The morning hadn't been such a carefree affair for Aegle as it was for some other students. She'd only been back in Vytal for a couple of days and already 'I was in the hospital' was losing all effect of lessening the work load that had built up during her week long absence. She shouldn't have been surprised, it was hardly a phenomenon she'd never encountered before, but it seemed no fairer now than it had the first few times she'd encountered it. There were three fundamental truths where school was concerned: The only time a teacher cared about homework was when it wasn't done, All teachers were under the impression that their's was the only class that gave out homework, and nothing short of a medically induced coma was excuse for handing something in late. Actually, Aegle mentally amended, she knew from personal experience that being in a coma was not a valid excuse. It was these thoughts and thoughts much like them that flitted about Aegle's capacious brain as she left the Hall and stepped into the open, late-spring sunshine. Stepped was, perhaps, not the best word. She certainly made her way into the sunshine, and certainly used her feet and legs to do so, but to say 'step' would be to imply much more finesse than was actually present. A more accurate, though just as potentially misleading, description of Aegle's particular method of locomotion would have been 'limp'. An even more accurate, albeit needlessly elaborate, description would have been to liken Aegle to some marvelously hinged sculpture which was constantly on the edge of tipping over. For she didn't walk so much as she fell over repeatedly, while always managing to catch herself at the last moment. Years of familiarity and practice had even managed to impart something that, while you wouldn't call grace, was at least grace like to this rapid repetition of forestalled falls.

She was dressed as she usually was, which is to say she was dressed in such a way as to be most unpleasing to the human eye. She wore a heavy pair of camouflaged cargo pants, which were at least three sizes too big for her, over top of a pair of equally heavy and oversized steel-capped boots, whose weightiness at least contributed to her singularly gliding-lurching gait. Overtop it all, and so big that it covered her nearly half way down her thighs, she wore a hoodie of the most excruciating orange imaginable. At least, one had to presume it had once been a hoodie, because it had a hood, long sleeves and a front pouch. 'Once been' being the operative words, because it had also quite clearly undergone a very dramatic remodeling at some point in the recent past. Namely, it had been blown up, perforated at close range with what seemed like grape-shot, and set on fire. Then, rather than being laid respectfully to rest at the bottom of a laundry hamper or dumpster fire, it had been 'repaired'. 'Repaired' in that someone, presumably it's owner, had tried to close the most significant tears with whatever had been at hand, namely safety pins, elastic bands, staples and, in greatest abundance, black electrical tape. The end result looked less like a hoodie and more like an example of why there isn't much skill overlap between tailors and automotive mechanics. Last on the list questionable aesthetic affectations was her hair, which was styled stiffly in a gaudily tall mohawk, nearly thirteen inches in length, and dyed the same unfortunate, visible-from-orbit shade of orange as her hoodie. 
Oh, and she whirred as she walked.

So Aegle, visible as an explosion and whirring mechanically with each step, limped into the sunshine, and immediately felt all the better for it. She felt the warm rays of sunlight on her naked scalp, felt it start to warm down the back of her neck as she stepped from the building's shadow, and immediately found herself with a smile on her lips. Vytal's temperate climate was a far-cry from the boreal climbs of Legion, her native home, but she seldom found herself missing the year-round snow and icy rain. That wasn't true actually, she did quite miss making snowmen and having snowball fights, but the constant sunshine and gentle ocean breezes were a welcome replacement. Looking around, she found herself gravitating towards the border of the quad, caught in the current of other students, headed out for a bite to eat between classes. She thought about going to the cafeteria for something quick and easy, but her gut just wasn't in it today. Steering off course, she cut through the flow of traffic and across the grassy lawns between the walkways. Between Lily still being in the hospital, running into Sol, and her own gradual recovery from the events in the basilica, Aegle really didn't feel like cheep campus food. What she really wanted was some curry. Curry hot enough to strip paint.

