Rowan was flooded with relief as Kalos reacted to his gift. He was been afraid for the worse, in case she had laughed at him or flat out rejected it...but maybe she...liked it?

She had even called it a treasure. A treasure! Rowan's heart fluttered. It was a similar feeling to how he felt when he was anxious, scared of shifting, but...it didn't...hurt?

He nodded when she asked if she could keep it, trying to keep from smiling.

And suddenly she was speaking, rather quickly. Reminding him he was on his way to class. And before he could really react she was on her way out the door.

Rowan gave a little wave as Kalos exited.

"Uh...y-yeah...see you later..."

There was a pause, Rowan waiting a moment to make sure Kalos was actually gone. When he confirmed the coast was clear he hopped off the washer, grabbing his backpack. He closed his eyes. And smiled. He gave his fist a quick pump in the air, celebrating his success! She liked his lame rock!

Taking a moment to regain his grumpy composure Rowan then heads to class with a spring in his step.

Her number one concern was to find someone else, literally anyone else, to talk to. The "why" wasn't as important as the fact that Kalos was sure she had not yet fulfilled her love-obligation.

"Hey, kid!" She reached out to touch an elbow of a passing student, only... it wasn't a student. The woman was a teacher, short as a student so the confusion was understandable. Kalos' heart sank as she recognized the woman she'd been encouraged to speak with, but hadn't yet had the courage to do so.

"M-Ms. Sundance. I'm really- I didn't mean..." Oh boy. Kalos was sure her face was flushed purple as she took a small step backwards. It wasn't like Ms. Sundance was mean. She was supposed to be very nice, in fact. Just... the animals... There were always animals around.

Kalos had to ask something and just get it out of the way so she could check her "I was brave today" box and then maybe run away.

"WHAT DOES LOVE FEEL LIKE!" She hadn't meant to shout it, Kalos was in such a rush to get the words out, it just happened at full volume somehow.

(Liz Sundance)

Of all times to be carrying an ant farm through the hallways of the mansion, the break in between classes was potentially the worst possible choice. There were quite a few kids suddenly milling around, going in every direction, and spontaneously demonstrating the effects of mutations all over the place.

It would’ve been difficult enough, had Elizabeth only been carrying books or such - not much an issue there if they dropped - but an ant farm would shatter and cast its denizens all over the place, which would possibly cause a panic amongst all the students, and definitely one across all the ants.

So Liz was trying to be extra careful as she navigated the halls until she could reach her classroom and--

“Whoa!” she cried as a hand touched her elbow. She immediately flinched and clung tighter to the farm before her senses caught up to her. It wasn’t a surprise assailant, come to get her or her ants.

It was a student.

“Oh hi, Kalos,” Liz said, recognizing the girl on sight. Even though she hadn’t had Kalos in class yet, the young lady definitely stood out. Besides, Liz had made it a point to be familiar with all of their Atlantean students, even if she hadn’t spoken to several of them. “So sorry, I didn’t see you there. I was just focused on--”

The blonde blinked many, many times as Kalos’s question blindsided her.

“Uh...what?” Liz said. She blinked a few more times as she scrambled to process the words. “Love? Can you be more specific, please?” The teacher’s mind began spinning in a dozen different directions as she began calling up all the relevant data on the subject. And boy howdy, there was a ton.

Ok. So this was happening now for sure. The hustle of the class change seemed to take a collective breath after Kalos had shouted. Mostly, the reactions were similar. Blink. See that there was no threat. Move on. The kids continued on like a never ending river where Ms Sundance and Kalos were just a rock in their way.

> "Love? Can you be more specific, please?”

Surely Ms Sundance knew what love was. "I mean, you know what love is? Like romance, I guess." Kalos looked around. Really, it wasn't the best place to talk about love.

"I've heard it's like a feeling in your belly or liver or something. I mean, you look like you've been in love at least once because you're like really old, right? So you have to have had a romance at least once and know what it's like. So. What's that like?"

As much as she loved her new rock, Kalos decided it wasn't worth risking its loss. The rock went back into her hoodie pocket and she got her pencil ready for her notes.

Liz blinked again. She was doing a lot of that, it seemed. Now she had parameters with which she could divine meaning and construct a response. But before she did that, she needed to be a teacher.

“First of all,” she started, fixing Kalos with a look, “it is extraordinarily rude to tell someone they look really old, whether they actually look old or not.” And you’d better not actually think I do! Liz shifted the look into something more disarming. She’d chalk it up to cultural and linguistic differences, at least this one time.

“Secondly,” she continued, noticeably more jovially, “this can be a pretty broad and in-depth topic - probably easier not to have it out here.” Liz nodded her head at the hallway. “Let’s go to my classroom. I need to get this ant farm somewhere safe anyways.”

Liz turned and continued her path down the hall, pretty sure Kalos would follow. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Students could get finicky when talking to teachers. But a kid willing to yell such questions at a teacher probably had more than a kernel of curiosity.

