[color=007fff][center][h3]Abel Fulgurate – Cafeteria[/h3][/center][/color]

By the time his teammate discovered and made her way to his side, half of Abel's handcrafted bacon, egg, and biscuit sandwich was gone, and only the core remained of one of his two pieces of fruit.  A cup of coffee, mixed with some milk and sugar, sat beside a cup of juice on his tray.  Having spotted her approaching, he made no motion but to put down his food so as to not let it get in the way of conversation.  He brought a napkin to his mouth, just in case, while Sapphire got herself situated.  “Good morning,” he replied to her greeting.  She didn't seem too pleased to be her, but her presence was pleasant enough.  Hanging around SASG's team leader never bothered Abel—in fact, he felt it appropriate that two of the less talkative hunters-in-training at Beacon should be together.  With that out of the way, he gingerly picked up his remaining pear to bite in.  Before he could do so, his partner's voice came again, for which he paused in his tracks.  Immediately his mind shot to his proposed nature excursion with Krysanthe, but blabbing about it up front struck the guardian as the wrong thing to do.  He couldn't quite place why he felt that way -he wasn't doing anything wrong, after all- but all the same he thought it better to be vague with his reply.

Thinking to himself that he could easily blame early-morning grogginess for his lackluster response time, Abel told Sapphire, “I was thinking of heading out into the Emerald Forest.  You know, for some fresh air.  Explore the woods and all.  Um, after that...”  He groaned inwardly as he recalled a stroke of misfortune that had been hanging sneakily over his head like a little stormcloud waiting to burst.  “I gotta study for the English quiz on Monday.  It's all rhetoric, but I'm just awful at all that wordplay stuff.”  At this point, Abel felt on a roll.  Several sentences had been completed without a major flub.  Feeling brave, he performed a stiff [i]give me a break[/i] gesture and continued, “I mean, why do we even have English and Math and stuff at Beacon?  Won't help us kill anything or keep ourselves from gettin' killed.  You...uh, you get what I'm saying?”  Abel went ahead and took a large bite out of his pear in order to both provide valuable nourishment and to signal the end of his part of the conversation.  Basically, he was home free at this point.  Sapphire could drum up a response, or shrug her shoulders and say nothing, but the weight of the interaction lay on her now.  Any awkwardness would be totally her fault; to be frank, though, Abel was torn between feeling bad about putting his partner into the spotlight and feeling pleased with how well he'd articulated himself prior to coffee.  [i]Speaking of which.[/i]  Following his nugget of fruit, the guardian busied himself with his coffee cup.