Impart
The next morning, a psionic alarm woke me up half an hour early.
I grabbed some food, got cleaned up, and paused outside Nora’s door.
Yesterday had gone unexpectedly smoothly. Treating her…normally was proving more than doable. She could be, and was, a friend. I could treat her like a friend.
So, was this overdoing it?
Nah.
It took a minute of careful designing in my head, but I materialized a simple container of compressed gas connected to a horn. It wasn’t the classic ear splitting airhorn that I had in mind…
“BRRRAAAPPPTTT”
But it was plenty to give Nora a start.
“Bright and early!” I said.
“[Ga-Godammit, Caleb!]” Nora hissed, instantly wide awake. “[Scared the shit out of me!]”
“[I even warned you last night,]” I joked.
“[You’re evil,]” she muttered. “[Pure evil.]”
Nerin woke up too. “Caleb, you koievaiwalta !”
“[Oh that’s a bad, bad word,]” I told Nora. “[Catch up! I’ll meet you in the basement!]”
Nerin swore at me while I ducked out the door. She could go back to sleep just fine.
·····
Nora stumbled into gym about ten minutes behind me.
“[Dude, do I really have to wear this?]” she asked blearily. Instead of her normal colorful Adept clothing, she was barefoot in a simple grey tee shirt and shorts.
“[Yep,]” I told her. “[We’re going to push your creative powers today, and if we push far enough, that means some of your creations might spontaneously destabilize.]”
“[…Yeah, probably a good idea then,]” Nora said.
“[No sense delaying then,]” I said. “[I had two things in mind for this morning. A lecture rundown on the basics, and an object lesson. I’m going to go out on a limb, and guess you want the object lesson first? To wake up?]”
“[Probably a sound idea,]” Nora agreed.
“[Okay, well the object lesson comes with a disclaimer,]” I said. “[Halax told you that Adeptry is dangerous, right?]”
“[Yeah,]” she nodded.
“[Well he didn’t do it justice,]” I said. “[Stand back.]”
Nora backed up a few paces and I materialized little red cylinder with a fuse sticking out the top.
“[What is that?]” she asked.
“[What’s it look like?]” I said. “[It’s dynamite.]”
It was simple Adeptry to light the fuse.
Nora only raised an eyebrow at me, which confirmed what I suspected. She knew Adeptry could be dangerous, but she become too comfortable with it to have the appropriate level of concern. I’d noticed she’d been cautious whenever she made something so far. Caution was good.
But fear was better.
The fuse ticked down on my stick of dynamite, and with just an inch of fuse to spare, I finally hurled it into the air behind me.
It exploded with a sharp crack, making Nora jump again.
“[Dude, what the shit?]” she asked incredulously.
I didn’t reply, instead taking a few steps closer to her and making another explosive. The first one had been tiny, about the size of a film canister. This one was road flare sized.
Putting on my best dead expression, I stared at her while I burned down the fuse on the second stick of dynamite.
“[Caleb, seriously, what the fuck? You’re going to hurt yourself.]”
“[True,]” I conceded. That was part of my point.
She was sounding more properly concerned now.
I wasn’t going to toss away this one, and she saw as much. I didn’t blink, and she decided to do something about it.
She rushed over, pinching out the fuse.
“[Dude, what the fuck was the point of that?]” she hissed.
“[To scare you,]” I said.
“[Well, mission fucking accomplished! You could have blown yourself up,]” she said, chastising me.
For a split second, I was reminded of Nai and I. Nora was older than me, but it was easy to forget that. On the flipside, it seemed like it was easy for her to forget how much more familiar I was with Adeptry than her.
“[I could have blown you up too,]” I corrected. “[From what I’ve gathered about you and Halax, your healthy caution of Adeptry comes from potentially hurting other people. That’s good. Being concerned about others is sensible. But you need to understand that the person you’re most likely to kill with Adeptry is yourself.]”
“[But why would you play chicken with explosives?]” she asked, still incredulous.