---

"CLOSED?" Aegle whined in a tone of voice that had all the charm of slowly cracking ice. She stared up at the door in utter disbelief, hands hanging at her side and mouth incredulously wide. Emblazoned upon the small piece of cardboard taped to the inside of the window was terse statement that the curry-shop had been closed for renovations, pending the upcoming Vytal Festival. Aegle could scarcely believe her eyes.
"But I want curry!" She whinged, and a quiet growl from her gut let her know that her stomach agreed. She tried the doorknob just to be sure, but to no avail. She would just need to get her spice fix elsewhere. Grumbling quiet and surprisingly tame invectives beneath her breath, Aegle slammed her bandaged hands into her pockets and, whirring indignantly, made her way back up the street. Pulling her scroll from one pocket, she drummed the word 'curry' out with her calloused thumb and hit enter. A moment later, she was looking at a topographical layout of the city surrounding her, her own position denoted by a small blinking arrow in the very center. 
"S'one not far." She remarked with a bit of surprise, tapping the nearest marker to her own. 'Suicide Green Curry' blinked on the screen, as well as a small picture showing a not-unwelcoming shop front for a restaurant she didn't recognize. "What's a 'Ramen Shop'?" She asked aloud, before shrugging and touching the prompt for directions.

A few minutes later, Aegle, visible only as a huge plume of orange hair bobbing along the lower edge of the ramen shop's window, made her way into the unfamiliar restaurant. She was preceded a couple of steps by the quiet whirring that accompanied every movement she made, perpetually emanating from the baggy folds of her overlarge clothes. She looked around dubiously as she entered, then tested the air with apparent mistrust forming on her open face. 
"Doesn't look or smell like a curry shop." She said critically. It didn't look much like any store she'd ever been in, really, at least not one where they sold food. There were no tables for one thing, only one large counter behind which a very broad man in a white smock was doing something that Aegle, interminably short as she was, couldn't make out. The counter, she noted after several seconds of looking at it, was surrounded by bar stools. Was she supposed to sit at the counter then? After few more seconds of scrutiny, her eyes alighted upon the small ramen shop's only other patron. He was young-ish, but Aegle had never been good at placing age, and dressed in a suit which, even from behind, looked very sleek and well tailored. There was nothing on the counter in front of him, so either he had just got there or this place didn't actually serve food. Frowning, as near to indecisively as she ever got, Aegle half-limped up to the counter. It was nearly as tall as she was, but then she was only five feet tall, and then only if she stood up as straight as she could, so that wasn't saying much. 
"Hey." She called out to the broad man on the other side who, she could now see, was making something that looked a lot like food. He graced her with an perfunctory glance over his shoulder, one which maintained the mystique of exactly what his face looked like, and made an even more perfunctory grunt. Maybe he was a man of few words. Maybe, having heard one word out of Aegle, delivered at pitch just slightly within the range of human hearing and just slightly louder than was polite for anywhere outside of a sporting event, he was not eager to hear another. 
"D'ya serve somethin' called a..." Aegle fished her scroll out of her pocket regarded its screen. "Suicide green curry?" She stood with an unusual posture, half curled forward and with one shoulder slightly lower than the other, like she wasn't yet ready to commit to a complete slouch. Without so much as a grunt this time, the broad man gestured at the capacious menu board above his head, apparently listing the shop's many items. Sure enough, among there number was 'Suicide Green Curry', with a little cartoon skull and crossbones beside it. Emboldened, which is honestly a pretty dangerous state for her to be in, Aegle grin and tucked her scroll away. 
"Sweet!~" She chirped, just a few octaves below a dog-whistle and a few decibels shy of a train whistle, "I'll have that please!"
The broad man responded with another grunt, accompanied by a long suffering shrug, and resumed making whatever else he was busy making. Grinning happily, Aegle clambered noisesomely and with only some difficulty onto the nearest stool. She had just about gotten herself perched precariously atop it when she realized she'd picked the seat right beside the smartly dressed young man she'd noted previously. Given that she'd had an entire counter and a dozen odd seats from which to pick, this momentary indiscretion should have made her feel a little abashed for her haste. It didn't though. Aegle only knew embarrassment, be it for social faux pas or anything else, as a thing that happened to other people. 
"Oh heya~" She said, utterly without chagrin, as she settled herself in place, whirring minutely all the while. "I'm gettin' the Suicide green curry~" Then, in what was, for her, a conspiratorial tone, and just regular speaking voice for other people, she added, "I hope it's really hot!"


