Chapter 2

* * *‘Why’s he looking at me like that?’Dojin was feeling a little anxious over Maru’s gaze. As a matter of fact, having his classmate stare at him like that was only making him feel sorrier.‘Is he mad about having it be taken away?’ Maru turned away. But the boy’s face was a little weird. Maru started rubbing his eyes as if he had seen something.‘Did something get in his eyes?’ he wondered. Dojin was a little confused. Well, whatever. He needed to look back at the teacher. He didn’t want to get scolded over his lack of attention.

* * *‘What the heck is that?’Maru, for a second, saw ‘that’ above Dojin’s face. He blinked a few times thinking that he was just imagining things. But it just didn’t go away.‘A word bubble?’A pink bubble was floating above Dojin’s head. Almost like he was in a comic book. He was reminded of something the woman had said. Something about getting a few abilities.‘Could that be… Inner thoughts?’ he wondered. Since Maru had already experienced something out of this world, he was not so ignorant to pass something like that off as a mere hallucination. He would have passed the word bubble off as a figment of his imagination back in the day, but things were different now. Maru looked at Dojin again. But the word bubble wasn’t there anymore.‘Does it have some sort of a requirement?’The bubble disappeared in an instant. If it really did allow him to read minds…“We’re only doing morning classes today, so don’t you dare fall asleep. Let’s have a decent one year together, you hear?” the teacher said.“Yess.” The replies from the class were getting a little lazier now.The teacher exited the classroom clicking his tongue. Of course, he took the MP3 with him.“I’m really sorry. I was just going to listen to it for a second.” Dojin immediately gave his apologies.He seemed to be fairly sensitive to stuff like this. He was a guy who knew to be sorry. That made Maru pretty happy, honestly. He hadn’t seen many people like that in his 45 years.