Chase sat cross-legged on the floor in the living room of the Mansion, his backpack to the side of him and his back to one of the many couches. He was at the crucial period where it was debatable as to whether or not Legos were too babyish to play with. Today, however, the twelve-yer-old had deemed them acceptably big-kid-ish toys. As such, he was currently building a pyramid of Legos upon one of he flat, green Lego sheets. The base was 12 x 12, and he was currently starting on the second tier.

This was one of the pitfalls of going to a school where most of the attendees were teenagers. They considered themselves to be "so far away" from the years of Legos. Those were nostalgic memories from their tween or childhood years, and they were "so much more mature" than that.

Stupid big kids. Chase puffed a cheek out as he built. He'd never be like that! He'd play alone forever if he had to, but he'd never be one of those stupid, Lego-hating big kids!!

Thus the child continued to build.

There was nothing interesting happening in her room. So she left it.

Kalos stood for a long while with her back fit into the space between two panels of wainscoting. Everyone walked with purpose here. They knew what they were doing. They knew where they were going. They were more than happy to ignore a girl who had tucked herself into a crevice.

The weirdest part was that no one seemed to want to tell her what to do. No one made her put things away or even sleep on her bed. She'd made an incredible mess of her room and thus far, no punishments had been handed down from on high.

She edged out into the flow of children that were on their way toward the kitchen and trotted through the hallways. Doors were open. She looked in but did not touch. Windows were open. She smelled the foreign air of so much dirt. Boxes of brightly colored blocks lay scattered onto the floor.

Kalos stopped and watched a boy click them together and pull them apart.

She knelt on the far side of the pile and took a rectangle in her hand. It was so uniform in color and had perfectly sharp edges. It must have taken someone a very long time to make so many!

She took another and imitated the boy by holding the pieces together, but they did not stick.

Chase became aware of the pink person when they padded closer to the chaotic spill of Legos. The shifter-child glanced up, briefly, to see who it was-- then stared longer when he realized that it was someone about his size (maybe a little bit smaller). And they looked really cool-- he wasn't sure if they were a guy or a girl, given their short hair. He'd have to ask.

They grabbed one Lego... then another... and began to tap them together, seeming puzzled.

"What are you doing?" Chase inquired plainly, without a hint of judgement in his tone. The boy remained cross-legged on the floor, looking at the new person with his own look of puzzlement.

"Wanna play Legos?" the child pressed-on, "My name's Chase."

"Nothing." Kalos dropped the toys before she could get in trouble for touching things. "I wasn't doing anything." And her tone dared him to tell her otherwise.

The boy was another demigod.

His skin wasn't that perfect alabaster she'd seen so often on the island, and like most other demigods here on the ground, he wore a lot of clothing. He sat with no regard to how long it would take him to stand up. He didn't look particularly threatening. He, like many others, continued talking despite Kalos' bald inspection of him.

> "Wanna play Legos? My name's Chase."

Chase was not a name. It was a threat. Kalos blinked solid blue eyes and took a moment to reassess his threat potential.

He might be a demigod, but he wasn't a very big demigod.

"I have the name Kalos. I want to play let gos." What was the point of coming here if not to play? She picked up a brown one and her hardened coral fingers clicked against the surface.

Brown. Like Chase hair.

"Can I touch your hair?" She blurted.

>> "Nothing. I wasn't doing anything."

Chase blinked, a confused spectrum of colors weaving through his irises when the girl (at least, she sounded like a girl), dropped the blocks. His brow stitched. He wasn't mad or anything, he just wanted to know what she was doing.

>> "I have the name Kalos. I want to play let gos."

"Kalos," Chase repeated, "That's a cool name."

Like a... ninja. Or something. Chase added another block to his pyramid, his tongue poking out of his mouth with concentration. He assumed that Kalos knew what Lego's were (despite the fact that she'd said it wrong), and assumed that the invitation would be enough to invite her to join him.

"I'm building a pyramid," Chase said, "What do you think you'll build?"

She was tapping on blocks again.

>> "Can I touch your hair?"

The shifter child inclined his head. It was mostly his hands and arms that were sensitive to touch, so it would probably be okay if someone touched his hair. Still, it didn't hurt to ask.

"Why?" the shifter child countered.

She wanted to correct him. It meant beautiful, not cool, but Kalos wanted something else more.

"It's brown." She held up the block. Brown. He wasn't stupid was he?

