Jon Lawrance wasn't nervous! Don't be silly! Except... he was nervous. Very nervous. It was his first day of school, and he wasn't exactly completely thrilled by the idea, as evidenced by his fidgeting as his father drove him to the school.

"Do well, Jon, and behave yourself. Don't be like Junior and fight on the first day of school," his father smiled. "And enjoy yourself. Make some new friends."

Junior rolled his eyes. "Dad, I told you, that guy was being a jerk! He deserved it."

"Aren't you friends with him now?" Anna interjected while Mona snickered.

"That doesn't change the past," Junior sniffed pretentiously and folded his arms.

"Alright you four," their father chuckled as he pulled the car up to the curb. "Get out of the car, I have to get back to your mother, I left her with Nelly and Stella. And have fun."

Jon felt a little better now, his siblings' quasi-argument setting him at ease, but he still had to navigate to the correct classroom - something which he had never done on his own before. But room 1776 couldn't be too hard to find, could it? Anna, Mona, and Junior all took off into the school, leaving Jon standing just inside the school doors, lost and clueless. A familiar feeling, to be sure, he thought as he set off to look for his own classroom.

When Jon finally found the right room, he slid inside to find the teacher had a big belly but not a big anything else. He found it a little strange looking, but didn't comment - his parents would call that rude, he was sure.

"Come in, come in, find a seat, any seat! In a desk, on a desk, on a beanbag chair, on the floor, where-ever you like!" The woman waved Jon inside - he recognized her as his teacher, Ms. Morianna Thompson.

He made his way inside and sat in a desk near the front of the room, beginning to think that school might not be the nightmare Mona claimed it to be.

Of course, Mona also remembered one past life where her husband gave her a baby and then went away to die, or at least that was how she told him the story.

"Are we all here now? All 16 of us? Good! Let's begin with roll call! When I call your name, please tell us your favorite color, ok?" Ms. Morianna was practically vibrating. "Carrie?"

Carrie was absolutely tiny in Jon's eyes. "I wike wed," she still had a lisp, too, which was sometimes taken as a sign that a child was a new soul, as those with previous lives often subconsciously pulled previous muscle memory without the knowledge to back up the movement.

"Good! Cassie?"

"Green," The palest girl in the class flipped her hair. Jon already didn't like her, she seemed bossy.

"Alright. Frances?"

"I like turquoise because it's the color of the ocean, which is so pretty and stretches forever!" Frances grinned and threw her arms out when she said 'forever', giggling.

"I like that answer, Frances. And Angie?"

"I like pink because it feels familiar to me and makes me think of solutions to my problems, like why my mommy doesn't want me to watch the news!" Angie grinned wide, and Jon felt like he'd seen her somewhere before.

"I'm not going to stop you from watching whatever you want, Angie, but maybe wait a few years to watch the news, it's hardly age appropriate. Pip, darling, what's your favorite color?"

"Umm… I don't know why you called me darling, but I don't really have a favorite, I just don't really like red that much…" Pip looked a lot like Jon, which was something Jon noticed almost immediately, but he wasn't going to interrupt Ms. Morianna to address it, so he stayed quiet. Angie, on the other hand, had no issue interrupting Ms. Morianna, as he heard her grumble, "That's what mommy says…"

"I called you darling because you are a darling, Pip! What about you Tommy? Uh, Tommy?"

Tommy must have been the boy who had managed to fall asleep on a beanbag within the few minutes they'd been in school. The boy next to him poked Tommy's shoulder, and he bolted upright and yelped, "Not the Russian Spies!"

"No Russian Spies here, Tommy, we just wanted to know your favorite color," Ms. Morianna seemed amused by Tommy's outburst.

Tommy, on the other hand, looked incredibly mortified. "I - I like purple," he finally stuttered out, attempting to hide behind his enormous amount of hair unsuccessfully.

"Ok, Tommy, thank you. And Hercules?"

"I just go by Herc, but I like all the colors!" Herc was one of the tallest kids there, but he was acting like a cuddly kitten - Jon's family had a kitten named Lauren, so he knew what he was talking about on that front.

"That's a great way to look at it. Jon?"

Jon sat up straight really fast and screwed up his little face, and blurted out, "I like green because turtles are green!" before blushing hard.

"I like turtles too, Jon! Turtles are just great. What about you, Marie?"

"I, the amazing Marie Lewis, hereby in-door-ess the color red!" Marie crowed as she leapt up from her beanbag, posing with one hand on her puffed out chest and one foot dramatically pointed behind her. The whole class giggled at her antics, except for the boy on the floor next to her, who hissed "Marie!" and just set the class off again.

Ms. Morianna giggled. "Alright, alright, settle down. Marie, I'm sure the color red is grateful for your endorsement. Paul?"

