Cain Richards/17/Male/Eagle & Smilodon/Mentions: Nicole, Jay, Heather, Sofie DeVaneuax(NPC)

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More people, joy! Alright, fine, the rest of the room was packed, but he just wanted to be alone.

"Jus' sit."

He ended up grunting into his elbow. Oh, shit, he hadn't meant to slurr that. That was bad, it tended to happen when everything started to get to be too much. It'd be fine as long as they didn't get too close, right? Either way, it would have to be. Cain couldn't afford to snap here. It was too public, if anyone saw him honest-to-gods snarling at someone else, it would eventually get back to 'Dad', and that's something nobody wanted.

~

'Please don't initiate conversation', it was too crowded for him to make a passable attempt at normal. All he could smell was sweat, Axe, a thick mixture of cloying perfumes, the oil-plastic scent of makeup, and other less than pleasent aromas. Sometimes his nose acted up like this when he got too stressed or excited, but it tended to pass pretty quickly. Usually within a minute, and then everything would go back to normal. It had been seventeen minutes and fourty two seconds. Not that he was counting or anything.

~

The table oozed the smell of bleach, rubber, and plastic, but it was still better than BO and angst. Holding his breath just made it seem worse when he had to inhale again, and Cain had no interest in tasting the collective smell of about three-hundred teenagers. Ugh, how could people stand to ever breath through their mouths instead of their noses to block out bad scents? It'd just end up coating their tounges instead. Gross.

~

One shade of the hodgepodge perfume scent got stronger as the girl who'd drenched herself in it got closer. Cain could feel her standing there, just at the head of the table to his left with her arms crossed imperiously under her chest. Godsdamnit, it was Sofie DeVaneux. A close sycophant to the school's queen bee, always hanging off the soccor kids. Someone real close to the highest social position availible, and she did not hesitate to use her percieved authority to do whatever she felt like. He'd crossed paths with her a good number of times when all the teams got together for one reason or another, enough that she considered herself to be someone he liked. Sofie cleared her throat, obviously trying to sound intimidating.

"What do you kids think you're doing over here? Can't you see that Kay clearly wants to be alone?"

Sofie shifted closer to Cain, head still on his arms.

"He doesn't want you idiots here. Get lost, brats."

"'s fine,"

he says against the plastic-coated plywood. Except it wasn't really said, not fully. There was the edge of a growl to the words, Thankfully, the way Sofie didn't react at all meant that she hadn't heard. Or at least took the undercurrant of anger to be pointed at the others, rather than her. Unfortunately, that also meant she didn't hear the undertone of threat to his words.

"Oh, hon, you don't have to be nice. It's okay, I'll deal with these hangers-on."

Sofie ran a hand over his elbow in a consoling manner, glaring at the others through her mascera-covered eyelashes.

Cain rolled his head slightly over his arms, not even enough to show Sofie a single eye, but he knew that they were burning into a glare at her.

"See? Kay doesn't want any of you losers aorund him. You're not worth his time."

Cain really, really wanted to tell her to fuck off. But at this point, with how worked-up he was, anything he tried to say would get lost in an angry snarl. But he couldn't just dip, much as he'd like to, because any more unexcused abscences would mean the school tells his 'Dad'. This was a lose-lose situation. Leave, and he gets beat for skipping school. Tell her to leave, and he gets beat for not being normal.

Nicole Blois/16/Female/Raven/Mentions: Cain, Heather

Nic was content to let her conversation with Cain end. He seemed just as anti-social as Nic was. Another student came to the table, but didn't address her. Once again, Nic was fine with it. The girl seemed artificially it off, blocking any emotion from showing. While this interested Nic, she let the thought go.
Then came Sofie. Nic almost physically recoiled away from the girl. Nic might not know who many people, even popular people, in the school were, but she knew who Sofie was. She was passive aggressive, and quite possibly the opposite of Nic.
It was interesting how Cain reacted to Sofie. Nic would have left already, if she thought that Cain wished so as well. However, it seemed like Cain hated Sofie more than he hated his table being invaded. So Nic did something she never thought she would ever do.

"I was here first, Sofie. If Cain doesn't like the company, he can leave." Nic had never so openly lied before. Nor had she ever argued her case before. It was a strange sensation. One Nic wasn't so sure she liked.

