On his first day in Rosebury, the academy's newest Initiate dropped his bags unceremoniously on his bed before flipping his salmon-colored hood over his head and promptly walking out the door. Canyon clutched his keychain with a death grip; there were no actual keys on the metal carabiner, he was instead methodically fumbling with a tiny, cheaply-made dreamcatcher looped around it. The trinket was a gift from his mother, before he departed from her and all that he had known, with 2-and-a-half suitcases and a pocket full of polaroids from his home in the city. On the final stretch of his journey, he had paged through the stack of photos, and felt himself become overwhelmed by Nana Kelly's face and the deep wrinkles that etched her 78 year old face. He had sniffled pitifully, wiping his tears on the inside of his hoodie.
Now, the holy land he was hunting for was only a few paces away. He read the sign from afar, identifying the aptly-branded pet shop as being called "Tails n' Scales," and felt his feet began to gaze the pavement with a little more spring. He shoved the keychain into his hoodie pocket, hiked up his jeans until the rips sat comfortable at his knees once more, and slid through the door.
As he looked around, the pet store was disappointingly normal. He had expected a little more spectacle from a town full of odd folks with "gifts." It wasn't normal enough, however, to take away the social anxiety that had taken root in his stomach since stepping onto Beata's campus. Every now and again, he suddenly felt a rush of bitterness at his state of affairs. His mother's entire side was, as these folks called it, "blanks." That meant that his gift had come from the man who made up about half of Canyon's genes... not that any of them would have known. He was gone the moment the word "baby" left his mother's lips. Perhaps if he hadn't had that screaming match with her, another round of Teenage Son versus Overworked Mother, he would have never discovered the strange new power floating inside him, and he could have lived his life perfectly normally. Oh, well. He had planned to leave the city for college anyway. If he really hated Beata Academy, he supposed, he would graduate in a few years and block the numbers of every classmate who he had befriended in the process.
At least this pet shop was nice. Canyon nearly floated, ghostly and purposeful, to a row of glass and acrylic tanks. They were all decorated with lovely green plants, sticks, and substrate. The boy shifted to squatting on his knees as he nearly pressed his nose to the glass of one enclosure. He read the title. Ball Python. As he looked closer, brown eyes scanning the floor of the display, he caught a glimpse of yellow scales and recognized the banana morph. It wasn't his favorite kind of snake (and even if it was, Canyon didn't have the money, time, or permanent dorm for a snake just this second), but he was content to swing his arms out behind him, take a cross-legged seat by the animal's enclosure, and watch it for a while.
The sound of footsteps alerted him to another's presence, someone passing by the isle he was sitting in. He waved at the man, trying to remember how to talk to others. It felt like he hadn't opened his mouth for a real conversation in three days. "H-hey!" he half-shouted. "I haven't had a snake since my grandma's died. Do you know anything about them? I want to get one when I get put in one of the House dorms, but I don't really know how big the tank should be. I... wait, do you work here?" Canyon cringed, a nervous laugh bubbling up. "Sorry, that should have been my first question, right?"
