Learning
Tiv’s Adept workshop met not just once a day, but twice.
Not everyone could attend every class, but that was half the advantage of it. His clones let him hold the class so frequently, everyone could make time to attend at least a few.
He constantly joked about how time management meant nothing to him and his clones, but I didn’t grasp just how little he was actually joking until I started attending regularly.
True to Nai’s word, we did just that.
My morning workout was quickly replaced with Adept practice.
In one week, I sparred with more Adepts than I had even seen in the last eight months combined.
And I learned that my exposure had given me a much less idiosyncratic impression of Adeptry than was actually the case.
Nai presented herself as a one-trick pony with an assortment of secondary tricks she’d practiced enough to be somewhat valuable. But the truth was even her secondary tricks were more refined than most Adepts’ primary skills.
Most of the Adepts in Tiv’s workshop restricted themselves to just one or two Adept tricks in combat. Keeping those abilities sharp and ready for combat use took more practice than I ever would have expected.
That hadn’t been my experience at all. My psionics were helping me keep my creations consistent, had to be.
Still, even with just a few tricks, these Adepts hadn’t practiced so much for nothing.
More and more, I was better carving out my niche as an ultra flexible Adept. But I still had a losing record. Counting my first spar with Tiv, I had thirteen wins and twenty losses at the end of the first week of spars.
Memorable losses included the L2 with elective augmentations in the form of extra arms. Trying to cope with four punches at once was tough: I could avoid or block any three I wanted, but the fourth had always managed to catch me, no matter what I'd tried in our spar.
There was another Farnata, the only L3 in the class besides Tiv and Nai, who just created water, water, and more exotic water. It was surprisingly effective defensive strategy. Every time I came close, she just dumped a few dozen gallons into the space between us. It wasn’t even pressurized, but the mass alone was enough to slow me down and give her the edge. She would dissolve whatever liquid she’d made after a few seconds, recouping it, and that way she stalled long enough to exhaust me.
My most embarrassing defeat had come from one of the few other improvisers catching me with my own flashbang trick. They’d only seen it the one time, but then again, so had I when I first reproduced it.
Every person in attendance was good. Really good.
Knowing that was actually reassuring, because I was managing to keep up with and sometimes even exceed them.
The losses were educational, but the wins were exhilarating.
“Go Caleb!” Tivs cheered from the sidelines. “Maintain your intensity!”
Simultaneously, there was a small crowd of Tiv clones cheering for my opponent too.
Said opponent was the same Farnata who’d defeated me with my flashbang a few days ago, but I was ready to settle the score.
He was trying to keep this a close-range fight this time: give me no chance to take the momentum for myself. He was confident hand-to-hand, and while that was normally one of my strengths too, this Farnata had superior training and was even more ready to counter my improvised punches and kicks than last time.
But that was fine.
I had some ranged tricks to complement my close-quarters gaps. And my experience had told me that few people were ready for them to be combined.
His practice knife darted past my quarterstaff, and I found an opportunity to make some distance. He pulled the knife back too slowly, and I stepped inside toward him, almost like a tackle. My shoulder bashed into his chest, stumbling him backward perfectly to be caught by a wide swing from my quarterstaff.
But it was an extra wide swing, and this Adept was skilled with his cascade. Knowing the ground behind him was clear, he took a big leap back to avoid my swing.
Except I did the same, getting more than twenty feet between us. The commonly quoted myth said inside twenty-one feet for knife vs. gun, but these weren't exactly laboratory conditions, so I felt pretty safe taking this to a shootout for a moment.
I materialized my revolver—modified for paintballs—and fired twice.
Two paintballs splattered against the riot-shield my opponent materialized. It was the one piece of Adeptry the Coalition had standardized: the bare minimum requirement to be deployed was the ability to create some kind of bulletproof shield or cover.
But my opponent had made a mistake. Unlike plexiglass ones back home, their shield wasn’t transparent. And I could exploit that.
I dissolved my gun, materializing an eggshell filled with highly compressed gas. I hurled it at the shield while I ran laterally toward the arena walls.
My shell shattered, instantly drowning the Farnata in a thick cloud of orange smoke. Completely blind, my opponent pushed his cascade wider through the floor.
Or, I assumed he did.
My own cascade didn’t reach far enough to cover the same floor. I couldn’t stretch my cascade that far, but what little I did have wasn’t in the floor. It was in the walls and, as I climbed upward, the ceiling.
