“Welcome…to my office hours!” Mindstorm said. She looked happy, which threw me off more than anything she could have done. In all the time I’d been a student here, she’d only been happy once; she’d smiled during our make-up assignment.
Still, there were two chairs in the dark office and no delivery food sitting on the desk, so I took that as a sign that this meeting would be on the fast side. I gulped, pushing down my worry about being in the same room with Mindstorm, and cleared my throat. “Thanks for meeting with me so quickly. I appreciate it,” I said.
“You’re more…interesting…than the current crop of incoming students. Such a typical load. Three super-strength bruisers, a magical, and a handful of speedsters and elementalists. The only interesting ones are the girl with the tractor beams…and one of the upcoming villains. He’ll shake up the SSS power dynamics as he grows into his powers.” Mindstorm stared at me, and I gazed back, literally unable to look away. “Tell me what your problem is.”
“Okay. We’re signed up for the associate’s degree program. We have the same classes and everything, and that workload looks doable for sure. But we’re also starting a minor league career, and Rocko—our producer—wants us to focus on that. We could get the whiteboard out again—“
“That’s where that went,” Mindstorm said, and Fursona fidgeted next to me in her fursuit. “I…appreciate you coming to me. Let’s talk about your classes first.”
“Team Composition with Mays, then Stage Combat and Psychology in Action. Those are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and they’re spread out, so it’ll be hard to get Episodes in until the evening. Then, on Tuesday and Thursday, we’ve got Superpower Legal Issues and Extra Relations and Public Presentation, again spread through the day. So, my concern is that the weekends will be the best time to do Episodes since we won’t be able to get away.
“Basically, I’m hoping for a strategy for balancing TU’s needs with Rocko’s,” I finished.
“And making sure we’re successful at all of it, ideally while having some downtime,” Bee added.
Mindstorm looked at her, then, to my surprise, nodded. “I understand. Would you believe me if…I said the schedule was crafted with working supers in mind? We professors aren’t clueless. Minor league heroes—and most of the associate’s degree students are minor league—start running into new problems and opportunities. You two are already…partners, correct?”
“Yes,” Fursona said, slipping a paw into my hand below the table. I nodded.
“Then Team Composition will be theoretical for the most part, but with your power, Magical Girl Understudy, you should…pay closer attention. You represent either a one-woman team or whatever your teammate and Episode need, and you should listen to the professionals on how best to…take advantage of that. However, Legal Issues Forum and Extra Relations both work together with Psychology in Action and the acting class.”
“Stage Combat is acting?” Fursona asked, sounding vaguely shocked through her modulator.
“Yes, Fursona.” I rolled my eyes. “You said you took fencing, right? It’s like fencing but for flair instead of efficiency. It’ll be awesome.”
“There are three ways to push from the minor leagues to the majors,” Mindstorm said. “One is to be so…good…at what you do that they can’t help promote you. Another is to have a big hit in the high minors or against low majors. That’ll catch eyes and move you forward. But for most heroes, including…your friend Magical Girl Stella-Lunar, the path to promotion runs through being good enough, but eye-catching for the…audience.”
Her face darkened, and she glared across the desk. “For you two, I recommend the last way. It’s the easiest path forward. It means paying attention in your theater classes, though, and there’s a danger of getting…scripted. There are a lot of heroes on scripts whose producers watch their every move for maximum screen impact. You’d be surprised who they are.”
I didn’t want to be scripted. An actress I might be, but even so, the free-form nature of Episodes felt the most natural—not whatever The Narrator did with the kids. And I had other reservations about progressing upward. “Doctor Mindstorm, I don’t want to be a major league hero,” I said.
“Oh? Interesting.” Mindstorm brought her face into a perfectly neutral expression. It looked almost bored, and she looked at Fursona. “What about you?”
The kangaroo looked down, and her paw slipped from my hand. I tried not to wince, especially when she started talking. “I don’t know. I feel like I moved through the little leagues really fast, and I could use the time to settle into my powers. The studio’s costume designer’s figured out how to get me into different fursuits, too, so I’ll have new powers to test out. I guess, uh, no for now?” She sounded hesitant.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Mindstorm steepled her fingers. “Would you mind if I…took a look at your powers? Both of you?” As she stared at me, I could see exhaustion warring with hunger. Still, she hadn’t hurt either of us—at least, not outside of the Combat Styles training room. I slowly nodded, and Fursona copied me.