“[You think if this was really dynamite, that I wouldn’t get blown up by my own creation? You said it yourself, I could have blown myself up.]” I asked. “[Adeptry is dangerous to people around you, but I know for a fact that you haven’t thought through all the risks you expose yourself to.]”
I crushed my stick of ‘dynamite’ in my hand, and it dissolved into a dense orange fog that fell, covering the gym floor.
My heart soared when Nora actually didn’t respond. Being methodical was a first instinct for her. Two full minutes passed in silence while she reevaluated the risks of her most familiar creations.
“[…My tendrils,]” she guessed. And she was guessing.
I nodded, seeing if she’d keep going.
“[…but how? I know how to control them well enough. They’re not going to crush me.]”
“[True,]” I said. “[The fact that you can control them at all is interesting, but not what I’m talking about.]”
“[Well, I have to stay in physical contact with them,]” Nora said. “[It’s the only way I can impart signals from my brain to the Adept-made nerves.]”
“[That’s closer,]” I said.
“[…What then?]” she asked. “[It’s not like they can poison me. Even if they were harmful to touch, they don’t stick around long enough.]”
“[Depends on what you mean by ‘poison’,]” I said. “[Halax probably did a great job coaching you on how to make them as stably and reliably as possible, but stable and reliable don’t necessarily mean safe.]”
“[Then why would Halax teach me as if they were?]”
“[Logistics,]” I hedged. “[The language barrier was still up. He was probably doing the best he can. He can’t make you fully aware of all the risks, so he probably told you as much as could about as many as he could.]”
“[Then spill already,]” Nora complained. “[What risks have I overlooked?]”
“[You got hung up on the fact that those liquid-flesh Adept cells you make can disappear. It’s easy to forget that, even if Adept creations don’t exist forever, they can still affect things in their environment while they do.]”
Nora frowned. It looked like the answer was on the tip of her tongue.
“[Cancer,]” I said, “[and prions.]”
Her eyes widened, and I finally saw the right amount of fear.
Nai had said it months ago: what you don’t know can hurt you.
“[…Fuck,]” Nora swore. “[Are you sure? I hadn’t even thought—]”
“<[Whoa, easy,]>” I said, cutting her off. “[You’re fine. The odds are tiny for your bio-Adeptry actually being carcinogenic. Odds for misfolding a protein, and it getting into your body, and propagating are all even tinier. You’re probably okay, but the odds aren’t zero unless you understand the risks well enough to intentionally circumvent them.]”
“[For crying out loud, lead with that next time.]”
“[Sorry,]” I shrugged. “[If you want to learn Adeptry more, you need to be equal parts fascinated and terrified. Mere caution is not enough.]”
It was harsh to spook her like that, but that was what she needed.
“[Anyway, that’s the disclaimer: be afraid. Object lesson…aptitude categories,]” I started.
“[Seriously?]” she asked. “[We’re moving on just like that?]”
“[I mean…I think you got the message. Do you feel like you better know how afraid you should be?]”
“[…Yes,]” she said.
“[Then we’re good to move on to…aptitudes! Also called ‘L categories’.]”
“[Categories,]” Nora followed, latching onto the word. “[Halax mentioned those. Power, range, precision.]”
“[Magnitude, not power,]” I said. “[I can’t make more than a few kilograms. But I can put a surprising amount of energy into a small amount of mass.]”
I leaned on my spatial modelling psionic piece to help me aim a small kinetic bomb a few meters behind me.
For effect.
Nora gave another start at the explosion. She didn’t miss that this one was stronger than the fake dynamite from earlier.
“[You have a problem,]” she accused. “[You’re going to bring down the building.]”
“[No,]” I said, meeting her eyes. “[I’m really not.]”
I knew my capabilities better than she did.
She slowly nodded.
“[Okay. Magnitude, not power. Magnitude of what, then?]”
“[I’m oversimplifying for sake of brevity, but it’s basically how much mass you can manifest. There’s a bit more to it, like how much energy you can actually get into said mass, but for introductory purposes…it’s your mass limit,]” I said. “[What’s the most mass you’ve ever created at once?]”