I’d fought hard to push my opponent away.
So the last thing he’d expect would be for me to suddenly close that distance in an instant and catch him off balance.
It might have been repeating myself, but come on…there was just something about attacking from above that nobody was ever ready for.
My smoke cloud dissolved as I fell, and for the split second their visibility returned, my opponent froze in confusion.
This wasn’t sport fighting, so I didn’t pull my punches. I materialized my quarterstaff under me, crashing into him and instantly pinning him to the ground. There were no sounds of ribs cracking, but he’d be badly bruised in the morning.
“That’s one!” referee-Tiv called out. My entourage cheered while the other gaggle of Tiv’s booed along with most of the Adept students.
He didn’t give up though. Even after what I, in theory, could have made a kill move, he immediately tried to wrestle out from under my pin.
Unfortunately for him, Nai had made sure to teach me follow through. I had the momentum, and he was flustered.
I unexpectedly let him up, but in the same motion, I grabbed his collar, dragging him up to his feet faster than he’d been ready. It made it that much easier to kick his leg out from under him and drive a fist into his chest on the way down again.
“That’s two!”
Instead of pinning him with my fist though, I darted past him instead, materializing as much glue as I could under him. The adhesive held just long enough for me to rematerialize my gun and shoot him right in the head.
“And that’s three!”
Just like that, the spar was over. Fourteen wins now.
One of the Tiv clones helped my opponent up off the ground, immediately applying ice packs to the spots I’d struck.
I replied with a grin.
After every match there was a debrief. Both participants and spectators contributed feedback. The whole point of these workshops was to learn after all.
“Pir, where did you go wrong?” Tiv asked.
“He took the momentum and…and I don’t know what else.”
“He did,” Tiv agreed. “But when? And how?”
“…I’m not sure. I got caught up in the pace.”
“Caleb?” Tiv asked. “Do you know what you did?”
“Well, it felt like he had too good a chance if he kept things close quarters on his terms, so I let him think I was going to play for distance. I pushed him away so he wouldn’t expect me to sneak back close to him so quickly.”
“Correct. Everyone remember: attacks don’t necessarily have to hurt to be effective. Blinding or immobilizing your opponents, even briefly, can be invaluable,” Tiv nodded. “What other choices saw you win?”
“I went for all three points one after another, no interruptions,” I said. “If I let him collect himself, I would miss out on chances to attack while he’s off balance. So I didn’t give him a chance to collect himself.”
Tiv nodded, addressing the whole class. “His experience is showing again. All of Caleb’s wins happen the same way: multiple points scored in succession, and he hasn’t lost without scoring at least one point on any of you. He’s been in real, lethal fights with Vorak Adepts. That’s why he’s more decisive than a lot of you; these fights are the next step up for trainees, but for him they’re a step down from what he’s already been through. Warlock?”
Prompted, Nai stepped forward, “There is no substitute for the real thing. Your first battle filling an Adept role is the one you’re most likely to die in. If you can survive the first one, then you’ll be more prepared to handle the next and all the rest. So remember that you aren’t just training to fight, you’re training to be Adept in fights.”
She stepped toward my defeated opponent, asking directly, “Pir, you were quick enough to materialize a whole shield in the time it took Caleb to draw and fire his gun. When he pinned you down on your chest, why didn’t you materialize a shield right above your face and torso?”
“I’ve got no excuse, Asu Nai,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you if you had an excuse,” she replied. “I want you to confront the failure and identify where you fell short.”
“It happened too quickly,” he decided, “or rather, I wasn’t fast enough: to think of it, or carry it out.”
“You’re correct,” Nai told him. “Leb’s water trick beat Caleb yesterday by slowing him down, even if it didn’t harm him. Did you think to try something similar?”
“No,” my opponent said. “I was too focused on carrying out my initial strategy: defend via continuous offense.”
“And the first moment Caleb put you on defense, your plan fell apart,” Nai said. “You shouldn’t think of improvisation in combat as true improvisation. If your first plan fails, switch to a backup, always have an extra plan. If you don’t have an extra one to fall back on, make one, fast!”
“You all need to improve your speed, especially when you’re choosing what to materialize. Even if you aren’t utilizing flash formation, you still want to create things as quickly and decisively as you can.”
