Light danced on the ceiling like radiance on the ocean floor as Gideon toyed with his mirror. Surveying the room he saw that everyone else had already started on the assignment. Turning their face this way and that, the students seemed to be trying to capture some hidden inner beauty in their reflection. Gideon scoffed at that idea. These dirtlings knew nothing of beauty below the surface. The magnificence of the depths had evaded them log ago.

Gideon held the mirror up to his own face. His face, while striking, only hinted at human proportions. His two bulbous, deep set eyes dominated the upper part of his face and rested upon impossibly angular cheekbones. Gideon's nose remained unobtrusive and flared out flatly at the nostrils. His mouth stretched delicately above a pointed chin. While Gideon considered himself a rather attractive adolescent, his class mates seemed to find his alien features combined with his shyness unnerving.

Gideon looked up to find his teachers reproachful eyes boring into him, probably due to the fact that he had yet to even pick up his ebony pencil. Scowling back, Gideon picked up the pencil and began to contemplate his self portrait.

The drawing was supposed to be realistic and symbolic, so naturally, Gideon began drawing himself in his true form. Legs unified, current caressing his body, it all came into focus. He stared at his creation. While his abs may have been exaggerated quite a bit, the brilliant white paper represented his skin perfectly.

Gideon found himself again looking around the room. None of the other students had finished. Some had yet to stop admiring themselves in their mirrors. And they said I was vain! He thought.

Rising fluidly from his seat, Gideon passed a girl staring at him incredulously from her table. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her twist in her chair to whisper something in he friend's ear. Gideon was sure she talked of him because he caught the words 'creepy' and 'loner.'

This would faze almost anyone, but Gideon was used to being treated this way. Humans had good reason to be wary of him. At this point he wondered if his self portrait revealed too much. Would anyone see the scales as more than symbolic? His mother had stressed to him the consequences of revealing the deep secret to dirtlings.

Gideon by now had arrived at the desk in front of the teacher. Favoring risk, he thrust the drawing into the teacher's hand and turned quickly, not wanting to see the already spreading smirk on the teachers face.

It was going to be ok. Gideon told himself. With the way he avoided the school swimming pool no one would ever guess what he was.