A Stir

For better or worse, Orion had settled into Emi’s home. Or at least, the downstairs living room. With Emi’s parents away on a long business trip, the house was his temporary domain. Though it was a far cry from his throne of darkness, he managed to make do. The couch had become his resting place, and the strange, glowing box Emi told him was the ‘television’ was a fascinating device.

But that will have to wait for another time, because it was time for Emi to go to school.

And certainly – she was not about to leave him home unattended.

Rushing to school through the crowd of students, Emi had barely managed to make it past the front gates before Kana and Misaki surrounded her.

“Hey, girl,” Kana waved, “you didn’t return our texts yesterday. What’s going on?”

“Um… well… I… um… I fell asleep.”

“At eight PM? Isn’t that a little early?” Kana crossed her arms.

Misaki pushed up her glasses the moment she noticed him in the distance.

“Who’s that?”

The sudden shift in the atmosphere put a stop to the three girls’ private conversation, as slow murmurs through the courtyard with a sea of students turning their heads.

And there he was.

Orion walking through, his silver hair catching the morning sun, his red scarf draped like a royal mantle. But instead of his usual imposing presence, his entire demeanor screamed of discomfort. The neatly pressed school uniform clung awkwardly to his frame, as though he were a lion forced into a circus costume. His expression remained unreadable, but his clenched fists and stiff posture made his irritation clear.

Emi almost pitied him.

Almost.

The hushed whispers among the students turned into not-so-subtle gawking. Some girls exchanged glances, whispering excitedly behind their hands. Others merely stared, their fascination barely restrained.

"Oh no," Emi muttered under her breath.

Orion's sharp gaze scanned the crowd before landing on her. In three strides, he closed the distance, standing beside her with his usual commanding air.

“Tell me again why is it that I must wear this clown costume?” Orion asked.

“Um… well… it’s because our… tribal chief,” Emi explained, “he doesn’t like foreign outfits. Hates people expressing themselves. So best not to draw attention to ourselves.”

“Hmm – fine.”

“Hey, Emi,” Kana tugged on her sleeve, “aren’t you going to introduce us to this fine-looking young gentleman right here? What a specimen isn’t he? So cool and mysterious.”

Misaki stared him up and down, while also noticing all the other girls in the background diving deeper in the whispers among themselves.

“You don’t look like a normal student,” she said.

“I’m not a student.”

“Just... don’t do anything weird, okay?” Emi groaned. “Blend in. Be normal. Can you do that?"

Inside their classroom where everybody had been seated, Orion stood in front of everybody as their teacher told him to introduce himself.

“Well, where to begin? I am King of Soluna, Son of Evil, father to all that comes from the dark. Warlock of Mystical Energies, Demon Priest of the…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all heard that before,” the teacher cut him off, “go take your seat now.”

Some of the other students laughed, several of the girls found him intriguing and charming in a strange way. And the murmurs especially got much louder the moment he pulled up his seat and sat down next to Emi by the window. Everything from rumors and questions about the status of their relationship began flying immediately, with word already traveling far about how he was living in the same house as her.

“Ugh, maybe this was a mistake,” Emi facepalmed herself, more annoyed than anything else. “Maybe I should’ve just left him with the TV and locked the door.”

The silence of the classroom broke the moment lunchtime came. Kana and Misaki immediately took this opportunity to grab their seats next to Emi, placing their lunchboxes on the desk.

“Alright, spill it, girl!” Kana slammed her hands down.

“That’s right,” Misaki pushed up her glasses, “who is he and why is he living in your house?”

“Um… well… it’s a long story.”

Down by the cafeteria counter, surrounded by confused students and one very irate lunch lady, stood Orion – tossing on the counter a gold coin the size of the palm of his hand that he seemed to have yanked out of thin air.

“I offer this in exchange for your finest bread,” he declared.

A long silence filled the air as everybody around stared in awe at this alien and his unwavering stoic confidence. The lady looked at him, then down at the coin, then back at him again.

“Is this chocolate?” she asked.

“What is chocolate?”

“Is this fake?”

“It is real.”

“It smells weird.”

“Space dust.”

“ORION!” Emi hissed, jumping down the stairs having dashed through the hallways like she had just lost a puppy.

“Ah, maiden, just in time,” said Orion.

“No, no, let’s go,” she grabbed his arm and dragged him back to class, “I forgot that I shouldn’t leave you by yourself. We use yen here! Actual paper money! Not fantasy treasure!”

“It is real.”

The lunch lady, witnessing this, blurted out:

“Are you real?”

The bell rang.

Emi collapsed into her chair with a heavy sigh, wishing the day would be over. Orion, as dignified as ever, calmly pulled his chair back into position beside her.

“Can we go one period without causing a scene?” Emi muttered, half to herself.

Before Orion could say anything else, their math teacher entered, an older, stiff-looking man with a surprisingly gentle demeanor despite the stern expression.

“Alright, class,” he said as he dropped a heavy textbook onto the desk. “Pop quiz.”

Groans erupted from all corners of the room. It was already near the end of the day, so this felt almost cruel at this point.

“You there, new student,” the teacher pointed his finger, “Orion, right? Let’s see what you’ve got. Why don’t you solve this one?”

He turned to the board and chalked up a complicated equation. It wasn’t high school math. It wasn’t even college math.

It was the kind of expression that made even Misaki, the class nerd, flinch.

There was a beat of silence as all eyes turned to Orion. He stood slowly, walking toward the board with a kind of eerie calm.

And then, something shifted.

A flicker. A whisper of flame. A resonance beneath the skin of the world.

No one else noticed it. But he did.

Something stirred inside him. Something old. Something infinite.

Not his full power, not yet. But a sliver, a thought process he hadn’t felt since crossing over. The fog of this world began to part. He had expected to be depowered for much longer. But it seemed like his natural gravity could not be so easily contained.

He stared at the equation, his head tilted. Symbols unfolded in his mind – not the numbers and signs on the board, but deeper structures, primal symmetries from the bones of the cosmos itself. To everyone else, the chalk squeaked against the board. But to him, it was a symphony.

He didn’t just solve the equation. He rewrote it. Refactored it into truths that couldn’t be comprehended by anybody in the room. And when he turned around, the board behind him looked like ancient alien scripture wearing a disguise, with some Earth mathematical symbols placed inside to make it still feel real and somewhat intelligible.

“Therefore, factoring in all 26 dimensions of the string-fold, adjusting for curvature drift across compactified reality loops, and assuming the primes remain distributed along the critical axis of harmony – the solution becomes trivial.”

The other students had no instinct of calling him out for faking it, because they knew that he had legitimately solved it, and more – so much more. They just couldn’t tell how, especially how this was not fake.

“What the hell is that?” Kana whispered.

Misaki squinted, trying to process it. “I… I don’t even think that’s math anymore.”

Orion returned to his seat in silence. Emi stared at him, wide-eyed.

“You weren’t just showing off, were you?”

He said nothing. Only stared out the window, eyes a little more focused now. A little more alive.

And somewhere, deep beneath his skin, his magicks stirred.