“Tom, it’s time to… WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOUR LEG?” Matthew yelled.
I don’t know about you, but when someone yells out in shock early in the morning, about a foot away from your bed, you tend to wake up whether you want to or not. So begrudgingly, I opened my eyes.
“Why are you waking me up in the middle of the night?” I asked, sounding like I had been rudely awakened because I had.
“It’s only quarter past seven, not midnight. Anyway, the airship to Telum will leave in two hours. You need to pack,” Edward answered.
“Because we need to pack,” Matthew unknowingly repeated, “And you didn’t answer my question. What happened to your leg? I knew something happened, but not to that extent.”
“It fell off. Washington bribed me with a new leg, and that’s it. I thought we went through this?” I answered. Said leg was scarred and a bit stumpy at the end but had healed. I had almost forgotten about it after only one day. Is that normal? The new leg was perfectly matched for my missing limb. How much was a tailored leg, anyway?
Back to the matter at hand, not at leg: I needed to pack.
Most of my clothes were still in the top of my wardrobe, where I had dumped them originally. I had only worn about five different T-shirts and a pair of jeans, not including the ones that were destroyed. From the pile, I grabbed some jeans and put them on. I was pretty sure they matched. I was too giddy at the prospect that I actually was going to Talum, which still didn’t feel real.
“Only just,” Edward retorted.
I stuffed the pile into the suitcase that had been next to my bed since I had arrived; there hadn’t been anywhere to put it. I crammed my gauntlets, Red Thunder, into the case. It only just closed.
I went to check how Matthew was doing with his packing, which was probably taking longer as he hadn’t had the lazy/brilliant idea of putting all his stuff in one pile. He was just staring at something behind me. I turned to see what he was looking at; in the mirror, I saw myself, grinning with excitement but glowing with blue static trailing behind where I just was, almost like I was half made of lightning. When I stopped moving, the static faded until I looked normal.
“Well, that’s new,” Edward stated, sounding disinterested in the revelation of my newly found skill.
“You unlocked your Legacy!” Matthew exclaimed, which was clearly a better response. “It looks like you’re a speedster type, considering how that took you less than a second, and you’re just in time for Telum.”
I guess we were going to have to get used to people with powers. We were going to a new school for that very reason. This was going to be fun.
***
Miss Rose drove us to the airship port, which was about half an hour's drive from the orphanage as it was nearer to the kingdom's centre. Regular school didn’t start for at least a couple of days, so she had time. We climbed out of the car and saw a group of at least fifty people, our age and upwards, packing into an airship.
I had never been in an airship before, but these ones looked larger than the ones I had seen on TV. I ran to the line. The immediate change of scenery from only just being able to see the line to seeing it almost right in front of me made me disorientated, causing me to trip. Luckily, the only person who saw me trip and fall on my face was one of the two teachers, as it happened too quickly for the other people in line to notice. He was quite tall, leaf green eyes and choppy brown hair. He looked guilty, as if he were somehow to blame for my trip, and avoided eye contact with me, quickly going back to registering the other students. I stood up, dusted myself off, and pretended like it didn’t happen.
Matthew caught up with me a minute later with a slight glare for running off, I joked apologising for making a fall of myself. A woman with eyes the colour of tree bark and hair, like the man I first saw, was checking the people onto the airship. I recognised her immediately as Clover Fortune, aka Lucky Charm. I then remembered that I was wearing her emblem on my t-shirt: a four-leaf clover. I pulled my jacket tighter around me, hoping she wouldn't notice it. Then, it was our turn to be marked off the list.
“Washington did say we had some late entries, and one is a fan, it seems,” she said with a smirk. Of course, she would notice it. She let us onto the ship and, as we were apparently last on the list, followed us on board.
“I would have warned you, but I thought she would like the compliment,” Edward casually stated.
“Well, thanks for the heads up,” I thought at him in the most sarcastic tone I was able to think.
The ship was massive, with an open-air design. The few seats it had had already been taken, and there were glass windows either side. Due to the number of passengers, there wasn't much room.
I took the first spot that was clear at the window to try and get a good view. I realised after that I should have let a shorter person in front so I didn’t block the view. Luckily, Matt was a shorter person, so I didn’t have to talk to anyone new for this hour or so ride to Telum, which was only the other side of the kingdom. Unfortunately, other people had more sociable plans.
“Hi, my name is Alex Eye and this is my friend Oliver King, who are you?” said a boy introducing him and his friend who clearly had the same idea as me when talking to new people as Alex seemed to have to hold him by the shoulder to stop him leaving the situation. The boy had copper eyes, blond hair, and freckles and was considerably shorter than his friend. He wore a white hoodie with a blue vein design going up the sleeves. The friend, Oliver, had gold eyes, red hair, and a bow strapped onto his back.
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“I’m Tom, he’s Matt,” I said, motioning with my hand. In my head, I said, “And the floaty, kind of on-fire person beside me, that’s Edward.”
“Funny.” Edward verbally rolled his eyes.
“Sup,” Matt said, still looking at the ground passing by.
