When Earth Kisses Heaven
The dark room's mirror held the dim reflection of a girl whose damp and drying hair fell down past the length of her back. Discontent and restless, she thought of how the time was just as close to night as it was morning, the only time she would have dared to shower. Despite her fatigue, the girl couldn't find it in her to sleep. She had simply stood there for a while with a dark green towel about her shoulders, a garment long enough to serve as a robe on its own.
Ironic, how the color standing for nature is considered completely unnatural for humans.
At that thought, she grinned to herself, leaned her head down, and cupped a scarred hand around her face from chin to brow. The flow of magic passed through her hair like a gentle breeze before she lowered her hand again, blue eyes gradually opening to find her natural, blonde hair. Resting her chin in that same hand, she stared rather blankly at herself. It wasn't a look she particularly loathed, but at some point in her life, she had simply stopped considering it to be "her." For the moment, it could stay.
Not being one to play with her own hair past keeping it managed and her personal idea of presentable, she went about the painstaking process of getting herself dressed. Though most might not have thought twice about getting their clothes on in their own dorm room, especially in the case of one particular roommate, she was uncomfortable revealing herself under more or less any circumstances. A green, high-collared, long-sleeved shirt, a pair of khaki cargo pants, and two black, rubber, slip-on sandals served as the armor for a reckless fool about to leap out of her own window after a shower in the middle of the night. Anything closer to the body, she reasoned, would have simply felt too strange directly after bathing.
Standing well clear of her claimed tree and in the soft dirt trail, she looked up into a sky clear enough to count all of the stars, a light, natural wind making its way through her hair. It had been quite some time, and something told her that night would be as good as any to release her tension for a while. In her mind, she repeated short mantras, preparing to realize her ridiculous feat. A heartfelt prayer, my feet to the ground, my sight to the skies, a kiss from Earth to Heaven...
Her human mane floated into the air, along with the looser parts of her garments, in a shifting, tranquil calm. The peaceful moment was soon shattered, leaving them all to trail behind her body, as it was quickly hurled into the air along the path of a lightning bolt. It was a loud crash, as one would expect to hear during any storm, shaking the windows of the dormitories with a sudden shock wave.
The girl had been thrust a few hundred feet above the roof, her back still to the building, with her arms crossed against her chest and hands to her shoulders. For that brief moment, she felt as if she could fly, and it was very nearly the truth, up until the turning point where weightlessness took hold, soon to give way to gravity once again. She turned herself in the air, acquired her choice of a target above the stairs, and concentrated on falling with style. There was a complete lack of fear, because there was no room for it between the rush of excitement and raw determination.
The landing upon the concrete uprising was not quite perfect, but the second counter-strike of lightning through her body did manage to break her fall down to a few feet, knocking her up into the air again to prevent her hitting the roof with full force. Standing now, she could feel errant bits of static form around her that pricked at the tiny hairs of her skin. Soon discharging them with a strike of her palm towards the ground, her feet seemed to crackle with each step as she gave focus to rooting herself there.
What Kalinka then practiced could have easily been recognized as some type of martial art, but it was unlikely that anyone from St. Catherine's would have recognized the martial art itself. Occasionally, each practiced attack would issue forth another crack of thunder, but none of them were nearly as loud or obvious as the first. Whether she realized it or not, she had attracted the attention of something dark looming nearby, something that still kept itself out of sight.