David

16

Fiddler Crab

Mentions: Cain, Sophie DeVaneuax, (NPC) Heather, Jay.

David jumped from his seat, and exited the room, relieved it was finally lunch. He walked as fast as he could through the hallway bustling with hungry kids, and approached the door, eyeing the burgers (Are they burgers? He was pretty sure they were burgers.) warily, and nodded at the cook as he took a plate. Now it was the worst part of lunch: deciding where to sit... well, practically every table was full, except for one which seated Cain, and two female students that he didn’t know. As he approached, he realized he was in the back of the lunch line. Yikes, only 3 minutes left. When David looked back, he saw another girl, Sophie, he guessed. David noticed that Cain glaring at her, well, that made sense, Sophie was very anno-wait, for a split second Cain’s eye glinted a fiery orange, and then it was gone. Maybe he just imagined it, once he started walking again, the end of lunch bell rang and he quickly scarfed up the mystery food and headed to math class, he caught himself wondering if the fierce orange he saw in Cain’s gaze was real or not.

Cain Richards/17/Male/Eagle & Smilodon/Mentions: Heather, Taylor (NPC), Open

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His shoulders dropped as soon as Sofie turned back, tension falling out of his muscles once she'd left. The screeching ring of the bell made Cain flinch a little, and he lifted his head just as one of the people who'd sat down spoke up. Not confident in his ability to talk at the moment, Cain just made an affirmative grunt as the girl, Heather(?), rushed off. He pushed himself out of the attached plastic seat and grabbed the bag by his feet, slinging it over one shoulder as he stood. Cain pushed his way through the thick cloud of milling teenagers, trying to avoid as much physical contact as possible.

~

The gym locker room was a dirty cream, tiled walls stained with water damage, mold, and other less obvious substances. There was a corner of the showers that Cain was pretty sure was covered in blood. It smelled like faintly like copper, at least, was a flaky dark red-brown. An exercise t-shirt and knee-length shorts were tossed on quickly before he practically raced out into the attached gym court. The bleachers were closed today, up against the walls, and the basketball hoops were raised to the ceiling. The only other gear out was a pile of detachable-flag belts. So it'd be a capture-the-flag day, huh? Well, there would certainly be more than enough physical activity going on. Better than if they were just tossing tennis balls around like last week. As the rest of the class filed in, the day's gym teacher cleared his throat.

~

"Alright, class! Today we're gonna be running around trying to steal flags. Today is going to be every man for himself, and any team-ups I see are getting disqualified!"

A few of the less-enthused students began talking among themselves about how to get themselves out early without having to do too much running, many plotting to just group up to get out as quickly as possible. Everyone knew that Mr. Salvez would not only lower the grades of anyone who didn't participate, but would force them into some other form of physical activity. Usually it would be worse than whatever the original game was.

"And I can hear you there in the back! The last man, or woman, standing gets to choose what we do for the next week!"

Oh, that got the stragglers to shut up. That was pretty good motivation. Have to do a bunch of physical activity right now for the chance to not have to do anything for the next full seven days? It was pretty unlikely that they'd win, because most... weren't in the best physical condition, shall he say? But it would pretty much force participation for a good number of them.

~Everyone flooded towards the pile to grab a belt each, a good number struggling to get the inflexible rubber-plastic material to cooperate with them as they tried to tighten it. The teams used these belts quite a bit, so Cain and the rest of the serious sports kids had very little trouble getting them on and tightend properly. Each belt had two 'flags', really just strips of yellow or red made out of the same material as the belts. Each was attached by way of a cup socket, designed so that if one was pulled it would make a distinctive popping noise, as well as being to hard to return to their position to be easy to do sneakily. He pulled the sockets so that they'd each be a little off-center from the front of his thighs, and tugged the gym shirt over the belt's material to prevent people from latching onto it. Stretching languidly, he shook out his arms to warm up a bit. Cain was nearly shaking with the amount of repressed energy in his system right now. This was going to be fun.