With no other warning, Nai created a ring and flung it straight at my face.
Just like she warned me, my quarterstaff sprang into existence mid-swing, deflecting the ring with a rattle…
…A rattle?
I realized I hadn’t actually deflected the ring, but caught it around my staff.
Every Farnata in the room looked surprised.
Nai hid her surprise before any of the trainees could notice it.
A happy accident.
“Now, if it makes any of you feel any better,” Caleb here is cheating a little bit,” she said. “His augmentations aren’t just in his joints and tendons, but his nerve tissues too. It’s hard to say how much is him being an alien and how much is his augmentations, but he’s going to be faster than a lot of you. So will most Vorak Adepts.”
One trainee—I recognized her as the water Adept—raised her hand with a question.
“We keep getting told that constant practice will help us be fast enough in real combat, but what else can we be doing to eliminate those indecisive moments?”
“Are you asking…what can you practice besides practice?” Nai asked.
“Sorry…” the Adept replied, “I mean, it feels unclear what all we should be practicing in free exercises. How do you practice decisiveness?”
Instead of answering, Tiv and Nai both turned toward me. I caught a trace of psionic signals flashing between them for a moment.
They’d exchanged messages on a psionic channel I hadn’t been looking at.
“What?” I asked, “I’m not teaching this class.”
“No, but your perspective is unique, and it could be valuable to learn from,” Tiv said. “How did you get decisive?”
“I…it’s hard to explain,” I said. “I just… decided to.”
I was met with only quizzical looks. Many of them from Tiv’s lingering clones.
“I mean, decisiveness is how quickly you can act intelligently. In a way, it was easy for me to start acting that way under pressure because I had no training. I had nothing to measure my choices by. I couldn’t second guess what I did, because I didn’t find out if it was a bad idea until it was too late. So I decided to focus on acting impulsively as…well, as optimally as possible.”
“…That doesn’t help at all,” the water Adept said plainly.
“Sorry,” I shrugged.
“Caleb brings up a good point though,” Nai pointed out. “He was put in situations where he didn’t have the opportunity to second guess his decisions.”
Another Adept piped up.
“But isn’t that a problem? The whole point of this training is to prepare us for when we’re actually at risk in battle. But if we can only practice that by actually being in battle…”
“You remember how much your drill-instructors wore you down in basic training?” Nai asked.
A round of uncomfortable nods went around.
“Same principle here. All training has to be weighed against the risks it poses to the trainee. Adept risks are a lot higher. That’s why Ase Tiv has been so exhaustive in learning exactly what your limits are. He doesn’t want any of you to die as your combat exercises become more…”
Nai struggled for the right word.
“Authentic,” I suggested.
“Yes,” Nai agreed. “In the next few weeks you should have your first fire-trial with other grunts. They’re going to be counting on you to know what you’re doing with your powers. So—safety and Adept risks notwithstanding—don’t just follow Tiv’s regimen; take the initiative for your own training. Because if you can’t be decisive with your own choices, it’s going to be nigh impossible to take the initiative when others’ lives are at stake.”
“Does that mean we should try branching out more? Try to develop more dependable tricks?” one Adept asked.
Nai gave the Farnata a look that betrayed absolutely nothing.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“There are benefits and costs to diversifying. Decide for yourself if it’s worthwhile.”
It was, I realized, a challenge.
Nai had given them all the answers they needed to succeed, but she refused to put those pieces together for them.
It would be worthwhile for most of these Adepts to broaden their practiced skills. Some of them were getting hung up in what exactly having ‘one strong trick’ meant. If you made a gun and bullets, was that one trick or two?
The answer varied immensely depending on how you practiced it.
If you only practiced truly one thing, eventually you would start to plateau. And if I—an untrained, minimally experienced Adept—was managing to best some of these trained soldiers, their growth was stalling.
There was no way Tiv didn’t know. The class was too intensive for him not to be aware.
In fact…that might have been the point of the workshops. Instead of focusing on training naturally talented Adepts, was he focusing on those who seemed to have subpar skills, trying to slowly squeeze them for every last drop of potential they had?
I glanced at the two headliners and their expressions.
Tiv glanced my way, but Nai didn’t break her gaze on the trainees.
<…Can I give a hint?>
I didn’t say a word, while some of the Adepts paired off, discussing quietly exactly what kind of answer Nai was looking for.