Max Chromium

Aegle regarded the young man's meal dubiously when it arrived, at once perplexed and underwhelmed by its over all appearance. To her, it simply looked like a bunch of drowned spaghetti wearing a half-formed ham and egg breakfast as a hat. It wasn't even that it looked unappetizing, as Aegle certainly liked all the component parts well enough, it just seemed like the blandest possible meal that could be cobbled together from them. It didn't help that the majority of the dish was white or off white, intermixed with brief flashes of color. Still, he didn't seem altogether displeased by the dish he'd been given, so it must have been exactly what he'd ordered. Why he'd ordered it was another question entirely.
"The ladies meal is on me as well sir." His words cutting through her reverie, Aegle blinked twice tipped her head before she fully realized his words hadn't been directed at her. It was only after reaching this conclusion that she actually deciphered what he had said, and that puzzled nearly as much as the fact that he hadn't answered her hellos or told her what he was eating. The reason for her confusion was of a more singular quality, however, and revolved mainly around the fact that seldom, if ever, had anyone ever referred to her as a 'lady'. In fact, her perplexity at his chosen nomenclature was so complete that she actually surveyed the restaurant around them, in an effort to figure out who he was talking about. For a second, it didn't even occur to her that she might be the lady he was referring to, and it wasn't until he looked right at and addressed her that she even tentatively accepted that possibility. 
"So umm..hi! My name's Max," He told her, and Aegle had just enough time to refocus her emerald eyed gaze on him before he added, "Don't worry about your bill cause your meal is on me."
Then, before she could rally to respond and in quite rapid succession, the dark haired young man continued. "Consider it a thank you for sitting next to me and talking to me. I'm not very good at talking to people sometimes."
It was about this point that Aegle's gaze started to glaze over, and her expression shifted the few degrees from perplexed to nonplussed.
"If I may say so without sounding weird, I really like your look! I am really digging the hair and your outfit!"

It might not have seemed like a great deal of information to process, but Aegle's mental processes had never been known for their alacrity. In fact, just about the only thing she'd caught from Max's opening salvo was that his name was Max, while everything else had quickly merged into featureless white noise the moment it got past Aegle's ears. It wasn't that she was disinterested or dismissive, it was more that she could only really be expected to run one, maybe two trains of thought at a time, and running any more than that was tantamount to two opposing trains on the same set of tracks. 
"S'nice to meetcha?" Aegle replied in the verbal equivalent of muscle memory, before her she was forced to shift gears and further complicate this unwieldy metaphor. She was only barely able to digest the fact that he was paying for her meal when Max deploy his second volley of conversational artillery. 
"This is what I'm rocking." He told her, and Aegle saw that he was holding two not dissimilar handguns. Where had those come from. Still trying to keep up, and failing miserably, Aegle's attention flicked between Max and his pistols as something like uncertainty crept into her, otherwise blank, smile.  
"I call them my chrome cannons. My parents made them for me after I designed them because my family owns a weapon shop in Rift."
"Neat...?" Aegle proffered in an ill-fated attempt to join the conversation, only to be immediately overridden by Max's enthusiasm.
"You can check them out if you want," He told her, and before Aegle really knew what she was doing, she was raising her hands to take the matching handguns from him. "but be careful cause the triggers are kinda sensitive."
"What kind of weapon do you use?" 

Aegle, for her part, stared back at Max like he had just slapped her with a live fish. She blinked once, twice, then three times, before finally looking down at her hands and seeing, much to her profound confusion, that there was a pair of pistols sitting in them. 
"Uuuh..." She managed after a few seconds of silence, the strain her mental backlog was putting on her mental machinery landing just shy of causing actual smoke to billow from her ears. Then, finally, something seemed to jangle free of the psychic tangle taking place between Aegle's ears.
"Fists." She ejaculated suddenly, with all the abruptness of a well used machine powering out of seizure. She nearly pulled a fist to show him, but suddenly remembered the handguns in her hands and fortunately forestalled that move. Almost apologetically, and with far more care than she usually showed anything, Aegle set the matching pistol's aside before showing Max her hands.
"Ya know? I punch stuff." She explained, pulling two fists to show him. She was a pugilist, technically, her specific technique lying somewhere between traditional boxing an an improvised sort of brawling. Which was a pretty laughable claim, given her size. 
"And my name's Aegle..." She continued, pronouncing the name 'Ay-Glee', as she glanced between Max and Max's guns, sitting on the counter beside her. "S'a pleasure to meetcha... I, uh, can't really use guns. They look nice though." 