~

Salvez blew his whistle, and everyone took off. Free-for-alls were always fun, because pretty much the only enforced rules were the no-teaming and not letting the kids make their flags impossible to remove. Cain couldn't keep the manic grin off his face as he lunged towards a girl thinking she was being sneaky, grabbing both her yellow flags from where she'd kept them on her right side. That wasn't a very good strategy. The plastic fell to the ground as he turned to find a new target. His hands blurred as they slapped away reaching fingers almost absentmindedly, before a red flag fell from the offender, and Cain was off again. He was mostly focusing on defense, but didn't pass up opportunities to yank someone else's flags. Some people were actively getting out of his way when they saw him. Then, Cain saw his biggest opponent thus far.

~

Derrick, star quarterback of the football team. He hadn't lost any of his flags yet either, and the two began circling each other. An area quickly cleared for the two currently facing off, and most of the kids who'd already been disqualified were staring without a hint of shame. Cain's cheeks were hurting, but he couldn't drop the savage grin if he tried.

Derrick was staring him down in concentration, and Cain was doing the same. He was practically prowling around the quarterback, steps smooth and unhurried. In contrast, Derrick was a lot more tense. Heavy steps and flat-footed. The quarterback made a feint towards Cain's left, but he saw through the honestly poor attempt and didn't react beyond widening his grin. Derrick was growing even more wary as the stand-off continued, and Cain distantly registered that the number of flag pops had slowed drasticly. The cycle of feints and circling was broken when some opportunist made a grab for one of Derrick's flags. Such a sudden noise, combined with the tug, made Derrick turn his head towards the girl, and Cain made his move. With the quarterback distracted by the thief, who at this point had run off to a safe distance, Cain ducked under an upraised arm and grabbed the single flag remaining at Derrick's right hip. Someone in the watching crowd cheered, Derrick threw up his hands in good-natured exasperation, and Cain was back to flag stealing.

~

Something niggled in the back of his head, and Cain was already rolling across the waxed floor. It was miss thief again, trying for round two apparently. A manic cackle tore its way out of his throat as he saw the baffled expression on her face. Her surprise made it quite easy to yoink the remaining red flag at her thigh. The period passed in a blur like that, until it was just Cain and one of the soccer girls. He'd lost a flag at some point, so the two were equal in terms of remaining 'lives'. His teeth were bared in an almost mocking fascimile of a gleeful smile, and it looked like Cain was unerrving her a bit. Now that they were the last two left, there was a lot more space for them both to manuvere. He could hear a bunch of kids placing bets on who would win between the two fo them, some with actual stakes. Cain barked out a harsh laugh at that, eyes still locked on his opponent.

He rolled his shoulders almost lazily as he stalked around her. She was moving in a circle too, though within his own circumfrence, and didn't take her eyes off his for a second.

Ah, there it was. A shift in the knees, slight twist of the hips, and she dove at his remaining flag. Grinning madly, Cain lowered himself into a slight crouch. As her hand approached his left thigh, he exploded into motion. He rocketed upwards at an angle, letting her pass beneath him. The barest hint of shock flashed in her eyes before a loud pop sounded in the mostly silent gym. Cain let the fabric fall from his fingers, and started coughing.

~

He was trying to breathe too much at once, he knew that. It sometimes happened to him whenever he got too into a good game, or ran too long in the gorge. Cain sucked in more air as he straightened from the hands-on-knees half-crouch he'd been in, spine cracking audibly as he panted.

"Ow. Think I pulled a lung,"

he muttered under his breathe, before leaning over to help his still-grounded classmate up. She was looking at him kind of blankly, like she hadn't expected him to do what he had.

"What the hell, dude? Join the soccer team!"

Yeah, it was kind of expected that the sports kids would be the last ones standing, but usually gym class didn't end with draft attempts.

"Wasn't that impressive. Jus' jumped,"

was his response, sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck. Oh, wow, he was drenched. Did he really move so much? The burning ache in his legs, chest, and arms said yes.

"You were a god-damned blur Cain! C'mon, man, help us out! We'd go national for sure!"

She was fake-glaring at him right now. Well, he was pretty sure it was fake.

"I already have too much to do, Taylor, you know that. Already on two teams, can't handle a third."

It was true, Cain already had problems making sure he showed up to enough practices to qualify for football and lacrosse. A lot of the team practices were staggered one after the other, and he couldn't attend every single one what with his family situation plus his aggression issues. Taylor opened her mouth, probably to wheedle him some more, but Coach Salvez rescued him by dismissing the class to go change.

