You wouldn’t have known a thing if I hadn’t pointed it out.

Timeline/World: Riverside University – Family Ties
Characters: Adonai Rochemont
Race: Human
Age: 26
Final Word Count: 528 words

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Some people like to claim that if my head wasn’t attached to my neck, I likely would lose track of it. These people don’t know me very well and it’s likely better this way. I tend to pay so much attention to details that at times I fail to see the bigger picture, this is an issue. The potential of ‘losing my head’ if it wasn’t attached to my neck is one that is as unlikely as immortality ever being achieved while I’m still alive. I know some scientists are working toward that goal but it’s been an on and off thing with a lot of communities for years, I don’t think it will change any time soon.

Now, one particular person I had to deal with while I was at university—one of their youngest students ever to date—was a firm believer that I was too younger, that I’d rigged all the tests, that it was impossible that I’d be smart enough to be there when I was and they were on my case often. The main point of this was that I’d also started late. I could have been taking university-level classes by the time I’d been twelve but it just hadn’t really been a possibility financially so it had waited until I’d been sixteen.

That one nagging person I could have lived without. Whenever they were around me—that was uncomfortably often because we shared a lot of classes and they were of a prior generation, the type who went back to school by the time they were fifty because they wanted something new in their lives and I applaud that mindset—they made sure to remind me of everything I didn’t need reminding. That this one report required X number of words and pages, that this other project required Y and Z, as though I somehow wasn’t sitting right there in class, top of that very class with grades that kept my GPA at a perfect 4.00.

I suppose that, in a way, this is why I might have issues with some of the older generations. Some of them seem to think that we—the generation born after them or even of their children in some cases—aren’t focused. That we are liars and that technology has rotted our brains to the point where we need to be reminded of everything and that if somehow, heaven forbids, someone would show promise, it would be a fluke.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that I wanted to learn all I could from these classes, I would have dropped out. The constant nagging made enjoying the lectures from the professors a difficult and near impossible thing and no amount of trying to bring it up to the rightful party ever yielded any result. That is, at least, after the first year, when said nagger moved on to other pastures. I don’t know if it’s because they dropped out or simply because they changed majors but I had absolute and blissful peace from the second year on and it made my continued learning experience just absolutely perfect, I could certainly not have asked for anything more.

Every time I try to talk to them, I fumble my words. I’ve never done that before.

Timeline/World: Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Agathe Taylor
Race: Human – Meta – Water
Age: 33, physically about 20
Final Word Count: 538 words

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I’m certainly not the most outgoing person, looking at the rest of my siblings and my cousins, I’d have to think this is a partial family trait because some of us are this way and some of us aren’t, though maybe it’s just a natural on and off trait in people, I don’t know. I’ve just never been really big on going to others to talk about myself or to try and befriend them. I did still have a friend or three growing up but they’d been the one to approach me and I had let them.

Things changed a bit when it was Callias who came my way. I don’t even really understand how it all worked out or what he ever saw in me before we did start talking but I guess that is just one of those things. The friends I’d had at that point, I’d warmed up to them, you could say, it was easy to talk to them and smile and be outgoing but with Callias? I froze; I don’t really have any other way of looking at it, other than I froze. I’m stumbling over my words, not quite stammering but still being unable to really formulate anything overly coherent, it was mortifying.

Though, it wasn’t really that way at first. At first, it was closer to the way I’d been with my other friends. It was when this whole… dating thing started happening that my body and especially my brain started to do its thing. I can’t tell if it was because it was new or if it was because I did want to be with him in that way but my brain was somehow wired differently?

I’m over that now, of course, things are smooth and perfect at this point in our lives but the first couple of years were mortifying, at least to me. He was so patient it was different but… so often I had these thoughts that all of this word-fumbling and head ducking and uncertainty would drive him away. I’m glad it didn’t and that he stayed through it all, I would have been really lonely on my own but I would have handled it, I figure that if he hadn’t loved me to the point of staying with me all along, we wouldn’t have been meant and that’d just have been it, no arguing the point, in the end, a fact is a fact and you can’t force someone to love you, that’s just crazy.

The fumbling and word stumbling didn’t just disappear one day, though. Oh no, furthest from. It just got better, little by little. My heart wouldn’t constrict and then gallop away when he’d take my hand, instead it would just speed up a little in a fluttering motion and settle again, my words starting coming out in a much smoother fashion, my reactions became slowly more natural and less uncertain. I guess this is like getting used to a new thing that never was there in your life. Some people take to these new things with finesse and act like they’ve always had it and some, like me, just need a little—okay, a lot!—of getting used to it.