There is an odd continuance to emotion that lingers on while its triggers have otherwise been negated, as if a consciousness that must drag along its underlying id. This is what Mia had felt for these past weeks, for she felt her Revenant weak, and herself still unlike other students. In a sense, a Revenant is an appearance, where external weakness is taken to suggest internal ugliness.

  After class the next afternoon, she went home to Marisa, trained with her in Marisa’s mentor room reserved in the second-year building, then had an hour at home before someone knocked at their door.

  Mia answered the door: it was Rochelle, a first-year student. She was a bald black butch, a phrase she was usually careful not to mispronounce. Mia had not spoken with her much; nor anyone in her class; but Rochelle seemed sociable and humorous. Over the years she would learn that Rochelle had the unerring ability to completely & utterly identify the social ecosystem of any room she entered.

  "Hey Mia. Don't know if you remember my name, but I'm Rochelle - I'm in your class, one with the tail and claws. Um, I was wanting to go out somewhere with somebody and figured I didn't want to go out alone, you know?"

  "Where are you going out to?"

  "Stone Butch Brews." Rochelle rubbed the back of her neck.

  Marisa perked up from the couch. "Oh, I love that place! Mia, I dunno if you're club lesbian or bookstore lesbian, but it's not like a normal club. It's quieter. Women-only."

  Rochelle nodded. "And whichever side of nonbinary gets to count as women."

  "A lot of students go there. One time they tried to open a men-only version of it, but it closed down the first month because-"

  "A rogue host bombed it." Mia turned her head and nodded. "I remember we had a fan contest to identify who it was, then forwarded our tips to Urasaria. They gave us pictures of his home right after they reduced it to a smoking crater." She smiled at the memory.

  Marisa blinked. "Oh. I thought it was because male students aren't gay?"

  "Well, straight male homoeroticism should have given them a year before bankruptcy."

  "There's entire industries built around giving straight men a safe outlet to be homosexual." agreed Rochelle.

  "We’ll go together." said Marisa. "First-years aren't allowed to leave campus without their mentor."

  Off they went to this favored hangout of female students, local beer garden Stone Butch Brews, a business model almost certainly illegal in that no men were allowed and no men were hired. It had been trashed a few years ago as the result of one's student relationship crumbling, and the ensuing insults thrown between past girlfriend and the next, but many students pitched in to reconstruct the building. There were several photos along the wall of the civilian owner with various female Urasaria student-presidents; whether these had ever gone beyond simple flattery was something speculated upon but never certain.

  At another table outside, Mia observed a first-year student named Kirihara, who was an Indian woman with rough brown hair. Her lack of grace had often led her to acts that disgusted others, but were important in that she had made them memorable to others regardless of glare. She was sat aside a woman who was eating pasta with her hands.

  The woman stuffed another bite in her mouth, then through it told Kirihara: "Oh, fuck you, you freak. The only thing you're seeing there is your own stupidity and paranoia. You just wanna blame me for shit because you never wanna take responsibility, is that it?"

  "You think I just go around blaming everyone else?" said Kirihara. "Because I know sure as shit I'm not just seeing things when it comes to you, so why you gotta think it's my fault, huh? Blame Kirihara for everything? Fuck, I heard that shit all the time back in Arizona."

  "Yeah, I wonder why, you dumb creep."

  "You sure weren't calling me that last night when I came to visit, though, eh? As soon as you want something, that's when you don't have an attitude."

  "Yeah, maybe I'm just as stupid as you are for being drawn to some brute like you. That's not love, though, that's lust. I already know I don't wanna love you, so I'll just settle for lust."

  "Well, I still like you. I'd like you more if you knew to shut up more."

  "Yeah, well, that makes two of us." she said. "…you really mean that, though?"

  "Of course I mean that."

  In all memories Mia held of Kirihara, this was the only moment she could remember of her being possessed by anything that could be termed a romanticism; Mia would later say that the most unfortunate fact about Kirihara is that Mia never had the opportunity to make her mother apologize for giving birth to her. She did not want to further take part in this, and so did not look longer at the two. "Well, those two seem unpleasant."

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  "Every week you see two lesbians independently reinventing heterosexuality." said Rochelle. "That's Kirihara, though. She's the type of person who wants everyone to know how disgusting she is. Some prize she's got with her, too."

  "That isn't another student, is it? With her?"

  "Nah, you can tell by the reaction times. Are you a natal host?"

  "Yes, er- I am. I should have guessed."

  "It's cool. My sisters are all civilians, so I have a knack for picking up on it."

  "They must be jealous."

  "Oh, they are. But I think it’s a good thing they’re civilians, really. Don’t get me wrong, being a civilian is pretty scary, but you’ve got punishments and regulations that mostly keep you in line. The average person’ll get a mediocre job in a mediocre marriage with a house they’ll spend their whole life paying off, but it’s essentially safe. Urasaria, though… you've got no structure. Just a life you can truly screw up or the ability to really screw up everyone else's."

  "Well, I agree freedom isn’t always the best thing for someone. But I’d still always rather have control than not."