~

Most of the sweat from gym class had been wiped off with a spare shirt, and deoderant had been re-applied, but Cain probably still stunk, so when he reached Health he found the most isolated seat he could. A good bit of the tense energy from the morning had been burned off with the adrenaline of the gym game, but there was still electricity thrumming through his veins when he finally came down from the victory high. Health was, yet again, about the dangers of drugs. You'd think they would try to vary up the cirriculum year by year, but nope. Same PowerPoint, same assignments, same lecture. It had actually been proven about two years or something. A kid had recorded the Health lessons throughout the year in secret, and did the same the next time she'd had the class, then wrote up transcripts for each and cross-referenced them with each other. It had been pretty much a word-for-word copy, discounting questions and disruptions. Honestly, it was kind of impressive that the teacher had the information so memorized it just came out with so few differences.

~

CAD was pretty entertaining for the most part. Real easy, too. The teacher would hand out a couple of papers detailing some part, and they'd have to draw an exact copy of the thing in AutoCAD and Inventor. They got way too much time to do everything, and so a lot of the class was spent in either a completly silent work fugue or the entire class joking around because they were all done. It was sometimes frustrating with how little they did, but Cain could at least play around with the software a bunch.

~

Last class of the day, Woodshop. Or, where a far too overworked teacher tried to corral a group of twenty or so teenagers in order to keep them from loosing fingers, toes, and/or eyes. They were working on boxes right now, which wasn't the most complex project, but they had to do all the preperations for the woods they wanted to use instead of the teacher. And they'd get to keep it afterwards, so, neat. Nothing too serious happened during ninth period, but Cain was still buzzing with untapped energy.

~

As soon as the end-day bell rang, Cain was shutting off he table saw and out the door. Everything he needed to take home was stuffed unceremoniously into his bookbag and Cain was no longer on school property. He had no practice today, it had been cancelled because of some prank covering the sports equipment in soda. The school now had to clean everything and make sure nothing was broken, which would take them a while. So Cain had an entirely free night. With how jittery he'd been all school day, it was an easy decision to make. His bag was tied into a high branch near the woodline, and Cain vanished into the undergrowth.

Nicole Blois/16/Female/Raven/Mentions: Cain (ind.)

The lunch bell rang, and Cain disappeared before Nic could thank him. Nic could have sworn that Cain's eyes had glown red when he had snapped at Sofie, but when she had looked again they were brown again. Still, Nic knew there was something different about Cain.

Nic's next class was history. A rather boring subject in Nic's mind. Nothing ever changed with history, so there was really only so much you could learn.

After history was gym. Today was capture the flag. Nic survived a grand total of thirty seconds before she was out. Though, it wasn't like Nic was trying. Running up to strangers and invading their personal space? No thank you.

Chemistry went by fast, since there was a test on certain chemical reactions. But the last class of the day was by far Nic's favorite. Cooking. Yes, Nic took a class where she got to make and eat food. Today the class started meatloaf. They wouldn't finish today, but they would get the ingredients mixed, at least. Nic was putting her bowl of meat into the fridge when the release bell rang. Nic quickly washed her hands, then slipped out of class. Nic left the school at the first door she came across, instead of trying to fight her way through the front doors. Nic didn't take the bus anyway.

Instead of heading home, like most students, Nic went to the gorge. The path she took led down to the base of the gorge. At the bottom, Nic stashed her bag next to a bolder sized rock, and pulled out her climbing bag. The bag contained her helmet, her climbing shoes, and a small bag of chalk.
Nic was ten feet in the air when she saw Mr. Bird. Nic didn't actually know the man's name, but he was always at the gorge with his binoculars. So, Nic had dubbed him Mr. Bird. He never spoke, never told her his real name. Whenever Nic tried to say hello, the man simply disappeared, and Nic wouldn't see him for the rest of the day. So, Nic just ignored him, and kept climbing.

half way up the gorge, Nic stopped climbing, taking a break on a small ledge. Up so high in the gorge, the wind was strong, and batted Nic's hair against her face. Nic didn't mind, it was refreshing being up so high. Up here, her problems seemed so small, so unimportant. It was the best feeling in the world.