Max Chromium

"Maybe." Aegle agreed, pleased by Max's evident indifference at her inability to answer what felt like the majority of his questions. Running into someone who spoke to quickly for her to keep up with was not something new for Aegle. She was well used to people outrunning her brain with their mouths, but usually if she just tried her best to answer what seemed like the most important questions and comments, she usually did alright. It got easier the better she knew someone too, though that may have had just as much to do with those familiar someones slowing down for Aegle's sake as it did Aegle having a better intuition about them. She also wasn't completely opposed to teaching anyone the mean basics of close quarters combat, given that she was something of a specialist in the area. Mulling the thought over a little, she turned just in time for a bowl of something steaming, pungent and virulently green to be placed on the counter before her. Glancing up, she found the broad chef looming over her, his deep set eyes and angular features giving him the unflattering countenance of a cinder block.
"Cheers." She said, without really knowing why, as a friendly grin spread across her lips. Her only answer was a roll from shoulders big enough to qualify as a geological event, before the terse chef turned back to his work. What else he had to work on in a shop occupied by only two people, Aegle did not know. Then again, Aegle didn't try to guess, because her attention had been entirely stolen by the meal placed before her. Without even waiting to see if it was hot, in the both literal or subjective sense, she had cupped the bowl in her hands and raised it from the counter top. She was surprised by just how watery it was, the sauce swishing about more like soup than the gravy consistency she was used to. A few desultory cuts of meat and vegetable bobbed up from beneath the opaque green surface, but the main body did seem to be the sauce. Some people, in the interest of cleanliness or manners, used utensils to eat their food, especially when that food might prove inedibly hot or spicy. Aegle was not one of these people, and she didn't so much as blow on her curry first. She only brought one edge of its bowl to her lips and tipped the contents into her mouth.

The results were, at once, very sweet and very, very hot. Hot like fire and a chemical burn, the two pronged attack of spicy food which had been prepared at an infeasibly high heat. Aegle recoiled, spilling a spoonful of the nearly lambent sauce down the front of her hoodie, and gasped softly. 
"Hoo, wow." She choked out, face turning a nearly medical shade of red. It was hot, alright, but hot in a way the usual curry she consumed was not. Not knowing anything about scoville units or the particular ways by which certain spices achieved their 'hotness', she couldn't identify how. But she liked it. She liked it a whole heck of a lot. Rallying, she tackled the bowl a second time, gulped down two hungry mouthfuls of sauce and then lowered the bowl as she chewed on about that many mouthfuls of food. Potatoes, peppers and what was either fish or chicken, as well as a few other vegetables and greens that she couldn't identify, all exploded with flavor in her mouth, spreading a broad grin across her lips even as it turned her body's internal temperature up to eleven. She cough once, her scalded throat briefly rejecting any more terminally spice and infernally heated food, but immediately stifled the sound with another hearty intake of curry. By the time Max had finished his noodles and broth, both of which he'd consumed with grace and aplomb that utterly eclipsed Aegle, Aegle was using her fingers to pick the last remaining morsels from the bottom of her otherwise empty dish. Her face glowed alarmingly red, and a noticeable sheen had appeared on her skin, but she looked nothing if not pleased. 
"Boy, weren't that good?" She asked, before popping the final piece of chicken(Fish?) into her mouth, "S'like drinkin' fire dust through a straw. And so tasty~" she licked the last few drops from her fingers, then leaned as far back as her crooked back allowed to slap her stomach in satisfaction. Only then did she realize that Max was looking at her again, and her luminously red features curdled into a faintly contrite smile.
"So..." Max finally said, ending a pause so pregnant that it was already being rushed to the hospital, "I was thinking that maybe after food time, we could hang out and go do something fun?" He spoke in bursts a bit more manageable for Aegle's belabored brain, recharged quite thoroughly by her newest experience, to keep up with. "I don't know what you would like to do for fun but I'd like to find out and stuff. I think you look like a super cool person and I would like to get to know you better if that's okay?"

For a moment, Aegle just stared back at Max. Then contrition in her smile had all but evaporated, but something quizzical had entered into her expression.
"Nope." She told him, utterly irreverent, grinning and popping her thumb into her mouth to clean the last of the green curry from it. When she was done, she shoved that same hand into her pocket and, with a loud whir of mechanical protest, fished about for a couple of seconds before finally pulling out her scroll.
"I still got three classes today." Aegle explained, showing Max the screen, on which her schedule flashed in crisp white lines, "And I got trainin' after that."
Then her eyes flashed and rare inspiration struck her.
"Though I guess you could come hang out with me then. I could show ya a little hand t'hand stuff I know, and maybe even spar a little with you." Grinning, as if this were a singularly brilliant idea, she eagerly added, "And then maybe you can shoot me a little. I can always use practice against a ranged foe."
Retrieving her phone, Aegle regarded the time critically and then quickly hopped from her stool. 
"Eh, I still gotta go visit Lily." She said, as if that would mean anything to Max, "Meet me at the training cells after school!"
Then, without waiting for an answer, Aegle spun on her heels and limp-loped out of the store. "See ya, Max! Thanks for lunch~"
She was barely out of sight, the last glimpse being her hair as it bobbed urgently along the lowest edge of the window, before something a thin strip of white paper was placed rather firmly on the counter top in front of Max, where it was held down by a hand which had clearly known many knives and hot edges. One finger, the size and shape of a farmer's sausage, tapped the sheaf meaningfully, just above where the cost of the two meals had been totaled.
"Strange girl." The big chef said tersely, in a voice not-unlike two stones being rubbed together. His deep set eyes regarded Max closely as he spoke, "Brave boy. Pay up."

