Constantine Vance roamed the aisles of the grocery store, scanning the shelves for something he'd actually eat. His eyes passed over green boxes of spaghetti, red boxes of shell pasta, mutli-colored boxes with bright labels that were full of something he wouldn't buy if you paid him to. But, depsite the open layout of the shelves, he couldn't find what he needed.

Constantine sighed and shifted the weight of the plastic basket he was holding into the crook of his elbow. He walked the length of aisle, and was almost out of it when something caught his eye--the pasta he had been searching for. He grabbed the last box of tri-color rotini off the shelf it stood on and walked into the main part of the store.

There were hardly any students here, and most of the ones that were tended to be juniors or seniors, and the rare sophomore. Most freshman didn't have enough money to go grocery shopping, fewer of them knew how to cook, and even less of them had the desire to make their own food when they could just eat in the school's cafeteria. There certainly wasn't an over-abundance of freshman boys, Constantine knew, planning to make pasta for dinner.

One of the few skills Constantine's mother had brought to the family--other than her skill to cheat on her husband with her married boss, therefore acquiring subtle pay raises over time--was an ability to cook. Constantine remembered wanting to learn as a child, and finding later that he already had some skill. He had fostered it over time, and it had come in handy when his mother, the secretary of a business, began to be given later and later hours, "because the boss needs me to work late."

So every once in a while, Constantine pocketed some of the money from his seven-dollar-an-hour job, picked a random recipe from a cookbook he had found in the school's library, and made dinner for himself, the others in his dorm, and anyone else around who happened to want something to eat. It was an odd hobby for a fifteen-year-old boy, he knew, but he couldn't help it--he just liked to cook.

Ash's stomach was howling like mad and the empty pit which was now her stomach had been aching for days. Still she refused to eat, out of home sickness and the guilt of surviving the fire that had destroyed the only place she liked to see as home. Just looking at food often made her feel nauseous. But when she passed by the grocery store her stomach took over and lead her inside. She clutched her stomach and not wanting anyone to see her face twisted in pain she used her power to turn invisible.

Avoiding the crowd of people attempting to avoid each other was a lot harder then she'd have guessed. Still she made it to a rather deserted aisle and began searching for food. She felt something like a rat searching for crumbs. She didn't know what she was looking for or what she wanted so when she hit the junk food section she reached out and plucked a giant bag of chips opening it right there and began to devour it.

How unusual it must looked to anyone passing by. A giant floating bag getting eaten by someone unseen. It put the people passing on edge. And Ashley wouldn't have even noticed if it weren't for the feeling of being watched. completely forgetting that she was invisible she growled made a face and collected another bag of chips before heading toward some other aisle. Bumping into people of course was inevitable.

Constantine supposed it was a bad thing that he didn't find the floating potato chips odd. He had, perhaps, become numb to things like this, which "normal" people would have hailed as phenomena, even miracles. Instead, he was just watching mildly, barely even flinching when the bag of chips growled at him. He simply raised a hand to his head and ran it through his hair, a habit of his, and raised an eyebrow lazily.

"So... invisibility? That must make it easy to steal things... things like potato chips," he said, gesturing towards the invisible someone's current snack. If Constantine had never seen invsibility in action, he might have been slightly disconcerted, watching the chips go from the bag, perfectly visible, and then disappear abruptly in midair with a crunch.

Reminiscing for a moment, Constantine looked back on his rather brief stay at Nimbus. One of his friends, another freshman called Greg, had been very fond of turning himself invisible while he ate, partly to freak out (or perhaps woo) the girls who sat nearby. So Constantine had seen his fair share of foods disappearing down invisible throats, pork being chomped by invisible teeth.

"You're attracting attention," he told the invisible human (it was impossible to tell yet whether it was male or female, and Constantine still liked to think of it as disembodied chewing). "The people here aren't exactly knowledgeable of our way of life." This was true, and Constantine didn't want to find out what would happen if someone called the police on an invisible chip burglar. Likely it would result in a ransacking of Aura Academy, and mass kidnapping to scientific facilities. Constantine had had enough relocation for one month.