“[Hard to say for sure,]” she said. “[I make a few dozen pounds of clothes a few times a week…A few times I made a bunch of yard games for the youngsters. Maybe… two hundred pounds of stuff total? Two-fifty?]”
Well that firmly put her into the L2 bracket. The actual statistical clusters didn’t line up exactly this way, but the rule of thumb limit on the L1 bracket was the Adept’s own bodyweight. If you could make more mass than you, your magnitude was probably L2 or higher.
“[Show me,]” I said. “[We’re putting you to the test. Something simple, regular, consistent. Cubes maybe. Make as many as you can, and tell me how hard it becomes as you continue.]”
“[I assume I should make sure these cubes aren’t carcinogenic?]”
“[Inert,]” I said. “[Make them so that they have as little chemistry as possible. Like a noble gas. Ideally, they react with nothing.]”
“[Inert,]” she nodded. “[I can do inert.]”
A cube fizzled into creation with a pop and a few dark wisps of smoke drifting off it. Hmm. It seemed she had an affectation.
She went about making little cubes clutched in her hands, two or three inches across. She would make one, materializing it directly in the grasp of both palms, before dropping it and making another.
Her method stood out to me. There had to be a reason she found it most intuitive to create one cube with both hands. The wisps of smoke were interesting too. There didn’t seem to be a smell to them. Maybe mist was the more appropriate word.
I also hadn’t expected her to make them this individually small. Picking one up and cascading it, had me estimate each one was just barely over a kilogram each.
She settled into a rhythm, and started really churning them out. One hundred. Two hundred. She wasn’t showing any sign of slowing down, and there was quickly a large pile of the cubes.
Three hundred. Four hundred cubes.
Holy crap.
I was quickly beginning to revise my estimation. It was a lot harder to guess the upper L2 and lower L3 bounds for humans without a bigger sample size, but Nora was already beginning to northwards of three hundred kilograms. She still had some more to go before she started pushing the upper bounds of the L2 cluster, but well on her way there.
“[Five-hundred twenty-two, five-twenty-three, five-twenty-four…five-twenty…five…]” Nora was visibly straining now, pushing her body’s ability to withstand the stresses of Adeptry with each additional cube..
“[…five…twenty…six…]” she huffed. “[That’s it. I can’t do another.]”
I gave a whistle, impressed.
“[At roughly a kilogram per cube, that puts you at about 520 kg, or about a bit more than an eleven-hundred pounds,]” I said, impressed.
“[Is that a lot?]”
“[Yeah…yeah it is,]” I nodded.
“[What now?]” she asked.
“[Dissolve them all,]” I suggested. “[Now we check your intricacy.]”
Nora did so, and the pile of cubes went up in a very dramatic flurry of dark mist. Three seconds flat, almost six hundred pounds of junk had just disappeared.
“[…That doesn’t happen with your stuff,]” Nora noticed. “[The wisps, I mean. Is that bad?]”
“[No,]” I said. “[Some Adepts have some affectations that crop up in their creations, almost like a visual theme. You’re not making dangerous fumes or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. If it’s something you’ve noticed from the beginning, it’s probably just aesthetic.]”
“[But why does it happen?]” she asked.
“[It could be as simple as because you expect it to,]” I said. “[Most affectations like that crop up because it just feels right to the Adept. It could also be a quirk in how you or your subconscious is enforcing the properties of the materials you make. A lot of the time they might not even be aware of it. But I want to test more than just your magnitude. Next comes intricacy.]”
“[I take it that’s what Halax called ‘precision’?]”
“[Yep, but that one makes sense. This category is a lot muddier because it’s measuring both. It’s how small and detailed of something you can make, but it’s also how many different characteristics you can get into a series of creations simultaneously.]”
“[Uhh…help me out,]” she said.
“[Sure, but this is an object lesson,]” I said. “[Make something round, put it right here.]”