“As for the third thing,” Liz said over her shoulder, “You’re asking about several different things. Love and romance, while often related and commonly interwoven, are not, in fact, synonymous.” She shook her head to flip some hair over a shoulder. She chuckled. “You can have romance without love, and love without romance. You can even be in love with romance, yet not be in love with the person you are romantic with.”

They got to her classroom and Liz opened it up. “And that doesn’t even begin to cover the nuanced spectrum of love, either.”

Kalos was mildly affronted. She hadn't said Ms. Sundance looked really old. Most mutants were absurdly beautiful and if the de-aging epidemic taught her anything, it was that mutants only seemed to get younger every couple years rather than aging.

She'd said she WAS really old. There was a world of experience worth of difference in those two statements.

"Okay." Kalos demurred, showing that she was sufficiently cowed. Teachers loved it when students looked like their spirits were at least a little crushed.

This seemed to cheer Ms. Sundance as well. That, or she wasn't one to hold a grudge. Kalos agreed again and followed in the wake of the woman with the farm of ants. Maybe they grew tiny crops?

> "Love and romance, while often related and commonly interwoven, are not, in fact, synonymous.”

"Wat?" Kalos stopped to write that down, but then had to jog to catch up before she'd gotten more than two letters written. "No. I guess I knew that." After all, not everyone who had love actually wanted it.

Except Ms. Sundance went on to say like three more riddles.

"You're teasing me." She planted her feet in the doorway to Ms. Sundance's classroom. "I just asked what the feel is- what it feels like. I didn't ask for a puzzle about spectrums. You do an- uh- it's an action. You do something. So it has to have a feel." Right? That was right, wasn't it?

Elizabeth barely had time to set the ant farm on her desk before the laughter overtook her. For several seconds she let her bemusement echo off the walls before snorting and shaking her head. “Oh hon, you picked the wronnng person to talk to if you’re just wanting a simple answer,” Liz told the girl, her teeth flashing in a huge grin. “No, I’m not teasing you,” she said a bit more soberly, reaching out to touch the feelings of the ants. Things clarified.

“Sorry for laughing,” she said. “It’s just that this is such a massive and convoluted topic. Did you know that people have been asking that same question for thousands of years? And some of the smartest scientists in the modern world still can’t agree on a single answer?” The blonde’s voice picked up a bit of speed. The data had been aggregated and now she had a channel to transmit it on.

Liz leaned against her desk and faced the girl. “You are correct, though,” Liz acknowledged with an eager nod. “Love can be an action, sure. And most people would probably agree it has a feel. But do you want to know a secret?” She leaned forward and whispered, “Love can feel different to different people!”

She flashed another smile. “That’s one of the tricky things about love. Some people say it’s this warm, pleasant feeling. Constant, glowing, everpresent. Some describe it as excitement, a spark that appears whenever their loved one is near, a buzz, a tingle, a shiver, a thrill. Still others might only feel its absence: a loneliness or emptiness that only happens when their love is not around,” she rambled, gesturing with her hands to underscore her points. She was about three seconds away from picking up a marker and writing on the whiteboard.

Empath shrugged and spread her hands. “To be honest, love can also feel differently at different times to the same person, too,” she admitted. As she focused on some point on the wall, she smiled and reflected. “My first boyfriend, I loved him. I don’t think I was in love with him, but it was a variant of love nevertheless. I still love him, although not in the same way that I did. What was once a surging tide of passion and enthrallment has become a gentle tide pool, calm and treasured.”

Even if Carrick made that rough most of the time.

Kalos had been told once upon a time that if someone tells you they are wrong or bad that Kalos should believe them. So when Ms. Sundance said she was the wrong person to ask, Kalos frowned. The coral girl very nearly walked out when she laughed. At least the very next thing was an apology. Kalos eased uncomfortably into the classroom watching a very clearly comfortable Ms. Sundance. The teacher reigned here and Kalos was definitely unwelcome.

She looked at her paper feeling stupider than she had in months. Ms. Sundance talked about variants of love like variants of virus.

"So. What's the point of even trying to be in love or not be in love? You don't know when love might sneak up and you. You don't know what it might be like. It might not stay the same? It can hurt you. You might like it? No thanks, I'm out." She turned to leave, Ms. Sundance was the worst person to ask, she said so herself.

And yet, the rock that Rowan had given her weighed heavily in her pocket.

"Do you still think about him even if you are not IN love? Did he love you? Did your boyfriend ever give you a rock? "

Ooookay, time to dial it back a bit, Liz. Elizabeth realized she was starting to lose her audience. She blinked. Right, this wasn’t actually a class, despite being in a classroom. This was just a question, no time for the entire lesson plan she was starting to whip up. She was pretty sure that if she pulled out the plastic replica of a brain, the kind that you can pull out the differently-colored regions to discuss each one better, Kalos was going to hightail it into another time zone.

