It was only during the following day that Sam found out why Sarah couldn’t make it to lunch. She confided in him, as they were walking to breakfast together, that the reason she had to cancel on them was because she had just gotten the results from one (apparently there were a couple) of the courses she was taking that had extra exams in addition to the final. She got a barely passing score, so she panicked and decided to stay in until dinner, reviewing the material. That was also the reason why she left dinner early (i.e. as soon as she was finished eating); she had the rest of her studies for the day to catch up on.
“It’s lucky that today’s Sunday,” she also told him. “So that I could skip working out to study without Felix or Yvessa knowing about it.”
“And what’s so horrible about them knowing about it?” Sam asked.
“Because they already think that I’m taking too many electives and giving me enough shit about it as it is.”
“But… they’re right. Is that what it is? You don’t want them to know that they’re right?”
“They’re not right! I just had a lot on my plate lately and hadn’t managed to spend as much time studying as I’m used.”
“Because you’ve also been juggling me, though. Is that why you’re willing to tell me about yesterday and not them? Because you should already know that I agree with them. It is, isn’t it? You’re telling me this to make me feel bad?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m telling you this because, unlike them, you’re willing to admit that you don’t know what you’re talking about and so you might be wrong about me.”
“Tsk! Curse my weak-mindedness and lacking sense of self. But you do know that this current state of affairs will only last for so long, right? Because eventually I’ll be sure that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the academy and then I’ll flip completely to the other side. After all, as uncertain as I’m willing to admit to being about stuff that I know nothing about, I’m just as dogmatic about stuff that I think I’m familiar enough with.”
“What makes you so sure that once you’re more knowledgeable, you won’t see that I’m the one who is right? Not that it matters because by the time that happens, I’ll be back in my usual form, so there will be nothing to confide in you, that I wouldn’t be willing to with Felix and Yvessa.”
“I’ll hold you to that. I don’t like keeping secrets. I have no experience in the matter cause no one in my life ever liked me enough to tell me something they weren’t willing to tell other people.”
“You won’t have to keep any other secrets, I promise you. I just told you about this one because I didn’t want you to seriously consider Felix’s stupid suggestion that I planned to skip out on you guys in order to manipulate you into spending time together. If I wanted to do that, I’d have just used my go to method: threats of physical violence.” She smiled.
“You have other secrets? No wait, don’t answer that. The answer is also a secret in it of itself. Unless you don’t have any other secretes… Damn. This is problematic. Now I know what they mean when they say that secrets complicate relationships.” Sarah patted him on the back reassuringly. But it was with an unassured manner that he sat down with her next to Felix and Yvessa. Although, to be fair, he was pretty sure that his unnerved manner was more due to his mind’s unhealthy obsession with trying to be funny rather than actually being worried about keeping or spilling Sarah’s secrets.
“So did you end up playing something?” Yvessa asked Sam.
Yesterday, during dinner, he told them about his trouble with creating leisure plans for the future, after his dream for an after lunch optimized hour had gone up in flames and he spent the whole time watching ViewTube (the main problem was that he spent most of it on a binging stuff he was already familiar with). His friends were all true to the cliche roles he had already assigned to them in his brains: Sarah said TV; Felix said books; Yvessa said video games. But all of their concrete suggestions were modern stuff, which was a no go as far as Right Generation Sam was concerned. He did tell them that he leaned towards Yvessa’s suggestion and was thinking of playing something that he was familiar with and would allow him to shut his mind and listen to music. But after downloading a bunch of games applicable to that description, he lost his will as soon as he launched the first one and just veggied the rest of the night away (minus time spent cultivating) back on watching videos (and if he was still having dreams, they would probably have been filled with the pasty skin and orange wig of America’s favorite emotionally stunted inbred).
“No,” Sam admitted with a downcast look. “As soon as I booted up the game I just thought to myself, ‘Why bother? They probably managed to make one or even two sequels to it before the world ended. And if they had enough time to pump it with the same amount of dlcs like the one I’m playing, then it might have reached the status of being better than its predecessor.’ And that took the winds out of me wanting to play any of the games I was familiar with.”
