Andrew groaned, holding his hands to the side of his head in frustration at the brightly lit desktop in front of him.

"This is so stupid, why am I even bothering with this?!" he practically shouted, glaring angrily at the screen as if it was the essay's fault he was mad.

Two thousand words on proper procedure for an emergency concussion situation. Two. Thousand. Words.

Andrew was awful with essays, and the topic could be explained in five sentences, how in the world was he supposed to extend it to two thousand words?! What was the professor thinking?!

He pushed his desk, sending his chair rolling on its wheels over the carpeted floor. "Screw this, I'm getting food." he said to himself.

He didn't really know why he shouted all the time. No one lived with him, and no one would care about his plight if they did. Maybe he was just a loud person.

It didn't really matter, right now he wasn't thinking about his volume. He only cared about finding that cup ramen he'd left somewhere in his pantry.

As the ramen cooked in his microwave, he sat on the granite countertop of his kitchen, his arms crossed and eyes closed as he went deep in thought.

He needed to finish the assignment. It was due in three days and he hadn't even started. Being awake at 2 am the night before Monday was a nightmare, but he had to do it. He didn't have enough time to sit around or else he'd fail the assignment.

He heard a crash through the wall of the kitchen, and sighed, shaking his head at the sound, not bothering to worry about it. It was probably Caitlyn accidentally smashing through her wall again. That girl was nuts when she was fired up, and mixed martial arts combined with sheetrock doesn't end well.

He briefly wondered how much it cost her per year to replace the wall. This was the fourth time this month she'd done that. Oh, well, at least it wasn't his body she was smashing this time.

The beeping of the microwave brought him out of his thoughts, and as he opened the cup and stuck a fork in to grab the noodles inside, he sighed.

He didn't amount to much ,when he thought about it. Caitlyn was clumsy, but she had a whole career in martial arts to go for. Christopher in the apartment above his was a renowned author of a very popular book series. Across the hall was master programmer in the making Cameron Fernandez.

Meanwhile there was him. Procrastinator extraordinaire. He wanted to become a nurse, but at the rate he was going he doubted he'd get very far with that goal.

He did try his best, but he never could quite find the motivation to do much. He scraped by with classes, but that was about it.

He knew he was a boring person, but who cares? He wasn't bothering anyone with his lifestyle, and he had no one to impress.

Single, broke, and boring. The typical college student.

He sighed to himself, setting down his half-eaten cup ramen. "I'm taking a walk." he said to himself, grabbing his keys from his desk next to his keyboard and heading out the door without looking back.

Maybe being outside would help him clear his head. It couldn't hurt at least.

The South Carolina air was cool despite it being early autumn, and it was pleasant on his skin since he'd opted not to bring a sweater. Edgerton was nice this time of year, being up in the Appalachian Mountains, and he enjoyed walking in the night breeze.

Traffic was low in his neighborhood, so there was little sound other than of people in the apartment complex he lived in and the rustling of trees around him. It was peaceful. At 2 am you'd never guess this was a highly populated area.

He didn't even bother looking both ways as he jaywalked across a street towards a nearby part, the looming figure of Hendrik's Peak, a local nickname for the nearby Mount Hennessey, hanging like a backdrop over the horizon. The mountain sheltered the city from excessive rain, and also provided the cool breeze he was enjoying right now.

He sat down at a bench in the park, sighing to himself as he leaned back in the seat, letting his arms hang over the backrest as he stared up into the sky.

There weren't many stars, being in a city that was busy even at night in the downtown area, but he could still see the three stars in a line that marked Orion, and the bright light of Jupiter was clearly visible nearby.

He enjoyed stargazing, but it was hard to do in a city where the sky was clouded by light pollution. It was pretty boring only being about to point out Orion and the Big Dipper after all.

He heard a groan, and sighed, looking back behind him at the source of the groan. Some homeless person probably.

He blinked in surprise as he saw someone lying on the ground, half-covered by the bushes behind the bench.

At first glance, he assumed he was right in that it was some homeless person, before looking a little more carefully told him that this person, whoever they were, seemed to be wearing an oddly well-designed suit of some kind that make them look like some sort of dragon person...Cosplay, probably.

Okay, so a drunk cosplayer. So? Even that wasn't exactly unheard of here. It was rare in this particular park, but it happened before in other places around the city.

Still, something about the cosplayer bothered him, enough that he didn't turn around. Rather, he continued staring at them, before they rolled over, giving him a better view as they rolled out of the bushes.

A girl, and from a red stain on the side of her head, she was injured. Realizing that, he jumped up out of his seat, standing by the bench and staring at her.

She must have somehow hit her head on the fence behind the bushes, and now, she was clearly unconscious...and she likely had a concussion.

Great. It seems the subject of his essay had some practical application almost as soon as he decided to take a break. Using what he knew about medical aid from school, he ran to her side, kneeling on a knee to set one hand under her shoulders and the other on her stomach to lift her upper body up gently, careful to avoid accidentally touching her wound to the branches of the bush.

She went up limply, and was surprisingly heavy for her moderately small frame. As he lifted her arm around his shoulders to pull her up, he grunted at the weight, holding onto the bench with his free hand to aid him in lifting her.

The small spines attached to her elbows dug into his ribs as he stepped forward, getting used to her weight as he helped her walk...well, more like dragged her. She was still unconscious, but she wasn't very badly injured, so he opted not to call 911. There was no need, her injuries were within his understanding, luckily.

It took him half an hour to slowly walk her back to his apartment complex, during which he passed the same spot he usually jaywalked and yet again had no reason to look down the road, and by the time he made it to his door, he was exhausted.

He let her slide off his shoulder to rest on the wall while he got his keys out to unlock the house, glancing at her as he did so. "You really are heavy, you know that?" he asked.