It had been another day in his long life much like many before. Aegir was near the air strip watching the current batch of newbies shuffling out of the plane. Already he was marking them, reading their minds and delving into their memories in an effort to find something interesting.

Normally he would leave one of his nodes nearby to do this leg work but he was out of them currently, the last now a part of Ryu. A thought stirred through his mind, for he had been pleased in using one of his nodes for that. Thus, in retrospect doing his own leg work was no trouble, besides, in a few months he'd grow another.

Currently though he was with the boundries of nearby woods, his pigmentation now brown to better fit in to the branches of trees that he was in, observing the air strip as new students shuffled off the plane. He had been disappointed in many of the new batch. Not many had intresting back stories and while most were attractive that was one of his bottom most things to look for.

But it was when he focused upon Kalia that his interest was grabed completely, something that was rarely done to a telepath. He felt it, something familiar and yet something alien at the same time. He recognized the altered state of her brainwaves and knew that her thoughts had been tampered with, surpressed, but why?

He debated over the likely reasons as he reached out with his mind, trying to lift this veil but he only had enough time to tell that the arrangement of brainwaves had been done in such a way that it mirrored his mere own, begging the question that another of his kind was responsible.

But before he could pry any further Kalia and the other students were wisked away from the grounds. He knew he was too slow in moving to keep up with her and thus let her slip away.

That wasn't so long ago but he did not rush head long into things. Instead he considered means of approaching the situation thoughtfully. He knew that he would need a bit of time to work out how to get around her suppressed memories. Thus he figured that an illusion would do nicely. While it played out his multifaceted mind would work to extract the information and slate his curiousity. And while he was going through the effort he may as well have a bit of fun with her afterwards too.

Thus the rumors started like wildfire suggestions implanted into the minds of several of her classmates about a masquerade that was coming up in a week's time. They spoke about it amongst themselves though the suggestion implanted in their minds would also blank them after a week's time.

Location, the gymnasium, the time 8 PM. Her teachers too had been implanted with the suggestion in case Kalia asked them questions and some of the girls were pre-programmed with answers to her likely questions.

Aegir, it seemed, was going through a bit of an effort with this one, but he was curious after all ...