The cafeteria was noisy in the morning, a far cry from the relative peace of the forest that Ajax had accustomed himself to over the years. Though he couldn’t exactly say that he minded. It was the sound of other people, a connection to the crowd around him that he had forgotten that he once craved.

He was currently alone at the table, always the early waker, for whatever reason. The next person down was either Mirah or Aaliyah, and then finally Walter, always staying up late and playing games.

Ajax liked to look around the cafeteria at the other groups and individuals. He knew very little about the reason why specific groups were here, and what their links were, but he liked to keep a watchful eye of the other people regardless.

There were a few groups that he was sure were already a part of a gang of some sort. It was in the way they moved and sneered at others, in a place full of others with links you had to be pretty ballsy, or actually powerful to pull it off. They looked a lot like the men his father had hung out with, before he OD’d on whatever he’d gotten his hands on.

Though Ajax was far less interested in them. They might be powerful, but they all looked normal and, frankly, boring. Although Ajax’s group were the new kids on the block, they didn’t seem to get a lot of other groups looking to flex their power over them. He could only guess that there was a grace period of some sort.

The people that interested Ajax were those that had a… changed physical form. He had heard about people becoming Linked and having their bodies changed irreparably, even to monstrous extents. Though, seeing someone so physically different than yourself was both somewhat morbid and intriguing at the same time.

Every morning, just as he walked into the cafeteria before most people had even woken up, he’d always see a large, amorphous blob of purple liquid waiting at a table for food. The first time he had seen them, he’d been well and truly shocked for obvious reasons. But over the past week or two, they’d slowly become passing acquaintances.

Ajax had never spoken to them, and they’d only casually waved to each other from across the cafeteria. He had wanted to, of course, Ajax was just that sort of person. If he could, he’d make everyone his friend. But between his own group being fatally dysfunctional, the screaming in the middle of the night from Mirah’s room, and the purple person’s closed off aura—he felt like waiting before going out of his way to make friends outside of his own group.

The person he was closest to in his own group was probably Walter, they’d spent a fair amount of time relaxing together, but they were very different people. Walter lived a life of comfort, and his interests were more technological, whereas Ajax was all about physical stuff. Though he had been playing a game with Walter when he got the chance, but even then, Walter got frustrated with him when he couldn’t pick up some of the concepts he was trying to teach Ajax.

Ajax hadn’t seen Dean around either, after unceremoniously being named team leader. Though Ajax wasn’t entirely sure if he wanted to meet the man again. He’d found him unnerving. Dean’s link had worried Ajax, but the way that Dean had talked about it, there was probably a lot more just like it around the joint, so it looked like he’d just have to get used to it.

“Ruminating on the world and it’s injustices, friend?” An overly dramatic voice said as Aaliyah plonked herself in the seat opposite from Ajax. He rose an eyebrow at the blonde.

“Not quite. Just idle thought about all the others in the building.” Aaliyah rolled her eyes at his stoic answer as she ordered her standard breakfast.

“People watching then?” Ajax screwed up his face at that, it sounded creepy. “What? I people watch all the time. It’s good to know who to keep an eye on. Like those gang idiots that are a couple tables to the left of us.” She said nonchalantly, referring to the very same people Ajax had seen on days prior with the permanent sneers.

“What gang, do you think?” He asked quietly, trying not to pull attention to their table. Aaliyah just shrugged.

“Probably a low level, no name gang. Maybe idiots for RO.” RO? It took Ajax a second to realise that she meant Righteous Order and scrunched his nose in distaste.

“What? Not into the whole Linked supremacy thing?” She said, voice dripping in sarcasm. Ajax huffed at the thought.

“I hear it’s more than just Linked supremacy.” Ajax said, the words like poison on his tongue. If there were any ideas that had hated, supremacy of any kind was one of them. Aaliyah, though, just shrugged.

“Yeah, I hear the same. Though I also hear that it’s mostly the low-level members, the upper-level members are just horribly bigoted against non-Linked. Bigots attract bigots of any sort, I guess.” Ajax would ask where she got that information from exactly, but they’d had similar conversations in the past and she always responded with a sly shrug. She didn’t seem to care enough to make a bullshit answer, at least.

“Anyway,” Ajax said, changing the subject, “Did you hear Mirah screaming last night?” Aaliyah looked taken aback, then shocked as she turned to Ajax.

“What happened?” She asked, feigning ignorance, though Ajax himself took her at face value. Of course Aaliyah had heard her screaming, in fact, she had packed a few things into a bag and was ready to sprint out of the building as soon as anything else happened.

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“I don’t know, Tracker showed up and went inside her room with a master key, left me waiting at the door and didn’t come out in the few hours I was standing outside.” Few hours? Aaliyah gave the man a genuinely confused look. Why would you stand outside the room for that long? Wasn’t like he could help. And why was Tracker here? They hadn’t seen her since they’d been dropped off here.

Ajax, misinterpreting the look on Aaliyah’s face as a look of concern, nodded with his own brow furrowing.

“I wanted to make sure Mirah was alright, but I guess Tracker had it under control.” He said, worry still written on his face, even as he rationalized.

Then another form plopped down on a chair somewhere in between Ajax and Aaliyah, a large yawn coming from the Asian man.

“Did you figure out what Mirah was screaming?” Walter said tiredly. He was up earlier than normal, almost an hour earlier than he usually moseyed his way down to the cafeteria. Ajax shook his head at the other man, a look of consternation on his face. Walter saw the man’s look and reached over to pat the much larger man on the shoulder.