It just so happened that Aegle beat Max to the training grounds, which might raise the question as to why she wasn't there to meet him when he rolled up less than five minutes later. The short explanation is that Aegle forgot. A slightly longer explanation would be that Aegle, who struggled to keep more than three concurrent thoughts in her mind at any given moment, had left the Ramen Shop nearly four hours prior. In that four hours, she had visited a close friend in the hospital, sprinted back to campus, attended a lecture on the advantages of minute dust combinations, worked on a few minor modifications she was trying to implement on the Oupis, attended another lecture on fine aura control, before finally writing a test on the different genus and super-genus of the creatures of Grimm. It should be noted just how much mental attention each and every one of these activities demanded, and just how little mental anything Aegle had at her disposal. By the time had come for her to write the test, that day's ultimate academic challenge, she'd utterly forgotten everything about the smartly dressed young man and the lunch he'd bought her. In fact, when Max to the training fields, Aegle was already in the heavily reinforced training building where she did most of her training. Already there and already set into her usual routine of endurance and strength training exercises. That's how things would have stayed too, with Max outside and Aegle within, and only one of them aware of the other's absence, had it not been for a chance glance down at the front of Aegle's hoodie. One of her exercises, a combination of push-up and jumping jack and general bane of high-schoolers everywhere, necessitated that she take her hoodie off first. It was one of the few activities and, indeed, the only exercise that might have induced her to do so. When she did, she caught sight of the virulently green splotch her lunch had left atop the hoodie's glossy black and eye gouging orange. A few moments of puzzlement and a headlong sprint later, and Aegle was off to correct her mistake. 

That is how Aegle, despite arriving at the training field five minutes before Max, managed to meet up with him nearly ten minutes after he got there.
"Max!" Aegle gasped as she ran up from behind the waiting young man, her shortness of breath and the quiet, strained whir beneath her clothes betraying her sprint. 
"Oh wow, it is you. Awesome." She said with a breath she hadn't yet caught. She was wearing her hoodie again, having hastily thrown it back on even as she ran to meet him, but little else had changed. She was still red in the face, though this time from an ill-advised run at top speed and not an ill-advised oral experiment. Shaking out her hands, she regarded Max quizzically and, for the first time, saw just how tall he was. Or, perhaps 'wasn't' ought to have been the operative word. Aegle was very used to people being taller than her. Standing just a little under five feet most of the time, pretty much everyone was taller than she was. Yet Max was only about half a foot taller than her, which made him about the same height as most girls Aegle's age. She also noticed, for the first time, the rather strange cut of his jacket, which had obviously been tailored to match his hair. It was an unusual visual flourish, though not an unfortunate one.
"What're ya doin' waiting out here?" She asked, catching her breath remarkably quickly for someone who wouldn't stop talking, "The trainin' cells are over there." She waved vaguely the way she had come, at an almost industrial building some distance apart from the rest of the training field. Constructed from concrete and with few windows, it more closely resembled a warehouse than a training hall. Constructed from concrete and with few windows, it was much better suited to those practicing with live ammunition than an open field surrounded by school grounds. 
"Come on. I already got all my stuff in one of the rooms." 
Turning without waiting for his ascent, Aegle lead Max into the vaguely threatening training building, down a hall way of basically unfinished concrete, through a steel door with a reinforced view window, and into a sizeable room, both broad and tall, constructed from equally unworked concrete. It's only furnishing was a military style duffle bag by the door, beside which a medkit was also waiting. Aegle stopped at the bag, fished out a couple of strips of boxing tape, and slapped them over top the knuckles on each hand. It was a strange thing to do, given that her hands were still thickly bandaged the way they had been when she'd met Max.
"D'ya got something specific ya want me to show you?" She asked curiously, as she placed another strip of tape over her knuckles.