Interrupt

Umtane hadn’t wanted to monopolize Nai today.

Yesterday’s success in Chief Mo’s department had been a good omen, but the Vorak had cited other priorities. We met briefly in his investigation room before I went off more this morning’s battery of tests. Chief Axa’s Molecular Organics department wanted to know what kind of amino acids and proteins human bodies worked with on the smallest level. It had been an uneventful series of needle jabs followed by a very long two hours lying on a slab while a very large humming machine tried to image my body's organs and systems.

After lunch, I was due for a follow-up with Physical Medicine where Nai or Tasser was going to try and clone the department’s computer files. Our appointment had been scheduled for an hour ago, but we were still waiting. My detail from security was not forthcoming about the delay, but they might not actually know anything. At least they waited outside the room instead of within. It would have been impossible to have a conversation with them listening.

Of course other things could stop conversation too.

“Caleb, you need to shut up sometimes,” Nai said.

‘Shut up’ was an interesting phrase to translate. Technically she hadn’t said that. The phrase she’d used literally meant ‘hold your breath’, but it was used in virtually an identical manner.

“Technically, I didn’t ‘say’ anything for that whole appointment…” I protested.

“”

I was finding that psionic telepathy didn’t always properly convey tone. She sounded a lot more serious out loud. That had been the wrong time to make a joke about a technicality.

“Was it really that much?” I asked.

“Yes,” Tasser said. “Even I started noticing you pestering her.”

I winced. He wasn’t Adept, so he hadn't even heard what I’d said to Nai. He knew Nai well enough to pick up on the signs though. The fact that he was probably the only one to do so was little comfort.

Yesterday’s visit to Ecology and Biospheres had been productive, but had left Nai unhappy with me. She’d been even more peeved after this morning’s appointment though.

At first I thought she was just having an off day, psionically speaking. There were some days that I felt intensely disturbed by the gargantuan psychic machine I’d built. Those days were fewer and further between the more I dissected it and figured what made it tick.

But Nai turned out to be perfectly content with her comparatively sparse number of mental machines.

She was less fond of having someone badger her with undetectable conversation.

“Pleading ignorance,” I began, “is this a Farnata thing or…”

“No Caleb,” she said wearily. “It’s personal. Or maybe it’s a ‘you’ problem. You swap between psionic-speech and out loud like a wild raskinthe… they’re these animals…oh, never mind.”

“I think I get what you mean by context,” I said.

“Might not seem like it,” Tasser said. “But I’m actually the more social one between the two of us.”

That did surprise me. But then again…

“You’re decently talkative around me and Nai,” I realized. “Not so much everyone else.”

“Casti specifically, but yes,” he said.

“It’s not about sociability,” Nai said. “I can be social just fine. But you aren’t giving me the choice. It’s all one sided. Psionics lets you talk to someone who can’t choose not to listen. It isn’t like ordinary conversation. I can’t just walk away.”

“I didn’t realize you felt that way,” I admitted. “You seemed pretty interested when I first made it.”

“Tactically speaking, it’s a perfect weapon. I don’t regret taking that risk for a second. But when you’re talking in my head, and there’s another conversation happening…I can’t ignore one or the other. Somehow they don’t compete with each other, I can focus on both at once, I don’t understand how. But that doesn’t make it any easier, if anything it’s still harder to keep track of both.”

“Like how holding a weight in one hand doesn’t stop you from holding a weight in the other. But doing both is obviously harder than just the one,” I said.

She nodded. “ But this isn’t holding up weights. It’s a conversation, it’s complex, it takes attention, there’s pressure, and sometimes it’s…it’s just too much.”

‘Too much’.

Oof, that hit me where it hurt. I’d said that in the past.

Once upon a time, I had been a very shy kid. It wasn’t until late middle school that I’d joined the theater club and forced myself out of my shell.

I’d thrown up onstage in front of the first play I’d been in. Every eye had been on me, and it had just been too much. I’d angrily muttered that to myself over and over again afterwards.

That had nearly convinced me to quit, but I’d been…motivated. I wasn’t proud of why I’d done it, but for better or for worse, I’d eventually learned to at least put a lid on the anxiety that chewed away at me when talking to people.

It felt like a trivial thing to worry about now. Except…if I imagined speaking onstage now…it still made me sick, even if I knew I could endure it. But imagining the same thing speaking in front of Casti, or even Vorak…

It didn’t faze me. At least not enough to feel like it mattered.

Part of me worried that I might have ingrained some of Daniel’s mind into my own. But given what I knew about psionics…that didn’t feel likely.

