Although it might not have appeared as though Cormac, seemingly engrossed in tinkering with his device, was not paying much attention to his surroundings, that could not have been further from the truth. With the aid of his auditory augmentations, he was subtly eavesdropping upon the conversations of dozens of different groups at once, while absent-mindedly striping the contraption of its components. Most of the students appeared to be introducing themselves to one another, sharing their names, impressions of the school and aspirations for the year to come. Most notably, however, he overheard several people detailing the specific nature of their abilities, such as a boy at the front with tactile retro-cognition and a young girl wearing a gas mask who exhaled acidic chemicals. Generally speaking, however, most of the students he observed appeared to be Class C, S or B metahumans, meaning their abilities tended to be either physical or parakinetic, rather than cognitive or metaphysical. Almost automatically, Cormac found himself devising contingency plans for countering their special talents in the event of a direct confrontation, simply to pass the time. He doubted he would ever find himself in a situation where he would actually need to use them, but he never knew...

As he was contemplating the newly acquired information, he spotted a young adult roughly his age looking towards him. He immediately took notice of several dozen insignificant details about his clothing and the way he held himself, concluding that he was probably an outgoing and sociable person. The man had pale Caucasian skin and bore long, lightly curled orange-blonde hair, falling slightly past his neck, tied in an unassuming pony tail.

“Hey gizmo, what's that ball thing you got over there?” he called out to him, using an excessively familiar tone, as though they were old friends.

[i]"Gizmo?"[/i], he asked himself internally. [i]"Really?"[/i]

After waiting a few awkward seconds to emphasise how profoundly unimpressed he was with the person's artificial familiarity, he responded. Now, a lesser, more immature person might have used the opportunity to make the obvious Freudian "ball" innuendo, but not Cormac. No, he was above such petty, childish antics. He was a person of a higher moral caliber, he aimed towards much more elevated levels of discourse and had no time for crude or disrespectful...

"Either an ioun stone, a very lame excuse to start a conversation or the world's least comfortable sex toy, take your pick."

Yeah... never mind...