06.02: New Life, New Responsibilities

DANNY ADENIRAN
Danny was enjoying life for the first time in… a very long time. Mutant High was an amazing place, although they were discouraged from calling it that. He still missed his mom even though she hated him and said he was an infidel abomination, she blamed the West for whatever had caused mutants. He got homesick now and again but he had been here a week now and it was becoming normal.
Normal. He would never have seen himself as a kid that would have gone to a posh boarding school. As if having lessons five days a week, and on saturday mornings was normal anyway. That is what his individual curriculum required. Classes were small so as soon as you started slacking off the teacher was there to find out what the problem was. And he was going to have to learn two foreign languages.
Danny had gone out running, he knew his health was good but living rough for as long as he had had left him with some nutritional deficiencies. He had seen the school dietician for that one, he had an eating plan, aka a diet, and a couple of supplements he had to take for a while.
Two students he had met had told him things about the school. Jamie and Noah were from opposite ends of the social spectrum, Jamie was from a titled British family and Noah had lived on the streets of South Africa for years since his family broke up disastrously. They both went out on what was called First Contacts, like Bobby Drake and Sam Guthrie had done when they had found him and Aurora. Danny wanted in on that. Danny was a grey shirt, being a new arrival, while they both had coloured shirts that denoted where they were in their training and experience. He knew he had a lot of training to do so he was keeping himself fit, he had done two circuits of the island and his watch showed him his time had really improved since the beginning of the week.
As he approached the mansion he started to wind down and as he jogged gently towards the front doors he saw a face he had not seen before.
“Hi,” he said brightly, “I’m Danny.”