If anything, it was a matter of necessity. Survival.

Back home, it was viable to talk to as few people as possible, for as little as possible.

But out here?

I didn’t have a choice. When I’d first crashed here, not a scrap of my mind had been worried about what Tasser or Nai had thought of me. All my anxiety and fear had been consumed by threats on my life. Social interaction was a survival mechanism.

It was obvious in retrospect, but until now, I’m not sure I’d actually thought of everything that happened to me as a ‘life changing experience’.

Because it certainly was. Even ignoring Adept powers and the days of Daniel in my head…

I wasn’t the same person.

Once upon a time, I might have been fiercely proud of the fact I’d managed to be outgoing like this. Now it just tempted me to be angry instead.

I shouldn’t be angry at Nai though. It was odd to realize at first, but Nai complaining to me was actually her trying to reach out. Taking the social initiative like this wasn’t like her… because she’s not that outgoing, I realized. She was choosing to do something difficult to prevent it from being a bigger problem later.

I got the impression she was bringing this up with just Tasser around because she wanted to avoid anything like the last time we’d butted heads.

If Daniel were here…he would have probably just been patient and listened. I could do that. If she was trying to be patient with me, I could at least do the same.

If Nai the Farnata was actually less outgoing than Tasser…who had she been before the Coalition’s war? Even before that, who had Nai the Kiraeni been?

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “It…hah, it didn’t occur to me that aliens could be like that too.”

“Too?” Nai asked.

“Some humans are like that too,” I said. “I just wasn’t thinking enough.”

“Just ‘some humans’?” Tasser asked. “No humans in particular?”

“Oh you shut up,” I told him. “I’m not scared to talk to people.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. I’d made a slight tactical mistake. Nobody else had specifically mentioned being scared of talking to people.

“…anymore?” he guessed.

I threw my hands up. “Being stabbed by aliens and getting abducted forces some priorities to shift. What, do you feel like you missed out on that version of me?”

“I’m surprised by how much of a sense I have for you sometimes, Caleb,” he confessed. “For all the time we’ve spent together, it doesn’t feel like we talked about ourselves that much.”

“Sometimes I get the same impression of you and Nai,” I admitted. “I keep wondering how you two got to be friends.”

Nai gave Tasser a knowing look, and I swear he looked back at her like he could have a telepathic conversation.

“I was taking the free moment to complain,” Nai told Tasser. “But you might not get a better chance to talk to him about it.”

“Tell me what?” I asked.

“Alright…I said I’d talk to you about it before we left here, and there’s probably not going to be a better moment for it,” Tasser said. “Group sharing is easiest when everyone shares a bit about themselves I suppose.”

“Taknak,” Nai prompted, reluctantly saying the word like it tasted bitter on her tongue.

“Umtane called you that,” I remembered. “Nai nearly hit him.”

“It’s…well, it’s technically a Casti word for someone mentally impaired, either congenitally or through brain damage. But it gets used as a slur,” Tasser said quietly.

“Whoa, really?”

He nodded. “I doubt Umtane would know how it’s used. But you’re wondering why some Casti treat me so oddly and it’s because of that. Technically I’m diagnosed with an erratic disorder. I’m pretty sure there’s an official note in my Coalition file that says I’m prone to violent outbursts.”

“Again, pleading ignorance here…” I said slowly.

“No, of course he’s not,” Nai said, answering my question before I could actually ask it.

“Well…” Tasser said. “It depends on who you ask. My job is to fight Adepts and I am good at it.”

“That doesn’t seem like the same thing,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” he agreed.

“So if the diagnosis isn’t accurate, why do people care?”

“The diagnosis is accurate,” Tasser said. “Or at least it was back when I first got it.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I was ten or eleven?” he said. “I can’t remember exactly when, but I was pretty wild for a Casti kid.”

“You’re shying away from the really ith parts of it,” Nai accused him.

“I’m easing him,” Tasser retorted.

“He got put in a special school on the Casti homeworld where corporal punishment was enforced,” she told me.

“…See, I have a little bit of a problem here,” I said. “Because on Earth that would be a [super] bad thing for a school to do, but I don’t know how normal that is for—”

“It’s both very normal and not,” Tasser said. “Light physical punishments are still used widely: superficial damage is nothing to Casti. But where I got sent…this went beyond having your hands flicked or shoulder cut.”

“Go to a lot of parts of Nakrumum and you’ll see very rigid rules put in place. And the punishment for pushing back against what is ‘supposed to be’ can see you harshly punished,” Nai said.