“So why not play something modern?” Felix asked. “There’s plenty of great stuff that you could play while shutting your brain and listening to music.”
“Because if you’d have listened to him yesterday,” Yvessa said, “you’d have heard that he wanted to play something that still required some basic cognitive input, like a strategy game. And any modern game is bound to be unfamiliar to him and thus will require him to dedicate some time to learning how to play it.”
“Yeah…” Sam said, “that’s exactly it. Wow. Good job on being able to stand my bellyaching, I guess.”
“Think nothing of it. Yours is a perfectly valid stand even if I do not hold it myself or share the same interest with the kind of games you’re most interested in.”
“Whatever.” Felix waved his hand dismissively. “Just take care you won’t become one of those people who think that everything made before the Integration was great and that everything after is shit. They’re really annoying.”
“Buddy.” Sam put his hand on Felix’s shoulder. “I’m already one of those people. Always have been. Probably always will be, if just to fuck with most people alive. Don’t feel too bad for me, though. Even without gaming, the rest of the evening passed just fine. I’m recharged and ready to take on the week!”
“Are you really?” Sarah asked.
“No. But I always never am. I’m one of those people who would fare way better if they could store their relaxation energy because even after a whole semester break off, I’m already drained by the second day of the second semester.”
“And yet you still managed to graduate. So you must be able to push on through despite your perceived lack of energy.”
“Yes. It’s a process I like to call ‘stop feeling sorry for myself and acting like a little bitch.’ It’s got a hundred percent success rate because anything that I ever flunked on doesn’t count because I must have not wanted it hard enough.”
“Well, I, for one, look forward to the day when you finally stop acting like a little bitch,” Felix said and received a withering stare from Sarah in response. Which might have been, although probably not, the reason that he continued and said, “The good God above knows that I have a lot to learn on the subject.”
“I doubt it. What did you do then for unwinding yesterday?”
“Don’t say wild sex,” Yvessa warned Felix.
“Does he really say that?”
“Yes.”
“That was one time.” Felix held his finger up. “You asked me what I wanted to do most with my trimester break and I said, ‘Having wild sex every other day doesn’t sound too bad.’ I didn’t even end up having that much sex, I’ll have you know! And I’m sorry if the truth hurts you, prudes, but sex feels nice and it’s great for relaxing after a stressful period! But no, I did not have any sexual relations yesterday. I just stayed in and went to sleep a little bit early, as a treat.”
“That’s nice,” Sam said. “I miss sleeping in.”
“Slipping in?”
“Fuck off.”
“You three are sending me some very mixed messages, you know? Anyway, I didn’t even end up sleeping more than usual. My bastard body woke me up before my alarm. You know that”—he turned to Yvessa—“because I told you I was heading for the gym early so we won’t work out together today. And speaking of heading to the gym early, guess who I didn’t find there?”
“Jane Fonda?” Sam asked.
“Is that a real person?”
“Of course.”
“Right, what a stupid question to ask. Is that person living with us today?”
“I think you would have heard of her if she was.”
“Who didn’t you see at the gym?” Yvessa asked, although she, like everyone else at the table, probably already knew the answer.
“Why the intrepid second-year cadet and woman of many interests,” Felix said. “Our dear friend Sarah Khan. Care to comment as to why that was?”
“No,” Sarah said.
“Can I hazard a guess?”
“No.”
“Can someone else?” Sarah’s face was impassive. “Well, OK then… I just thought that as friends and future comrade-in-arms, we ought to be honest with each other and aim to help one another as much as we can.”
“Is that in some document that we have to sign?” Sam asked. “Or is this just one of those social norms that I keep hearing so much about?”
“Sarah? Anything you want to share with the table?”