Kneeling down at the spot I pointed out, she once again made the creation directly in her hand. Was it a range issue? That was the one category I hadn’t gotten to. It was the simplest.
A small round ball flickered into existence with some more wisps of dark mist. The color of which was not black, as I’d first thought, but very dark blue.
“[Okay,]” I said. “[Dissolve it. Now make a round thing and a square thing, both at once.]”
That proved harder, but she pulled it off.
Nora materialized the round sphere in one hand and another one of the cubes in her other, setting them on the points I indicated.
“[Make three things inside this ring, square, round, and triangular, without putting any part of yourself inside,]” I said, conjuring an orange piece of chalk and marking the gym floor.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Nora frowned, further confirming my suspicions.
She put her finger right up to the edge of the ring, and created three small baubles in each of those shapes. These were much smaller than her previous polyhedra. Before she’d been making baseball or jewelry box sized solids.
But each of these were the size of dice, each one materialized only a centimeter from her finger on the other side of my chalk line.
“[Same shapes in the ring,]” I said, “[but this time give each one two colors, unique from all the rest.]”
She was getting more and more focused as my tests grew more complicated. Three more dice appeared, this time each one looked half-dipped in two colors of paint.
“[Five coins,]” I said. “[As close to US currency as you can manage.]”
“[I don’t remember exactly what they—]” she started.
“[Just as close as you can manage,]” I repeated.
This one took longer, a full minute of frowning at her palm while she puzzled out each coin before she made it.
Eventually she opened her palm and showed me correctly sized and colored coins: a penny, nickel, dime, quarter, and dollar. None of the text was legible, but the other details were surprisingly sharp. The faces especially were each distinct, and the eagle on the back of the quarter was well defined.
She was definitely L2 in precision, like me.
Which confirmed what I’d guessed. She was hard limited in range.
“[You didn’t make those inside the chalk circle,]” I pointed out.
“[You didn’t say to,]” she replied.
That put a grin on my face. She didn’t miss a thing.
“[So how intricate am I?]” she asked.
“[Decently,]” I said. “[I can’t be sure without knowing more of our human statistical quirks, but I’d guess that you’re a low L3 in magnitude, a low L2 in intricacy, and extremely low L1 in range.]”
“[How much mass qualifies you for L3?]” she asked.
“[The very generalized figure is a dozen times the Adept’s bodyweight,]” I said. “[You’re just short of that benchmark, but you also haven’t practiced at all. I’m making an educated guess here, but I think you can make a lot more than this.]”
“[Just a hunch?]” she mused.
“[I’m in the low end of all three categories?]” she asked.
“[You’re in the lower end of each statistical cluster,]” I said. “[L3 in magnitude is still way more than even the highest L2 can make. I think you definitely have more raw talent for Adeptry than I do. You can make at least a hundred times more mass than me, and you’re more intricate than me in some ways, but I think I have you beat in some others.]”
The only area I was sure I exceeded her plainly was in range. In fact, judging by today’s performance, and how she’d created and mounted yesterday’s basketball hoop, she couldn’t materialize anything more than a few centimeters away from her skin.
“[I recall you kicking both my ass and Halax’s on Archo, though,]” Nora said.
I nodded awkwardly. She might have been needling me bringing it up on purpose…
“[I have more experience,]” I shrugged. “[I can make up the gap just by knowing what I’m doing more. Because…Halax was not as good at English as I am at Starspeak.]”
“[So?]”
“[So, Halax couldn’t give very complex answers to any questions you have.]”
A grin crept across Nora’s face.
It could be awkward. I could be dumb. But this was why it was so great to have another human around.
Whatever individual baggage there was, we were both getting more answers.
“[Object lesson is done? Lecture time?]” Nora asked.
I nodded. Practical testing was great. But when you were as information starved as she was, and I had been? It was easy to crave someone just spelling it all out for you.
I dragged us over to one of the gymnasium walls, deciding to use it a bit like a whiteboard. Nora conjured herself a beanbag chair for seating.
My teaching experience wasn’t zero anymore. This was actually fun.