“They basically trained any ‘undesirable’ behavior out of me,” Tasser said. “Or they like to think so. Really, they just taught us to become very good at hiding it.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I mean, I get that this is all [screwed] up, but just what kind of stuff were you doing that they hated so much?”

“Practically nothing,” Nai said.

“Talking out of turn, wearing the wrong kind of clothing, complaining about certain traditions, I even started some fights,” Tasser said. “There’s a lot of disruptive behaviors back home doesn’t like.”

“I still don’t get it,” I admitted. “I think I’ve done every one of those around Casti on base. But they still don’t treat me anything near like that.”

“You would find it that way even if you went to Nakrumum. Nai too.”

“Why?”

“You’re not Casti,” he said simply. “Why would anyone expect you to act Casti?”

“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but Nakrumum sounds like a terrible place to live,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s not like the whole planet does it. Some places are better than others, and every homeworld has its problems. But out here it’s honestly better than anywhere back home,” Tasser said. “That’s why you probably haven’t picked up on this too much. On base, in the Organic Authority, there’s different prevailing cultures, even if some of the homeworld baggage bleeds through every now and then. Colonies are new, and by nature they’ve broken away, at least some, from conventions on the homeworld.”

I knew there were some pretty terrible parts living on Earth too.

“I’m a little surprised you don’t seem bitter about it,” I said.

Tasser wore a thoughtful expression, “I suppose not. Long time ago I figured people would treat me however they liked, and there was nothing I could do to control that. Part of my trouble is I understand why they did it. Conformity and group cohesion was an advantageous trait for Casti to have, evolving. I think it’s been ingrained in my people.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “I did my best in a bad situation and got out of it as soon as I could.”

“That’s a harsh decision for anyone to make,” I said. “Get in line or leave the pack?”

“I thought so too,” Tasser said. “But that’s not quite accurate. Just because one pack says ‘leave’ doesn’t mean all of them will. Took me a while, but I found a group worth belonging to.”

“Enlisting in the Coalition?”

He nodded. “My family shipped out to a colony first, but yeah. Nai and I wound up with the same meal shift in training, and we were the only two people who didn’t complain about anything.”

“Nobody else would shut up,” Nai said. “They all wanted to talk to the Adept who could make fire.”

“I did too,” Tasser confessed. “But like I said, I had a lot of practice shutting up. So if she didn’t want to talk, that was fine.”

He held up a fist for Nai to bump. She frowned.

“It’s an Earth thing,” I said, demonstrating with Tasser’s other hand.

She humored him and bumped his fist. “Quaint,” she said. “Does it have any special meaning?”

“Uh, well it’s a bit like shaking hands which is related to showing the other person you’re unarmed. I guess…I guess this might be a bit different though, because a fist is supposed to be a weapon. So maybe [bumping] is about trusting the person across from you to have a weapon…”

“...How much of that did you just make up?” Nai asked.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Oh, at least half,” I said. “I don’t know why we do it, do you know the origin behind every odd minor Farnata custom?”

“No,” she conceded.

“I don’t think anyone knows all of their own culture,” a new voice said.

Dr. Eebat poked his head into the room we were waiting in. Finally.

“Not that I’m complaining,” I said, this conversation had actually been fun. “But what the [hell] is taking so long?”

We’d been waiting for more than an hour now.

“Nothing anymore. Director Hom-Heg cancelled all afternoon appointments,” Dr. Eebat said. “Not just for you, the whole facility.”

“Why? Does it matter to us?” I asked.

“Nemuleki is with Chief Niza and the Director this afternoon,” Nai said. “She’ll call if there’s anything important.”

“Wait, if the whole building has basically closed early for today, does that mean the gymnasium is free?”

“I suppose it is, yes,” Eebat said.

“Could we use it then? It’s in your department isn’t it?”

“I…yes, you could use it. What for?”

I turned to Nai with a question, “Adeptry?”

She frowned for a second, but quickly softened to the idea. “Actually, sure. That would be a good change of pace.”

Knew it. She might not have been very happy with me yesterday, but I knew she’d like this. There was just no way an Adept became as skilled as her without enjoying it at least a little.

·····

Tasser ended up calling Letrin and Wurshken. He’d promised them a chance to ask some Adept related questions at some point, so Nai and I were going to have a small audience.

Before we’d left Demon’s Pit, I’d sparred with Nai as part of her Adept training. She’d wiped the floor with me every time, and I’d expected her to.

