!-Chapter Two-! Old Friends reunite

"Lily, what are you doing here?"

A fond smirk found its way to her face, "I'd think it would be obvious. Not only by my statement, but uniform as well. I'm going to Aru, same as you." His red-eyed glare spoke his thoughts well enough, "If you meant 'What am I doing at Aru?' It was Mr. Dickenson's idea that I go here. And your sister as well."

"Lea's here too?"

Lea brushed purple bangs out of her eyes, wand walked over to Kai, burgundy oculars glinting as she stood behind him, "Yes I am, brother. Didn't you notice."

Kai nearly jumped, but caught himself, although his eyes widened. Returning his eyes to normal, he didn't even look back to address his siblind. "Hmph, should I have?"

"Nice to see you too," Her voice held a tone of dry sarcasm as she went to take her seat.

Over where he was standing, Mark nearly felt envious of Kai, until he heard how he had been addressed. Laughing in his head, Mark had to admit that the two relatives did look similar and wondered how he couldn't have noticed earlier. The bell for homeroom ran. Students ran in at the last minute and took their seats.

As the bell finished ringing, a student ran in. He stood just insde the door as he pulled a cap off his head. Surprisingly enough, his messy hair didn't become any messier. Over in the far side of the room mahogany eyes alighted on the boy. Another pair of brown eyes and a pair of eyes covered by length brown bangs fell on him.

"Whew. Just made it." He sighed and took a seat next to a girl with shoulder length brown hair that bobbed out.

She scolded him under her breath across the aisle, "Tyson! Why are you so late? Max's been here for a while."

"Sorry, Hils, I slept in."

Daisy released Tyson, who was sitting in front of her, from her gaze, to look over at Max, how had indeed been in the school for over half an hour. Their homeroom teacher sat at her desk, pinning Tyson and Hillary, who were having an argument under their breath and glowering at each other, with a black eyed gaze. They eventually felt the gaze and looked over at her.

"Ms. Tatibana, Mr. Granger, do you have something you want to share with the class?"

They both looked at the other before looking back at their teacher, "No."

"Good. Next time you might allow me to take attendance with out distractions."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good." The teacher stared down at the list of students in her hand.

The paper fell to the desk in the third senpai homeroom as the homeroom teacher left it on his desk. The announcement system flashed on, welcoming the students, announcing the clubs meeting that week and then shut off.

The students in the room broke out into conversation. Molly turned to look back at Rei, who was sitting behind her, "Hi, Rei. How's the rest of your team."

"Fine. They're all in this school."

"How funny, same here." Molly, unlike Lily, was not aware that Mr. Dickinson had planned this, and dismissed it as a coincidence.

"That's nice," Rei was slightly distracted as he looked out the window.

The second homeroom was filled with people like Rei, honey-shaded orbs, pointy ears, and longer and sharper then normal canines. One of them was a girl with overly pink hair. Sitting next to her was a normal looking girl, although she had paler skin, relatively short, wild orange hair kept in a low ponytail. Black met with gold.

"Salima," the pink haired one addressed the red head, "I didn't know you were here."

"Same here, Mariah," Salima said, also whispering, "I thought you lived in China."

"Yeah, we do. But Mr. Dickinson wanted us over here, according to Lee."

"Same."

Later in the day, the first senpai homeroom was going to their recess and passed the second kohai room. Lily's silver eyes were tainted turquoise as she heard faint muttering behind her about the Mexican teenager in the room. However, Lea held nothing back, glowering at the offending girls, shutting them up.

Kai, Lily, Lea, and Mark sat in a corner, occasionally breaking the mutually agreed upon silence with comments about idiots or short blurbs of conversation.

In his class Tyson was soundly asleep. The teacher up front had introduced himself as their math teacher. He would be teaching them algebra II. He was in the middle of explaining his particular deviation on normal school policies. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose when he noticed Tyson quietly snoozing away, "That's the world champion? How sad."

"Mr. Granger."

Hillary desperately reached across to poke Tyson in the arm. They boy started and looked up at the teacher, "What?"

"Good to see you're awake."

"I wasn't asleep. I was just...resting my eyes."

The entire class stared at Tyson, a few laughing at him, "Well, I would prefer it if you paid better attention."

"Yes, sir!" And everyone in the room wondered how Tyson had managed to sneak into a school like Aru.

By fifth period it was lunch time for the whole school. Not being able to stand the other students in their homeroom, Kai, Lily, Lea and Mark had gone down to one of the senior courtyards. Sitting at one of the tables under a cheery tree they ate in silence. It was overgrown with weeds, no one had probably been here for a long while.

Tyson, Hillary, Max, Kenny, and Daisy were also heading to a courtyard to eat, but one of the Kohai. The group of five juniors passed by the decrepit senior courtyard.

"Hey, guys!" Tyson called out when he spotted four of his friends. He ran into the courtyard when they didn't look up at him.