“[Suppose you’re stuck in ancient Mesopotamia, and you’ve got a magnet,]” I said. “[But there’s a problem. You don’t know it’s a magnet, and you’re really unlucky. There’s just nothing else ferrous around you. No ore, no dust, no nothing. So you just walk around for your whole life with this stupid chunk of metal without ever realizing it’s a magnet! Or even that magnets exist!]”
“[I…could put it on a floating leaf by coincidence and find out it always points north,]” Nora pointed out. “[What does this have to do with Adeptry?]”
“[Patience…Yes, you could, and you’d be very resourceful for doing so. But even if you did, you might think that North is where the ice and snow is, so maybe this rock just points toward the cold. And before that point you wouldn’t even know that.]”
“[I think I get it,]” Nora followed. “[Without something for the magnet to react to, I’m never going to learn all of how it works.]”
“[Exactly,]” I said. “[Adeptry is the same way. Psionics too, now that I think about it. It’s probably why no one on Earth ever spontaneously created anything with their brains.]”
“[Then something had to change,]” Nora guessed. “[Well, actually no. We changed. Positions. We were abducted.]”
I nodded.
“[And so we were removed from an environment with no proverbial magnets…]”
“[…Into one rife for reactions,]” Nora concluded.
“[The particular environment is called…]” I lectured, materializing pages with demonstrative diagrams, “[the Adept field. Just like how stars have a magnetic field, they also project other fields. Like a gravitational one. Aaand…a bigger one capable of carrying the just huge amounts of energy to be used in Adeptry.]”
“[How big is the field?]” she asked.
“[Absolutely massive, light years,]” I said. “[Some stars’ fields are so massive that they actually overlap with their neighbors. But generally, the farther out you go, the weaker they get. There are some exceptions to that, though.”
“[Do all stars make this field?]” Nora asked.
“[Sorta. No. Maybe,]” I said. “[Every star aliens have colonized? Yes. Others? Hard to say. Probably not all of them though. Having an Adept field present is necessary for the aliens’ method of FTL. You know what FTL—]”
“[Faster than light,]” Nora nodded.
“[Sorry, had to double check,]” I said. “[Only in this case, it’s not faster than light at all. Their method doesn’t make you go faster, it makes you go shorter. One of the early Farnata Adepts found a method to create a… series of materials which could bridge points in space. It takes an immense investment of time and energy, and it has to be managed constantly, and both ends of the bridge have to remain within a sufficiently powerful Adept field. But it works.]”
“[They created wormholes with Adept powers,]” Nora said.
“[There’s a lot of details and prerequisites you’re skipping over, but yup.]”
“[Well, we travelled here from Earth,]” Nora said. “[If their wormholes need Adept fields at both ends, doesn’t that imply the existence of an Adept field from the Sun? Our sun, I mean?]”
“[Yes. Maybe?]” I said. “[It’s complicated. Bridging space theoretically means one star’s field should be able to travel through the wormhole and propagate outward on the other side too. But then that gets into activated and inactivated field states. It’s a mess. I don’t fully understand that part right now…where was I?]”
“[Adept fields, wormholes—]”
“[Right, right. Long story short, as soon as a potential Adept enters an Adept field, you roll the dice.]”
“[So we get abducted, carried through a wormhole, and dumped into a star’s Adept field. So we activate…but not all at once. We’ve been cropping up one by one for months.]”
“[Correct,]” I said. “[Everyone’s different. Activating Adeptry is not instant, or regular. Every Adept has a proverbial little egg timer that starts ticking down once they enter a field. The longer it gets to tick down, the easier it is for Adepts to activate. Stress is usually what pushes it over the edge though. But before anyone actually shows their powers it’s pretty much impossible to tell who’s Adept.]”
“[That begs the question how our abductors picked us out of the population,]” Nora said.
“[Correct again,]” I said. She was following along excellently. That was no mean feat. Adeptry was complex stuff.
“[But this isn’t an abduction conversation,]” I said. “[This is a lecture. The more you know about your own Adeptry, the more safely you can start messing around.]”