“Hey man, I’m sure she’s fine. We saw Tracker go help her last night.” Walter gave a shy wave to Aaliyah as his morning greeting and she shot him a bedazzling smile. “Ah, uhm, so why do you think Tracker is back? She came out of room five last night when we heard the screaming.”

Aaliyah raised an eyebrow at that. Tracker was on the same floor as them?

“I dunno, maybe she’s going to teach us?” Ajax said, voicing a possibility in Aaliyah’s mind.

Or keep an eye on us, she thought conspiratorially. Aaliyah was hardly one for authority figures. There was a silence over the group that usually came when they ran out of things to say. None of them were good enough friends to be able talk ad nauseum yet, though Ajax sometimes wished that Walter would blather on about whatever game he was playing or show he was watching. It’d make group talks way more interesting, but around Aaliyah Walter clammed up hard.

Ajax’s meal came and went, as well as Aaliyah’s with almost nothing spoken between the three of them. What was weird was Mirah’s no show, she was usually down here much earlier than Walter, and Walter had come down pretty early. Aaliyah could guess why, of course. Walter clearly hadn’t slept well, the constant yawning and the bags under his eyes said enough about that. Mirah probably got the day off after whatever had happened last night.

“Ah,” Walter sighed defeatedly, “I wish I could train with my link more.” He had whined about this before, and Aaliyah was just about sick of it. It was a smile on her face she turned to the shorter man.

“You know that you can, right? Willem never said that you couldn’t go and use the training room to test your link and all that.” Walter opened his mouth in argument but deflated a bit after thinking about it.

“I know, but I can’t do the same with everyone else. Like, you can’t use your link without Willem there, ‘cause you’ll go on a rampage,” Aaliyah’s eye twitched at that, but she said nothing, “Ajax just kind of has an axe and can use it, I don’t know how you even train that,” Ajax looked thoughtfully down at the large fireman’s axe that was always stuck to his hip, “and then Mirah just trips people and hears stuff! I don’t think she even knows what her own link really is.”

“‘Hears stuff’?” Aaliyah recounted, confused.

“Oh yeah! You weren’t there when we fought.” Walter said, hitting his forehead with his palm in an exaggerated reaction that made Ajax roll his eyes, “We were just about to start fighting after Willem told us to not use out links and yadda-yadda, then she raised her hand and was like ‘I’m using my link’ or something like that.

“So apparently Mirah gets voices in her head that tell her what her opponent is going to do next. And ‘cause she can’t turn it off, she gets to use it in a fight. Which means I can’t win.” He shrugged, seemingly fine with that fact, though Mirah was far more confused.

“Two links?” She questioned out loud and the other two stopped dead. Though it wasn’t long before Walter waved away the concerned silence.

“Nah, couldn’t be. Every year or so there is one or two that show up and ‘apparently’ have two links, but it always gets disproven. There’s, like, no way.” Walter shrugged, the idea pushed from his mind. Ajax took that explanation and decided that it was good enough, but Aaliyah didn’t put it down just yet. Whispers of what someone would do next and telekinesis, those were two really different things. A minor precognitive link and a mental link?

Walter finally got his meal and chowed down, and just in time. Their timetable was relatively set by this point, and they could almost instinctively feel when the time to begin was, and so as they readied themselves to have their bodies slowly improved by Willem’s callous regimen, A tall, lady with slight Indian features with black hair turned the corner from the elevator. It was Tracker, of course, though this was the best look at her that many of the team had gotten. She was dressed in a tight-fitting suit, like she had when they had all first met her.

Behind her stood Mirah, looking extremely tired, but was making herself walk behind the taller woman anyways.

“Hello team. I hear you have all been doing well in the physical training department?” Tracker spoke jovially as she neared the table. Around them, other groups turned to see Tracker. Some didn’t seem to know her though others, namely the clearly more affluent, had their faces fill with recognition and a shadow of awe.

“Well, I can bench almost four hundred or so kilos now. Not nearly that impressive without my axe. Though my axe doesn’t seem to like to have its power used for bench pressing stuff all that much.” The tall man lamented amusedly. Tracker raised an eyebrow, she had seen him slice a tree down with barely any effort and helped him drag a tree back to his log cabin. That tree was easily more than that, but a large margin.

Tracker nodded in understanding, and it only took a look at the others to tell they were doing better. Mirah had gone from a waif of a thing, anorexically thin, surviving off of air and whatever trash she could get her hands on without putting herself in danger. Now, she was on her way to even being able to be called fit, though she still looked light. Aaliyah looked much the same, though her muscle was more well defined. Walter had lost quite a significant amount of weight, something that would be extremely concerning if he weren’t Linked.

“Alright then. Well, I was supposed to be around earlier this week, but I was hired on to run security on a big corporate deal for a few days, so I’ve been busy. Today is your first lesson in Linked 101.” She smiled toothily at the three that stood in front of her.

“Do we have training with Willem?” Walter piped up and Tracker shook her head.

“No, not today. Tomorrow he told me you are all going to work on your links.” Walter looked relieved, even a little excited. Tracker nodded to the three of them.

“Alright then class! Up we get. Time to get a move on!” Tracker called enthusiastically, and maybe a little louder than strictly necessary, causing the other groups to look upon her little class amusedly and maybe even sympathetically.