Kalos looked around for something close to her brand of pink, but she settled on pulling a red one that looked a bit mangled. Maybe someone chewed on it. She set the blocks down in front of his pyramid, if it could even be called a pyramid. It was more like stairs than anything else.

"Your hair has smooth. Demigod smooth."

Kalos dropped the hard tips of two fingers in order to use the more dexterous tentacles of her hand. She dipped her head and reached between the prongs of her coral crown in an attempt to grip some small bit of something. It was very closely shorn, almost impossible to grab.

The texture was different. That's all she was trying to say.

"The feel is not same."

>> "It's brown."

"Yeah?" Chase pried. This girl was getting weirder and weirder by the second. The shifter child supposed he couldn't hold it against her, though-- she was, after all, a girl. Albeit a pink girl with cool spiny rock things sticking out of her (easily like a +10 for the coolness factor), but a girl nonetheless. Girls were always weird, even when they were cool.

>> "Your hair has smooth. Demigod smooth. The feel is not same."

"Fine," Chase admonished, pausing in building his pyramid and leaning forward, "You can touch my hair."

Whether or not she accepted the invitation was up to her.

"Kalos, where are you from anyway?" the boy pried, lacking the usual decorum of an older person, "You talk funny. And you use big words like 'demigod'. I don't even know what that means."

And she touched people's hair, and clicked blocks together, and called Lego's "let's go's".

He didn't have to be happy about it. He just had to allow it. "You have my thanks."

She touched his hair with both tentacles and coral fingers, pulling a single lock up and away from his head and letting it slide over both textures from her hand. It was as silky as it looked. And the curls were fun. She would have liked to tie it up into little sections. Instead, she let his hair go.

"I am from a bad ocean." And that was that.

She put her fingertips back on and scooped some Lego around until she found a piece she liked. "Demigod is person with power, but you're not seeing it."

After looking at his lame pyramid and observing how the blocks snapped together, Kalos decided she would build a Doric style temple like the one outside of the pristine part of town. No! Even better, she saw some pieces that were black and angled. A plane. Like the one that the X-men used. She started building wings by sliding two bricks over one another until they snapped. It was an incredibly satisfying feeling.

"Hoho. I like this." Kalos sprawled forward onto her tummy and tried to make the pieces fit into a black plane.

Kalos accepted the invitation, inspecting his hair as though it were a smelly sock. There was the faintest tingle at the physical contact, but on the crown of his head it wasn't unpleasant. Just like the subsiding pins-and-needles after sitting on your foot for too long.

>> "I am from a bad ocean."

"Oh," Chase said simply, lifting his gaze when the tingling subsided. She found another block. That explained why she didn't know things. Like how he didn't know things when he first ran away from Mommy and Daddy. Chase echoed, "You're from the ocean."

>> "Demigod is person with power, but you're not seeing it."

Kalos seemed to find something she wanted to make, laying on her stomach and beginning to build.

>> "Hoho, I like this."

"Yeah, like that," Chase said encouragingly, returning to his pyramid and choosing blocks seemingly without intention.

"Here, they call 'demigods' something else," the boy hazarded, without looking up from his task at-hand. Second layer of his pyramid was finished, onto the third, "Here, they call them 'mutants'. And there's a lot of them, that can do all sorts of things."

"Like... you're a mutant, because you're pink and have..." Chase tapped his head, "...spines. And I'm a mutant 'cuz I can look like other people, sometimes. There's a whole bunch of mutants who can do things... and then there's humans, who can't."

"I'm from the Atlantis Ocean" She reported and got two more bricks to click together. It was looking a little more square than she wanted. Kalos took that last brick pack off.

"No, you are wrong. Mutant is all of every powered person." The X-men had already explained that to her. Kalos got a thrill from clicking another block into place. These made really good sounds! Unfortunately it did not sink into the correct position. It was not centered. She clawed at it.

"Demigods are the kind of people you have no way to see power. They do things. They have shiny hair and smiles that are lies." More than the brick she'd wanted came off. Kalos looked at the chunk of blocks as if it had done a very bad thing.

"Pink mutant are gorgon. Or any mutant you see all the time is mutant, that is gorgon." Humans? Well, she'd seen the Atlan-ensnared humans. Kalos wasn't concerned about those.

Kalos lined the black brick up correctly this time and that, in turn, got the wings to stick. It was actually starting to look like a plane now, but she needed something for a the front part that they could look through.

He could look like other people? She turned a curious eye to this Chase. "Can you look like ugly people?" Kalos did not count herself among the ugly people, she was mostly curious and guided by her whim.