The boy next to Marie got up, said "Thanks a lot, Marie!" and then clambered up onto one the desks. "The color blue is the best color! It is better than any other! It's the sky above and the sea below, better than any other color we know!" He rhymed. "Thank you!" Paul practically sang as he leapt down from the desk, while Marie looked miffed that he'd outdone her. Jon tilted his head a bit funny, he could swear he'd seen Paul somewhere before…

"That was a lovely performance, Paul! What about you, Angel?"

"Ummmm…" Angel, or at least the girl Jon assumed was Angel, was staring at Pip with a weird look on her face instead of paying attention. "Whatever is good…" Her voice was barely audible, she was paying that little attention.

"Alright, then! Aaron? Aaron?"

"I like books," A boy in the corner of the classroom said from behind a copy of Click, Clack, Moo, Cows That Type.

"Er… Alright? I wasn't aware books was a color but okay…" Ms. Morianna looked perplexed. "And what about you, Margaret?"

"I like yellow, it's shiny and so pretty and I love it," this one… This girl was even more familiar to Jon than anyone else in the classroom. He felt like he should know her, like they had been friends… but he knew he had never met her before. What was going on?

"Thank you, Margaret! What about you, James?"

"I don't really have a favorite color," the boy on the floor next to Tommy shrugged, "but if I have to pick one… maybe grey? It's calm."

"Alright, that's interesting! Do you have a favorite color, Lizzie?"

Lizzie looked up at Ms. Morianna, clutched her little ragdoll closer to her, and said, "Um… I like blue, like the color of Zazi's dress…" She held the doll up when she said Zazi, so Jon assumed that was the doll's name.

"Thank you, Lizzie. Alex?"

"I like green! But not just any green, a nice, dark, shiny green! It has to be shiny. Otherwise it looks like ew," Alex punctuated the 'ew' by sticking his tongue out and screwing up his face. He looked even more familiar than Margaret, and he was a different type of familiar, too. Less… familial, perhaps?

"Okay, Alex, that's fantastic!" Then Ms. Morianna turned to the whole class. "I suppose it's my turn now! My name is Morianna Thompson, but you may call me Ms. Morianna, Ms. Thompson, or, if you're comfortable with it, Mori. I like all colors, and I'm going to be having a baby soon, so there will be a little while I won't be here. Now, today we're going to talk about what the rest of the school day is going to be like…"

'Mama was right,' Margaret thought to herself as she hopped off the bus. 'School is boring, but interesting at the same time. Although… there was those voices I heard when the one girl mentioned a sunset…'

Margaret thought about those little snippets she had heard, and belatedly realized they weren't english at all! Her brain had supplied what they had meant, yet looking back on it, those voices had said little more than gibberish. Well, gibberish and a name.

"Djau! Why would you do that you him? Why would you hurt him?"

"He was too perfect-"

"Exactly! He was perfect! You should have been proud, but instead, you shoved him into a tub of molten gold!"

"I am the senior apprentice-"

"And I am your Mistress of Goldsmithing! I assure you, the Pharaoh will hear of this, and you will be executed!"

Who the hell was Djau? And who had killed him? Who was the Mistress? And Pharaoh? Were they from Ancient Egypt? Was this a past life flashback? If so, why was she already having them? Every study her mother had talked about over the dinner table said they have never started more than six months before the revelation of the life that those memories correlated to, but at the same time, very few people under the age of thirteen had revelations, and none had them before the age of six!

'Something strange is going on here,' Margaret thought as she opened the front door of the home she shared with her mother, who likely wouldn't be home for another couple hours, as her studies often kept her attention fixed and she lost track of time. It wasn't possible that Margaret's revelation was near, was it?

"Are you alright?" a voice asked, jolting Nymphadora awake.

"Yes, yes, why do you ask?" she replied, hoping her constant worry was successfully cloaked for the moment.

"Well, I think this is your stop? It's where you got on this morning - hey, what's your name?" the owner of the voice, a boy wearing a beanie, asked her.

"Dora," she replied after a moment. "My name is Dora. What's yours?"

"Hercules," the boy grinned. "Yeah, like the movie, but I'm not like the character, promise."

"Ok, Hercules," Dora giggled, then stopped. "Oh, yeah, this is my stop. I guess I'll see you on the bus tomorrow, Hercules."

She scrambled to grab all her stuff and stumbled to the front of the bus to hop off and trudge towards her parents.

"Who were you talking to?" her mother snapped. "He better not be one of them."

"He's in kindergarten, like me, Mom," Dora sighed. "I saw him in the classroom across the hall." Not a lie, not the whole truth. Just enough to make her mother stop.

"Well then," her mother scoffed, "You had better get ready for a ritual. Your father and I found a new one that will even make it so that other people who are reincarnates will avoid you!"

"Yes, mother," Dora sighed.

"Don't give your mother that tone of voice, young lady," her father said from her other side. "You wouldn't want all our effort to make sure you are a new soul to go to waste now, do you, Nymphie?"

"No, father."