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"Mmm." Horatio responded, a vaguely thoughtful noise, at best. "I wouldn't turn down pancakes. I wouldn't turn down anything, really. It's just always weird, breakfast for dinner. Oh, to be a normal, regular sleeper." She shook her head, knowing that at least two of the six Otherfolk never slept at all, and only the most human did so with any regularity.

"At any rate, you make the best food. I can only assume it all that herbalism nonsense. So yes, pancakes works."

The Mage nodded decisively, finally making eye contact with her Fae companion. "I don't suppose you and those herbs have anything that could keep me out until tomorrow, do you? I can never sleep that long, even when I desperately need it. Too busy thinking."

[Sorry for my disappearance.]

The woman took another gaze about the class and shook off the feeling of a bad order of specimens. Turning her back to the class to return to her seat. Her hands covered the arm rests placed along the sides of her chair. The rolling chair gave a creak as the backing gave a slight slant before Kiala sat down. The slender, yet powerful right leg, moved to hang over the left in a more femanine manner of sitting. With the elbows still crouched on the arm rests, tha pair of hands came to meet in the middle of the woman's skirt, her fingers lacing as the brillant hair tickled once more at her forehead.

This particular part of teaching always seemed to add more of a dominating feeling. It was as if watching over a small pack of her own. Just as she would see her own alpha sitting on a higher level of ground to watch what the others were doing. When she was a pup, Kiala would spy the powerful leader on his perch, and next to him, was her. Ah, how envy use to spread amongst the pack when she use to enter the perimeter of the grounds.The pair of eyes seemed to turn blank as the memories flashed.

To many of the new students that would be attending her class hopefully, this would seem as a time to do whatever they may want, but to someone such as Pan would know better.

Bell stood outside the school, staring at the place that would become her home until she had learned everything she could about her powers. A small frown graced her lips as she stood in the rain, though it wasn't the wetness of the rain that bothered her. In fact, the sight of the school was what actually bothered her. This would be a school of people who had all been discriminated against for their whole lives. Would they accept her, a girl who was practically human from being raised by them with their values and ideals still filling her head? Confusion and nervousness filled her as she remained where she stood, quickly becoming soaked in the black button-up blouse and red plaid skirt she'd chosen for her first day of school.

Sighing, she finally began moving towards the entrance, feeling slightly self conscious in her clothing as she noticed a few students milling around in uniforms. Having just arrived after being recruited by that odd man who'd seen her trying to heal her parents, she knew almost nothing about this school, and certainly didn't have any uniforms. She stopped at the front door, not even noticing that some other students behind her were complaining that she was holding things up, and took a deep breath before entering the doors of the school.

From the pocket where she'd tucked it, she pulled out a map that the recruiter had given her with instructions to go to the headmaster's office to receive her schedule. Examining the sopping paper in her hands, she was distressed to find that the poor quality map was pretty much disintegrating in her hands, the paper breaking flaking and ripping and the the ink smearing and running so that there wasn't a single legible word remaining on the paper. "Just lovely," she muttered under her breath, "Now what am I supposed to do?"

Glancing around the hallways, she picked one at random and began wandering, hoping she'd eventually find some kind of sign pointing her to the headmaster's office.

Evie smiled at Miya. "Don't worry, Miya. I'm sure Ms. McDowell won't mind. You probably aren't the first who hasn't wanted to do it." She looked uneasily up at Ms. McDowell. The woman didn't seem the type to be caring, but Evie wouldn't tell her friend that.

"Just tell her you can't. She'll probably give you something else to do," Evie told her with a nod. "I'll tell you how disgusting it was after class, " she told Miya with a grin, referring to dissecting the pig. With that said Evie put her focus back to her own piglet.

Holding back her urge to disect the animal by her own hands, or teeth really, Evie picked up her scalpel. Sorry piggy, the feline lycan though before she sliced the animal down the middle.

Miya nodded shyly, smiling a little bit and feeling a tad more hopeful. Evie gave good advice, she thought. She giggled just a moment at Evie's comment about how disgusting it would be.

Miya stopped giggling almost immediately though, when Kiala's voice cut through her, causing her breath to catch in her throat. She watched as the teacher approached her, looking frightened and feeling her heart rate picking up. She turned to look up at her when she came to stand behind her, and felt even smaller than she normally did. As the woman began to pose questions, Miya's mouth opened slightly, as if to answer, but no words came out. Her vocal chords seemed to have froze up with fear.