Her smile softened. “No, he never gave a rock,” she said with a shake of her head. “I baked him a seedcake, once. We didn’t really do a lot of gift-exchanging. We mostly just shared time and talked about everything. He was my angel -- he brought me through a lot of dark times,” the smile deepened with fondness, a tint of sadness.

She nodded at the girl. “Yes, he loved me, too,” she said firmly. That was why he’d been so tortured after she’d abandoned him. Among other things. “I do think about him still--” because he was in her biology class and kept skipping it or making snide remarks under his breath to the other students! “--but we’re very different people now, in very different stages in life.” Well, actually Carrick was still the exact same Carrick he’d been when she’d left, but the whole de-aging thing was far more in-depth than Kalos’s questions necessitated.

Liz spread her hands again and gently shook her head. “But I don’t regret one moment of it,” she confessed. “The times he and I were together were some of the most special, important, and beautiful times in my life.” Even the pain of heartbreak didn’t compare to the sweetness of her memories.

Okay. So Ms. Sundance changed from lecture mode to actually answering her. The woman's smile softened her features somewhat, not too unlike Xavier's smile had. Love seemed to have a certain look to it, Kalos was learning. She relaxed marginally.

"Let me get this right." Kalos frowned at her notes, totally unsure if there was anything she COULD write down from this conversation. "You loved him. He loved you. You aren't lovers any more?" Did he... die? Considering Ms. Sundance seemed to care about rudeness, Kalos was sure that asking that was not allowed. Besides, she mentioned them being in different stages of life.

"If you were bestfriend lovers who shared your hearts and talked all the time, why would you stop doing that? You have that love look on your face and you said you love him still, but I don't get the "in" part of in love. How do you know when you're in it? You just fall in the hole and you're trapped?"

Elizabeth nodded along as Kalos attempted to get things sorted out. “Correct, we broke up years ago.” And just this past summer, from his perspective. Although it hadn’t been a break-up so much as letting the relationship die of neglect. But that wasn’t a conversation Liz was going to have with a student.

“There were a number of factors at play,” Liz said, after a brief moment of considering her words. “Primarily, there were a lot of other emotions at the time that took precedence, and well, in the end, we just sort of stopped talking and once I went away to college, that was the end of it all.” More sadness on her features, before she shrugged.

“That’s one of the many tricky things about love,” she said reflectively. “It’s hard to pin down. I didn’t love him for maybe a year after we first met. And even then I didn’t notice I loved him for a few months. For me, it was a gradual thing, before I counted it as love.” Liz grinned at the girl and nodded at her as she slipped back into Kalos’s metaphor. “So it was really more like I’d been digging for a long time and didn’t realize I was at the bottom of a big hole until I looked up and couldn’t see over the top.”

“I wanted to involve him in everything I did, and wanted to be involved in all of his activities as well. I wanted to know all about him, I wanted to see him smile, I wanted to spend as much time with him as I could. I wanted to share my life with him. But it didn’t happen overnight. Kinda snuck up on me, actually.”

The blonde cocked her head to the side as a thought came to mind. “Of course, there is such a thing as love at first sight, in which you see a person and you instantly, immediately fall in love with them and you constantly think about them even before you get to know them.” She shrugged again. “I’ve never felt that, myself. Never even felt anything else that had felt that before. But then again, I might have more nuanced and higher standards for defining love than most people. Perk of my mutation and all that.”

Again, she just didn't know what to add to her notes. Maybe love was like a magnet? You were either going towards it or shoved away? No, that wasn't right either. Ms. Sundance said she still loved her lover, but not "in" love in the same way. Kalos huffed. This was really super dumb. She'd gone from hating the assignment, to kind of liking it, and then right back into dislike.

"How do you spell messy? Is it "ie" or "y"?" That's all she was going to write about this section of love. MESSY. It was really messy sometimes.

"I should go ask someone else about the next part..." Kalos edged toward the door. If she had to turn and run to get away, she was willing to be that dramatic. She needed away now.

Elizabeth kept a smile on her face even as she chuckled internally. After everything she had said, Kalos seemed to have boiled it down to one word, if her expressions and question was anything to go by. “With a “y”, dear,” she said, now quite confident she was losing her audience. Especially since that audience was inching toward the door.

Liz reached over to grab the ant farm as a way of a living prop (what kid DIDN’T like object lessons?! The correct answer was “none!”) to liven things up. She was already concocting a comparison and metaphor about an ant colony and the impacts of love and/or loyalty on a society in terms of various levels of stratification when her experienced teacher’s eyes caught sight of the clock.

“Actually, it’d be best if you head on to class now,” she said, suddenly disappointed that there’d be no time for ants. “You’ve only got about a minute before the bell rings so may want to get moving.” Liz considered writing her a note, but there was plenty of time to get to the next class. Besides by now the hall was usually emptier, most students already in their next class or lining up outside the door….just like hers, even. “Come on in, Jeff,” she said, waving at the cerulean-skinned boy who’d poked his head into the room.

“Stop by after classes are over for the day and we can finish this, okay?” she said to Kalos and she went about putting the ant farm away.