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peppered with just the slightest hint of nostalgia.
    “Do you feel bad…I mean…about leaving?” Red asked.  
    She paused for a moment before answering, glancing around at the eatery as if she were recalling all the times they had eaten here. Red felt as though it were just yesterday that they had their first meal here. He even remembered which table they sat at. “It’s a useless emotion,” she finally replied. “Missing things. This is how life is, what’s the point?” She seemed to zone back to her usual aloof attitude after the question, as if her response reminded her that this was how she felt.
    “Well that’s kind of a cynical way to see things,” Red remarked.  
    “Want some more egg?” She asked, extending the brown thing towards him. He waved his hands, and she noticed that they were shakier than usual. “You’re a bit jittery.”  
    “Nervous for the exam…and…woke up from a nightmare.”  
    “Same one as always?”  
    “Mmhmm. And… I dunno… I always feel like I see things after them. Like, things that are there…but not there.”  
    “My mother used to tell me that dreams were memories of past lives. That children could remember their past lives and were much more in tune with them; that’s why they were more prone to having nightmares. It’s like how people never truly forget traumatic events. They just bury them, but the memories always come back for you.”  
    He grunted in silence, noting that she had mentioned her parents, a rare occurrence. He never asked her about them. They had a silent agreement between each other prohibiting discussions about their past before they had met.    
    “What do you think?” he asked after a long while.  
    “I think dreams are just dreams. Like consciousness, an accident in a universe where the improbable is always what happens.” Her reply was so mechanical, he wondered if this was how she truly felt or if it was how she had trained herself to feel. What’s the difference he thought to himself.
    “Hmph,” was his only response. He was somewhat accustomed to her nihilistic outlook on life, but never bothered to argue against it, even if he disagreed. He always thought that it was impossible to assess someone’s outlook justly. You could know every detail of every experience in someone’s life, but still fail to understand how they related to each one.
    “Oh yeah, I have something for you,” she said. “Since you don’t use a weapon to fight with,” she handed over a clear pouch that felt as though it were filled with liquid, but looked dry on the inside. Upon closer inspection, Red saw that it was filled with a fine red dust that floated freely in the inside of its container, somehow defying gravity. He was taken aback when he realized what it was.
    “Flashdust?”  
    “Mmhmm. Use it during the field test if you need it. It’s every fire user’s dream, isn’t it?” He noted that she didn’t use the term ‘elementalist,’ on purpose.  
    “How’d you get it?” he asked.  
    “Beat up a second year and took his coin.”  
    He looked at her in horror, unable to tell whether she was joking or not. Unlike Butz, she was fully capable of doing some of the things she sarcastically mentioned.
    “Relax, I’m kidding,” she smiled after a minute.  
    “Well… it sounds like something you’d do…” Red replied.  
    “You’ll love the qualifiers you know, when we go. They let me go last year to attend as an observer. They split the races up into groups, and its not just regular sparring. You have to pass different obstacles, and the arenas themselves, well, let’s just say they’re massive. And completely different from the plain ones we’ve been fighting at in Academy. And you have to see all the different races fight, some of them are really unique. The gemini factions especially, they’re a cut above the rest.” Raven marveled.    
    “I wanted to tell you something by the way,” Red began awkwardly