“[I’ve been messing around quite a bit already…]” Nora said, materializing a black tendril coiled around her arm for emphasis.
“[Just now, did you…]” I began.
“[I made sure to add to my intentions,]” Nora said. “[No cancer, no prion shit, no diseases of any kind if I can help it. Even allergies.]”
I nodded. That was good. She was thinking of risks beyond just the ones I’d reminded her of.
Looking at it this closely was spectacular. It blurred the line between liquid and solid, forming a fleshy cord almost as thick as my arm.
“[And let me guess,]” I started, “[this was the first thing you ever made? Or close to it? An adjacent variation maybe?]”
“[…Yeah, how’d you know?]” she frowned.
“[Because if Halax really was looking out for you, then he wouldn’t let you materialize anything this complex without safeguards. The first things Adepts make tend to be…better fleshed out—pun intended. You made this quasi-flesh, I made psionics, Nai made vorpal fire…]”
“[Vorpal fire?]” Nora asked incredulously. “[What in the hell is vorpal f—]”
“[I’m getting off track,]” I cut her off. “[Back to the plot…we hit the Adept field and suddenly, boom! We start becoming Adept. Things only get more complicated from there. Once you’re Adept, some…connection between you and the field is formed. The precise nature of the connection isn’t well understood. Or at all. But as long as you’re inside the field, you can tap into it, draw energy from it. You can’t just do whatever you want though, even outside of the basic L categories every Adept has their idiosyncratic limitations about how they use or tap into the field. Plus it takes some of your own energy to access the field’s stockpile, call it the price of admission.]”
“[So if we go far enough from a star with an Adept field, we won’t be able to create anything?]”
“[Yep, but that’s sort of a moot point,]” I told her. “[The star we’re orbiting has the smallest known Adept field and our powers are still viable at three times the radius of the furthest colony in the system.]”
“[One of the things we experimented with was how long creations last,]” Nora said. “[I and the other first Adepts in our group had to figure out how to make more clothes for ourselves. What affects the duration a creation can exist for?]”
“[Depends on the creation,]” I said. “[Whenever Adepts make things, they draw energy from the Adept field and cause it to behave like matter. You can think of it like making a mold with your intentions, and then stuffing energy into the mold.]”
“[Einstein,]” Nora said. “[Mass and energy are the same.]”
“[Yes, the quality of energy you put into your creation determines how long it can last. And I do mean quality , not just quantity. Even low energy creations can be kept stable for extended periods of time if the Adept has some well-formed ideas and knowledge on how to make them stay stable.]”
“[I don’t understand exactly what you mean by ‘quality’ of the energy. Like different forms?]”
“[Sorta,]” I said. “[Energy isn’t what people think it is most of the time. Matter is easy to wrap our heads around. It’s solid. Tangible. Energy is fuzzier. We think of really hot lightning bolts or plasma shooting from a phaser or something like that. ‘Pure energy’ gets thrown around all the time in sci-fi but there’s no such thing. There’s a reason Adept researchers haven’t called it ‘Adept energy’ or something like that. It’s because nobody quite understands what form the energy takes. The only things we know for sure, is that it doesn’t do much until an Adept imposes new properties on it.]”
“[Halax talked about how the Adept decides everything about their creation,]” Nora said. “[You mean we decide the properties of the energy—which is the same as deciding the properties of the matter.]”
“[Correct again…]” I said slowly. “[But Halax left out one critical detail: it’s impossible to decide every last property. There’s just too many possibilities for one person to control them all. The energy—or your subconscious, or both—will always have to fill in the gaps.]”
“[That jives with what our experimenting turned up,]” Nora said, materializing a shirt. She handed it to me, showing me the sleeve.
Woven into it—a bit like an anti-theft tag at a store—was a round colored button.
“[One of my campers figured out that if they intended to make a shirt stay materialized for multiple days, then they could actually keep it tangible for longer than if they just tried to materialize it for as long as possible. Deciding a definite endpoint increased the total lifespan. After that, someone came up with these buttons. The color fades over the course of a few days, from blue to green to yellow, orange, and red.]”
