Lena looked up at the sign at the entrance to the high school. Its letter were printed boldly, its metal frame hold it in place against the front of the building: West Academy of California.
Well at least I’m going to an academy instead a regular high school, Kiri thought.
That morning she had locked herself in the bathroom while Alexander and Magdelina tried to convince her to go to school and experience real teen life. She had told them that she had no teen life at all but instead had ended up in a government official base for supernatural crap. She had been trained from five years of age about tracking down criminals and trained for battle to fight the evil force called the Covenant. She was born in a government laboratory, created by two married, rich and famous scientists, Alexander and Magdelina. She was created with reflexes, strength, agility, and amazing hearing, eyesight and could speak all languages around the world especially dead languages such as Latin, Egyptian, and Hebrew. Alexander and Magdelina said they would come in handy when she would have a mission to go and find some lost treasure. There would be ancient dead languages she would have to uncover.
Kiri walked up the steps and opened the door. She whistled. The academy was at least 72 feet high and 5o feet wide. Famous paintings hung the walls narrowing down the halls that led to other classrooms. The floor was marble and so were the walls. There was a studio with cd’s and a recorder to record singing and other music. She looked up and saw paintings and carvings of beautiful angels and ballerinas everywhere.
This must at least have been 5 billion dollars worth of money, Kiri calculated in her mind.
She started walking to the admissions office, her blue navy boots clicking on the marble floor. Magdelina said she had to wear a plaid skirt and a blouse with a short-sleeved sweater over it. She decided to cave in and style her hair that matches her out fit in a cute way. She had her hair in pigtails with gold bells laced along with red ribbons holding back her beautiful black hair.
She entered the admissions office and spoke with the secretary. The secretary gave her the schedule for her classes, locker number, gym locker number, and lunch number to access lunch. Lena learned that her teacher was Miss Samuels. She was told that her homeroom number was 1783 and to go and tell her teachers that she needed the materials for all her classes. She started walking toward her homeroom since it was still early in the morning and she suspected that it was still homeroom period. Her boots clicking on the marble floor was the only sound that was heard other than the air conditioning running. It was hot out but not really hot. It was probably a little cooler than it usually was in the summer, especially when it was only July. She wasn’t really nervous at all because she’d been watching every show and every magazine a regular teenage girl would watch and read. She knew about fashion, laws and boundaries of being a girl, and she also knew how to talk when she was talking about boys, and other stuff that seemed to be what normal teenage girls talk about.
She wasn’t all that much into girl stuff especially when she could take a vacation in an uncharted island instead. She loved to rough it out in the wilderness. Sometimes she would be gone on an unknown island for days or weeks without out Alexander and Magdelina knowing or worrying. Magdelina was her psychologist and said parents shouldn’t suppress their children’s creativity and adventure so much and let them have all the fun they can get. Alexander was her trainer and he also agreed that being adventurous is great for both the body and the mind. It is kind of funny since they don’t have a normal child to teach this to.
When she reached her homeroom number, she took a deep breath and opened the door. As she entered everybody in the classroom turned and looked at her. The teacher stopped dead in her speech and turned toward her as well.
“Well, Miss Motosuwa, how nice of you to join us so early” Said Miss Samuels, “Everyone, this is Kiri Motosuwa and she’ll be attending W.A.C. for now on.”
Everyone looked at her like she was some goddess or something and practically every guy had his mouth dropping to the floor. Miss Samuels showed her where she would be sitting and as she sat down everyone greeted her like they wanted to be her friend.
Wow, everybody is so friendly here. I wander if I would really fit here, amazed Kiri as she shook everyone’s hand and greeted them just the same way as they greeted her.