Tears suddenly filled her eyes when Kiala began more closely questioning her about why she was here, and she jumped lightly when the teacher took another step. Miya was quivering. When Kiala quickly turned and bent down to her level, the witch flinched away from her, bumping lightly into her desk, making the contents of her basin quiver slightly as tears began falling from Miya's tightly closed eyes. Her heart was pounding painfully in her chest. She didn't know what to say. She couldn't think, couldn't speak... This woman terrified her!

The words "I'm sorry" kept playing over and over again in her head: the words she couldn't say with her frozen voicebox.

Pan deftly finished his dissection, and with the last of his available organs properly identified and separated, he turned his attention back onto the brewing trouble between Kiala and the girls he'd just met, the snow leopard and the little witch.

Mocking her power was all well and good in Pan's book, but Evie might just be overstepping the line. Pan knew the biology teaching Wolfie would probably never hurt him, they had a rapport, of sorts. But, when the little Kitten had the balls to stand up to her that way, well, Pan was tempted to worry. Kiala was a good woman, but she didn't take challenges to dominance too well.

Then again, Evie was also a child, nothing more. Probably younger than him, with the way she acted. Not a threat, Kiala. Not a threat. he thought, waiting for the teacher's response, and biting down his own. They don't understand. Tell them why it isn't wrong- they were born dead, soulless little bodies, useless except for study. Don't try to make it right, just not wrong.

Of course, piglets were always stillborn before being heaved off for dissection. In a vague way, Pan wondered what would happen when they got to cats, later in the year. Those were live strays, put to sleep in pounds. They'd actually had a chance to live, and hadn't deserved their deaths. There would be a riot, at this rate. Alas, being noble comes at a cost. Usually one of ignorance.


------


"You should most definitely make it for me. Knowing my luck with plants, I'd do something wrong and knock myself into a coma. And if I went comatose, you'd get all upset, and then there would be no one left to drag him," Horatio motioned over her shoulder, in the general direction of Darien, "out of his den and into the oh-so-unpleasant light of socializing. He'd turn to stone, you know." She nodded assuredly, as though this were some scientifically proven fact. "He'd never even get out to drink, if someone didn't make him."

True, Horatio did not know her fellow teacher well, but she could sense another recluse as easily as she could see a short circuit or a burned bit of semiconductor. He was worse than herself, she was absolutely certain. It didn't help that, as far as she knew, he must to edging ever closer to the end of his free life, soon to be bound by the blood of things younger than himself.

"Actually," she turned her eyes towards the frigid man when as she leaned against Momo's kitchen counter, "What on earth brought you out today?"

Pan breathed a shallow sigh of relief, and turned his back on the finished scene, heading towards the row of sinks to wash his hands of the preservant before his skin was harmed by it. This happened every year, or at least, the three times he'd taken the class before. Technically, he wasn't even supposed to be here, actually, but he had little else to do.

It usually took days or a week or two, though. He didn't know if it was better or worse that the first day had brought out the usual speech. Probably better, it gave the students with weak stomachs a larger window in which to withdraw, but still. He'd have to watch his mouth around Evie, from now on. I'm probably the one that convinced her Kiala was one to stand up to. Completely short circuited her training. I'm such a bad influence...

As he finished washing the suds from his hands, and anything that might have festered into guilt from his mind, he turned to the front again, noting that in his brief space of blindness, a number of chairs had been vacated. He moved towards the nearest abandoned tray, to begin cleaning and putting away the unwatched tools, while he eyed Evie and Miya, waiting to see if they'd leave.

The vaguest twitch of a smile tugged at the corner of lips that seemed all too red against the white of his face. Most of the time the Vampire did not find humor to be an appealing emotion, but at that moment he was particularly amused. She was analyzing him, like a scientist examining a none-too interesting project and trying to find what to do with it. The moment was enhanced even more by the other woman's speed pick-up just a moment before, seeming as if she was trying to widen the gab between them. I know I am cold, he thought wryly, But I did not know I was frightening. The last was added simply for his own further amusement at a frail joke.

"At first I was under the impression that I still had a History lesson to teach, but was informed otherwise by a bulletin. After that, curiosity took over, I suppose." Silvery shining retinas studied Horatio for a moment, intent and calculating. The moment came and went so quickly that one might even wonder if the look had come to pass at all. "I do dislike this sunlight, of course. We don't get along too well, either." Subconsciously his left hand came up, fiddling with the cross beneath his silken shirt. The other two present would not know what was underneath unless a sharp eye could catch the soft imprint in the cloth between pale fingers. Irony abounding.

Darian was satisfied with simply answering questions. He neither desired to ask any himself nor sit in silence. Quiet solitude was one thing; silence amongst a group was quite another awkward phenomenon.