The first thing he said was not, as Erik would have expected “I’m going to be your roommate” or “My name is (insert name here).” It wasn’t even “I’m sorry for tackling you and sending you to the floor and by the way is the bump on your head alright?” and it certainly wasn’t “Hello, I’m an insane lunatic recently escape from the mental institution across the street, and I want to eat your liver,” although Erik thought it quite possible that the latter had not come up because the mental institution was not, in fact, across the street, but on the other side of the city, near a used car dealership and a small, privately run music school.

No, the black-haired boy was grinning but silent as he pushed himself off Erik, brushing nonexistent dust from his pants with an absent expression on his round face, and raised an eyebrow at Erik as he lay on the floor, looking stunned. “I,” he said coolly, the grin vanishing from his face, “am a ninja. Who are you and what are you doing trying to break into my apartment?”

“Erik Thorbiornsen. I’m supposed to be living here. Apartment 306, right?”

A look of surprise flashed across the maniac’s face before it split into a wide grin once more. “You’re Thor! Come on in, I’ve been wondering when you’d show up, I got in over a week ago . . .” he continued to burble cheerfully, completely ignoring Erik.

“Thor? Erik echoed weekly as he got to his feet. After a minute of staring at the open doorway, he gathered his keys and bag, following the maniac with dripping reluctance.

“You’re kind of skinnier than I thought a Thor would be, but everything else fits – tall, blond, blue-eyed, grumpy – why are you wet?”

Erik dropped his suitcase inside the door and slammed it shut behind him. “It’s raining outside,” he said, pushing dripping hair out of his face.

“Bad luck, man, really bad. It hardly ever rains around here from what I’ve seen. Your timing must just be off, or something.” He waved a hand in the air in a vague way that suggested something akin to sympathy.

Slowly, Erik surveyed the small apartment. Carpet the colour of ugly, just like in the rest of the building, a desk with a computer at one end of the room, a small tv, a table already covered in junk mail, a couch, and an armchair with suspicious stains on it. By the tv was a cluster of wires and plastic which, after a moment, and moving his wet hair out of his line of vision once more, Erik realized was a collection of consoles and controllers. Obviously the property of the maniac. Which brought his attention back to the most important thing in his mind at the moment. “Who the hell are you?” he asked bluntly.

The boy had thrown himself onto the couch, swinging his feet in the air as he fell onto it, but he halted the inane monologue that Erik hadn’t been listening to. Slowly, he lifted his head from the cushions and stared at Erik in open amusement. “Me?” he said, pointing to himself. “I’m Ray. Ray Fujimoto. I’m your roommate. Nice to meet you, Thor,” he said, and punctuated his sentence by waving cheerily before flopping back onto the couch with a boneless grace.

“It’s Erik,” said Erik tightly, tugging his damp feet ouf of squelching shoes and throwing his wet jacket down to lie on the floor in a small crumpled heap. He made his way over to where the maniac – Ray – was lying, hopping as he went so he could pull of his damp socks. “What the hell was that?” he jerked his head in the direction of the doorway.

“A precaution. We ninjas can never be too careful. Anyone we meet could be someone sent to extract a horrible vengeance upon us for something we did in the line of duty.” Ray delivered this explanation with an easy smile, his arms behind his head and his feet still waving in the air.

Erik scowled and pushed the waving appendages out of his way. “You’re not a ninja,” he said flatly, wondering how long it would take him to get a transfer to another apartment, and if he could stay with Dustin in the interim.

Ray sat bolt upright, his feet smacking Erik in the side of the head as they rapidly swung downward. “I am so! I come from a long line of ninjas!”

Erik pinched the bridge of his nose and wondered where to begin. Simple and straightforward was probably the best, even when one was dealing with someone who was obviously insane. “There aren’t any ninjas. Especially not in Canada.”

“That’s a lie! My father was an awesome ninja when he was younger!”

Erik resisted the urge to smack the indignant boy on the couch. It would be too difficult to predict the reactions of someone who had obviously fallen off the map of reality a long time ago. He gathered his wet socks instead and went to find the bathroom. “Younger?” he asked automatically, regretting the vague query the instant it passes his lips as he was peering into the small bathroom, flipping the light switch on.

“Well, it’s hard to be a ninja when you get past a certain age. That’s why Dad became a diplomat.”

