Rain struggled as discretely as possible. The ribbons were expensive in that frail, delicate kind of way and his fingers were already tearing away the tiny silk threads from each other – he had not even really thought of the fabric as being made of tiny threads, even though with close inspection it obviously was. Before his inexperienced tinkering they were more like thin bands of soft metal, with an oddly mercury-like quality on the surface. As he struggled to resolve his predicament as quickly as possible a playful voice lifted his head like a bullet sound. It didn’t take him long to identify the owner of the words, and the first thing he did was look away (never downwards!), in the most apathetic way possible, even though he knew the individual must have seen his initial surprise. He was not by any means caught in the worst position possible, but Rain noticed the differences between his own attire and the stranger’s. And he’s absolutely not complaining, grateful for the simplicity of his assigned clothing, but the connotations he concluded from the situations rose harshly. The school seemed to issue different designs to every student. Again it was the peculiar tightrope between thoughtful and disturbing. Something tells him this would become a running theme. 

 Lowering the mask, his eyes shot back towards the others’ amber ones. It was a tricky choice whether or not to believe he should stand his ground here – he needed friends before unavoidably finding enemies – but more than one of his options were, at least to the normal pedestrian, paranoid. He spoke solidly, the solidity of the ground beneath ceramic plates held by shaking hands. [b]“I don't need your help! ...If I can’t put it on then I’m probably not meant for it.”[/b] Sort of a blatant lie since, however modest the mask’s adornments were, it was practically carved on him. [b]“Do you think it’d be a problem if I didn’t wear a mask in the Masquerade?”[/b], he smirked, approaching the stranger a bit. His intuition tells him not to become enemies with this particular person, though being as he was he teased this decision eagerly. [b]“Maybe I’ll balance you out. Please inform me, what can I learn from the fact that the school deemed you worthy of becoming a seventeenth century French aristocrat?”[/b] 

He bit the inside of his cheek a bit in fear that it might really be [i]eighteenth[/i] century instead and that somehow people remember this from high school, where they’ve probably learnt a lot more information than him, but his face lit up artificially with comfortable assertiveness, holding his mask on his hip. [b]"That also happened to be in some vampire movie, apparently"[/b]. His tone was friendly in the core, in a deliberate attempt to not actually offend the other too much, but if one were really good at reading into people they would recognize this just as trying to seem cool and indie. Which it was, of course, but even the speaker doesn't know that. Rain waited for a response in anticipation.