"Before you get worked up, I wasn't trying to cause myself serious harm," Nida says as he shifts to start cutting the bottoms and tops off of the onions. This will be the best defense. If he starts crying over his parents, it will just be the onions. "I am too well trained for that. It was bad luck. But I know how to fall the right way, and I know how to fall slightly bad. I chose the slightly bad way, I just wanted a bit of sting in my legs and the like. Which is why I didn't have the power up when I did it. Thus the actual injury."

What he'd wanted was to feel something other than the strange pain in his chest. The hollowness of realization that seeing that, knowing what his parents looked like didn't make it any better. That...

"For my birthday. I wished I knew their names. It was a mistake."