Erik cast a disbelieving look over his shoulder at Ray’s earnest, round face, before he snorted and carefully tossed his socks on top of the shower to dry. “No bathtub?” he asked, changing the subject and steering it as faraway from ninjas as possible. Bathtubs and ninjas were two topics that didn’t really belong in the same view of the universe, let alone the same room.

Ray shrugged. “Saves them room, I guess, and that way the bedroom’s bigger.”

“The bedroom?” Erik’s heart sank at the sound of the dreaded singular and cursed his parents silently for their ideas to save money and their ignorance of the thought that maybe being in an apartment with only two rooms might have been something they should have informed him of before he left home. Ray jerked his thumb in the direction of the adjacent doorway. Maybe he could sleep on the couch without being pestered if he told the kid that he had some kind of back problem that required him to sleep on couches. But who knew what kind of sleeping habits a kid who thought he was a ninja might have.

With a sigh Erik snapped the light switch into the off position and reached over Ray’s head to push the door to the bedroom open.

Nothing exploded.

No traps were detonated, causing nets to descend or pointy objects to impale him.

There was not a single bizarre, otherworldly creature to emerge from the partially opened doorway, although Erik had to stop and ask his imagination what otherworldly creatures had to do with ninjas and ninja-wannabes in the first place.

What he could see of the bedroom from his vantage point in the bathroom doorway, and with Ray in the way, was more of the ugly, nearly rock solid carpet, and some dirty laundry.

Squeezing carefully past Ray, Erik went to get his bag once more and drag it the short distance that remained between it and the bedroom.

“What’s your major, Thor?” Ray asked as he fell back on the couch, not offering to help Erik move the waterlogged suitcase or unpack, which was probably a blessing as Erik didn’t particularly want the nutcase rifling through his things.

“It’s Erik,” Erik grumbled as he dragged the suitcase, having the sinking feeling that he’d be saying that a lot as long as he was around Ray. “Undeclared.” He let the suitcase fall and it landed on the ugly bedroom carpet with a noise closer to a splash than a thump. “You?” he asked, grateful for this normal thread of conversation.

Ray’s cheerful voice carried easily from the living room. “Pre-law!”

Erik boggled at the idea of the short lunatic as a lawyer while he opened his suitcase and began unpacking the layers of slightly wrinkled, slightly damp clothes. “That’s . . . interesting,” he said, to cover his disbelief. “You really interested in law, then?”

“Not really. Just part of the old family tradition. My family’s big on tradition. You know, celebrate all the old holidays no matter where you are – ”

“You aren’t from around here, then?”

“Nope!”

“Where?” Erik asked, wondering why a guy who was obviously talkative needed to be kicked in the direction of normal, sane conversation.

“Well, I was born in Rome – ”

Erik’s eyebrows rose as he shook a pair of jeans out. “You don’t really sound Italian.”

“Well, after that there was elementary school in New York and Moscow, middle school in Dublin, most of high school in Tokyo . . . And then I graduated from a school in Ottawa this spring.”

Erik paused over the final layer of clothes, wondering if he should ask why someone who’d lived all over the world had decided to go to a university in the middle of nowhere. He suspected that the answer would give him a headache. “Right, you said your dad was a diplomat. What about that law tradition, though?”

“He got bored with it kind of quick, I guess, and went into something else as soon as my grandfather would let him. But just ‘cause he got bored with it doesn’t mean he won’t try and uphold family tradition with his kids. Maybe he feels guilty about abandoning the family way, so I get the whole thing grilled into me extra hard.” Erik nodded sympathetically, even though Ray couldn’t see him, and began shovelling his clothes into the unoccupied set of drawers. He was overly familiar with parents who were too attached to tradition. “So you’ve got learning the languages everywhere, which kind of mucks with your accent, best classical education he could find in every damn city, ninja training whenever he had the time – ”

Erik, in the midst of pulling open a second drawer, jerked at this and his foot narrowly escaped being crushed by the falling chunk of pseudo-wood. The crash didn’t seem to register with Ray.

“ – and now pre-law, so I can become a law-ninja in the old family tradition. I’d be happy just being an ordinary ninja, but Dad’s real insistent that I do it all proper.”

Erik swore, slid the drawer back into place with a few more mental curses, and wondered how long it would take to get a new apartment and a new roommate, and how many painkillers he’d have to buy before he could move.