Class got out a bit early that day, and Catame was grateful. As poorly as he took the cold, he loved watching snow, and it was actually decently warm outside for once, so he might actually be able to go out in it. He hurried from the class, Tantra bounding after him and Frux following at a more sedate pace. Daynoren and his bond had lingered when they spotted their applied magic tutor, wanting to ask her a few questions before class that afternoon. They didn't share applied magic with Cat and Tantra, being at a more advanced level. Catame didn't mind, really, since he was happy seeing his brother for the history, magical theory and sciences, biology and literature, and tactics classes they did share-- and besides, everything Daynoren and Novitas were learning was far beyond him, and he knew it. 

The break for lunch was, in Catame's case, two hours long. Plenty of time for a walk, a snowball fight or two, and then a dash back inside to warm up and get some hot food in him. Tantra didn't mind the cold nearly as much as he did, and Frux withstood it with his usual stoicism.

So out he trotted, aiming for the courtyard and, so he planned, the forest beyond. He didn't make it that far. Just as he headed out into the cold, tugging his quilted jacket and cloak closer around him against the chill, a rather large something caught his eye, and he stopped short, blinking. Why was there a suit of armor standing in the middle of the bonding complex lawn? And why was there a little child stuck inside it?

"Catame, let's leave it," Tantra whispered nervously, ducking half behind him, as if somehow she could hide behind him, despite being taller than he was already. "It smells funny."

"I want to see, though," he told her, blocking out her nervousness as best as he could. "It'll be okay. Frux will make sure nothing can hurt us." Not that he thought anything would, of course, but Tantra trusted Frux's magic more than either of theirs, and rightly, and that always reassured her. The older Light dragon sat just inside, letting them do what they would while he stayed warm and comfortable.

Tantra thus reassured, Catame trotted out, and towards the armor. "Hello! What're you doing in there? Are you stuck?"

If a suit of armor could have jumped, this one would have. As it was, it twitched and made a lot of clattering sounds as its multiple parts crashed together. Catame jumped a little, too, at the sound of all that metal, and Tantra cringed a little, again making her silly attempt at hiding behind him. He got the feeling that she would probably have run back to Frux, if he hadn't been the one insistent on talking to that poor child stuck in the armor-suit. He's just a little boy, Tantra, he thought at her.

Now that he was closer, he could make out that the child was green and fuzzy, obviously not human or dragon, so probably daemon-- and Tantra was right about him being a little odd, though to him he "felt" odd rather then smelled it. His voice, echoing from inside the helmet, even sounded odd. "Well, uh... yeah, actually, I am." He sounded very young, not any older than Catame. He couldn't imagine how he'd gotten stuck inside a suit of armor, much less how he was making it walk around. Perhaps-- he blinked lightly, "turning on" his magic-sense. The suit, and the boy inside it, both lit up with power-- more power than Catame thought any daemon could possible hold for so long. All that magic had to be what he was using to walk around with-- but why?

"Do you need some help getting out?" he asked, looking at where he could see the daemon-boy's face, through the helmet.

"Getting out?" the other boy parroted, and gave a weak giggle. "I'm too stuck for any help to... well... help." He shook his head slowly, and the helmet moved, too, the feather-plume trembling with the movement.

Catame frowned, brows furrowing, and Tantra was relaxing, peering around him shyly. "You don't look all that stuck, just hanging there from the head-cover-thing," he commented.

"Helmet," Tantra whispered, blinking.

"Helmet," he corrected. "It doesn't look very comfortable, unless all that magic is holding you up, too."

The armor clattered faintly again, as the green daemon boy twitched with surprise again. Catame was puzzled, now. He acted as if no one had ever spoken to him, before! Or even looked at him! He'd looked away from Catame's gaze almost as soon as he'd met it. Maybe he wasn't supposed to be in the armor, and was afraid he'd be in trouble... that might make sense. Kaur would be furious if he'd gotten himself stuck inside something like that, magic or no magic-- but then, he didn't think he'd ever want to put himself into a walking suit of armor. Like he'd told the boy, it didn't look comfortable.

Then he started stammering, his eyes going wide, snapping and Catame was even more confused. "I, uh, what? Magic? You... see it?"

