As it turned out Alexander had every right to the evil glint in his eye as he turned out to be an absolutely monstrous taskmaster. He had me on the deck of the ship almost immediately after he had agreed to help me get my new abilities under control.

“The first, and hardest step of any cored person is being able to actually use your magic at will.”

We were sitting on the deck of the ship across from one another as the icebreaker cut through the dark water smoothly. It was night although from the clocks aboard the ship I could tell it was already around ten in the morning and I assumed that was one of the reasons for the empty deck.

“A lot of cored schools will teach people a shortcut to accessing their powers through their emotions.”

I nodded eagerly as I was already somewhat lost in a daydream of using magic and shooting fireballs from my hands.

“This, however,” and he looked at me sternly, “is at best a crutch, at worst absolutely crippling.”

I listened intently as he continued,

“If you are not able to use your magic without putting yourself into an emotional state you will never be able to have any fine control of your power.”

The air was heavy with humidity from the occasional ocean spray and as he said this Alexander reached out a finger and a single snowflake formed. As I watched the snowflake grew in a replicating fractal pattern until the whole thing was the size of his palm. Lifting his hand he threw the snowflake into the air where it burst apart into dozens of smaller identical shapes.

“What I just did was not just a process of visualization and creation as is often believed by both cored and uncored people. While yes I had to visualize what I wanted to create I also had to narrow down my field of influence until it was small enough to just effect single water particles.”

At this point, I was both thoroughly impressed and also extremely overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he had just said. It was absolutely staggering to understand the level of fine control it must have taken to be able to do things on a near molecular level.

“When you use emotions as a shortcut you can instinctively do things but you will never be able to do it on command or be able to replicate the results each time.”

Alexander continued to explain to me the nuances of control and the basic principles that governed the actual use of magic. He narrowed it down to three basic pillars although he admitted that there was much more that doing this missed out on. The pillars though were as follows, control, power, and creativity. For me, he said that considering what he had seen me do on accident power was likely not something I needed to be focusing on. No control was where my issues clearly lay and with this understanding my training well and truly began.

It began with the sort of things I had expected out of mystical training of some kind, he taught me basics of meditation and had me practice them for hours throughout the day. This only lasted for a few days though as the ship continued to sail he started having me help the sailors. I was always the lowest on the totem pole with whoever I worked with and was given some of the hardest and most menial jobs. I did everything from chopping potatoes in the ship mess which I enjoyed the most since I had always loved of cooking. To polishing tools down in engineering where the engineers cracked jokes at my expense while I worked. Throughout all of it, Alexander would come and check in on me every half hour or so. He’d start off by asking mundane questions about the tasks I was doing, then the difficulty of the questions increased. He’d start asking me questions in Russian, then in Chinese, then Japanese as it turned out he knew those languages as well. Then as those questions grew easier to answer he started asking me basic math questions as I worked those increasing in difficulty as well. About four days into this as I was working on reassembling some piece of machinery I lost it. He had just asked me a calculus question I couldn't have done in English much less in the Chinese he asked me it in. I gripped the wrench in my hand and I felt the metal soften like putty in my hand as I felt heat light up in my stomach. I was quick this time though and I knew what to look for and I grabbed onto the heat before it could run amok. I struggled with it as I felt my anger at Alexander cool and as it did I felt the heat slip away like trying to hold onto sand. I dropped the wrench and looked up to where Alexander stood next to me as I sat at a desk working. He nodded at me looking at the wrench with the impression of my grip on it and then back to me.

“Good now you know how to recognize what that feels like, do your best to make sure it never happens again.”

I looked down at the wrench ashamedly, and I felt Alexander's cool hand on my shoulder as he walked behind my chair.

“It's okay, I was trying to annoy you, just enough for you to be able to catch yourself, I'm surprised it took this long, you're a very patient man.”

I could hear the smile in his words as he spoke to me,

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“You're doing good, fix the wrench and ill be impressed.”

He squeezed my shoulder and walked away and I felt myself surge with pride at his compliment and an irrational need to prove myself to him.

The purposeful annoyance ended after that incident although the seemingly endless parade of menial tasks I had to do didn't. It did make sense to me considering that I was living and eating on the ship for free and I was fine with doing the work without the consistent interruptions. My Russian improved greatly as I spoke it exclusively with the rest of the crew who all warmed up to me rapidly. Apparently, it was rare enough for an uncored person to gain cores that I was somewhat of a fascination to the majority of the crew. Besides Repun and Alexander, there were no cored people aboard the ship and I sensed that I was some sort of inspiration for them. Alexander and I started to have longer classes in the evening when he was off of watch duty and it was during one of these I talked to him about a growing concern.

