Jamie swings a key on a ring around his index finger, "The tires? Rubber. Made of..." he stalls, "It's a pretty complicated process, actually. But they don't break easy, and they grip the road better than wood or metal wheels would."

He swings a leg over the bike and motions to the small seat further back, "Can't really keep personal space on this thing," he shrugs. 

Lexius hops on, looking off-balance. "Nothing to grip," he mutters darkly. "You've invented a horse without an ass."

He laughs, "Fondled a lot of horses asses, have you? If I'd known I was going to be picking up a passenger, I would have brought a better bike for that," he reaches around behind both of them, searching for the bar on the back there, "Here, you can hang onto that, if you want, or you can hold around my waist, I'm not shy." 

Lexius rolls his eyes and puts his arms around James's waist. "On, noble steed."

He gives a credible attempt at a whinny! And turns the key in the ignition, sending the bike rumbling and turning them up the road. 

Alex is in an overgrown hedge maze in the gardens, reading in the grass in a dead end, as you do when you're trying to avoid everyone. Jamie has up and vanished, and hadn't even had the decency to come get him before he did, so his options were essentially their rooms and this, and he's been spending far too much time inside lately. He's missed the sun. And the privacy of being alone in the semi-wilderness. 

Someone falls through the arbor and lands heavily in an overgrown rosebush. "Faex!"

Alex drops his book and scrambles to his feet. 

He looks at the boy in the grass. He looks up where he'd fallen from. He starts to scowl, "Were you watching me-?"

He tries to get up, yelps in pain as the thorns tear at his skin, and concentrates.

The rosebush shivers as the thorns fall from its branches. There's a sound like rain as they hit the ground.

Then the strange boy stands up. "Paenitet me obtrudere, sum - ignoscas, ubi per corvos est hoc?

This is out of context enough to drop the scowl from his face, though the use of- if that was flames it was exquisitely controlled, he couldn't see a lick of fire- the use of whatever that was makes him wary instead. 

And then Latin?

He tries to translate that based on years old rememberings of that time he'd spent three months trying to learn Latin on his own, mostly comes up with 'sorry', 'where', and 'crows' for some reason. That last one can't be right, can it? 

"Do you know where you are?" He tries asking, in Italian, and then again in English, and again in French. 

"...barbarus es? Faex. Barbarus es."

He points at himself. "Aquitainus Septimus Leonatus ex Mare. Leo." He points at Alex. "Et tu?"

Well, he knows that one.

"Ale-" he makes a face, "Alessio Lucius Vongola. Alex," he repeats the format back to him. 

Also, he knows 'barbarus', though he has the vague impression the Romans just called everyone else that. Are there Romans now? There might be Romans. At this point 'and now there are Romans?' isn't stretching his incredulity much, not after the secret magic rainbow fire mafia. 

-which, now that he's thinking of it, he could solve the language issue with flames. Except that his sky is tangled enough with his secondary storm that doing anything that only takes the one of them takes him ten times as long as it'd take Jamie. He starts working on it anyway, shunting storm flame out of the way as he refines it. 

(As a side effect of this, dark red swirls into his eyes and pools there.)

"Alex," Leo repeats.

Then the red eye shit starts happening. He raises his eyebrows and leans back on his heels. Some kind of barbarian magic? Maybe it'll help bridge the communication gap.

Well, it takes him about fifteen seconds to scare up enough pure sky for it, and if he slips on refining more he'll have to start all over again, but.

"Leo," he says in return once he has it down, and, "Gonna go ahead and assume you didn't mean to drop in on me." 

He's not speaking Latin, but Leo can understand what he means anyway. 

"Fancy barbarian magic," Leo comments. "Uh, nice to meet you, and no, I certainly didn't. I tripped and fell into the fountain in Academy Square and landed in your lovely rosebush. Sorry about the thorns, if you want them back I can grow them back on."

The rosebush is looking a little squashed, too, he notes, but he shrugs, "If the gardeners came out this far in the grounds they'd probably thank you. What Academy?" 

Leo strokes a finger along the rosebush's smooth branches, which shiver again as they heal over and straighten. Its blooms, which had been withering as autumn approached, return to full vibrancy. He pokes one, and the petals fall away as the core ripens into a thumbnail-sized red berry. He pinches it off the stem, concentrates over it for a moment, and pops it into his mouth.

"So, I'd say the Academy," he says contemplatively as he chews on the rosehip, "and look at you like you're insane, but while I'm sure it'd be funny, I'm actually capable of making basic inferential leaps. Hi! I'm Leo. I'm from another world, apparently. This is your estate?"

He watches more closely for flames this time, and- still doesn't see any. The hell. 

"A-" he stops, needing a moment to come to terms with that. "Another world," he continues on a deadpan.

He's leaning enough into sky that he can't deny the guy sure thinks he's telling the truth. 

Proceeding as though he is, for now, "My grandfather's," he says, and, "Take it everyone where you come from knows about the Academy, then? And you're sure you're not a far-flung last bastion of the Romans that got cut off in a pocket dimension or something," he'd been reading The Sixth Flame the other day, a collection of stories that go a ways to explain how deep the mist paranoia is around here. Getting trapped in a pocket dimension was only about midway down the iceburg.

"Please consider for a moment how little it would alter my hypothesis space to be from a pocket dimension rather than another world."

"Point," he admits. "Uh. Welcome to Earth, I guess. Terra, Gaia, etcetera. The Vongola Estate, more... specifically... you shouldn't have been able to get through the wards without calling down security on your head, actually," he realizes, "What were you doing to the rosebush? That's not flames." 

"It's called crafting. There's air, earth, fire, water, wood, and metal. I was using woodcraft, lets you manipulate plants and plant products in various ways. Flames would be entirely inappropriate for rosebush manipulation unless I wanted the rosebush to be charcoal instead."

"Flames as in soulfire. 'Flames' stands out less, so that's what we call them. They don't actually burn things you don't want them to. Usually," he amends, giving the faded discolouration on his hands and wrists a dark look. "Sun flame could have done that, if thorns fall off naturally, I don't know, I'm not a gardener. Or mist flame, maybe. But it wasn't flames." 

"No, it wasn't. Soulfire's the magic that's letting us talk? That's more abstract than crafting usually gets. You get some abstraction but usually - emotions, not concepts."

"'Concepts' is... more or less what soulfire is all about." He looks off towards the house, though he can't see it past all the hedges, "Security'd want me to flag them down about this," he says, "But you're not hostile," he seems very sure of this. "You have a way back to your world slash dimension, or should I take you up to the Fort to see what Grandfather thinks of this." 

"Yeah, let me craft a portal real quick. Whoops, not an element as it turns out."