“Hey,” Oliver said, clearly having been dragged into the conversation. He looked behind him, noted that Alex had taken his hand away from his shoulder, then said, “Look, there’s a space over there by the window. Nice meeting you, bye!”
“He doesn’t like meeting new people,” Alex explained to us. Well, more to me than Matt, as he was still looking out the window and clearly not listening. Then, in the direction Oliver had just gone, Alex shouted, “You’re going to make friends whether I have to force you or not.”
“Well, that was odd,” I thought to myself.
“You do realise that was the son of Leo King, owner of Light Industries?” said Edward, reminding me that I couldn’t do that anymore.
“Who?”
“The people who make the top gear and weapons that most Mythics rely on,” Edward answered, explaining it to me like I was a child. “You know, like the ones you put on your hands.”
“These are Light weapons? I always thought they were pretty heavy when I held them,” I thought, smiling at my own terrible joke.
“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” Edward responded.
I go back to looking through the window at the buildings passing by. Nothing overly interesting happened like any fights; most of the Mythics had been called to divert a herd of Blackheart Shades, reducing structural damage, and the rest mostly stayed behind to deal with minor things or because they would cause more problems than they would solve. I thought Lucky Charm would have gone with them, but I guess an airship full of excited teens with superpowers needed more luck than them.
***
The airship landed outside a massive castle-like structure with a large gated, stone wall surrounding it. I could see the battle stadium in which training Mythics could brawl to test their powers or just general skills. Just past the stadium was a shooting range ten times bigger than the one at the orphanage and its own medic wing. The last one I myself will hopefully not have to use, though Edward said that I would get to know it well, which was unsettling.
This place, Telum, is one of the main bases of operation for Mythics, not just those attending it. It has some of the best resources for training, so much so that a lot of active Mythics take over the facilities at times for their own use; it apparently makes them feel superior. Also, if you are going out of the kingdom, you have to run it through Telum to get permission. Not many people could be bothered, though, as it's mostly there for when a Mythic has a power that may cause disruption or when they want to make a show of following the rules.
The main gates opened to a grand courtyard with statues of the most famous group of Mythics who graduated from Telum and were one of the first to do so, each one a prime example of their power type. The team were in battle stances, weapons in hand and ready to take on whatever Shade came their way. They each faced the part of the school which represented who they were: Miracle, the healer, faced the med bay; Crash, a tank, facing the battle stadium; Culture, a magic type, faced the library, which was full of combat, history, and even plain story books; Mechanism, a technopath, faced the shooting range; and Blink, a speedster, faced the cafeteria, not just because she needed to consume a large amount of calories to fuel her power, but because she was almost a semi-professional cook. The statue was amazing; you could clearly see each Mythic’s determined expression in the face of danger, with the level of detail they put into each of their faces with signs of tiredness, cuts and scars being visible like the artist had actually been with them during one of their battles. There was almost a focus on their eyes as each one of the Mythics had crystals which seemed to shine with their respective colours.
Miss Fortune, as she likes to call herself, started the tour by going over the rules: no fighting outside the arena, no leaving Telum without permission from a teacher, no this, no that, blah blah blah. The usual. I listened to make sure there wasn’t a “Don’t remove books from this bookcase” or “Don’t go into this side of the castle.” But no, only mundane rules.
“Can you speed up time as well as slow it down?” I thought, hopefully.
“Nope, you’re going to endure the rules like I had to. There is no speed-up button,” the floaty person answered, then vaguely added to himself, “though you might enjoy tomorrow.”
He stopped answering me after that and instead ‘let me find out myself’, which is another way of saying he ignored my questions because he couldn’t be bothered to answer. Miss Fortune showed us around, telling us where things were, like the training rooms and the stadium. After an hour of boredom, we arrived at our rooms.
“So that is the end of the tour. Tomorrow, you will be allocated teams and rooms. You will sleep here for the time being,” Her conclusion was followed by a groan and excited murmuring from the crowd as most were looking forward to seeing their new rooms.
“Oh, she is doing this thing,” Edward mumbled under his breath, though I don’t know how that works with being a disembodied soul.
“What do you mean?” I thought at Edward as my interest was piqued at the thought of secrets.
Edward chuckled, “Now, I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise, would I?”
Ignoring him, I turned to Matthew and asked, “How do you think they pick teams, Matthew?”
“I’m not sure; I overheard some of the other students talking about how hush-hush they were about the process.”
“Can't you just do your magic thing and just mind-read?”
Mathew looked at me flatly. “My runes are not that discrete, and I’m sure we’re being watched.”
“Fair,” I replied, disappointed, “Are you sure you didn’t glean anything from what you overheard?”
“One of their older brothers warned about Bonegrinders, but I don’t know how that would work,” Mathew replied after thinking for a second. "They’d just be too big to hide. Oh yeah, and something about how they pair off students, so it's likely I’ll see you during it.”
“Yeah, that’s not that much to work off of.”
“Anyway, let’s just set up our sleeping bags; we’ll find out the actual answer tomorrow.”
After getting out a sleeping bag near the edge of the hall, I took off my leg and gauntlets and placed them next to my suitcase. I slipped into my sleeping bag, still in my clothes from this morning, and tried to sleep to get to tomorrow quicker.