pools but smoldering embers. “It’ll be my treat, L.C.. Please?” He looked at her under the hanks of hair over his eyes, creating a puppy dog effect that he had no idea that he was creating the image.

[L.C. Milliner]

“Not appreciated? That blows.” L.C. snorted, rolling her eyes. “Some people would give up their right arms for something like that. Hell, I’d like to heal some damage,” She glanced up at the destroyed branch still inside the tree, “Rather than having it trail behind me all the time.” She supposed he’d want an explanation, but she wasn’t keen on giving one out right now. She was still recovering from her fall and would likely destroy something if she had to whip her spikes out again.

She was almost ready to walk away, but the offer of coffee made her stay. “Seriously?” she hoped he wasn’t joking. A word to the wise: don’t joke with the poor kid about buying things. It puts her in a ticked off mood. The next part of his statement made her snort. Great, pity coffee. Just what she needed. “You don’t have to take me for healing me. I should thank you for it. I mean, come on. You saved me the inconvenience of having to find band aids and freak out the school nurse…”

[/color] She trailed off, because there were a lot more problems that would’ve followed, like explaining to Sean, lectures about safety, and the like. If anything she should be taking him to coffee. Not that she was going to say that. “Actually, what I need right now is a new pair of jeans. Not coffee. So, how about I take you up on that offer some other time?”[/color]

She was going to have to go to her dorm, which likely was filled with her dorm mates, all of whom she was pissed at, and she’d have to get her jeans, and oh god, it would be a mess. Unless, of course, she had help from someone. She looked to Tal, raised her eyebrows, and gave a smile that would’ve made the Cheshire cat look like a saint. “There is, however, something you can help me with…”

Oh, boy, what trouble have you gotten into?[/blockquote]

[Blah, sucky post. Sorry.]

[Talen Trahan]

Aha, so the coffee did indeed make her stay. He smiled to himself as she stopped from walking away. He was sad that she didn’t want to take him up on the offer, but nonetheless it would be a rain check for a later “date”. “All right,” he told her as he gathered his stuff. “I guess we can go out later for coffee.”

He himself was about to walk away when he noticed the glint in the girl’s eyes. Sure, he liked girls as much as the next teenager, but that glint was everything but inviting. He suddenly felt like he was being cornered into something that could either get them both into trouble or just himself into trouble. “If this helping you out thing gets me into trouble, there will be no coffee for you,” he warned her as he rolled the sleeves up on his sweatshirt, rolling his shoulders and looking at her.

“What would you like me to do?”