Snippet #1881150

Damien held a hand to his head as he saw some girl skip down the hall, though he hadn't moved from his earlier position. He saw her express her liking of the place, and he saw her threaten the students over her camera. Energetic. Distracting. She was interesting, no doubt.

He glanced over to Emerson, in the same instant seeing him play with the placement of his items and his iPod. Damien had one them, too, but he hadn't put it on because he knew that he'd just get a history lesson about whatever song he picked in the new environment. The place usually didn't affect his powers beyond providing more information than he needed. Had he turned on a popular song, he might have seen how many kids had listened to it in the past at the school, or maybe he would have found a teacher that listened to the song often enough, or, maybe better, nothing would have come from it. Whatever the case, Damien was too new to the area to bother with extra visions.

The live-action voices dragged Damien from his thoughts in that instant. Already, it seemed Emerson was chatting up the ladies, though not in such a bad way. He almost seemed shy. This made Damien smile. If he was shy, he could rest at ease at night. Shy was a blessing.

To prove his theory, he focused on Emerson again, but, this time, he focused on thoughts and feelings, not just his voice. Every emotion and every thought were either part of the past or the present, and each one had a uniqueness to it. What Damien got from him was the flash of a memory, something about making friends, and a sense of... It felt like nervousness mixed with curiosity, but he had been wrong before with emotions. Emotions were different for every person, even if they were directly translated without the need for confusing words.

Curious himself, Damien followed Emerson's example and went to the doorway, mostly to watch. He leaned against the door frame and peeked his head out of the room, looking to the camera.

He hated cameras. They were like a pool of information sitting in both the past and the present. Movies gave him headaches, even music, sometimes. It was the connection of information to the current -- a time within a time without being out of time -- but separate and not. People lived on in movies when they should have been long dead, and, never could a movie be completely erased from the world. Even if every copy was destroyed, it lived on in unwritten history and Damien's headaches.

He put a hand on his head, squinting a bit at the camera. He was practically making a face at it in protest, childishly, but he couldn't touch it. He didn't want his hands to be changed into anything other than maybe water-logged, prune hands from swimming, and even that was undesirable.