  "Because you’re smart." Rochelle winked. "I love my sisters, but they aren’t. And with somebody like Kirihara, well… something's rough in the head with her."

  "I can agree with that assessment based on the few brief looks we’ve given her."

  "That’s right." Rochelle grinned. "I just like observing people. Then I get in trouble because I can’t keep my mouth shut. I’d be terrible as a celebrity or politician." She turned fully to Mia. "But, you didn’t say too much in class today or yesterday, so maybe you’re observing, too."

  "Oh, I'm just still taking a bit of time to… adjust. Urasaria's been quite a rupture from my life before."

  "Host highschool but now you're finally allowed to kill, yeah. Well, that's our purpose as hosts, so it's all good. I never knew hosthood ran in your family, though. I'm sure you know people brought it up your first day."

  Mia was slightly irked. "Inherited from my father, yes. I respect him. I didn’t join out of some sort of guilt or anything like that, if that’s what you’re about to ask. I actually despise a lot of rogue hosts even more because of what he did. They act selfishly when he was selfless."

  "Sorry, I didn’t intend to… come off like I was questioning your loyalty or anything. Hey, with me, I don’t even care about unregistered hosts unless they hurt people. Individual discretion is one thing that separates students and cops."

  "Well, I care about unregistered hosts, regardless. They should choose Urasaria. Registering Revenants is about the possibility of harm, not individual judgments. And especially if someone is lucky enough to be born a host, then I’d still consider it an act of harm by laziness if they won’t use it to help other people. Again, unlike my father."

  Rochelle thought to say that it was convenient his decision had freed Mia the difficulty of making any different distinction, but given what she was trying to do with and/or to Mia, did not. "I think it’s good you aren’t tempted to scorn him for other people's approval. People confuse vengeful for morally right, especially when it comes to crime, or cutting out such-and-such or so-and-so, but that shit’s for advice columns, not reality."

  Mia nodded. Again she heard a noise from Kirihara & the woman she was with, which resembled some sort of alien screech. There seemed something primordial that had arisen in the birth of that thing known as Kirihara Kishor, that made no story about her unbelievable; that she had once been seen finding a cockroach in her glass and eating it merely to disgust someone else, or her arythmatic juking to some invisible music that filled her head. Naturally, there were the stories of possible drug addiction or psychopathy abound in her. But once she had swirled herself out of society to where the tides of perception would continue independently to press her outward, she had neither the social acumen or desire to crash inward again.

  Mia looked over the civilian woman, and thought it odd to see the most perverse and ostensibly ruined version of her former fantasies reflected back at her. She tried to calm herself and be more amicable; she had allowed her anger to boil out too much. "Don’t students not normally date civilians?"

  "Oh, now that’s something I’d barely want to recognize as a date or a relationship." They both laughed. "That’s just asking for a fight a day and maybe something worse, especially with her being a civilian. Look at the way she nudges Kirihara for attention after she’s just insulted her. She’s humiliating herself and doesn’t know what she wants."

  "Perhaps she does know what she wants. She wants that sort of fight. She might not realize intense love is different than just intense emotions. It’s very sad, but not very uncommon."

  Rochelle smiled at her, as did Mia to her. "You don't say that from experience, I hope."

  "No, not at all. I've never seriously dated anyone."

  "That's what I like to hear."

  Mia picked up on that Rochelle was making an attempt at her, yet there was something forceful and intense to Rochelle's personality, that combined with her current focus on Aimee acted to shunt out most feelings of attraction. Though Rochelle had called her intelligent, she felt still odd about it, as if Rochelle would be better off with someone who had less of a personality to fill, someone who could better latch onto the force of her's.

  The luck of love is such that it can be random whether two love or dislike each other based wholly on the creation their minds are forced to make of each other, a silhouette assumed by whichever traits one chooses to unveil first.

  Marisa brought them back their drinks, chiming: "Nothing alcoholic for you two."

  "I figured that. We're not 21." muttered Mia.

  "Oh no, that doesn't matter, you're legally immune anyways. I'm just like, not gonna let you drink until you're at a more mature age like... 19. Don't Revenant drunk."

  Mia sighed and drank her soda. "Do you think it'll take me an entire year? I've always felt mature for my age."

  "Still too young for us to be allowed to have own personal nuclear weapons, in this butch's opinion, but hey, who am I to argue with the state?" Rochelle shrugged. "Then again, they probably couldn't convince people in their 30s to do what we do."

  "I dunno, but like, you should stick to murder before anything else. I mean, we're like, biologically wired to love killing and hurting enemy hosts."

  Mia nodded, and she created in her recall that she had sighed after her first kill, not a sigh of exasperation but rather that akin to post-orgasm. And for another hour as she sat with Marisa and Rochelle, two natal hosts, did she feel further stamped into her mind that beckon to bloodshed, an ode to violence and the desire to avatarize herself; to be bigger did not mean she needed to be morally better, rather that it could be she of callused mien that was able to prevent the boring of wounds by others; or at least, this was how it was to Mia's mind. She felt adrift in that amusing odyssey against rationality that all sometimes enjoy, at least until the piling of life restrains such impulses in ourselves; yet to be a host is to have no such anchors.