After attendance, the ring for the end of homeroom period rang and everybody hustled out to get to their class on time. She looked at her schedule and saw that she had art for first period. She hustled to her classroom where she sat down next to a girl with funky, punk clothes and her hair in a bun with different colors of dye in her hair. She turned and looked at Lena and smiled.
“Hi, I’m Suzette” she said in a southern accent.
“Hi, I’m Kiri” Kiri said friendly.
“I like that name. It suits you very well” Suzette said and got out her sketchbook as the teacher came in.
The teacher had a Green-day shirt on and a pair of worn out blue jeans. He looked to be about in his late twenties and he had black hair and a single earring in his left ear. His skin was dark, looked to be about Mexican and his face was the most beautiful face that you would have ever laid your eyes on. As he came over to stand in front of the white board, he wrote his name on the board: Mr. Perez.
“For those of you senores and senoras who don’t know me, I’m Mr. Perez. You could call me Mr. P. or Tony, whatever. But no Mr. Tee-pee or Mr. Pee-pee. Just call me either, Mr. P., or Tony, whatever floats your boat” Mr. Perez said. Everyone laughed and he smiled friendly. His accent seemed to be laced with Spanish and another accent Kiri couldn’t point out.
After attendance, he had everyone pick partners who were someone that they didn’t know. Kiri and Suzette had laughed when they had picked each other automatically at the same time. Mr. Perez smiled and said, “Good. We’ll get started then.”
The class seemed to have taken the majority of the day because when Kiri looked up at the clock after finishing the final touches on the details of the sculpture, it was five minutes before the bell would ring. She looked back to gaze at her master piece and glanced at Suzette, who was sitting in a stool scrutinizing a weird green substance in her hand. It looked like Silly-Putty with its opaque, neon green color and the way it was a little runny as Suzette held it in her hands, studying it.
“This thing reminds me of Flubber,” Suzette said laughing at her attempt to catch it as most of it dripped through her fingers.
“You know, it kinda does,” Kiri said, laughing at Suzette failed attempt to save the goo from spilling on to the floor, “where did you get that?”
“From my brother. My mom confiscated it from his this morning because she found out that he was gunna smash it in some kid’s hair at lunch.”
“Where did he get it from then?”
“He said he got it from a friend but I think he got it from the dumpster or sewage or something because that is what it smells like.”
The bell rang at that moment and everybody shuffled out of the room to go to lunch. Kiri and Suzette were too busy talking about the goo that they didn’t even realize that everyone had put their sculptures away into the kiln. As Suzette and Kiri rushed to clean up their mess and put away their project, Mr. Perez appeared out of the storage room and walked over to grab all the extra clay from the tables and put it into a large, white trash bag.
“You know why your guys are my favorite students?,” Mr. Perez said with a mischevious grin on his face.
“Why?” Suzette answered, happily.
“Because you can help me clean up the mess the other lazy bums made,” he said chuckling and headed back to the storage room to put away the extra lumps of clay. Suzette’s expression turned from happy to sullen as she grumbled a lame excuse of how work ruins her appetite.
Kiri laughed and started on the mess of dried clay bits and swiped them into napkins and into the trash. She went over the storage room and opened up the broom closet to find green goo oozing out of the crack of the closet. She bent down touched the green glob. Kiri tried to grab a good sized blob to look at it more closely but the goo was too runny and thin to pick up properly. Just then Suzette walked over and saw the green goo oozing out of the closet, a disgusted expression on her face.
“Ew! What is that?,” She said as she bent next to Kiri to get a closer look.
“I don’t know. I opened the closet to get the broom and I found all of this coming out from the wall,” Kiri said as she tried again and failed to get a good size handful of the glob.
“Wait, this looks like that goo my mom took from my brother.”
“Where is it?”
Suzette hesitated, still looking with amazement as she stared at the green goo coming out from the back of the closet. Finally, she reached inside her pants and pulled out a sandwich bag with the green blob in it. When she opened the bag to get out the goo, it quivered and jumped out of the bag to join the already large puddle of goo on the floor on the closet.
“O my God! That was so freaky. And believe me, I know freaky when I see it. In fact, he lives in my house and my mom calls him my brother,” Suzette joked dryly.