“[A countdown clock for Adept clothing…]” I grinned. “[Tiny energy investment...I bet you guys had a central hamper or something, to toss all the garments a few hours from decomposing. Brilliant.]”
“[We had a schedule for when we needed to renew the clothes. One of the ways we’ve been entertaining the youngsters is by having them draw designs for the next batch,]” Nora said.
“[Who’s your youngest Adept?]” I asked.
“[Gladys,]” Nora said. “[She’s just eleven. Scared herself shitless when she made a ball. Totally by accident.]”
“[She okay?]” I asked. “[There are no protections strictly built in to Adeptry.]”
“[Yeah, Halax had warned me not to try anything risky by the time she activated, but still...]”
“[It’ll be interesting to see how she ends up growing…]” I mused. “[Kids are usually more creative, and she’s going to grow up with creation at her fingertips…]”
“[That’s why I need to learn this stuff, badly,]” Nora said. “[Back to the lesson.]”
“[Keep asking me questions,]” I said. “[Most of this lecture is just me repeating the answers to all the ones I asked.]”
“[So when we create things, we’re drawing energy from this field, and just…convincing it to behave like matter?]”
“[Very correct,]” I said. “[In Nai’s native language, Adepts are actually called ‘negotiators’. You propose an idea, physics objects, and you haggle back and forth until you materialize something into existence, derived from the quality of energy provided. What we ‘negotiate’ isn’t real matter. It doesn’t exist in nature. We can make our exotic matter closely mimic the real stuff’s characteristics, but ‘real’ matter doesn’t decompose back into nothing after a delay.]”
“[Then…that’s why we can’t make antimatter,]” Nora said. “[If Adeptry is consistent with conservation of mass and energy, then to make something with as much potential energy as antimatter…]”
“[You’d have to invest that much energy on the front end,]” I confirmed. “[Physics would throw a fit. Same story with nuclear stuff. If you want to create a chunk of uranium that actually mimics its nuclear properties, you have to A) know how, and B) be prepared to invest that much energy. Making a chunk of metal only chemically similar to uranium is much simpler by comparison.]”
She knew her high school physics. The fact that we were all in school just a few months ago went a long way.
“[Okayyy…]” Nora nodded along. “[Then…like, ninety-nine percent of the energy that goes into our creations comes from the field, from the star. The actual physical demand from the Adept must be almost negligible.]”
“[Just that price of admission comes from us,]” I confirmed. “[I don’t fully understand that one as much. Something about our metabolic processes loses energy when we try to create something. The system loses energy accessing the field. I can’t be sure, but the way it was explained to me makes me think it’s some quantum physics I don’t have the background or linguistic skills to understand.]”
“[Then why is it easier to create things with a motion?]” she asked.
“[Not sure. There’s a lot of theories, but the best one I’ve heard guesses that activating your nervous system in association with Adeptry distributes that price of admission throughout your body more, so you don’t feel the exhaustion so soon. Instead of just taking from your brain, the process draws from the nerves in your body making the motion too. So it drains you more evenly. Plus, whatever connection between our physical brains and our Adept powers that exists might benefit…clarity-wise from more neurological activity in our body. Kinda like saying a word out loud to help yourself read it.]”
“[That’s…very apt,]” Nora said. I frowned, peeking at her psionics. She’d connected the psionic journal to her transceiver and tied them into her sense of hearing. Every word she heard got written down!
There’d probably be some spelling errors though. Maybe I could look into it…
“[…Are you taking notes on all this?]”
She nodded.
“[Sure am, I’m giving myself some homework too; I’m going to translate the transcript into Starspeak to practice this terminology in both languages.]”
“[Smart,]” I said, wishing I’d thought of it. “[I put in a lot of work figuring out how to shove these concepts into English.]”
“[So, Adept field, imposed properties, what else is there?]”
