[i]You're fine. Everything's fine. Just breathe.[/i]

Even as Amelie repeated the mantra to herself, she knew it was working just as well as usual—which was to say, not at all. She was perched on the soft leaf cover within Primas' park grounds, wrapped in the soft white feathers of a dove. The disadvantage of smaller forms, though, was one of the deeper biological changes—her heartbeat was intrinsically faster. Not  exactly helpful when trying to calm down.

The young Korean woman turned her focus inwards, yellow birds eyes sliding closed and feathers settling. She concentrated on her heartbeat, breathing in deeply and letting it out twice as slowly. She'd only had scant months to adjust to being in the outside world, so she had to stick to the most basic tactics to calm down. From a few hundred beats per minute, her pulse slowly calmed from three hundred, to two hundred, to finally a calm one hundred bpm.

Amelie opened her eyes, wings having melted into arms, feathers flattening into smooth human skin. For not the first time, she was infinitely grateful that her clothes seemed to shift with her whenever she changed forms. Standing, she dusted herself off and lifted the bag she'd been using as a nest only minutes earlier across her shoulder. She couldn't hide anymore. Sooner or later, either she'd walk into Primas herself, or they'd drag her in, she was sure of it. Might as well enter on her own two feet. She just tried to empty her brain of anything but the map she'd tried to memorize, kept her head down, and walked forward. Of course, she wasn't counting on the common room being full when she got there.

"Oh," she squeaked out, surprised and embarrassed that she'd been surprised. The first thing she'd noticed was the several people standing around the room; the second was that everyone was so [i]tall.[/i] She herself came in just under five feet; if she was going to be dwarfed everywhere she went, things were going to be even more difficult. The others seemed to be introducing themselves; Amelie herself slid to the back, hanging around one of the couches and clutching her bag. If someone asked, she'd give her name, but she wasn't going to talk about her powers with strangers.