Let's chase away these indecisively cloudy days

Pham Thi Anh Sang

"Uh..." Quickly, the girl thought over what had happened in the courtyard. Really, her memory wasn't too clear. "Well, I was kind of doing this, this thing," she said, trailing off a little. "I don't know, I was just kind of making light? I think? I was just throwing it around like, um, um. Beams? Beams!" She nodded her head excitedly at having gotten the word right. "Of light!"

"Yeah, uh, it just kind of changed into marbles on it's own," Anh Sang said, pouting in thought. "Just regular white light ones but something funny happened so they became hard light ones but I don't know what it was." She shrugged. "And, um, um. Stuff happened."

"It was really only one marble that exploded. And, um. I think I might have taken too much light from the sun?" the girl guessed, shifting uneasily. It was kind of embarrassing to talk about her mistakes. "Sometimes too much sunlight at the same time makes things go weird, I don't know? I didn't try to do anything funny to it. I was just picking them up and then this one floating one kept changing back and forth. Uh, soft light and hard light, I mean. It kept changing back and forth. And it was um, doing this thing." She made in and out motions with her hands to mimic pulsing, since she didn't know the English word for that.

So Anh Sang thought that this purple one was maybe stable since it wasn't doing that. Is this hard light or soft light, though? she wondered. It was already kind of difficult to tell with regular white light but with purple light, it wasn't like she had any reference for that sort of thing. Does it even work the same way as regular light?

She was impatient to find out, maybe too impatient. Since she didn't think that anything bad was going to happen -probably- Anh Sang thought that she should just do whatever she wanted. After all, Mister Cunningham was there, so everything should be okay, right? And she would be careful! Really!

Without much other thought and partially mesmerized by the color, she pulled the purple marble off-

-and marble and girl promptly vanished.

Pham Thi Anh Sang

As soon as the marble touched her skin, Anh Sang could feel this fuzzy feeling crawl up her fingers to the rest of her body. Although, crawl might have been a bad word for it. The fuzziness washed over her in a span of time less than a second. Like actually! She could tell exactly how long it was but didn't know the word for it. The time ticked by as usual but it wasn't adding up the right way. One, two, three... The girl looked around to see everything at a standstill.

She looked up into Mister Cunningham's frozen face, frowning. "Hello?" Anh Sang tried, not knowing that even if the words would be clear to her, anybody else would probably not hear a thing. They'd need a radio for it and even then, it would all go by in a blip of static. The girl tipped her head to the side in confusion, looking down at the marble in her hands.

There wasn't one. In fact, she didn't have hands at all. Or a body. What she looked down at was a faintly shimmering shape that vaguely resembled a human body.

"Eh?!!" Instinctively, she took a step back in surprise. Ahhhh what's going on?

For a split second, her hands became normal again before flipping back to weird. The purple marble shifted in and out of existence with them. Things swirled into a dizzying blur and when it cleared, she wasn't in the field with Mister Cunningham anymore. Instead, she was standing out in the middle of the lake Floating above it, actually. It was maybe a mile below her but all Anh Sang could think was a muddled train of thought about how she couldn't swim. She dropped several feet down suddenly and screamed-

-Which caused her to reappear on the rooftop of the Academy. The girl still kept screaming, though, because she was suitably terrified and just didn't understand.

"Ahhhh change back, change back!" She waved her hands up and down wildly, trying to go back to looking like a person. "Go back to the field, go back to the field already!" The girl stomped her foot down in frustration.

Reality spiraled again and move her to the other side of the rooftop. She stomped her foot again and managed to move herself to the covered walkways of the courtyard.

Anh Sang thought for a moment, looking down at the frozen people below her. It just looked so weird for everybody to be like that. What was wrong with them anyways? Okaaayyy. Um. She turned towards the sports field, moving her feet just a little bit in place, and shot forward a few dozen feet in that direction.

Expecting to flop on her face or something annoying like that, she was pretty pleasantly surprised to find that it didn't happen. And no headaches from the dizziness either! That's actually kind of cool... But still, the lake thing was terrifying.

She looked at her not-hands again, trying to will them back to being normal. They flickered back a few times until she was reasonably convinced that she might be able to get them back if she tried really, really hard. I should probably get back to Mister Cunningham in case stuff happens, though. Anh Sang thought that it was really mature of her to be thinking that.

A few more shuffles in the direction she wanted and the girl eventually got kind of back to the teacher. She gave it a few tries but couldn't get back to exactly where she had been at before. The man himself was still just standing there like he had been when Anh Sang had left him and that was really kind of creepy actually.

"Okay, change back now," she ordered, holding her not-hands out in front of her. "Right now, right now!"

For several, um, not-minutes, she kept at it, trying to coax her magic out of whatever funny thing that it was doing. It didn't work. Finally in frustration, she threw her hands up. It launched her up a dozen feet into the air.

Then, suddenly, the fuzziness was back and her body came back into existence, with the marble shining solidly in her fist. Ha! She had a brief moment of triumph before she realized that she was still in the air. And apparently right above her teacher.

She fell.

Pham Thi Anh Sang

Anh Sang made a slight, high pitched eep of surprise as she crashed into Mister Cunningham's back. She didn't even have enough time to put her arms out in front of her to cushion her landing; she simply fell on her face. It hurt. A lot. The teacher, from appearance alone, already didn't seem like an especially soft person to fall into. Now Anh Sang could say for certain that Mister Cunningham was probably the last person she'd want to ever land on. Ever. He was surprisingly solid, as opposed to Ha Jung, who was unsurprisingly soft.

For a few moments, she stayed on the teacher's back, cradling her nose with one hand. Mommy and Daddy said that unless she heard a cracking sound, it probably wasn't broken. Anh Sang was pretty sure she had and -Ow, ow, ow. She whimpered for a moment. Then, with her other hand, she wiped away the liquid she felt on her nose and saw that it was blood. At least she didn't feel like crying as she rolled onto the ground and sat up.

"Ahhhhh, I think my nose is broken," the girl groaned, partially muffled by her hand. She blinked at Mister Cunningham a little. "And um, hi again? Um. I went to places really fast and everything was weird and stopped." The word teleportation would have been a good choice but it wasn't really a word that a ten year old could be expected to know in a secondary language. "I think my nose is broken," she said again, meaning that she was pretty certain that it was.

Pham Thi Anh Sang

She made a quiet, pained sound of protest as Mister Cunningham moved her hand away. It was only a little move, though, and it didn't take too long at all so she stood as still as she could and let him have his look. And of course, Anh Sang was a big girl so she wouldn't act like a baby and make a big fuss over how much her nose hurt. If she scrunched up her face in a certain way, she almost couldn't feel anything. Or maybe it just hurt so much that it seemed like it was hurting less. Things were funny like that.

The girl followed Mister Cunningham obediently, because he was nice and didn't make her feel bad about having hurt herself. He hadn't even scolded her for landing on him either! In Anh Sang's mind, that put him right under Ha Jung in terms of niceness. It was kind of hard to beat out somebody who'd fall out all over himself to apologize for the tinniest thing.

She tipped her head back when Mister Cunningham told her to, grimacing as some blood went down her throat. The part about her power passed by her without understanding it too well. Time stop? What's teleportation? The first part of it, she could get. The second part was just weird to her.

Teleportation? That was the right word, right? I guess I'll ask Ha Jung about it later. Mister Cunningham was already being so nice about things that Anh Sang didn't want to annoy him or anything.