“No thanks,” she answered, while focusing down on her plate. “I’m pretty hungry, so I’m going to finish everything that I picked up.” Sam gave her a thumbs up for that response, although she couldn’t see it with her eyes so downcast.
“Ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A of Sam being a bad influence on Sarah.”
“Wow,” Sam said, “if this is your first exhibit, then either you haven’t been paying much attention or you have a very forgiving definition of what counts as bad influence.”
“I don’t get it Sam. Do you not care about why Sarah is behaving out of the norm?”
Sam was just about to answer when Sarah looked up and gave him a stern look, completely ruining Sam’s attempt at deflecting the question and the possibility that their friends wouldn’t figure out that she told him something. “I… Ahem…” He cleared his throat. “What I meant to say is that I haven’t known Sarah enough time to define what her normal behavior looks like, so I don’t really feel like I can provide valuable input to this conversation.”
Yvessa rolled her eyes. “So what was it, Sarah? You figured out that you were seriously behind in your coursework but didn’t want to tell us know because that would only prove that we were right?”
“No.” Sarah’s blushing face was an indictment all on its own. “OK, yes. I found out that I almost failed one of my exams so I stayed in yesterday and this morning to catch up on my studies. Can we please drop the subject for now?”
Felix nodded. “So obviously you told Sam about this beforehand because you didn’t want him to worry about you, right?”
“According to her,” Sam said, “it was because she knows that I don’t respect my own opinion, so any condemnation from me will be hollow.”
“Sure… yeah. Let’s go with that for a reason.”
“Didn’t I just ask not to speak about this anymore?” Sarah grit her teeth.
“Fair enough.” Felix turned to Yvessa. “It’s not like we can do anything more anyway. She won’t listen to any of us, or even Dan and Maurice.”
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Maurice actually backs me up, so I do listen to him.”
“Really? So you’re saying he’s the one that we should be focusing on convincing instead? Sam, you’re friends with Maurice. How about trying to change his mind on the matter?”
“Define friend,” Sam said.
“OK, maybe not a friend. By friendly… right?”
“Eh.”
“Oh stop that, Sam.” Sarah gently pushed his shoulder. “Maurice likes you well enough.”
“Perfect then.” Felix clapped. “So you endorse the plan? If Sam manages to convince Maurice that you’re taking too many electives, then you’ll drop some of them.”
“What? Obviously not. Look, I just didn’t have as much free time recently as I’m used to, so my studies suffered as a result. That’s it. And that’s all that we’re going to say about the subject anymore, clear?”
“Hear hear,” Sam agreed. “And I, for one, don’t understand how you could pivot the conversation topic from myself to another person so thoughtlessly.”
“What are you on about?” Felix asked. “You’re the one that did that by asking me how I spent last night.”
“Yes…” Sam stopped to gather his thoughts for a moment. He had already managed to forget about his own part in the gears of the dialogue moving. “But, but, what I expected you to do was to lob the ball back to me. Answer the question and then return the focus of the conversation to where it was. ME.”
“OK, we can do that right now then. What did you end up doing instead of playing games?”
“Too late. I already got offended. Let’s move on to Yvessa, who’s the only one whose whereabouts for last night are still unknown.”
“I split it between cultivating and school work.” She shrugged. “Watched a little TV before bed, I guess.”
“Wow,” drawled Felix, “riveting stuff.”
“You’re the one that went to bed early.”
“Yes. But it got us onto the Sarah conversation. So it was much more interesting in the long run than yours.”
“Guys, guys.” Sam held up his hands. “There’s no reason to be fighting over which had the more interesting night in or just life in general. The answer is me. It’s always me. Why? Because I live in two worlds, yours and the past Earth, so I bring two different outlooks into every situation which provides the audience with greater pleasure than just your singular one.”
“Not arguing against your point, because there is just too much to argue, but what about Sarah? She also has her foot in two worlds. In fact, her step in our modern world is much more balanced and nuanced than yours. Shouldn’t that give enough advantage to at least equal you in interest?”
