Mariko was looking up at the sky when she was struck. It was blue. Not Mariko's favorite colour for a sky. The skies of her youth were greyish things, dense with cloud and dancing with sleet and lightning, a sky that put on a [i]show.[/i] Blue kept feeling weird on her eyes, like she was trapped under the gods' soup bowl. The plastic bags she'd been carrying with her ached on her fingers, threatening to cut them apart like so much cheese wire. And someone had just run into her stomach. Head first. It wasn't that big of an impact, but it pushed her juuuust far enough for her to lose her balance, which was all took to leave her sitting down on the pavement with a sharp pain dans sa derriere. 

"Oww..." She grumbled, letting go of her plastic Aura Mart bags in order to massage that tender area. "I think i might've broken my coccyx...." She looked up, at the girl she'd just bumped into, Even from her reduced height, the girl looked small, even borderline dwarf-sized. A local girl? Or one from school? She doubted the girl was old enough to be in her class with all that pinkness, maybe a first-year? In either case, better not to joke about breaking bones. She'd already been in one embarrassingly painful misunderstanding about disabilities this week, no need for someone to go around thinking she had early onset osteoporosis as well.

The girl was frantically waving at her. No, wait. There was a pattern to it. Was it sign? Mariko had heard about it, but had never bothered to learn. Her eyes would go kaput far earlier then her ears would, anyway. And the whole exercise struck her as needlessly invasive and energetic, in any case. She smiled, in what she hopes was an apologetic manner and brushed a few stray strands of dirty blonde hair out of her face. The girl stopped windmilling her arms about, reached into a bag, pulling out a block of notes with a plastic spiral holding them together, wrote something down, and handed it to her.

[b]" I'm so sorry,"[/b]

it said, in the unnaturally neat handwriting of those with steady hands.

[b]"Are you ok?"[/b]

So, what, deaf-mute? That was probably not true. Mariko had seen Zorro as a kid once (Both the NHK version and the 1957 series, if you care about that sort of thing) , and what she'd see- uh, experienced at Yamaku had only reinforced the idea that most of the deaf weren't mute; like Zorro's sidekick Bernardo, or that one wierd kid in third year with absolutely no sense of balance or hearing because of some inner ear trouble yet still spoke passable Japanese, if he wanted to. Or that one techy boy in Mariko's year who had a text-to-speech program on his phone. So, probably mute, if anything, and shoved into the deaf classes in first year because it was easier She opened her mouth and responded "Yeah, I'm okay, thanks for asking" before putting a hand on the wall, lifting herself upright and smoothing out her skirt. "Might i ask why you bumped into me, or where you were even going in such a hurry?"