Ashida Noriko, aged barely thirteen, had at last found the Circus Gelhaar; three years prior, they'd come through Japan, and with her family she'd gone to see them, and discovered that the acrobat she'd been so fascinated by was not just a man in body paint and a costume.

Kurt had been real as she was, she was sure--blue-skinned and tail and three-fingered hands and all. And Nori had been entranced then and there. She'd had no way of knowing, back then, that a scant few months later she'd start showing signs of manifesting a mutant ability of her own, though the signs had been mistaken for other problems. Medication had done nothing to solve the constancy of her racing thoughts and endless energy, and when she'd finally manifested fully--and shattered everything glass in her vicinity with a blinding cascade of electrical current--the eventuality of her leaving had been all but written on the wall.

Actually running away had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, but the six months she'd traveled following the circus had finally come to an end as she crept closer to the back of a truck, climbing up to hopefully sleep in the bed.