“Sure… in theory. But think about this: I spent last night watching comedy clips. She spent it studying.”
“Is your point that Sarah’s a better cadet than you are?” Yvessa asked.
“Better person? Yes. More interesting person? No. And if Sarah was listening to us right now instead of being lost in her own head, probably thinking about boring school stuff, she’d agree with me.”
“I’m listening just fine,” Sarah said. “But thank you for bringing up boring school stuff because it’s a perfectly valid excuse for me to cut early. See you at dinner, guys.”
“Are you seriously not going to say anything to her about having too much electives?” Felix asked Sam once Sarah was out of earshot.
Sam shrugged. “Look, you two, and Dan, I guess, think this one thing about Sarah. Sarah—and also Maurice now, I guess—think another thing and the both of them probably know Sarah’s capabilities a little better than your side. I’m leaning to your guys’ point of view, don’t get me wrong, but I have nowhere near enough knowledge about anything to come to any prescriptive decision. I’ll tell you what, I’ll be writing Farris, my dear old mentor, a letter with a bunch of questions one of these days. I’ll make sure to ask him for his point of view on the matter.”
“How would that help anyone? I doubt that Sarah is going to listen to Farris if she’s not listening to Dan.”
“It’ll help me by delaying the date by which I need to come up with an informed decision on the matter. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to copy Sarah and also cut early, well earlier, today. I’m feeling a little bad about taking so much time off yesterday.”
After bidding his friends goodbye, Sam made the way to Dan’s office in brisk pace (headphones on). He was slowly getting in shape after all, so there was no reason not to use his newfound endurance and speed to cut some unnecessary traveling time wastage. The door—as was becoming the norm—was open and let Sam in without a sound. And Dan, as per the new norm, was sitting at his desk, staring intently at his computer screen. The very picture of a high-ranking school administrator and nothing like the person who ranks amongst the thousand most important people of the Web should look like. Although, the other two Rulers Sam had met, who were both stronger than the just level 10 administrator (well, one was definitely stronger. Sam didn’t know where Dan actually ranked compared to Esther), also didn’t look too much like their rank would suggest. Which was good news to Sam because becoming a Ruler was a definite prospect in his future, but changing his style was not.
“Sam, good morning. Please take a sit, I’ll be with you shortly… Actually, how about you make us drinks today? You don’t have to, but it will save us one or two minutes, and I know your views on the efficient use of time.”
Sam obliged to the request and made sure that the groan he gave as he was standing up, having just sat down, wasn’t too loud and pitiful. Luckily, there wasn’t much thinking to be done for their drinks, Sam just had his glass of cold water, and Dan had his cup of tea whose only ingredient besides boiling hot water was a single tea bag (black tea as it turned out, Sam didn’t bother taking a look before). He put both drinks on the table and sat down with only the slightest of groans. He closed his eyes to practice some gathering, but didn’t get through too many cycles before Dan cleared his throat and he opened them to see Dan joined him in the opposite sit.
“Sorry about that,” Dan said. “I’ve taken on a fair share of extra administrative work for the military and it’s been hard to shuffle it back the way it came from now that I have new obligations on my time.”
“It’s fine. Just as long as you’re also talking care of yourself, right?”
“Are you alluding to me becoming Ruler sometime in the future? Or is just a general wish for my wellbeing?”
“I wasn’t alluding to the first, but now it’s both, I guess. Just didn’t want you to lose sleep because me or anything.”
“Nothing to worry about from that aspect. If I end up losing sleep, it’s not because of you, I assure you. But enough about me. We have a very packed day, week rather, ahead of us when it comes to your studies, no?”
Sam nodded. The question wasn’t rhetorical. Dan liked for Sam to take an active part in “designing” their lessons together, which mostly just meant that he went over with Sam about what they were going to do in do in the coming day and where it fit in the weekly schedule. Last Friday, however, Dan also told him what they were going to do way off in the future, next week, when Dan proclaimed him to be proficient enough in his gathering for them to start learning about the fundamental gathering techniques during their next lesson.
