Imaginary Friends [Open]

Pham Thi Anh Sang

The Academy seemed strange now that most of the people were locked away in their rooms. It was almost more magical like this, being able to do whatever she wanted in public without people disapproving. Not that Anh Sang would do anything really weird, nope! But the point was that the possibility was there and that was good enough for her.

She probably should have stayed back in her room, too, since she was still sick. But it really wasn't that bad; she just felt a little cranky and had a runny nose. It hardly diminished her energy at all. Besides, her butterflies were slightly less jagged looking today and the colors weren't flashing as painfully bright, so she was optimistic that she was getting better. They still resembled scribbles in a badly filled out coloring book but, well. It was kind of neat when it wasn't making her melt through things.

Sniffling, Anh Sang looked around the cafeteria for a familiar face. It was weird seeing the place so empty. Most of the people there were already sitting in groups of two or three. What really caught her attention, though, was a pale skinned, white haired person who was sitting alone. Is that a girl? She really couldn't tell but it seemed like an interesting person to be around so she took her tray up to that table.

"Um, hi!" she said. "I'm Anh Sang. Can I sit here?"

Pham Thi Anh Sang

Ohh, Cytus speaks kind of funny, Anh Sang thought as she sat down, immediately a little taken aback by the monotone. She didn't feel too surprised, though, because Cytus had a sort of robotic appearance -the thing on the ear, for the example- and it just seemed right. And it was pretty cool, actually! Robots and other things like them were starting to grow on her a bit, probably because of her friendship with Sylvia. Anh Sang guessed that Cytus was a girl, too, from the voice, which meant... Wow, there's lots of robot girls here! She had to wonder why she hadn't seen any of them before. That just seemed silly.

"I'm only a little bit sick!" she reassured Cytus cheerfully. "There's some stuff in my nose and my head but I got really, really lucky. Most of the people I know right now got it pretty bad. Or they're hiding." Like Itou-sensei was. "So far, all it's done is mess up my light, see?" She snatched one of her butterfly scribble things out of the air and put it on the table between them. It was rough looking, with lots of sharp angles and the colors alternating abruptly from one side of the visible spectrum to the other. It looked a little more crystalline than it should have.

"Sometimes touching them does weird things things, though," Anh Sang said, biting into an onigiri filled with tsukudani. Lots of people didn't like eating at the cafeteria for some reason but Anh Sang didn't understand why. The food there was perfectly fine and they had wagashi. Wagashi made everything better and truthfully, that was the main reason why she was in the cafeteria at that time.

Pham Thi Anh Sang

Seeing Cytus about to touch the butterfly, Anh Sang automatically swept it a few inches to the side with a frantic hand gesture, drawing a line across the table with her fingers. The weird sickness hadn't taken away her ability to move light, only her ability to fully control how it was molded.

"Um, I really wouldn't want to touch that if I were you," she told the other student quickly. "When it was red, it made me sink into the ground and stuff. Then my friend had to dig me out." This butterfly didn't seem to favor any particular color over the others, which made her think that it was maybe safe to touch but she wouldn't take any chances on it. She didn't think they could dig people out of the cafeteria floor as easily as Sylvia could dig her out of the plain dirt.

"I can show you some other things that I made before I got sick, though?" Anh Sang offered, clicking her tongue against her teeth as she called some of earlier light crafted things. She had taken to the habit because it seemed just plain weird to have stuff randomly appear out of nowhere without any warning. What appeared in front of her were just some marbles, hard light and soft light both, levitating an inch above the tabletop. No particular color to most of them except for one with a slight purple hue.

Pham Thi Anh Sang

Happily, Anh Sang went back to eating her onigiri. She answered Cytus between bites -but she didn't talk with her mouth full, nope. That was rude. "Well, I kind of stopped touching the really weird looking ones after the red one did that," she said. "A few times when I wasn't sick, though, I could do um, um, te-le-por-ta-tion with purple light. It's really hard to make colors so I don't do a lot of that."

"Oh, it's usually all white colored like this one." She poked at a soft light marble on the table. "This one's soft light and the one next to it is hard light. It's really fun to make things out of them! They used to explode a lot when I did things wrong with them but now it's okay!" Probably. At least the explosions didn't actually have much force to them. Those times in the courtyard and the Admissions Office when they did were kind of special events.

Tilting her head, Anh Sang wondered a little where that tablet came from before her attention marched on. "No, it's fine! Sometimes I draw the people I meet around the school and sometimes it's good but sometimes it's also bad."

Onigiri finished, she went right to devouring the other one. "I think I came here in April twenty, um, twenty something ish?" she said after swallowing her first mouthful. "When did you come here? I don't think I remember seeing you around and that's kind of weird."

Pham Thi Anh Sang

Swinging her legs a little under the table -her feet didn't reach the ground- Anh Sang answered the question with a little shrug. "Maybe," she said thoughtfully. "But I don't get really nice colors a lot. They usually just kind of pop out on accident. And then sometimes they just disappear after a while for no reason so I can't use them anymore."

She didn't stop Cytus from touching the light this time because she was sure that the marbles were stable. They had been made before the sickness had started going around, after all, and Anh Sang hadn't dared to mess with them much after she had gotten sick.

"Years?" she echoed in dismay. Somebody could go years without drawing? And being the undiplomatic child, she said, "That sounds awful!" Because really, years. Anh Sang had only been alive for a few years herself, and couldn't think of what things would have been like if she hadn't been able to draw anything then. Maybe she would have just spent more time playing with her light? But it wasn't the same. The idea that she might have never known what she had missed was kind of scary.

"Oh, what did you look like before, then? Are you a shapeshifter?"