She tells him, "You have the saddest eyes I've ever seen" And for a moment he can't breathe.
He hand is stopped in midair, his brain too distracted by trying to solve her riddle to fit the puzzle piece in the hole. Like many other social greetings, hers was a puzzle. Although it was a way of saying hello that he had never heard of before. "Is that bad?" he asks, brows furrowed as he tries to solve her.
The brunette girl is haphazard, her body screams it; from her untamed scraggily hair, to her black tights with holes scraped into the knees, to her too-big mustard colored sweater that hangs off one shoulder and gives a peak of her navy sundress only at her neck and covers the skirt portion. She is a curious difference to the other kids at Whammy's, mostly for her disheveled appearance but also because she has moved forward and is sitting on the other side of his large white puzzle. She doesn't avoid him like the others.
"They remind me of storm clouds," she comments, leaving his question unanswered as she looks down at his puzzle. "What's the point of doing it without a picture?" she asks, referring to the pure white puzzle.
He finally fits the piece that's been hovering in his hand into the proper hole. "It's more challenging" he says.
"It's boring" she states, giving him a blank look. "You should let me fix it for you" she eyes one of the pieces but doesn't pick it up, instead watching his hands at he puts in another piece.
"I can finish it myself" he states, looking up in surprise when she lets out a laugh. It was uncustomary for the kids of Whammy's to show emotion. It was a weakness in their training, evident by Mello's frequent outbursts that sent him to kitchen duty.
She smiles at him, and he stares at it. "I don't mean that. I mean you should let me color it for you" she says. He just now notices the paintbrush she's twirling in her hand.
"What would be the point of that? Then it wouldn't be a challenge" Near stated, fitting another piece into place. It figures, most of the artistic letters were less educated in the simple ways of problems solving and academics such as he was. This girl simply didn't understand.
The girl sucks on the end on the paintbrush thoughtfully. A habit. "Maybe not, but it would be fun" she states, and he looks up at her as though she'd just said mars could be colonized within the next month. Absurd.
"Fun?" he repeats incredulously.
She sighs, abruptly flopping down on her back on the floor. "None of you guys just want to have fun, do you?" she asks rhetorically. "Why am I even here if I can't have fun…" she says sourly. A few moments pass before the transformer is shoved into her field of vision. She takes it carefully and sit up in surprise, giggling as she sees the T-Rex he is holding crashing through the large block city that had been sitting in the corner of the room. He'd finished it earlier in that morning and left it waiting for when Mello would come in to kick it over.
"The evil genetically-enhanced dinosaur has escaped the laboratory. Quick, we have to find a way to return his normal intellect before he reaches the president's office and assassinates him!" he says, doing the voice of a lego scientist in his other hand as the T-Rex continues to smash through the city.
She doesn't move until he looks up at her expectantly. "Not on my watch!" she says in a robot voice.
"It's optimus prime! Optimus, you have to give this chemical solution to the dinosaur!"
That was the first time Near ever met Karl.
