Soleil's eyes snapped open.
Rather than a train, he was back in his now all too familiar dorm room, the small space far cozier than a train car could hope to be. Although he was still wondering just what that even was. A dream? A premonition? Really at this point in his life those kinds of things wouldn't be all that unexpected.
But, for now he felt he could at least put those thoughts to the back of his mind. For now, he could let things be normal and just focus on getting ready for school as usual.
Well… "usual" for the last year or so anyway.
At current, Soleil was a student at a high school called Senba Academy, one of several high schools located within the "Academy City" that was part of the sprawling Far Eastern city of Nagazora. Covering schooling from pre-k all the way to the collegiate level, the Nagazora Academy City, or simply NAC, was one of the city's most standout features, housing dozens of schools and just as many academic research facilities on its massive campus, which housed close to 100,000 residents, most of them making up the student body of the schools.
Nagazora was a city that prided itself on excellence in all ways. The sprawling, technological metropolis boasted even more business and research institutes than it did schools in the Academy City, bringing in the best and brightest in both economics and science to reside within its sprawl. As such, many of the students were resultingly related to these companies in one way or another, be it family who were in high places or who merely got the benefits from being employed by some of them.
Soleil was not one of those students as it happened.
Having transferred into Senba Academy during his first year in high school for some particular reasons, Soleil had been an immediate outlier for more reasons than his status as a foreigner. Most people in the Academy City had connections. And as far as most of his peers and teachers knew, Soleil was some student who had drifted in from North America one day without much else to be said about it.
He wasn't in any clubs, and he'd never specified any intent for which college he'd be moving into on graduating, making him a bit of a campus phantom, only showing up for his mandatory classes before almost vanishing from sight to run off to the main city.
And frankly, he preferred it that way. Because as far as Soleil was aware, he was only in Nagazora because of a whim to begin with.
The words of the one who'd gone and sent him here still stuck in his head even a bit over a year later. And he couldn't help but find them a bit annoying at this point.
"Call it a gut feeling. I've just got a sense that you being there will result in… something. I'm sure it'll make sense… eventually."
Just recalling it made Soleil grumble out some curses as he carried on through his usual morning routine. Running his hands through his hair to loosen it from any tangles the night may have caused, cleaning off his face and such, tossing on his uniform, the usual things.
By the time he was trotting out of his room and leaving the dorm, it was amid the morning bustle of the countless other students departing from the other dorms and onto the main roads leading to the different schools they all attended, meaning it was a sea of different uniform styles the entire way.
From the dorm district of the campus, it would take one right out into a recreational zone. End to end it was filled with restaurants and shops for the students to pass the time at or take care of their needs. Just about everything from school supplies to the latest in game consoles could be bought within the little entertainment spot. Or, if one were as keen on being as quick yet unnoticeable as they could, they could slip into one of the several convenience stops that marked the different segments of the zone.
And such a thing was part of Soleil's usual routine. Ducking into the first convenience store out of the dorm block, grabbing something for breakfast—usually some breakfast styled meat buns—and then making a quick escape to head for the tram station that would take him to the main academy district.
All along the way, the buildings flashed with lights from holo-signs and adverts, streets maintained by civil-care robots flitting about through the crowds of students milling about the pathways. Part of the academy city's design was also the elimination of car-focused roads and paths, using suspended hover-trams to ferry people to parts of the campus that were too distant to reach in a ten-minute walk. This both meant that students and staff were in a much safer place to travel through, but also minimize clutter by allowing the campus to focus its infrastructure on the necessary buildings for it to be run properly and efficiently.
Truly a marvel of modern technology and innovation… so the tag line of the Academy City went.
As Soleil was making his way to boarding the tram, for a moment as it took off, rather than simply drown out the noise around him via his headphones, he at least took a moment as the packed car began to thrum with the sounds of a broadcast. Normal morning news.
[Today's forecast shows that the weather in Nagazora will be pleasant throughout the week. I'm sure those in the Academy City are welcoming this cool weather lately after the scorcher than was last month, wouldn't you say?]
[Oh I'm sure that citywide, this weather is a good sign for everyone. In local news, the investigation into the supposed embezzlement of ME Corporation funds by former CEO Raiden Ryoma is ongoing. To bring our listeners up to speed, just last month—]
Soleil elected to clap his headphones into place the moment the news turned to that. He wasn't one for morning drama… and had heard plenty of it at school anyway, for plenty of reasons and things happened to be. It wasn't anything he didn't know anyway.
But, as he was finishing up his breakfast, he did notice something in the crowd. A swish of dark hair, moving to another part of the train as eyes and mutters shifted their focus. And with it, perhaps unnoticed by almost everyone else, a faint spark of violet following that swish of black.