“Kom væk herfra, gamle mand,” snapped Birgit in Danish, which I had learned was both hers and Jensen’s home language.

“Ingen! I skader jer selv.” he responded curtly, stepping to stand between us.

“Alex.” he switched back to English as he looked at me, which for some reason prompted me to stand at attention. “I understand that your circumstances aren’t easy, but you need to learn to be more versatile with your power. It’s a tool, don’t be afraid of it. Use it on the ground, the walls. Try to see if you can control the radius of your destruction! Experiment with it!”

I nodded at the man. This was something that would have been fun to do with Iraklis, actually work on, and train with, my power. Dammit. Just when things were looking so good, I had to go and create a whole other mess, didn’t I?

I instinctively went to fiddle with the seams of my gloves, only to stop when I realised that I was actually not wearing them. Grunting to myself, I let both arms hang limb as Jensen turned to Birgit in order to continue his

“As for you Birgit, you are pushing yourself too hard,” he said, turning to the girl. “Every single attack of yours is bringing you significantly closer to hypothermia. Pace your offence and defence, find the subtle and small ways to use your powers.

“Now,” he said as he turned to look at something behind me, the elevator door I presumed, as he said, “Go to take warm showers and prepare for training. And don’t try to kill yourselves next time.”

As we started walking back to the open elevator, I took off my hoodie, I had a T-shirt underneath, and offered it to Birgit. She let out a ‘hmph’ sound as she took and put it on. It was big on her, almost comically so considering she wasn’t that much shorter than me.

We’d been going at this every day since the incident with Iraklis happened, and she usually had some sort of heavier clothes on hand. The fact that she didn’t bring some sort of winter clothing with her that day, the day we were going to use our powers, seemed odd to me, but I decided not to question it.

The door closed behind us, and the whole floor shook before it started ascending.

I turned and leaned on the back wall. Birgit just kept on staring forward at said wall, not turning around at all.

“You want to be like Alpha Surge,” said Birgit in English, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her.

“Yeah,” I said wistfully in Greek, too tired to translate. We both could still understand each other anyways.

I remembered the day that I met him. The countless videos of the man that Iraklis and I had watched. “I met him once and he told me those words. I guess he gave me the strength needed to not give up. Is it really that obvious?”

“Not really.” chuckled Birgit as she turned to me. “My parents met him once. They said that he acts cornier than an old school comic book character. And what you said was very corny. Nice, but corny.”

“Should I say thanks here, or was that an elaborate insult?” I asked half-joking and half-serious. This was my fifth training session since the whole Iraklis situation and the first time I felt my mind wander off from it.

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Birgit simply smiled at me. The elevator stopped and she sped out of it, with me trailing behind her. We went through the observation room and gigantic gym, going up the stairs to the second floor that were at the latter.

On the second floor was a long and wide corridor, with a series of doors for men’s changing rooms on the left and women’s on the right. A pattern that I had begun to notice with this place was the fact that every door was massive. I attributed that to being an adjustment for people whose size was altered by their powers.

I turned to the first men’s room in order to change and prepare for the day’s round of training. A small cough caused me to turn back, only to be faced with Birgit’s pointer finger and her staring intently at me.

“You have a good reason for wanting to be a hero,” she said in a very matter-of-fact manner. “You want to help people, inspire them. And that’s so darn corny I could vomit. We have only known each other for a little while, but I’d like to think you are genuine in that.” she explained, gradually sounding more aggressive in spite of the fact that she was saying nice things.

“Would you like to-” damn voice cracks always hitting at the wrong time, “-would you like to get together tomorrow and train our powers?” I asked awkwardly.

Truth was I didn’t exactly know how to respond to her compliment. At least I thought it was a compliment, so I decided to change the subject. The main issue with that was the fact that I was absolutely terrible at talking to people, especially those around my age.

Most of my regular interactions, at least my non-hostile interactions, were limited to Iraklis and my parents, so this was uncharted territory. In simple terms, I was a nearly eighteen year old person who still had trouble talking to people, in a situation where that would be necessary.

Even if I managed to fix the situation with Iraklis, and I prayed to God that I would, I would be completely alone at Atlantis unless I managed to function properly around people. Or at least with more functionality than my schoolmates, who mostly didn’t like me or didn’t know that I existed.

“Why not?” shrugged Birgit as she turned around. “I’ll ask Jensen if he can book another place for us. Two days after tomorrow, at six am in front of the Astoria hotel. Work for you?”

“Sure.” I responded with a shrug of my own.

“Oh, and I’m keeping this hoodie for the rest of the week.”

“What?” I said, yelled, screamed, shouted. All of the above really. “Wha-why-why would you do that?” I asked exasperated.

One normal conversation, was it too much to ask? Apparently it was. I wanted to clench my fists only to once again find out that I couldn’t, because I wasn’t wearing the damn gloves.

“I accidentally froze my own winter clothes.” She explained it as if it were a regular occurance. “My brother may be an idiot, but he will at least bring me the rest of my wardrobe from Denmark since he’s there now. But he’ll be here next Saturday.”

“Can’t you get one yourself?” I asked, desperate to find out an alternative to her getting my sweater.

“I only have a credit card with me, and if I used it to buy twenty jumpers my parents would know and want to talk to me about it. And the less I talk to my parents, the better,” she said, suddenly turning around and entering the room before I had the chance to respond.

If there was one thing that I had learned about Birgit, even if she didn’t explicitly mention it until that point, was the fact that there was something wrong with her family. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it, so I just went into my own changing room in order to prepare myself.

I didn’t know what her issue was, but I also didn’t want to push her. Our relationship might have started out a bit rocky, she was the closest thing to a friend I had at that moment. Let her keep the hoodie. My main issue would then be how to avoid any sort of conversation with my parents regarding that.

Well, at least that was one issue I could deal with relatively easily. Which just left a billion more to go.

I took a deep breath in order to relax myself.

“When did everything get so complicated?” I sighed out loud as I prepared myself for the training.