The air in the classroom is thick, and Malikai can easily assume it's a mixture of humiliation and fear; as he himself feels like he's been chewing on glass and metal. A few students are speaking quietly amongst themselves as he slinks past the doorway, body scrunched into itself a he moves to his seat at the back of the room.

      He doesn't bother with his hood now, sliding his hands against his shaved temples and pushing it down in a fluid motion that matches the one he uses to pull himself into his seat. It's awkward, his body curling forward to press his lower back into the chair as he rests his elbows against the desks wooden surface.

      Bringing his bag into his lap, Malikai carefully riffles through it; searching until bare fingertips brush cold leather. It's a task to remove his ruined gloves and then pull the new ones on without pulling his hands from his bag, but he doesn't need anymore panic. He's had enough.

      The door to the classroom swinging open has him looking up.

      Professor Key looks....annoyed is a word.

      Disappointed is another.

      Key steps up to the desk at the front of the room, an L shaped thing that takes up less space than it seems like it should but more space than necessary given the dimensions of the area it's been placed in. His left hip presses into the bend of it, and he crosses his arms as he looks across at all his students.

      "That was embarrassing. Especially from my older students." Key's voice is flat, one brow raised and eyes surprisingly void of emotion.

      It's.....un-nerving.

      Key takes a deep breath, body relaxing on the exhale. He looks both older and younger in the span of a few moments.

      "It's to be expected, I suppose. Duplicity is a seasoned veteran's, despite her young age. I can only imagine how much worse, and more entertaining, it would have been if it'd been Boom or Red Feather." There's a lithe in his words, like he's trying not to laugh, and his lips curl into a smirk at the left corner; eyes catching with mirth.

      The tension in the room drops to something that doesn't feel so suffocating.

      "Anyway. As Boom explained, this years curriculum will have a greater focus on combat. That, however, doesn't mean other studies are suddenly forgotten or unimportant. You'll be expected to keep up with all of your other classwork. Now......" Key trails off, pushing his hip away from the desk edge and turning; tapping his fingers against the board.

      A HUD screen pops up, spanning the surface of the older black board in an expanse of blues; greens, and reds. It seems very out of place compared to the rest of the classroom.

      Key's long fingers move across the screen with a practiced familiarity, an echoing sound accompanying them as they go. Another screen pulls up, stretching away from the main HUD display and spanning to the left of Key's body.

      "For some of you, MOST of you, this will be repetitive information. Unfortunately, I am required to teach it." He motions towards the secondary display screen, the text that's frozen on it's pixilated surface reading 'The History Of Anomolys'.

      "Something like 200 years ago, give or take a decade, the first provable Anomoly appeared. A child, who is only referred to as Case 1, was born with slit pupils. At first, it was believed to be an aggressive instance of Coloboma; which, in layman's terms, means that the eye developed poorly in the womb. Obviously, that was not the case." Key taps on the display screen, enhancing an image of a young boy, both age and ethnicity nondescript. The picture would be normal, if the child's eyes weren't reflecting light like a nocturnal animal.

      Malikai tunes out, eyes flickering across the display at the front of the room. None of this is new to him, and he instead focuses on watching the way Professor Key's hands move and the body language of the other students.

      No one is rushing to take notes, which can only mean that they've been taught this before. Malikai doubts anyone aside from himself are frist years, given their bored expressions and varying levels of thoughtless jittering. Most of this class appears consists of third and fourth years, but looks and skill level are hardly an indication; especially after the ass-beating they had all just been subjected to.

      The HUD screen changes, something he sees from the corner of his eye, and Malikai tunes himself back in.

      The image isn't of the boy anymore, but groups of children; labeled like test subjects.

      "As you can imagine, people reacted poorly. As children born with Anomoly's spiked, panic and fear set in and spread like wild-fire. Preternatural abilities weren't a new concept, but the fantasy and reality of them were and are two very different things. Individuals born and presenting with Anomolys were cataloged and monitored, separated from others under the guise of research, until 100 years ago when the number of people born with them exceeded those born without; dominating the worlds population 3:1." The screen changes again, the photo of children giving way to the image of a city on fire.

      Iron City.

      While not the only area uprooted by civil unrest and riots, the Iron City fire was a turning point in the P.W.A Civil Rights movement. The city had acted as a safe haven for those with Anomolys. Thousands died, hundreds were injured, the rest left without housing or shelter for weeks.

      "Widespread and unlawful, inhumane testing, segregation, and social behaviors led to the demand of fair treatment; and when they went ignored and peaceful protests were dispersed with violence, people with Anomolys and their supporters reacted in kind." Sweeping his hand across the screen, Professor Key expanded the image; the newly exposed portions showing bloodshed and death in every pixel.

      The air in the room changes, and when Malikai looks around the room from the corners of his eyes; there isn't a single person that looks comfortable. 100 years ago seems like several lifetimes, but he can imagine that many of them have family members that had lived through the revolution; hell, some of them still might.

      After all, how do you take Superman down with plastic bullets?

      While Professor Key continues on, Malikai's mind takes him away; back to a horrible time in a horrible place to a memory that he'd tried once to bury until he realized that he couldn't.

      -He's nine, small and fragile and sickly. His Anomoly hasn't shown yet, but it seems so inconsequential at the moment. His mom, a tall; bright woman with a smile that takes the lighting in the room to new heights, reads to him.

      'Don' get it. Hows come they don' just geat alon'?' God, his voice had been so small; words broken apart by a slight impediment that took another four years to be rid of. His mother had sighed, something light and sad as she pulled him further into her lap; pressing a warm kiss into his hair.

      "Because, baby. We were new and scary. They didn't understand, so they did what they thought was the right thing to do. It just happened to be the wrong thing."-

      He hadn't really understood at the time. All he'd known was that it was people being ugly to each-other. There was blood and death and fear, it was easy to see; but not so easy to understand.

      He understands it better now.

      He just never would have guessed how much of that hate had come from their side too.

      Shaking himself back to the present, they're on a totally different part of the presentation. It's moved along from war to an overview of the peace treaties and law's that gave people with Anomolys what they have today.

      "These pieces of legislation were not a fix-it. They weren't a band-aid, and it wouldn't be until almost 30 years after Iron City that we would reach the equality with others that we have now; but they pushed government and state mandates in the right direction." Key's voice ends on a sigh. He sounds.....exhausted. Not physically. It's more like the kind of exhaustion that comes from dealing with topics of gret emotional strain.

      Little surprise there.

      Key goes to say something else, a series of bell in varying tones; pitches, volumes, and key played over the loud speakers.

      Most students would be moving onto another class, another teacher, but not them. Anti-Hero students are stuck with the same teacher for all but Practical Combat and Tactical Planning.

      "Take ten. Evaluate your individual fights, talk to each-other, I don't care. If any desks leave the classroom, everyone fails."