Monotony || Noelle & Karen
Noelle looked back up at the noise, the slight smile that had spread on her lips fading a little as she listened to Ms. Hansen’s remark. The suggestion of insanity felt like a kick in the chest, but she found her breath returning when the teacher followed it up with a guess at invisibility. It was close.
Bringing out her notebook, she wrote, My powers are miming. I can conjure anything, but the only catch is that even though they look real to me, they’re invisible to everyone else.
She wondered if she should bring up her muteness; every other teacher and medical staff, much to her discomfort, seemed keenly interested in Noelle’s disability, but Ms. Hansen’s bitter indifference almost felt safe. She probably didn’t care, and even if she did, probably only for the sake of curiosity, and not because she wanted to cure or experiment on Noelle.
She decided to leave it as it was and wait for Ms. Hansen to ask; if she was anything like the other teachers, it would only be a matter of time before she blurted out the question.
"Odd," Karen commented simply. She had never even heard of such a thing, and she most certainly had no idea how one would use it, seeing as the object conjured - and presumably also any effect that object could have on its surroundings - were real only to Noelle, beyond the obvious use of it for self-amusement. But, then again, her own powers were only useful when she used them creatively.
It was another few minutes before she mentioned the other question that was nagging in her periphery, since the answer to the previous one had not cleared it up at all. “Does the muteness have anything to do with that or is it unrelated?”
She did not care beyond mere curiosity, but, at the moment, it seemed to be the elephant in the room that begged to be addressed, and she was not one to be ashamed of bringing up potentially sensitive topics.
The judgment in Ms Hansen's eyes didn't go unnoticed by Noelle, who was unbothered. People thought that invisibility of the objects itself made Noelle's powers--and this little mute girl, by extension--useless, but Ms Hansen had most likely failed to notice that Noelle had been conjuring the pen the whole time, thus making the ink and the paper the only visible part of her writing. In fact, if she conjured a notebook, the writing would probably look like it was floating on air. Noelle smiled inwardly as she imagined Ms Hansen trying to look stony and unimpressed at letters she had no idea the source of, floating on the desk, but kept her composure. It was amazing, what people could fill in for themselves.
Yes, she wrote to answer Ms Hansen's question, which she wasn't surprised she was receiving. It's related but I'm not quite sure how. Not too pressed to find out, either.
She hoped that remark would stop from inviting further questions, although frankly she doubted Ms Hansen would ask. The teacher didn't even seem to like her much, far be it from caring about something this, well, insignificant. Something about Ms Hansen was different from the other teachers; something Noelle couldn't quite put her finger on. Oh, well, she thought; it wasn't her place to try and find out.
