”Touch again and die.”

Jackpot.

The only thing that made Kai think twice was the fact that he had just put on his glasses. There was also the fact that the girl seemed totally serious and the real possibility that he could die, but he didn’t care about that as much.

With a sigh, Kai took off his glasses and tucked them back into his messenger bag. He looked Wings in the eye, his expression deadpan.

“I don’t want to fight you.” False, but it didn’t really matter what he said as long as he said something. “Actually, it’s so funny that you were going to Hot Topic. That’s, like, my favorite store. Do they have Hot Topic in le France, or wherever you come from? Do they have Dippin’ Dots?”

Thus surfaced his secret ability to transform into a chatty middle school girl.

Astrid's wings were just about to shift as she started to feel extremely woozy again. She blinked and grabbed at her head as she tried her best to maintain eye contact with Kai. Why did she keep feeling dizzy? Was it something she ate before?

“Actually, it’s so funny that you were going to Hot Topic. That’s, like, my favorite store. Do they have Hot Topic in le France, or wherever you come from? Do they have Dippin’ Dots?”

"What?" Astrid asked quietly, holding her head and swaying slightly as she tried to comprehend what he was asking. Why was he talking about France all of a sudden, and what were 'Dippin' Dots'?

She grabbed at a large potted plant next to a nearby bench to steady herself, looking down at the ground as she caught her breath. What was going on?

Astrid was not going to let herself look like a complete idiot in front of the boy, so she cleared her throat, stood up, and shifted her wings, ready to fight. The dress waiting for her in Hot Topic was just going to have to wait.

The girl didn’t catch on very quickly. More accurately, she didn’t catch on at all. She grabbed her head and swayed back and forth and kept eye contact with him. By the time she was grasping at a nearby potted plant to steady herself, Kai was seriously concerned for her wellbeing. He stopped talking. The last thing he wanted was to have to explain to the mall police why a seemingly concussed girl was passed out in front of the Hot Topic store.

Then, all of a sudden, her wings changed from fluffy black feathers to… crystals?

Kai blinked to make sure his eyes weren’t playing a trick on him, and they were still there: rows of glittery, wickedly sharp crystals.

He took an instinctive step back. The mall-shoppers who had witnessed the changing scrambled to get out of the way. Strangely enough, nobody inside the Hot Topic seemed to notice or care about what was going on a few feet away.

There was a long pause.

“What’s up with the…?” Kai finally asked, miming wings. “I only want to pet those about half as much as the feathers, if that’s what this is about.” Um. Uhhhhh. He could probably knock her out, and then run for it? He hadn’t wanted this; he’d wanted a confrontation, sure, but without the sparkly razors blades or public audience. “So, uh, are you even from France?”

*"Oui , êtes -vous même de la terre ?" Astrid sneered back in French, confident that he would not understand what she was saying. She spoke quickly and with a thick accent, so that even if he did speak a little, only a native Frenchman would understand her. Which, obviously Kai was not. It sort of made it better that he wouldn't be able to.

Astrid, having recovered her balance, paced back and forth along the mall floor, her eyes locked on Kai's hands in case he tried to make a move for something. "You stupid again and I shoot. Stay still, yes?"

Hopefully he would listen to that. As much as she liked fights and the attention they brought her, she really wanted that dress, and she knew there was no way she would be able to get it with mall security and the police on her tail. And there was definitely no way she would be able to get away with not paying for it. She did not have that kind of money.

---

*Yes, are you even from earth?

She was French! Kai could tell that much from the lilt of the words coming out of the girl’s mouth, although two years of French in high school was apparently not enough for him to understand what she had said besides “yes.” It had been another insult, most likely.

“You stupid again and I shoot. Stay still, yes?”

He stayed still, for obvious reasons. Also, wait, she could shoot? That complicated things.

“Sorry to break it to you, little angel, but stupid is my middle name.” He slowly raised his hands to eye level, so as to force her to look him in the face, and moved in closer. Not as close as he’d been before, and hopefully not close enough that she would shoot him, but close enough that he could almost pretend someone in the crowd wasn’t discreetly trying to film them. “What do you want?” he asked, for the sake of the camera. “What did I ever do to you, for that matter?”

If Wings was going to, you know, stop acting like a wannabe criminal, Kai would be glad to stick around and annoy her some more. If not… he wasn’t opposed to knocking her down again.

Oh, that was it.

Astrid hadn't even really listened to what Kai was saying, but she didn't have to. It sounded stupid, and that was all she really needed. The pretty dress would just have to wait.

"Want you shut up!" Astrid yelled, trying her best to ignore the dizzy feeling that was quickly returning. The room was spinning, and her feet felt glued to the floor, but she could move her wings. That was all she needed.

The crystals covering her wings sounded behind her as her wings beat quickly. On the third motion, the bottom row of crystals shot forwards. Her aim was terrible and her vision was blurred, but Astrid hoped that somehow they had sort of gone in Kai's direction. If not, she supposed that she could always try to shoot another row.

By the time the crowd realized that Wings intended to carry out her threat, it was too late to stop her. There was panic. There was shoving to get out of the way of the crazy mutant goth girl, and screams, and words said that would need to be censored out of the video footage later.

Kai, on the other hand, experienced a fleeting moment of satisfaction at having goaded her into this.

”Want you shut up!”

She had terrible aim. That said, the crystals were also a lot faster than he had expected. The majority of them crashed into and shattered the glass storefront behind him, but the crystal on the edge of the row caught him in the left shoulder. At this range, it cut right through his t-shirt and skin and flesh and just kept on going.

“Ah! F*ck!” He let out the words before he could help himself, or think better of giving Wings that satisfaction. It hurt. With the level of adrenaline running through his blood right now, it shouldn’t hurt. Not like this. All of a sudden, Kai wasn’t so much pleased as angry at himself that he’d gotten involved in this… mess.

“You want me to shut up?” he practically hissed. He was half ranting, half just putting on a show because why had he let her up off the ground, that had been a mistake and now he was going to fix it. “Well, that’s just too bad, because I’m not going to shut up. Why didn’t you tell me that when I was telling those people it was my fault for knocking them over, after you fell on top of me? What’s your problem, anyway? Is the little freak homesick? I don’t know any nursery rhymes in whatever trash language you speak, but I’ll tell you one in English if you beg me to.”

For the record, Kai thought French was a beautiful language. Given the fact that he’d almost died by flying crystal, though, he figured he could be excused.

There was a brief moment where Astrid received the exact reaction she had been craving. The boy cursed as the crystal grazed his left shoulder and kept going with a small piece of his flesh. She had seen people receive worse wounds and make less noise, but that just went to show her how incredibly weak the boy was. It was going to be so easy for her to take him down.

Instead of cowering in fear, though, the boy began to spout off English gibberish. It was already difficult enough for her to understand the language at regular speed, but when it was spoken in a rushed, intense tone, there was almost nothing she could decipher.

The dizzy feeling was getting worse by the second. Astrid grabbed at her temples and squeezed her eyes shut to try and ignore it. It was getting harder for her to stand on her feet, and she could feel her body swaying.

"Arrêtez!" She yelled at him again, this time a lot more confused. To keep herself from falling over, she took a seat on the edge of a potted plant and kept her eyes shut.