"I know, I'm kind of weird like that," Catame admitted with a nervous little smile. Sometimes people were uncomfortable with that.... "I see magic, and I use it like daemons like you do-- um, you are a daemon right? You look like one. I mean, I've never seen any green humans, an' you don't look anything like a dragon-- and besides, I've never met a dragon who turned green when they shifted, or had horns or fur still, not even an Earth." He was babbling. He hurriedly shut up, licked his lips, and then nodded. "Yes, I see all that magic in there. And you. Is that bad?"

The armor-suit staggered back a few paces as Catame's tentative question trailed off, and all he knew was that something had gone wrong, somehow or another, and he'd upset the daemon boy. Even with fur hiding his face, so that it was impossible for him to "go pale", he looked shocked and even a little sick. Catame wrung his hands in his tunic hem, and Tantra leaned against him, ducking her head and cringing again at the noise and subsequent sputtering. "You-- you can-- see-- tell-- but--" The boy swallowed, but still couldn't put together a coherent sentence: "How can you-- No one could... no way you could... how?"

"I don't know," Catame said, confused and no little afraid, now. Was there something wrong with him being able to see him? Was he supposed to be invisible, was that why he was so upset? "I'm sorry-- I didn't mean to upset you-- I'm sorry, are you all right?" He stammered a bit, himself, taking a single step towards the armor, trying to look earnest, but not sure whether he got across more than anxiety. Tantra gave a little whine, and crouched in the snow, not really wanting to go any closer-- for the moment, Catame ignored her. "Am I not supposed to see you? What's wrong?"

The boy's head and his helmet shook again, and through it he was staring with very large eyes at Catame. "I-- I don't know if it's... wrong, but.... No one's ever seen me before.... I don't get how-- there's nothing to see!" The exclamation echoed a little inside his helmet.

I still think we should leave it alone, Tantra whimpered silently, creeping up to "hide" behind Catame again and nuzzling into his arm without taking her eyes off of the armor-suit. She couldn't be this nervous, just with a new person, she wasn't that shy. And it couldn't be because he was a daemon; she was used to daemons by now, since the main reason dragons were wary around them was their "magic-stealing", and her own bond did that! It had to be something else-- maybe something he was missing. A quick peek through her eyes-- they were tightly bonded enough now to do that, and it was quite an accomplishment!-- made him blink, then take another look himself. He could see the little boy inside the metal... but Tantra could not.

It's not an it, it's a he. I can see him... I don't know why. "There has to be something there to see," he said reasonably. "You're talking to me, after all, an' holding up all that armor, so you have to be there. But... Tantra can't see you, and I can." He scratched his head, confused.

"No... there's nothing," the boy said, sounding forlorn and afraid. "Nothing at all... nothing but-- but how can you see that...." He hugged himself, inside the armor, and the metal body mimicked the action. Catame bit his lip, a little embarrassed by the obvious distress the other boy was showing, then trotted the last distance up to him and reached up-- standing on his toes-- to pat one of the metal arms; he couldn't get at anything higher.

"It's all right," he said, knowing it sounded awkward-- but he had to say something. "I bet Day will know, we can just ask him when he gets out of class, or something. That's my brother, he's in the advanced magic class. --Um, do you wanna sit down? I think my neck's going to get sore, looking up at you for much longer. The metal stuff-- armor, right? Well, it's really tall, and you're all at the top of it."

Tantra, relaxing a little bit since the armor had not yelled or attacked or done anything mean like that, and perhaps getting a glimpse out of his eyes to prove that there really was a confused and frightened little boy inside all the imposing metal, crept closer again. "What's your name?" she added to Catame's request, daring to speak up, albeit softly.

The other boy relaxed a little, staring down at him for a moment, then he blinked, tilted his head, and looked between Catame and Tantra, before answering softly, "Tyrolean.... There, you can sit there," one arm and metal gauntlet pointed towards a bench against the wall-- and Catame didn't even look where it pointed, staring in surprise at it looked as if the boy's arm went through the metal, and the armor's arm lifted at the same time, like it was attached somehow, like with string. It was one of the oddest things Catame thought he'd ever seen. "I can sit on the ground," the boy-- Tyrolean, he'd said-- suggested, his voice trailing off a bit. "S'okay?"