"Tyson! Get back here!"

"Ah! Tyson!

"Idiot."

Actually, out of the four left, Max was the only silent one.

"Tyson, this is a senior courtyard, junior's aren't allowed." Lily looked up at the world champion, a veritable coldness wafting off of her. Tyson stopped running a few feet from the door, turned around and walked slowly backing into the school.

When the five had disappeared and and the four in the courtyard had finished eating, Lily stood up.

"Still fifteen minutes left. Anyone up for a match?" In response three tops were pulled out of various pockets. "Guys versus girls?" Lily asked, pulling out a snow driven blade. The three nodded and Lily got the distinct feeling of talking to several walls.

They all walked over to a bare patch of ground. They put blade on their respective launchers and called out in unison, "Let it rip!"

In mid-air blue crashed with blue and white collided with dark gray. All four blads survived the mid-air collision. They landed on the ground and wobbled slightly before straightening out. One of the metallic blue blades, one with a picture of a blue bear superimposed upon it, grouped with the white blade, the other metallic blue spinning top grouped with the other one.

Kai grumbled in his head, he knew next to nothing about Mark's style, so how had he gotten himself into this?

In a nearly completely abandoned junior courtyard Tyson complained as he sat down.

"Man, Lily was so mean. Come on, why'd she have to be so cold?"

Daisy pulled her chopsticks apart, "She was right though, if a teacher caught you in there, you would have gotten into trouble."

Unfortunately, Tyson wasn't listening, he was stuffing his face with the contents of his bento box; he hadn't even bother to pull his chopsticks apart.

In the second senior courtyard, there were a few people. It was well kept, unlike the third, but fairly abandoned, unlike the first. Rei and Molly walked into the courtyard. The first person Rei spotted was Salima. He eventually took his amber-shaded eyes off the girl and looked over at the rest of the people, who were sitting at another table altogether.

"Salima!" Molly cried out, smiling and raising an arm. She walked over to Salima and sat down. Rei walked over to the other table. The people there were the ones with those same oddly colored eyes.

"Hey, guys."

A boy looked up, black bangs in his face, but out of his eyes, "Sorry, Rei, White Tiger members only." Rei stared at him, thus earning a fanged smile, "Just kidding. Sit down if you want." Rei sat in the empty seat.

"So, why are you all here? Aren't you supposed to be back in China by now?"

"It was Mr. Dickinson's idea that we attend this school." Mariah said happily, she was happy to see the last person in her "family".

"Oh, do you know what other teams are here?"

A boy that looked almost too young to be a senior brushed green hair out of his eyes, "I think the Saint Shieilds, Psykicks and BeyGirls."

"Kevin, what are you doing here?"

"Same as them..." Then he realized what Rei was really asking, "Oh, I just made the cut off, a day later and I'd be a junior."

Know Your Japanese Culture

Some extra notes, since Japan is different then America, so the school system is different.

The typical Japanese high school hours run from 8:30 to like sunset (dunno exact time). Most students walk or take public transport, they don't drive cars, even the seniors. Next off, their school year starts in the Spring and is 240 days long, typically, 40 days more then we do in America. Most of these are culture days, or spent preparing for culture days and so on and so forth. They also go to school on Saturdays for half a day, though the number of required Saturdays for each month has gone down.

The curriculum in Japan is the same throughout a grade, everyone is at the same level in a school, or district, there's none of this special ed and honors and AP stuff in Japan. I dunno if they learn at the honors level in America, or the normal level, so I go with normal, if you know otherwise, tell me.

Students of Japan normally bring a lunch with them, occasionally the school will give out lunches, but generally students have to bring their lunches from home. Instead of lunch boxes they have bento boxes. I'm not sure, but I think students can leave the building for lunch and come back for the next period. I'm not sure because this is what I gather from an anime I watch, but I'm not to sure if it was a Saturday or normal weekday.

Each school has a different and unique uniform, so that people from different schools can be told apart from one another and so that people will know which school a person goes to. Oh, and normally Japanese highschoolers dun date during school (or maybe in general, again, I'm not sure)

Whoo! This is all I need to explain now.

!-Author's Note-!

).o I thought I had updated this with chapter two, apologies. This has been done for months. I really though I updated it.

Mhm. Sorry for you avid fans of this series for taking so blasted long between the updates. The inspiration for another five stories have nipped me in the arse and won' let me write out this story except for like a sentence a day, if even that. So, yeah. .o I can try to force myself to haul the inspiration for this story back, but don' be surprised if it takes a while. When I get to the action in like five or six chapters and stop with the opening patter we should be good to go.

. also, when I get to an idea where to go for the next several chapters, I should be able to update biweekly, every Friday (for me) some time, maybe sometimes weekly. Yay. Oh, if you have a suggestion for extra stuff I should do (you know, t'add some meat to the plot to make it all, like, realistic and not just plot, plot, plot, give 'em to me. It would help with the speed of updates)