Each time we’d done so, I’d been paralyzed for the first few minutes remembering our first encounter. It was downright Pavlovian. Every time I tried to attack, it felt like a wave of vorpal fire was going to surge up.

But even anticipating losing like I had, I still had been unable to get her to move. She’d beaten me every time without stepping outside of a three-foot ring.

That had been a week or two ago. And I had brainstormed some new ideas though.

“Same rules as before?” Nai proposed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Changing them now would throw me off.”

Letrin piped up from the sidelines, “What rules would that be?”

“Nothing lethal,” I said. “One point is any good hit. We aren’t exactly playing strict by rules.”

“Oh please refrain from significant injuries too,” Dr. Eebat protested. “I’ll have to explain it to the Director if the First Contact gets hurt.”

“You’re not worried about us tearing up your gymnasium?” Nai asked.

The Casti’s face suddenly blanched like the possibility hadn’t occurred to him yet. He opened his mouth, probably to object, but I was already starting.

Staff fighting was odd, but Nai swore it was effective.

Materializing a quarterstaff wasn’t as quick as I’d practiced it before coming here. My Adeptry felt a little stale. Since coming here, I hadn’t created anything bigger than a few sheets of paper, and I was feeling it now.

I jabbed at her face with the end of the pole in quick succession. The first time we’d sparred like this, I’d done my best to try and twirl the weapon around, swinging from both sides and trying to pressure her that way. Swinging the weapon wide, she’d told me, was not a very effective way to use it.

And I was seeing why now.

Using it like a blunt spear was just faster. If none of my attacks were going to hit anyway, why not make as many as possible?

She ducked and bobbed her head out of the way, and when it seemed like she shifted her weight I stabbed at her ankles instead.

Attacking her feet had been my first idea.

Since she was determined to beat me without leaving her little circle, I could exploit that.

Except instead of catching an ankle with the staff, it was very much the other way around.

Her boot stomped down on my weapon, tearing it from my hands. In the same motion, she materialized her own version of the weapon and rammed it into my belly.

It sent me sprawling, but I wasn’t done yet.

“One hit for me,” she said.

“Yeah, laugh it upwards,” I said, butchering the idiom into Starspeak. I picked myself up and she kicked my staff back to me.

“Try to use your augmentations more,” she advised. “Your body is capable of moving in ways you think it can’t.”

Oh, I knew that.

But since she’d given me the advice, I needed to at least look like I was following it a little if I still wanted to catch her off guard later.

The first thing I needed to do was get her to ditch her staff…if I got it out of her hands, she wouldn’t reform it immediately—probably giving me a fighting chance. My plan worked a lot better if she was empty handed.

I pushed more aggressively this time, trying to vary my pace more. Jabs still went toward every body part that I didn’t think she could move quickly enough, but I tried pausing at random and faking more.

She still managed to sway, duck, and now block all my attacks. I had no chance as long as she was deflecting my quarterstaff with one of her own.

To get rid of it, I would need to catch a moment where she only had one hand on it.

That opportunity came when I started pressuring her by moving too close to her ring. It was suboptimal, and she’d explained why before. I was getting closer than I needed to and opening myself up for attack, which was exactly the plan.

She liked to stay on the side of the ring closest to me, so she had room to backstep if she needed it. But if I slowly drew closer, a few inches with each attack, she had to shift toward the far edge of the circle until…

I crossed too close for her not to punish me for it and she made a sharp swipe to force me back. It wasn’t a full swing, but it was definitely not just a jab. There was a moment as she started to pull the staff back, that she loosened her front grip to choke up on the weapon.

My quarterstaff dove at her wrist, and for a second I thought I had her, but she was too fast. She batted me away, but I saw her grip was off.

I hurled my stick at her hands, trying to get her to drop hers. It must have been a good throw because she hurled her own stick at me rather than only let go.

My throw missed after she pulled her hands back lightning fast, and worse still hers clipped my shoulder hard enough to tip my balance.

I was paying more attention to how my body was augmented, so I leaned into the fall, spinning on one ankle and staying on my feet.

“Mine hit, yours missed,” Nai said. “That’s one more for me.”

This time I didn’t say anything, dissolving my quarterstaff across the gym and materializing a new one. The timing of this was going to be tricky…

Nai did not match me. I’d gotten her to spend her weapon, so this was my chance.

I gripped my quarterstaff like a spear, getting a feel for the weight and carefully counting down the seconds.

As rapidly as I could, I threw the pole right at her face.

I could throw hard, and therefore fast. But not fast enough to actually strike her.