Instead, I did what the workshops were for: Adeptry.
My metaphor, I’d decided, was better than just an idea. It was a literal object lesson.
I made a plain, smooth-edged knife, tossing on the floor in front of them. Then I made an identical blade with both sides serrated. Then I made a classic military ka-bar knife.
My point was, small variations—even unsuccessful ones—of what they already had could inspire new possibilities. Every one of them had extensively practiced their tricks and how they were intended to be used. But they weren’t being bold enough to experiment with new uses, which in turn could elicit new creations.
A balisong was the second to last one I made, letting it twirl in my hand as flashily as I knew how. Technically, I should have cut myself with it, but my augmentations kept the skin from breaking.
I tossed the butterfly knife into the small pile of knives I’d made before warning them.
“Stand back,” I said.
I gave them the barest moment to back up before I showed them my newly practiced combat trick: not fit for sparring.
A specially shaped hollow knife materialized in the air, with the hollow portion filled by a carefully measured portion of compressed gas. The instant the creation settled into reality, the pressurized gas propelled the blade like a rocket.
It struck exactly where I’d aimed it: the small patch of floor exposed between the other knives I’d tossed on the floor. The blade stuck up from the floor.
“How’d you do that?” one asked.
“Metal and gas,” I said. “And careful aim.”
“Is that enough of a hint for you all?” Nai asked.
That was enough to get them speculating just what their teachers meant. Nai, Tiv, and I hung off to the side while the other Adepts began evaluating how they might be able to improve their skills or choose additional ones to practice.
Psionically, Nai caught me up on what she’d uncovered at the Organic Authority, but out loud we kept the discussion on Adept powers.
“I can’t believe you taught him that wall-clinging trick,” Tiv laughed.
“Yeah, how did you stick to the walls?” one of the trainees close enough to hear us asked.
“There’s a dozen ways to stick to a wall,” Tiv said. “But the Warlock taught him that particular method, and it’s just silly.”
“It’s a selective interaction trick,” I answered. “Opposing charges in the surface and my limbs that don’t interact with anything except each other.”
“If they don’t interact with anything, how do they exert force on your body?”
“There’s an intermediate material that interacts with both the charges and your body,” Nai said. “When I first figured it out, I was worried about disrupting the electrochemistry in my hands. Technically, you could just uniformly distribute a charged material in your hand, but I’ve found without the bridging material, the magnetism messes with blood pressure and my joints.”
“…What she said,” I followed.
The trainee nodded thoughtfully and returned to their separate discussion.
“That was a neat metaphor,” Tiv told me. “Those different kind of knives. Were you making those up, or are those real weapons from Earth?”
“Earth,” I answered, materializing another balisong to twirl and show off a bit.
“That seems dangerous,” the Century mused.
“It is,” I said. “But not as much as it looks. See? The blade isn’t double sided, but that’s hard to tell unless it’s still enough to look closer.”
“Probably doesn’t hurt that you have bulletproof hands,” Nai commented.
“That too,” I conceded.
“Hmm,” Tiv pondered, “I’ve done a lot of knife fighting with my clones. Up until now I would have thought that twirling to be risky. But there’s a bit of flair to it—it’s intimidating.”
“More unpredictable too,” Nai noted. “I do that with my vorpal fire sometimes. Moving it around instead of keeping it static. Keeps opponents guessing.”
“How do you move the fire around?” I asked. “You’ve drilled into me a thousand times that you have to create things that move themselves, but whenever you move the fire around, it really looks like arbitrary forces.”
Nai grinned at me. “Half the time I’m just making new fire,” she said. “But I can also use the exotic fluid’s tension. If I dissolve a cavity into the interior of the fluid, then the remaining fluid will move to fill the gap. That generates some momentum too.”
“Funny thing is,” Tiv added, “Nai is a downright genius when it comes to fluid composition and interaction, but she’s terrible with solids. She can cyclically dematerialize and recreate discrete portions of the fluid fuel for her flames. But if she makes anything—and I mean anything —solid, she can only dematerialize the whole thing.”
“You lost me,” I said.
“He’s poking fun at me,” Nai frowned.
“Yeah, I got that part, I just don’t understand what cyclical dematerialization is.”