Catame shook his head and shook away the surprise, and smiled up at Tyrolean's face through the helmet. "That's fine," he said, taking the metal hand-- he couldn't reach the real one, after all-- to lead his very strange new friend that direction. Tyrolean followed along docilly, but Catame was too focused on where he was putting his feet to look whether the boy that was Tyrolean walked as the armor did; he thought he might. "I think it'd be cold, but I guess you really won't feel all the cold, with the metal bein' what's touching the ground, an all. I can't sit on the ground... it gets too cold for me." He wrinkled his nose; not even Daynoren was as succeptible to the cold as Catame was. "Oh, and I'm Catame! And that's Tantra. And Frux is in the tunnelway, but I doubt he's going to come out here when it's warmer in there. He's not very sociable."

He couldn't help the friendly chatter; Tyrolean seemed like he didn't get talked to very much, and if a little babbling would make him feel more comfortable, well, he wasn't about to shirk in that department! Some people thought he talked too much, but, well, sometimes he thought they didn't talk enough. It made up for Tantra always being so quiet, at any rate.

Tantra trailed behind them, and when Catame hopped onto the chilled stone of the bench, she climbed up beside him and put her head in his lap. She was too big now to do more than that, but Catame didn't mind. Tyrolean, freed of Catame's light pull, settled to the ground with more clatterings of metal. Catame did note, this time, that when the armor sat, so did "Tyrolean". He watched, fascinated, as the daemon boy appeared to be sitting in mid-air, within the armor's chest.

"It's a pleasure," the slightly echoey voice answered sincerely. Tantra flattened her ears, crowding her head against her bond's stomach, but smiled shyly in a good approximation of where Tyrolean's face would be, could she see it. Catame stroked the short fur on her neck, and Tyrolean continued, "And yeah, I'm okay on the ground like this... can't really feel it at all, really."

"Not at all?" Catame repeated, then giggled faintly. "Well, since you look like you're sitting on nothing at all-- you, I mean, not the metal stuff-- I guess you wouldn't, would you? How'd you get stuck in there, anyway?"

"Sitting... on nothing?" Tyrolean blinked and looked down at himself, his helmet clipping the metal collar atop the breastplate. Then he looked back at Catame and Tantra with big, unreadable eyes. "Man, I wish I could see what you see...." Catame could think of several ways to show him, right off the bat, but he thought that maybe Tyrolean was stalling, putting off answering the question, so he didn't volunteer any information. The boy-and-armor drew their knees up and rested hands atop them, looking at them blankly while he thought. Catame was patient, and finally Tyrolean answered, "Magic accident...." He looked up with only his eyes, looking so pitifully nervous and sad that it almost hurt to look back at him. "I have a brother, too... and we... got a little ahead of ourselves."

If being stuck in a suit of armor is getting ahead of himself, I'm glad I'm not very good at magic, Tantra commented with a little shiver. Catame hugged her neck wordlessly and nodded at Tyrolean.

"What happened?" he asked-- then quickly amended, "If you don't want to talk about it, that's okay."

Apparently, Tyrolean didn't particularly want to talk about it. His gaze slid aside, and he reached up a hand to scratch his head-- but his metal arm went with it, and clanged against the helmet. Though a blush wasn't visible under all that fur, his ears turned back in a manner much like Tantra when she was embarrassed. Catame didn't comment, but scratched Tantra behind her own ears. Finally, though, Tyrolean answered, "Well, the story doesn't hurt to tell so much anymore.... But... it usually makes people freak out to hear it, then see what it really did...." He took a deep breath-- or, the boy did; the armor only shifted its shoulders lightly in imitation of the movement. "Here, I'll just show you the short of what happened, and if you don't freak out or decide to leave or... whatever... I'll tell you the long of it.... okay?"

Torn between feeling very sorry for Tyrolean, since this had to be worse than even being a magic-eating human mage, heatedly denying that he'd do any such thing as freak out or leave Tyrolean now, avid curiosity at what "showing" meant, and a little apprehension about what had apparently frightened a lot of people, Catame could only nod silently and let his new friend do whatever he was going to do. At the very least, it should explain things.

Oh, I hope it doesn't hurt you! Tantra's briefly panicked thought met his mind, and she buried her face in his tunic, as if, again, she could somehow hide in him when he was so much smaller than she was.

He wouldn't hurt anybody, he told her firmly. He didn't know why he'd think that, but the thought of that fuzzy little boy hurting anyone just felt wrong.

After a nod and a moment of obvious courage-gathering, Tyrolean lifted his hands to removed his helmet.