She caught the spear with one hand.

“You’ve tried that before,” she said.

The first time, she’d just ducked out of the way. Last time she’d caught it, just like today.

“Yup,” I told her, right as the tip of the staff ignited just a few inches from her head.

The decaying layer of insulating material I’d added to the staff decomposed back into nothing, exposing the blinding spontaneously burning cap I’d attached to the end.

It wasn’t quite one of my normal flashbangs—I wasn’t trying to cause any real damage. So, it didn’t explode so much as it did just burn. But it burned bright and loud.

Even if she shut her eyes, there was no way Nai wouldn’t be blind for a critical window.

I sprinted at her, approaching from an angle, my plan was to try and land a punch or kick instead of with the weapon. The flash wasn’t loud enough to hide my footsteps for long, so she’d hear me if I didn’t hurry.

I rounded behind her and tried to punch at the back of her shoulder only for my own staff to come crashing into my side.

Nai used my own weapon to throw me back, sending me tumbling to the floor.

No recovering from that fall.

She’d swung in a wide arc, the very thing she’d said was a bad idea. This was the hardest blow yet, and it caught me completely off guard.

“Okay…” I wheezed. “That…that got me…”

She blinked rapidly, trying to clear her vision. “That was a dirty trick,” she said. “But you tried to get too clever. I know your range is far enough you could have just materialized a flash midair. You didn’t need to bother with attaching it to the quarterstaff.”

“I figured you would have been anticipating that,” I said. “I thought just making a flash wouldn’t be enough, I needed to trick you into glancing toward it, even for a millisecond.”

“Maybe…” she said. “Complexity of the plan aside, it was well executed.”

“Except for the part where you still totally knew where I was,” I complained.

“Blinding me is a good start, but you forgot I have other ways of tracking you.”

She invisibly flexed her tactile cascade, and I was reminded of its presence underfoot. I still didn’t know how far hers could reach, but if she could discriminate how it spread through materials around her, she could easily shape it to cover the entire gymnasium floor.

“My feet,” I realized. “Your cascade tells you where anything is touching the floor, even if you can’t see it.”

“Handy trick in a fight,” Nai said. “Your own positioning is one third of any battle, knowing your enemy’s position is another third.”

“So when you said I shouldn’t make big swings…”

“It’s because big swings sacrifice speed to cover a wider area. Speed is usually more threatening,” she said.

“Unless you can’t see someone directly, but you know where their footprints are.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” Nai said. “You put together a better offensive strategy than most Adepts I’ve fought.”

“You’re just saying that because you enjoy beating me up, and you want to do it some more.”

“Well this is a gymnasium, and you were here to run around,” she said. “So run.”

“Oh no you don’t!” I said.

She created a massive blue cloud between us, and it spilled over the floor.

It sparked and crackled, but it lacked that characteristic heat that her genuine vorpal fire had. This was basically just blue fog with just enough of an electric charge to make my skin tingle, but it was harmless. It was a convincing facsimile, though.

“I won three points on you, fair and square. So now we get to see just how augmented you are.”

The funny thing was, the Starspeak idiom actually used the word for ‘round’ instead of ‘square’ but since the Starspeak version also rhymed, I couldn’t not adapt the translation.

This was one of Nai’s worst drills, just because she was effectively attacking me with her fire—her best, most practiced weapon.

She sent out tendrils of quasi-fire to compliment the layer she’d spread over the floor. Our audience was knee deep in the stuff, but they didn’t have to pretend it would kill them.

The bolts she sent through the air weren’t hard to duck and dodge, but they did force me to do just that. I had to keep moving to avoid them and that let her hem me back toward the corner of the gym. The floor layer just kept creeping forward, spreading everywhere.

I was quickly running out of footing.

“You’re going to have to go up eventually,” she said.

Climbing was one of those skills I’d come to rely on, but this corner of the gym was no good if she wanted me to play ‘lava’. There weren’t any handholds on this wall. But…

Using what little space I had left, I got a running start at the wall and leapt, planting my feet on it and kicking off it Bo Jackson style.

Jumping off the wall instead of the floor gave me the extra height I needed to land atop one of the large athletic testing devices littered about the gym floor. Casti computer science might have been stuck in the fifties, but these bulky machines were tougher too. They could take the weight of someone jumping on it. Dr. Eebat still winced though.

“Behind you!” Letrin shouted, from the sidelines.

Nai sent another steam of quasi-fire at me, forcing me to duck down atop the machine I was perched on. She contorted the same billowing stream to twist back toward me and come down from above, but I pointed a finger at it and said, “Bang!”

