Breaking in the Furniture (OPEN TO ALL!)

[Chris Jackson]

Christopher Thomas Jackson walked into the large relaxation room, as the teachers and all called it. He himself called it the break room, simply because it was like the breakroom at his uncle's workplace. It had decent furniture, a very nice TV , and other things. It even had one of the fastest wireless internet connection he'd ever seen. It was heaven for a bored teenager who couldn't get to the city.

The elemental walked into the large room, and smiled, the scent of new furniture tickling his nose.

"YES! They finally listened when I said that couches weren't supposed to have springs poking out of them. Of course, I was always convinced that there was some kind of space-time warp in there..." the remote disappeared all the time, even though it hadn't ever left the room. It had been this way since he was a freshman, his first year at Kosaka.

Chris had gotten a hookup of his to plant a tracking device on it a month before the summer vacation began to see if he could find out who had been taking the remote. And to this day, the signal had not moved, and was still blinking.

Chris plopped down on the new couch, enjoying the feeling that came with it. It was plenty comfortable. He grabbed the new remote- attached to the table beside the couch with a wire- and turned on the TV, and flipped the channels until it landed on the news.

The news always seemed to judge the metahumans harshly, and today wasn't any different. The various stories all had suspects that were meta-human, and the normals all were victims.

"Bullnuts." Chris said, towards a paticular story about how a lightning elemental caused a major power outage in California. With a sigh, CJ pressed a couple numbers on the remote and turned on the Loony Toons. He loved Bugs Bunny.

He heard footsteps enter the room, and raised his hand up in a lazy waving motion.

"Sup. I'm Chris, if you're new here."

[Ai]

Septimus McAllistair had been at the school for approximately two months now and the nineteen-year-old had spent the last fifty hours straight in the computer labs upstairs and down to the end of the hall, with the exception of a few very brief breaks. As he walked into the lounge, his orange eyes glistened under the bright glare of the fluorescent lights; the youth could have sworn that he had spent too much time in the lab and staring at the screen of a computer.

"Welcome." The look on Septimus's face was pleasant enough, though he was not smiling. The college-aged student never smiled anymore; he had not smiled more than once since he was in second grade. "My name is McAllistair, but you may call me Septimus if you would like." After looking around the room once again, he glanced down at Chris and then the couches.

Without putting his hand down onto the couch to balance out his weight, he sat down on the couch. It appeared as a rather effortless and quite robotic motion. After being around computers for more than an hour, there was an after effect on Septimus's brain that caused him to act more like an android of sorts and less like his true human self. The longer he was around a computer, the longer the effect lasted afterwards.

"I am not particularly new here; I have been here for exactly sixty-five days, seven hours and twenty-seven minutes." He looked over at Chris, locking his own eyes on the green ones of the elementalist.

[Chris Jackson]

Chris's greeting was returned, and the curious elementalist looked up to see an orange eyed lad dressed in old-looking clothes. Chris blinked, and grinned widely.

"Nice to meet ya, Sept. Mind if I call ya that?" he asked, returning to his TV. Again, his attention was drawn away from the boob tube to notice the young man's way of sitting on the couch. It was strangely mechanic- if someone had added some bells and whistles to the sight, the older male could be mistaken for a robot.

His eyebrows raised at Septimus's next statement: the exact time the man had been at Kosaka. It was rather impressive; and it seemed like the man wasn't lying. His eyes were drawn to the orange ones in front of him. They were the strangest color...

Chris shook that thought, trying to focus on the conversation and not to internally comment on the other youth's appearance.

"I've been here for about a year or two or something. I've lost track," a smirk grew on Chris's lips.

"Short attention span, ya know?"

[Ai]

Had Chris not broken eye contact, Septimus would not have either. There was something that amused him about looking at someone else's eyes; they were works of art, not unlike that of an advanced code or a long string of binary.

"You may call me that, or SC or Seven if you so desire." Although his voice was naturally metallic and somewhat stiff, it had returned to his normal intonation: lacking and inherently quite flat, but more than that possessed by a computer. An acquaintance-friend of his had given him the nickname Seven; after all, that was what his first name translated to.

He removed the small knitting needles from the jacket he wore and as he looked at Chris and then at the television screen, his hands moved, as if effortlessly producing stitch by stitch and row by row of the pattern. It was a simple pattern; he was only making the ribbing for a pair of socks he was sending back home to his older sister, but his motion was mechanical.

"I suppose I now know that you have a short attention span." Though Septimus was speaking to Chris, his hands kept moving and the needles kept clicking against one another in a now regular pattern.