“It means if I make liquids, I can pick and choose what mass to dematerialize, even if it’s in a mixture. So I can be constantly dematerializing and rematerializing vorpal fire in a steady cycle. But I can’t freely discriminate how I dematerialize solids. I’m clumsy with them: I can’t even dissolve big chunks of solids. I have to dissolve the whole thing at once.”
“…You did that on the moon,” I recalled. “You made that massive field of spikes, and then dissolved the whole thing.”
Nai nodded. “That was…complicated. There’s a trick to temporarily working past your mass limit, and I was using it there. Usually I use it to extend the duration of my vorpal flames, but there I was just making as much cover as possible.”
“I saw pictures of that,” Tiv commented. “You needed the cover. Some of those gunner Vorak had nasty tech tricks.”
“Every single Adept there was at least a seven on the twelve-point scale,” Nai said serenely. “But I beat them all.”
She…wasn’t bragging. But it was close. We both had made important steps that day.
“What’s the twelve-point scale?” I asked.
“Complicated,” Nai said.
"Oh, come on."
"Tiv, you tell him."
“You’re already familiar with aptitudes, right?” Tiv asked.
“Magnitude, range, and intricacy—the L categories right?”
“Yep. That is a very generalized way to describe the underlying capabilities of any given Adept, even civilian or non-combat ones. But different fields have more specialized ways to categorize powers. The twelve-point scale is something we Coalition Adepts cooked up to describe combat capabilities. The maximum score possible is a twelve: three categories with four points each. But…”
Tiv cast a glance at Nai for help.
“The categories aren’t the easiest to translate,” she elaborated. “They weren’t named in Starspeak; they’re Esagi. There aren’t precisely equivalent words.”
“It wouldn’t be the first linguistic puzzle I’ve had. Hit me,” I said, leaning forward.
“…Fine,” Nai shrugged. “First is Ten— roughly translated it means ‘attack’. There’s way more to it though. It’s not just about offense, but reach and…well a lot of different things. You could interpret it as ‘threat’ or ‘initiative’ too. There are connotations of being immediate, or at least more immediate than something else.”
“It’s your ability to overcome your opponent’s ability to persist, however it happens,” Tiv said.
“Ten,” I repeated. “So attack, damage, range, mobility too, I assume?”
“No,” Nai said, shaking her head. “Mobility falls under the second category: Sir. It’s the opposite of Ten. It’s defense, evasion, reflecting Tiv’s wording—it’s anything that allows to persist in the face of your opponent’s actions.”
“I’m not sure why you wouldn’t include mobility under attack— Ten,” I said. “It seems like outmaneuvering your opponent would be pretty important in attacking.”
“That’s a failure in translation,” Nai said. “Ten does include your ability to move into a position that you can attack from. But in Esagi— the language these words come from—that is part of ‘reach’, not mobility. There’s a reason I said that instead of ‘range’. If mobility is part of how you attack, then you’re right, it would qualify.”
“Okay, so oversimplifying: Ten is attack, Sir is defense. What’s the third category?”
“Everything else,” Nai said simply. “It’s called Va and it literally means anything extra that can potentially fulfill the role of the other two. You could call it the ‘swing factor’.”
“I take it you rate pretty high?” I asked her.
“I’m a solid eleven,” Nai said. “Tiv is a ten, maybe ten-and-a-half.”
“Let me guess how your numbers split…” I started, adding up everything I knew about Nai’s Adeptry. “Between vorpal fire and your selective solids, your offense and defense max out the scale. Four and four. Which leaves you a three in swing factor.”
“He’s good,” Tiv grinned. Nai nodded, confirming my guess.
“Now try him.”
I knew significantly less about the Century as an Adept, but I did know his greatest strength. If his epithet could be taken seriously, then he was virtually impossible to kill. He would max out Sir, just through the sheer obstacles in identifying which Tiv was creating all the others. Not to mention any other tricks.
“Two, four, four,” I guessed.
Tiv nodded. “How’d you know it wasn’t three-four-three?”
“Nai said you have a good chance of winning against her. So I bet you have more tricks than just your clones. I think you’re actually more like me: someone with a wider bag of tricks than it is deep.”
Tiv frowned. “I’m not sure that idiom translates very well, but I think I take your point. You’re correct that I’m not the only clone-capable Adept out there, but we’re still a pretty rare breed. I take it a step further though.”
