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Morning greeted Kiyo as it usually did, with a gentle vibration from her watch and the soft trickle of water from a fountain she kept on her nightstand for background noise. With a yawn, she did a prolonged stretch, the motes of stiffness in her limbs from a sleep plagued by terrible posture fleeing away like roaches exposed to light. She opened her laptop first, to check for the email she expected to find, after using that credit card to buy food for Suki. To her surprise, there wasn't one. Well, the transaction had completed without any issues, after all. No fraud checks, no confirmation needed. Perhaps technology had advanced. The girl shrugged. The project she'd been working on was still there, and she added a couple notes of things she wanted to try that had come to her in the twilight of her mental space, between lying in bed and falling asleep. Her mind was clear today. She'd have a breakthrough soon, she could feel it.

Kiyo enjoyed her lazy mornings. A hot shower, on Kiyo's timetable, could take no less than half an hour. Checking her mogall and looking over the familiar scenery of Hibusa town provided an illusion of productivity—she was doing her morning rounds, you see. There, she would find Roche and Haruna doing their regular morning jogs. She also found, most unusually, that there were a great many more mogall left alive from yesterday than usual. Even the outer reaches of the city, which provided the most spectacular views of the sunrise, still had a few. Usually, Kaeru and the GEMs would purge as many of them as they could find. If it was a suspicious development, it was also a welcome one. Her shower ran quite a bit longer than usual today, and she emerged totally refreshed.

This did mean, however, that she would most likely end up being late. This was somewhat tolerated on account of her truancy not really being surprising, given her appearance already broke plenty of school rules, and also on account of her injury, which got her some sympathy points. If she even bothered to get out of her apartment early enough to stand a chance, she usually kept too slow of a pace to make it on time. Today was different, however. She noticed, several times, that her pace was getting closer to the par time at each of her landmarks. That was when Kiyo realized that something was very wrong—or rather, very right. Eyes wide, she pressed her foot into the concrete, hard. [color=firebrick][b][i]No pain.[/i][/b][/color] Scientific to a fault, she did it several more times, risking the loss of a much welcome reprieve just to be sure that she wasn't deceiving herself. It had taken such an unusually long time, she was beginning to wonder if anxiety or depression could slow down a magical girl's injury recovery, too. [color=firebrick][b][i]No pain![/i][/b][/color] Her smile widened in a girlish glee she hadn't truly felt in a long time. Right away, she decided to run the rest of the way to school. Today, she would be on time.

Of course, that didn't mean she was going to go as far as to be a goody two shoes. When she crossed the threshold of the school doors, she continued running in the halls. She got some stares of disbelief and a few dirty looks, but for once, she felt like she didn't need to care how their eyes saw her. For the first time in a long time, she felt truly happy about something that was in no way related to being a magical girl—something distinctly human.