“[Tons,]” I said. “[This was just the basics, without really touching on any actual math or physics. You’re going to want to learn about catalytic materials, thermodynamic loss, auto-locomotion, the interface problem—that one’s really fun with psionics…oh, and I guess just psionics in general. But I’ve thrown a lot at you. I think we can save the rest for now.]”
“Thank you,” she said, saying the words in Starspeak. “[For all of this.]”
“…[I got you shot,]” I said. “[I’d have to be a pretty massive jerk not to feel bad about that.]”
“[Jerks are still people too,]” Nora said ruefully. “[Don’t sweat it. I appreciate what you’ve done.]”
How did she always say the thing that made me feel guilty? Not thirty seconds of conversation away from Adeptry and I was sweating.
“[…I’m homophobic,]” I blurted out.
Why. Why do I say things?
Nora, however, did not even blink. She just stared at me, completely relaxed.
“[…and you already knew that,]” I realized.
“[You weren’t exactly subtle, when I came out,]” she snorted.
“[So…]” I said.
“[So what?]” she asked.
“[So…why aren’t you more pissed?]”
She laughed.
“[Because in my admittedly very personal experience, the bigots to worry about aren’t the ones who are willing to admit it to your face all guiltily. The most unreasonable homophobes are the ones who swear up and down they’re not homophobic. They rationalize it, phrase it in different terms. Do everything they can to justify…justify to themselves why it’s right to decry being gay.]”
“[So…you’re cool with it…because I admitted it?]”
“[I’m not cool with it,]” Nora corrected. “[But you’ve kept trying to interact with me without being derogatory. Basketball, now this, I appreciate what you're trying to do, so keep at it. Maybe it’s going too easy on you saying this, but you’re pretty tolerant for a homophobe. So, no, I’m not cool with it. But…imagine that; it seems like you aren’t cool with it either.]”
"[Just like that?]"
"[Sure,]" she said. "[You really want to dwell on it?]"
“[…Nai called me out,]” I admitted, “[pointedly.]”
“[Good for her,]” Nora said. “[You’ve made some good alien friends.]”
“[Goes both ways,” I said. “[Nai and I…have a history of pointing out each other’s shortcomings.]”
“[…You said she threw you through a wall?]”
“[Yeah, have you been told about their homeworld?]”
“[Nerin told me a ton of people died. A genocide.]”
“[Wasn’t just ‘a ton’,]” I told her. “[It was all of them. The planet lost its capacity to support life in just a few hours. Virtually everyone on the surface died. Billions.]”
“[Jesus,]” Nora said soberly.
“[Yeah, well I had no idea at the time. I basically needled Nai for getting to know where her dead homeworld was.]”
“[…How are you still alive?]”
“[Tasser,]” I admitted. “[I hope you get the chance to meet him soon. You want to talk about aliens that have been good friends, he tops the list.]”
“[…Fuck, there’s so much I have to learn. Starspeak, Adeptry, alien culture, investigating who the hell abducted us, it’s a ton. How have you not been drowning?]”
“[Tasser,]” I repeated. “[Once we got away from the Vorak, he basically sat down with me for hours a day and drilled me on Starspeak and then some. He’s been invaluable day after day.]”
“[I’m a little surprised,]” she admitted. “[You don’t strike me as the most patient person. It’s hard to imagine you doing that day in, day out for months.]”
“[I wasn’t at first,]” I agreed. “[But I’m surprised to find that, among other things, patience can be learned.]”
“[I could use some of that,]” she said. “[Every day I’m here, I’m not with my campers.]”
“[We’ll find them,]” I promised. “[But getting you acclimated comes first. Once you’re fluent, we can get up to our elbows in the abduction stuff.]”
“[…I think I need to learn to fight with Adeptry too,]” she said. “[Sitting in on your workshops…it’s one of those ‘better to have and not need’ than vice versa, right?]”
“[I’m headed there later today,]” I said. “[You might be able to convince Nerin to tag along and coach you on Starspeak while you’re there. Nai and I can help.]”
“[Bet,]” Nora grinned.