“It’s the unpredictability,” I hedged. “Even with just the clone trick and nothing else, it’s so flexible that it becomes impossible to predict dependably. That sounds like swing factor to me.”
“Va is the hardest category to concretely define,” Nai admitted.
“So, where do I rate?” I asked.
“I have a number in mind,” Nai said. “But I know Tiv will disagree because he hasn’t seen what I have. But try to analyze yourself first. What can you do?”
“Well, I feel like I have some decent offensive tricks,” I said. “Between the gun, the kinetic bomb, and the new rocket knives, I think I could hurt someone of your caliber if I was smart about it. And lucky. Like, maybe not everyone, but more than just the low end—wait, actually how low does the scale go? Does it bottom out at one point, or zero?”
“Zero,” Nai confirmed. “In practice, it’s never actually this simple, but in theory non-Adepts are supposed to rate zero in all three. And you should know the scale is intended to be logarithmic. The gap between a three & four is exponentially larger than the gap between a one & two.”
“Alright…Then I’d give myself two points in each category. I have some decent attack options, I’m confident in my agility and evasion. Plus psionic tricks give me some extra information to help swing things in my favor.”
Nai glanced at Tiv.
“There’s no way you’ve reached two points in Ten,” Tiv said. “You don’t hit hard enough, even with the gun. Your reflexes are exceptional—when combined with your specific augmentations, I’d say they’re barely enough to give you that two in Sir. But just barely.”
“So I rate a five out of twelve?” I asked.
“Six,” Nai disagreed.
“ Six? ?” Tiv asked, incredulously.
“One Ten, two Sir, and three Va,” she explained.
“Three?” Tiv and I both remarked.
“You’d rate his psionics that highly?”
“Yes,” Nai said. “But also because you’re over focused on psionics. They aren’t the only factor.”
“…Ah,” Tiv realized.
“What?”
“The twelve-point scale doesn’t measure your Adeptry,” he explained. “It’s a measure of the Adept, the person themselves and their ability to do battle. Not just their Adept powers.”
“Tasser and I joke that even without Adept powers he still rates zero-one-two,” Nai said. “The scale is meant to get you thinking about how you approach Adept combat, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the person using the scale is Adept.”
“So technically the scale could be applied even to non-Adepts,” I said.
Nai nodded. “Tiv’s clones aren’t strictly Adept, but each one on its own still holds its own point or two in Va because they all have Tiv’s expertise and training.”
“And you think my own mentality gives me that much [je ne sais quoi] ?”
“Maybe I’m wrong and this is a psionic thing,” Nai said. “But you think well even when the stakes climb. High-pressure problem-solving skills like yours only come from one place: experience. No Adept trick makes up for it, and you’ve got it.”
“So I’m probably a five, but you’re being all encouraging and saying six?” I asked.
Nai didn’t dignify that with a response, only smirking at me.
“If I were you,” Tiv said, “I’d be careful not to conflate the twelve-point combat scale with the general aptitude scale. I’ve seen an L1 who rated a perfect twelve and more than one L3 who barely made two points. One is to describe Adeptry, the other is to describe combat.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “If Nai had a three in swing factor before though, how much does having the radar add?”
Tiv followed my glance at Nai.
“It’s definitely powerful,” Nai said. “Maybe even a full point on the scale. The question is, does it go to me, because I benefit from it? Or does it go to Caleb, because he’s the source of it?”
“You make it sound like your use of it is that dependent on him,” Tiv said.
“Maybe not actively, but over time? Sure. Psionics crumble—not the same way as other Adeptry—but they crumble all the same. I’m fixing what I can, but after a few months of my repairs it’s not going to have the same level of function.”
“Can Caleb fix it?” Tiv asked.
“That would require me being ginger enough to disassemble it and pass the pieces back to him for maintenance.”
“It’s fascinating to me that these mental creations have some form of…well, what seems to be physical consistency,” Tiv said. “…You should proceed with your psionics class quickly, Caleb.”
If, at that very moment, we hadn’t been psionically sharing the very investigative information I was being compensated with, I might have wondered if Tiv was trying to cheat around the bargain I’d made.
“I’m finishing up an introductory educational model,” I said. “The hardest part of learning them is understanding that they’re possible in the first place. The biggest obstacles happen to be the barriers to entry.”
“The biggest obstacles that you know of,” Tiv corrected me with a grin.