“I don't like the way the other sailors look at me,”

We were sitting cross legged across from each other on the floor of Alexander's room working on a meditation technique meant to help me access my abilities. We had been at it for over half an hour to no effect for me as I tried to search centre myself and search my mind for power. As I spoke I opened my eyes and I saw Alexander crack an eye open at my words.

“They look at me like some kind of folk hero, like I'm proof they can be like me.”

“Shouldn't you be happy that you're giving them hope?”

Alexander's response was about what I had expected, while clearly being liberal in his views on uncored people he sometimes surprised me with his naivety. Alexander had been raised in a family of entirely cored people and that had made him oblivious to some things I found obvious. It was clear that he was somewhat of an outcast in that family and this had made him extremely sympathetic to the plight of uncored people and I appreciated that. I however had come to notice generally that there was a general lack of depth when it came to the sort of political philosophy I was thinking of. It had puzzled me for a long time until I realized the cause was staring me in the face, cores. The existence of cores had made the politics of this world much less nuanced considering one group had an obvious un-levelable advantage. In my world politics had evolved into a massive game of deception with the largest governments and corporations posing themselves as benevolent everymen. In this world though with the existence of cores this sort of deception of the majority both impossible and unnecessary. Instead, the old adage of might makes right was still widely accepted with cored people holding almost any position of power. For these reasons it was clear to me that uncored people were lacking almost any sort of social or political awareness as they had little way to effect change. I guessed from conversations with Alexander that politics within the cored society was far more delicate and closer to my world.

His response to my question though did show that social awareness within even liberal cored people lacked the sort of nuance that was becoming more common in my world.

“That's the problem, to say becoming cored is something they need to hope for implies being uncored is wrong, is less.”

I watched Alexander as he digested my words, this wasn't the first time I had tentatively tried to contribute some nuance to his thoughts about uncored people. At first, he had fought against it explaining that it was only natural for people to hope to have more power. I had to point out to him that while I agreed with him the problem was that cored people held any and all power.

Through these political conversations, I slowly began to learn the slightly alternate history of this world and what I learned intrigued me. It turned out that this world was remarkably similar to mine except for in a few minor ways like the lack of political savvy. In this world, it appeared that many of the major historical figures of my world had been cored and therefore wielded similar power. America existed in much the same way that it had my world and there had been similar movements to overthrow monarchy although the charge had always been led by cored people. Slavery, racism, and bigotry in general still existed with cores only being another large characteristic used to divide and categorize people. I did find it interesting that the closer to the modern day we got the more this world seemed to be diverging from mine. Nuclear physics, for example, seemed to be a largely unexplored realm of science and while the second world war had happened nuclear weapons had been replaced with large-scale magic. I learned about this particular information as Alexander casually used it as an example of what was possible when a large number of cored people linked their powers together. It appeared as though the cold war and the soviet union had been much more short lived and the space race had never happened. Finally, as we got into the current day it seemed like none of the political leaders of my world or at least very few were active in politics. All of this information I processed better than I ever would have been able to without the advantage of being newly cored gave my mind. I did consider briefly enacting some sort of pland to give uncored people some knowledge of nuclear physics. I quickly shot this plan down both because I didn't know much about the topic and I didn't want the responsibility of unleashing nuclear bombs. I did realize though that I could likely use my assumed political ignorance to my benefit when I entered society. From what Alexander had said it was likely that I was at least somewhat powerful and that I had been uncored made me think cored society may use me as a sort of prop. I knew that they would assume that they would be able to manipulate and use me however they pleased as both a political and literal tool. The fact that I would at least be sought out was only confirmed by further conversations with Alexander during training. He cautioned me not to accept any of the first offers I would get when I was introduced into cored society. It was likely that several middling and weak factions would try to dazzle me into joining them. His suggestions were to try and work my way into one of the prestigious cored academies across the world. I noticed how he mentioned that if I played my cards right I could go to any of these schools across the entire globe, including countries like Russia or Japan. Alexander explained to me that these schools were more magical graduate schools than a sort of Hogwarts experience. I made the mistake of making this joke which was met with an extremely confused look from Alexander and me quickly having to make up something about American slang. In retrospect, it made perfect sense that of course, Harry Potter didn't exist in this world, at least there were some silver linings to ending up here.