Her door was surprisingly open but he still knocked. Her head snapped up from her task of folding a shirt.

The tall boy started, "Hey…"

She did not respond.

"I hate to ask this of you, but can you help me with something?" Minho continued.

Still, she did not open , but she did look more quizzically at him

"Onew had to leave to complete his schedule and he left a mess of the bathroom. It would be bad if it was just left like that," he started to explain. "Would you help me clean it up?" She looked at him suspiciously, but he pressed on, "Taemin and Key are still cleaning up the garden and Jonghyun is cleaning up two other rooms so…"

At her unwilling look, he dared to continue, "It that those mud people who are buddies with that guy who came for you had to interrupt Onew's bath like that. Poor hyung…"

She didn't know why she had to come. Standing off to the side, she wasn't doing anything and it wasn't even because she didn't want to. Minho stood in the middle of the room. That's all. He just stood there while breathing rhythmically.

As much as she wanted to leave, she held her tongue. The man in front of her looked so deep in concentration that she was afraid to interrupt. The small hairs on her arms stood on end, and she looked around while rubbing her forearms, looking for the source of her sudden chills.

"Just relax and watch."

Her attention fully returned to the being standing in the center of the room. 'Why is he holding his hand out?' Her brow furrowed as something sparkling caught her attention.

Minho almost smiled softly. As concentrated on the task as he was, she still held his thoughts. 'She always did get easily distracted by shiny things.'

The tiny sparkle grew into a bigger crystal, something she could see without squinting from her position. 'He's making ice? Why?' The space around Minho became unclear. She blinked twice, and the cloudiness started to sparkle with tiny ice crystals, but instead of falling like snow, it concentrated towards Minho's hand. At first, it packed together to look like white powder but as the seconds ticked by, the white smoothed to a glassy finish.

Glancing down to his feet, she noticed that water no longer puddled around him. 'He's moving the water molecules…'

He confirmed her hypothesis. "My ability is ice. You knew that." He stared at the slowly forming object in his hand. "But my specialty is gathering water to make ice. With that, I follow the natural laws of science that you humans have established."

She watched as the ice in his hand lengthened.

"What doesn't follow your laws is how I exude cold from my body," he continued. "While other beings would generate heat during energy use, I generate cold."

"That makes no sense."

He smiled slightly. "To you it doesn't. And even when I try to figure out why that is, I don't exactly understand how. I just know that's just the way it is." The object in his hand was now large enough to be carried in two hands. "And if I produce enough cold, I can cool the air around me and some objects, but I can't make ice without water because, by definition, ice is made up of water molecules."

The space between her eyebrows wrinkled again. "Why are you telling me this."

"You want to escape this world that we've suddenly pushed onto you." He stared at the ice in his arms without really looking.

She tensed at the reminder.

"But you can't escape it now that you know about it. Even if we let you go…," he said in a low voice. "You know of our world, but you actually really don't know anything. You don't know anything about us either." He looked up and took an experimental step towards her. She held her ground so he took another step. "About what we are, I will teach you."

She eyed his quizzically.

"Knowledge. Someone as educated as you knows that knowledge is key. It's the key to power. It's the key to making decisions. I will give you knowledge, and I want you to take that knowledge to make firm decisions that you won't regret later. I also want you to use that knowledge to protect yourself. Use it so that whatever you decide, you'll be able to survive as long as possible no matter what happens."

He was in front of her now, an arms reach away. A bouquet of flowers lay in his arms, one of the most beautiful and largest ones she'd ever seen. However, instead of soft petals of color and green, this bouquet looked to be made with expertly carved crystal. Without a doubt this sculpture weighed a good amount.

Holding the creation in one arm, he held the head of one of the carved flowers and pulled upwards slowly, coaxing the ice to mold so that he ended up with pulling out a single long stemmed, fully bloomed crystal rose from the solid bouquet. "Will you accept this knowledge from me and then make your decision to…leave?"

The young woman in front of him stared at the rose and then looked up at his face. Minho was right. She had been making such stupid decisions recently. She needed to calm down and think before she acted, and she needed to think thoroughly with all the facts. If this was a normal situation, she'd respond much quicker with the proposition and advice, but she hesitated a little.

Finally, her hand lifted and she shakily touched the rose.

A knock interrupted the moment, and she jumped back at the sound.

"Hey…Need any help here…?" Jonghyun asked slowly at the door, taking in the scene with questioning eyes.

Minho stared at the girl's down casted head. "…No.." He looked up at his bandmate. "Actually yes. I cleaned up most of the water but it's still a little damp. Can you blow dry the place before it gets moldy?"

"…Yeah. Sure." Jonghyun went around the room and spot evaporated areas, starting from the far corner.

She fled the room at a quick walk, just a little bit overwhelmed for some reason that she couldn't even grasp.

"I'm going to go check out my room," Minho told Jonghyun and then slowly exited. 'I made the right decision. We went about this completely wrong before…' He stopped by a different bathroom and placed the ice sculpture in the tub. Remembering all the times she looked at him with fear or caution, he thought, 'Maybe I'm just too cold for her…'

She stood and twirled the cold stem between her fingers. She had just took it ran away without even thinking. Now, standing in a random hallway, she organized her thoughts. The ice finally slipped from her grasp to shatter on the floor. Staring absently at her hands, she examined how her figures were red from the cold. An obvious thought crossed her mind, 'It's cold…'

She blew warm air on her hands and rubbed them together before bending down and staring at the shattered crystal. No, ice. Beautiful but cold. 'Maybe too cold for me…' Still, her hand reached out to pick up the rapidly melting pieces.

She straightened up and scattered the broken pieces onto the soil of a potted plant.

_______

Thea's Corner

I didn't edit this chapter. Sorry.

Onsen was awesome. So pretty. I was outdoors and there wer koi fish and a mini waterfall! So cool!

Posted: 24th of November 2011