“Hey, let me borrow that sandwich bag so I can take it to my mom. She is a scientist and I want to show her this. Maybe she can explain what it is,” Kiri said. She reached into the closet with both hands and scooped part of the pool of goo into her hands. Suzette opened the sandwich bag while Kiri poured it into the bag, closed it and put it into her pocket.
“You better be careful with that thing. You don’t know what it would do,” Suzette warned Lena as she walked out into the art room grabbed her book bag.
“I will. I’m sorry but I need to go home now so that I ca give this to my mother. You can come over to my house to see the results of her analysis if you desire,” Kiri said and walked out the room with Suzette following her.
“Okay, I will. And don’t worry about your homework or notes. I will get them for you and bring them when I come over after school,” Suzette said.
“Thanks a lot, you’re a life saver!,” Kiri called out gratefully as she ran out the door.
When Kiri was sure no one could hear her, she opened her compact mirror and pressed the purple button on the side of the mirror. The image of Magdelina came up on the mirrored image.
“What is your emergency Agent Kiri?,” the image said concerned.
“There is something weird going on around here, Doc. I found this in the art room closet when I was cleaning up,” Kiri took out the bag of green goo from her pocket and held it up for the Magdelina to see.
“What is it? Do you know?”
“Not exactly. All I know is that my friend Suzette’s little brother had this substance this morning. She brought it to school and showed it to me and shortly afterward I found a whole two pounds of it oozing out of the wall of the closet.”
Magdelina’s concern turned into glee.
“You made a friend?! How wonderful!,” Magdelina exclaimed, clapping her hands together, smiling.
Kiri rolled her eyes.
“That’s not the point here, Doc,” Kiri said a bit annoyed.
“Oh uhm, yes, of course,” Magdelina said trying to re-focus at the situation at hand, “Did it act in a peculiar way? Did it respond to any of its surroundings?”
“Not really, except when Suzette opened her bag of green goo and then it seemed to shiver and suddenly jumped out to join the rest of the blob of goo puddled on the floor of the closet. I think it has some kind of natural instinct to group together automatically. But when I grabbed a new handful of goo, it didn’t jump back altogether. It just let me take a piece of it and put it in the bag.”
“Ah, yes. It probably does have the natural instinct to come together just like a pack of wolves. And as for not going back together when you took some of it, the same simile applies for that fact as well. Wolves group together automatically when they are near each other. They part when they are either forced to or willing to. I’ll send Alexander to come and pick it up from you at your school.”
“Don’t bother. I’m coming home today so I can investigate this more.”
“Oh no, you’re not. We agreed that you were going to try to make friends your age and become a normal teenager for once, whether you like it or not. And besides, normal teenagers don’t skip school to investigate a weird mishap that happened in their school,” Magdelina scolded.
“I have already made a friend AND I interacted with other people my age. Now it is time for me to come home and do what I was practically born and trained to do. So whether you like it or not, I’m coming home to do my job,” Kiri said dismissively.
“I still don’t want you skipping school, even if you are more educated than the others. Just wait until Alexander hears about this…”
“Coming home!,” Kiri called out and ended the transmission.
Kiri sulked toward home as she stubbornly grumbled arguments over being a normal teenager. Oh man, was she going to hear about this again when she got home… and it’ll be much, much worse.

Part 2
The summer breeze blew through the windows of the duplex, rustling papers of research and tests and causing the wind chimes, hung at the window, to ring melodiously. The summer air had grown hotter within the last hours of the investigation. Magdelina sat her computer, staring at the samples of green goo in her microscope and then back at the test results on her computer monitor. Something seemed to be wrong but Kiri just sat on the chair next to the computer, staring at Magdelina’s expression of utter confusion.

“I don’t know why but this doesn’t make any sense. How can something this simple be so complex. Not only in behavior but also genetically,” Magdelina said.

“What? What is it? Is there something wrong?” Kiri said worried.
“This green goo contains a large sum of H2O, liquid nitrogen, and helium. Plus, it embodies millions of calciums, minerals, and genetic information.”

“And what does that mean?”

Magdelina looked at Kiri with disbelieving in her eyes.

“This green goo isn’t green goo. It’s a person. This substance is alive."