It wasn’t a full-strength kinetic bomb—that would have tired me too much to use for this—but it was a forceful enough pop to disperse the stream of quasi-fire long enough for me to leap to new footing.

The machines were close enough together, I could leap from one to one as long as I paid close attention to my feet, but as soon as I did, Nai tried to catch me with more aggressive attacks.

“Can you make it to the balcony?” she asked.

She intensified the number of attacks she made. Instead of just long blue streams launched from her position, she started making portions of the fog covering the floor to swell under me, swallowing machines and footholds before I could reach them.

I wasn’t going to make it to the balcony.

She hemmed me in with nowhere else to jump before shouting, “Cling to the ceiling!”

I jumped on reflex when she brought up the blue fog to engulf my last foothold.

I did try to kick off the wall to see if she would uncover a spot for me to land, but she wasn’t giving that kind of test.

The fog only lightly stung as I fell into it, but I was stung regardless.

“That was unfair,” I accused her. “There was nowhere for me to go at the end.”

She dissolved the quasi-fire filling the gymnasium, clearing it in an instant. “You could have materialized yourself a handhold on the wall, or better yet, this.”

Nai reached as high as she could on the wall without jumping, splaying her palm against it, before hoisting her whole-body weight up. Her hand adhered to the wall like Spider-Man.

“Okay, how?” I asked. “Glue?”

She shook her head. “Magnets, technically. Remember how you materialized salt throughout that ice? It was distributed into all the microscopic gaps in the solid?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well gaps get smaller than microscopic,” she reminded me. “Atoms are nearly entirely empty space.”

“So…you added a charged material, evenly distributed throughout your hand, and made an opposite charge in the wall? How can you make things that small? Even I can’t do that, and I’m supposed to be more precise than you. Also, if you’ve made something charged like that, how come the electrons in your hand don’t clash with what you’ve added?”

“For the first part, I’m not actually making anything small,” Nai said. “I’m uniformly affecting every part of an area the volume of my hand. That’s well within my precision. The second part is more complicated: it’s because of selective interaction.”

“Okay…” I said slowly. “So your precision isn’t actually limited by how small a creation you can make, but by how limited an area you can fill with that creation?”

“Yes, because the ‘size’ of a creation is almost a quality itself, rather than a quantity. What does it matter if I make two halves or four quarters or sixty-four square-eighths? I’m still just making ‘one’ of something.”

“Okay, I think that makes sense, but what is selective interaction then?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Nai said. “Adepts can decide the behaviors of what they create, like this.”

She materialized two small slates, each one a bit less than an inch thick. She handed one to me, had me hold it flat, and proceeded to drop the other slate straight through the solid one in my hand.

It passed through, like it was an illusion.

“What!?” I yelped. The second slate clattered against the floor, and she handed both to me.

“Colors can be a useful metaphor,” she said. “Imagine that everything in the cosmos is made of orange matter.”

“This slate,” she said gesturing to the first, “is yellow. This one is red. Red and yellow are both part of orange, so they can both touch orange.”

She tapped both blocks with her finger. “But they’re completely inert to each other. They can’t push or pull on the other. Red and yellow have nothing in common, so even though they’re both solid to orange, to each other…”

Nai motioned for me to try and clack the blocks together. “…they’re not even there.”

The two blocks phased into each other.

“[What in the Pauli’s hell is this?]” I breathed.

“With the magnetic charges,” Nai said, “you can do the same thing. Every electrical potential in the universe is red. The ones I added to my hands are blue. Blue positive sticks to blue negative without disrupting anything red.”

“But aren’t you made of ‘red’?” I asked. “For it to exert any force on you, something would have to interact with you.”

“Correct,” she said. “You could probably make the red or blue charges already. The tricky part for you will be bridging them with purple charges so you don’t destroy your hands. The fact that your hands are augmented already should work in your favor.”

“You really think I can do that too?”

She nodded. “It’s one of the most valuable and underrated Adept tricks I know of.”

I grinned. This was going to be great.

She wanted me to practice getting objects to magnetize to my hands first, before the other way around. So she had me try to make my quarterstaff stick to my downward facing palm.

Letrin, Wurshken, and Tasser were all watching keenly, heckling me occasionally. Nai reluctantly answered Dr. Eebat a few questions on Adeptry and augmentations.

It was a great afternoon to get my mind off our bioterrorist hunt.

But soon enough Umtane frantically burst into the gymnasium.

“Warlock,” he panted, “I need your help.”