“Yes,” Sam said. “We’re supposed to go over the actual fundamental techniques of gathering. So no more unnamed stages for us.”
“Well, the stages are still there and they might not be named, but they are numbered the same. But besides that, quite right. We’ll focus this week, and perhaps the next, on going over the differing methods for completing the first stage of gathering. We might not need the whole week even. It all depends on how easy it’ll be for us to see which method you’re most comfortable with. That’ll be the one whose more advanced forms we’ll focus on for the rest of the trimester. Lucky for us, for the third stage of gathering, or rather for the cultivating end of it, there is only one fundamental technique which all the others build upon. That technique is also usually the most complex for people to pull of so that’s what we’ll start with, just to make sure we can finish going over it today. As for today’s timetables, I wanted us to start with gathering for a change. We’ll do an hour to two of tracing after lunch and then back to gathering until dinnertime. The same schedule for at least the rest of the week. Just so that you could get used as fast as possible to the new techniques.”
“Sound good.”
“Excellent. So the fundamental technique for increasing your core’s capacity is called excavating. The main difference between excavating and the ‘technique’ you were employing up to today, is that the pre-fundamental method was just taking the gathered magical energy and focusing it on a specific, or as close to specific as possible for you to imagine, point inside your core. Excavating changes the whole concept by making so that instead of focusing on a single point, you’re focusing on your core as a whole. Imagine blowing air into a balloon and so expanding it in all directions compared to just sticking your fingers inside and extending it in just one. So, start gathering and once you’ll get to the third stage, I’ll show you how to do it. Oh, and before I forget, I wanted to mention that most people only start learning these more ‘advanced’ forms when they’ve had a year or two of gathering under their belts. So you’re well ahead of the curve, in that aspect.”
Sam nodded noncommittally, he’ll have to check this later with his friends to see whether there was anything to even feel proud about (not that there was even if Dan’s words were true, being better than a teenager is the prerogative of most other stages of a human’s development). He began gathering as per Dan’s instructions, the first stage coming much easier today that it did a whole week and a half ago, only taking him about two minutes to gather the maximum amount of energy that he was able to hold before it started slipping away (a major part of last week’s lessons was figuring out what that maximum amount was). The second stage passed instantaneously and uneventfully as always and once he had the magical energy held only a single thought away from his core, he nodded his head to signal Dan that he was finished (he still wasn’t completely sure of managing to hold the magic if speaking).
“Good,” Dan said. “What you’ll want to do now, instead of just constantly pushing the energy inwards, as you did before, is to hold it in your core and not let it go. So simply push the energy into your core and keep a steady hold of it.”
Sam complied and was immediately confronted with the difficulty of the task. This was exactly the problem that he was faced with the first time that he tried gathering. He couldn’t maintain control of the magical energy inside the magical vortex that was his core, so his hold grew weak and most of the energy ended up dissipating before making it inside. This was what the unnamed technique he employed up till now was meant to counter. By hurling the energy against the walls of his core, he managed to make use of it before it slipped away. But Sam of a week and a half ago wasn’t the Sam of today, and he managed to hold the magic inside his core for a whole minute. And then his mind wandered for a second and it all slipped away. He shook his head as he released his breath to signal Dan that he had failed.
“That’s excavating.” Dan nodded once Sam explained to him what had happened.
“Come again?”
“That’s excavating. Obviously not the part about losing control of the magic, but that only happened because most of the magic at that point had gone into enlarging your core. Holding on for a minute for your first time, with the amount of magic that you can grab hold of and the size of your core, is pretty good unless I got my math wrong. So you actually had an easier time with this than I was expecting.”
“Are you serious? That’s all I’m supposed to do? There’s no technique. It’s even simpler than what I did until today..”
