REMEDY [ninjago jaya]

5. Clear Boundaries

• Jay Walker •

Jay's afternoon was filled with boredom.

His calculus class was pure agony for him. Since a majority of the students were terrible at math, the professor had to dumb it down for the entire class. Although Jay hated solving the same problem over and over again for forty-five minutes straight, he would never say it out loud, too anxious of the attention of his peers.

His economics class was not his favorite, solely because of his professor, who loved pairing his students with each other for group work. Jay despised group activities, and the classmate he was paired with had done nothing but talking about whether she should dye her blonde hair black.

His last class for Monday, English, was better than the two previous ones, but still not enjoyable. Shakespeare, although an important part of the history of English literature, was a boring topic to discuss, and his Elizabethan language was a pain to decode.

So when his classes ended, Jay was elated to go down to the basement and enter his robotics club's cold room. Scott was already there and working on his own project. Jay was only regarded with a quick glance from him and then ignored again.

Another student was there as well, but Jay didn't know her well enough to spark up a conversation. Pixal was still a little mystery to him. Jay could count up all the things he knew about her on one hand, and even that was an overstatement. He didn't even know her last name.

Nonetheless, he ignored the other two people in the room and went to the back room to bring out his own project, MiniPix 3000. He was still puzzled about how he could possibly get his creation to fly, or at least levitate off the table.

As the other club members filled the room after their own classes ended, Jay tried various ways to wire the remote control for his invention, without paying attention to anyone else.

Until the clearing of a throat caught his attention and made him lift his head. His mouth dropped open when he saw Mr. Borg at the front, with Nya standing right next to him and looking around at the others curiously.

Her eyes landed on Jay but quickly followed their route and disregarded him again.

"Hello, everybody!" Borg greeted his students with a warm smile. "This is Nya! She'll be joining us here, and I expect everyone to treat her as a part of the team, understood?"

A chorus of "yes" atoned from the uninterested students. Nya didn't need an introduction because everybody in Ninjago High knew about her.

Jay had to admit he was quite shocked by her appearance, or reappearance better yet, because he could have sworn his assumptions about her were correct. She just had not struck him as a robotics enthusiast.

But clearly he was wrong.

Borg told his students to keep working on their respective projects and took it upon himself to show Nya around. Jay focused on his work but looked at their new member with great interest as they passed by his table to go into the back room where all their spare parts and equipments were. The door was left open so Jay watched as Borg's aging fingers grabbed an old machine from the previous year and showed it to her.

Nya's eyes seemed to soak up every part of the machine, but those same eyes possessed the mastery of deception when it came to sincerity, so Jay highly doubted she was genuinely curious.

There had to be a different motive for her being in there, with him, in the same environment. It surely didn't have anything to do with Jay personally, since he was certain she didn't even know his name, but there had to be something about her presence. It was so sudden, so unexpected, so unwanted. Maybe her brother had sent here down there to check out the room.