The things Kalos said didn't always make sense. As soon as Chase though he was understanding, she began to say more confusing things. It sounded like... according to her... demigods were mutants who had powers you couldn't see, great hair and shallow smiles... while physical mutants would be gorgons?

"So... are demigods and... gorgons... both mutants?" Chase clarified, "According to you?"

It was so much easier just to call them all mutants.

"Up here they just call them all mutants," Chase mumbled. With each layer, the process of building the pyramid was growing shorter. Third layer was almost done.

Kalos was looking at him, and the shifter child looked back, inclining his head. His eyes lingered somewhere between a puzzled aquamarine and a curious magenta-pink.

>> "Can you look like ugly people?"

"I can look like any people," Chase said proudly, "I just need something that belongs to them. Or I can do little things too, like..."

He looked around, searching for inspiration. His gaze settled on the crown of Kalos's head. As if pulled by an invisible string, his hair began to retract into his skull (or so it seemed) and as it did, it began to scrunch, developing that "kink" that also occupied Kalos's hair. Her color was strange, though, not a natural humanoid color, so Chases's hair transitioned to a strawberry blond.

"It's kinda like your hair," he said, "Kinda."

Were demigods and gorgons mutants? Kalos wasn't sure, but she didn't want to sound not sure. "Of course they are." According to her.

'Up here' he said. It was the best description of up here Kalos had heard so far. Manhatter and the Mansion didn't mean much of anything. It was all ground, soft and loamy ground. It was all the wrong texture.

She was working hard on making a tail for the plane when Chase changed his hair to be more like hers. The right texture.

Kalos dropped her plane along with her interest in it.

"Can you doooooo," she cast about for something non-demigod-ish, "teeth?" She bared her textured coral teeth at him.

Chase let the tightly-curled hair atop his head revert to the "natural", wavy dark brown. It shot back out on its own accord, falling in waves about its eyes. Kalos had hastily gotten to her feet, practically dropping her project.

>> "Can you doooooo teeth?"

Her teeth were weird. Pointy and uneven and pink. Not normal human teeth. Not something that Chase could fudge independently.

"Your teeth are... different," the boy said plainly, "I probably could, if I borrowed something from you. Something that belongs to you."

Not on his own, though. Her teeth were just too weird.

> "Your teeth are... different,"

Kalos snorted. Such a demigod thing to say that her teeth were abnormal and monstrous without actually saying it. It didn't bother her. They were her teeth. She wasn't getting new ones any time soon, and also... That was kind of the point of her asking. All demigods had shiny boring teeth.

She was dumbfounded when he asked for something from her. Was that a common custom?

"I don't have things?" Her statement turned into a question halfway through its inception. Was that true? She'd been told that her clothes were hers now.

Kalos pushed her hands against the ground in order to help herself to her feet. Little pink hands went to the overall buckles at her shoulders. She could give him this thing she wore.

The girl snorted at Chase’s observation, and the child furrowed his brow at her? What?

“I mean, they are cool!” he backpedaled, “I just can’t mimic teeth that are too different! I like your teeth!”

Kalos said something about not having things.

If he wasn’t blabbering now, he certainly started to once Kalos started unbuckling her overalls. Chase went into a panic—he was twelve, now, where changes began happening and children became acutely aware of their own bodies.

“Nonononono!” the boy protested, covering his eyes, “Please, no, keep your overalls. No!”

He hazarded a glance at his pink companion.

“Up here, you have to keep clothes,” Chase said, his cheeks hot as he got to his feet, “If you are wearing the clothes, you have to keep them on. Unless you go to the doctor, sometimes they put you in paper gowns, or if you’re going to bed you put on pajamas. Otherwise, up here, you have to keep your clothes.”

The definitely-embarrassed boy was definitely rambling now. Now that he was standing, he could tell he was taller than Kalos. Quite a bit.

“Here, I have an idea,” Chase said, starting to raise his hand, “Is it cool if I touch your overalls?”

Kalos passed the boy the already-unhooked strap, and Chase took it into his hand. As soon as the buckle made contact with his hand, his arms began to thin and adopt a twin, pinkish hue. The transformation wove its way up his arm, across his face, down his chest and other arm, and to his toes. The tendrils slithered into place, creating an identical Kalos in boys’ clothes, which now did not fit.

“Now I look like you!” faux!Kalos said pridefully as the seams of the tendrils smoothed themselves, cementing the illusion. Even her voice was the same. And…

Faux!Kalos grinned, “And my teeth look right, too, don’t they?”