“Is it simpler? I suppose that conceptually, excavating has one less action in the total chain of actions than the brute method has. But practically? There’s a reason you weren’t excavating for the last week and a half. If you tried before you were proficient enough in gathering, you wouldn’t have managed to hold your magic inside your core for excavating to be possible. Don’t worry though, it gets much more complicated in the future. But it’ll be a couple of weeks before we get to that. And it’ll be much longer until we can move on to any of the techniques that considered a step up from what you just did. What this means, however, is that I’m feeling certain that we could go over both major techniques for the first stage of gathering today. Let’s keep practicing excavating for another hour before moving on to those.”
Sam’s fortune didn’t hold, however, as he had a much harder time with the second of the techniques they went over. Holding, Dan called it. It involved tuning his own body to be able to pull more energy to it as if it was a magnet, a process that was supposed to cut short some of the time the most basic version of the first stage (blindly grasping outwards) took. But even after the rest of the morning passed, Sam was still not comfortable enough with the technique for it to be better than what it was supposed to be replacing.
But it all turned out to be a moot point in the end. Because after their tracing practice (ended up two hours), Dan introduced Sam to the second archetype of first-stage of gathering techniques: seeking. And Sam was good at that. So good, that Dan made a note to himself to ask Farris whether Sam being a Thread-Weaver had something to do with it. Sam bet that it did, and this time, his low sense of esteem wasn’t the only thing that made him unable to feel comfortable with success. Seeking really did seem to come much too instinctively to him. In a way, it reminded him of how the Threadsight seemed to come (and turn off) instinctively when he first awakened to his magic (although, there was a chance that Sam was bullshitting himself and that the two had nothing in similar with each other and Sam just fabricated the memory that they did).
According to Dan, the half and half split between the prevalence of seeking techniques and holding ones only held true in the general populace. In the military circles they were a part of, the greater difficulty (comparatively) for a person to better their ability with seeking meant that it was harder to standardize for wide usage. Especially since it seemed like it was all a matter of luck. You not only had to be better at seeking than holding, but you also had to be better in such a way that it wasn’t worth your time to be training in holding techniques because your seeking will always be better.
According to Dan, at least a fifth of the academy cadets would be those who always perform better with seeking techniques than with holding ones (with another fifth whose talents leaned towards seeking but not so much as to make holding completely non-competitive). Dan and Felix were two examples of this sort of people, although they both trained in holding for a while, just to make sure that they were both indeed better off with just seeking. But even the two of them weren’t as good with seeking as Sam was, according to Dan. Which was great news as far as Sam and his teacher were concerned. Sam because there was something he was good at (and who gives a shit about brute-luck and unearned opportunities at this point?) and Dan because it meant that the choice for what Sam should study was clear and there was no reason for them to waste time on learning holding.
So how was the seeking technique of gathering actually done? Sam wasn’t really sure. He just managed to do it by following Dan’s very basic instructions: “Imagine your thoughts sending out a tractor beam in a straight line. Next, direct your thoughts at the point around you that first pops up in your head. If you grab a hold of magic, good, pull it back and keep going the same way until you have as much magic, or close enough, as you can hold and go on to the second stage. If you miss, then no matter, just keep going until you succeed enough times. The ‘seeking’ part might be incredibly hard to improve upon, but the pulling back part is definitely not. And that’s what we want to practice.”
And he was right. Sam definitely had space to improve in that part of the technique. He lost a significant amount of magical energy either when pulling it back to himself or by mistakenly throwing out with his thoughts what he had already managed to grab hold of. But as for the first part? According to Dan, there wasn’t even all that much place for him to improve upon there, nevermind it being so difficult to do so. Every single time he sent out his thoughts, he grabbed hold of a wisp of magic, and while it was indeed just a wisp, it was still about a third of all the magical energy he could securely grab hold of.
Which meant that at the end of the day, Sam cut his time in the first stage of a gathering cycle from two minutes on average to less than half a minute. Dan closed today’s lesson by saying that since Sam had an easy time with both of the new gathering techniques, they could go back to their usual routine of equally splitting the lessons between gathering and tracing.