“Wonderful,” Mindstorm said. Then, her voice echoed in my head. <[System Menu].>
----------------------------------------
Fursona and I staggered across campus back to Walnut Tower. True to her word, Mindstorm had taken a good, long look at our power sets. Then, without another word of advice, she’d ended the meeting. “I’ll have…more personalized steps for you in an email, but I need to think it through,” she’d said.
So, as the secret elevator to my base lifted us up, we leaned on each other. We didn’t feel sick or headachey; we were just off balance, and it was nice to have someone to support me. I’m sure Fursona felt the same way, too. Still, when we arrived in my pastel-pink hideout, Fursona’s helmet came off, and she flopped unceremoniously onto the chaise lounge. I joined her, lying down on my couch.
“That…that sucked,” Bianca said, eyes closed and face pale. “Does she do that often?”
“No. Just give it a minute. Hopefully, the room will stop spinning, and you’ll be able to change the rest of the way once it does. That sucked—a lot. Did that meeting seem useful to you?”
“Yeah, actually. It told us a lot about what the professors are trying to do with the associate’s degree program and why they chose these classes.” Bianca lay unmoving, falling silent until I worried she’d fallen asleep in her fursuit. Then, just as I was about to try waking her up, she continued. “God, this is rough. I forgot how bad it was. All these classes work together. If we can figure out the core lessons each is teaching and how those relate to each other, it’ll be easier to focus on that.”
“I see,” I said, running through the classes. “Actually, I don’t yet, but I will by Friday. How long do you think it’ll take Mindstorm to send us that advice?”
“It’ll either be tonight, in the next five minutes, or after classes have been going for a couple of days. It depends on whether she decides we need the class’s context to understand her advice.”
“Makes sense.”
Bianca struggled to her feet and started pulling off the fursuit’s straps. I untransformed, then helped her, still feeling wobbly. As I did, I got a good look around the room—especially at the new screens.
“Got something new here,” I said, walking over to them. The screen that’d been a blank map of the city had been updated, with my three areas highlighted in different colors. The Poudre Districts glowed red, and the word ‘3V1L’ was scrawled across it in jagged letters, but a tiny dot in the top corner shone gold. There, an Old English script covered a tiny enclave labeled ‘Sister Sly.’ It took almost a minute to track down the electric-blue dot for Livestream, and Theseus’s green was relegated to a single building in Mid-Town, right next to the Council of Heroes building.
“We have maps of their locations?” Bianca said incredulously. “This is gonna be easy.”
“I don’t think they’re up-to-date locations,” I said. “Let’s check the other screen.”
This screen had way more information, and it made the other one’s information more useful, too. Each of the four villains in my rogue’s gallery had a section, including recent sightings. The ones for Theseus and Livestream only had one sighting each in the last twenty-four hours, so their last known locations were both more precise and more out-of-date.
Bianca narrowed her eyes. “Doesn’t Livestream constantly stream his superhero work? It feels odd to have only a single location and sighting.”
“Yeah. Lemme check something.” I fiddled with my phone, then nodded slowly. “Looks like he takes Tuesdays off. Let’s remember that. It’ll help narrow things down for the future.”
Sister Sly had been active recently, but when I went to find her most current Episodes, they were all locked behind a paywall. “Okay, I’m not paying fifty bucks a month for access to Sister Sly’s dozen or so Episodes,” I complained.
“Yeah, she’s been busy recently, but it’s all up in the north side of the Poudre districts. We’ll just have to deal with her when we deal with her.”
And then there was 3V1L. Golden Goose had wiped them out during the spring semester last year, but they looked to be making a serious comeback. The map’s bright red glow made sense; a full two-thirds of the screen was dedicated to news stories about their activities over the last twenty-four hours, along with forum posts claiming they’d seen 3V1L henchmen patrolling their neighborhoods. “They’re…going to be a problem,” I hedged.
“Definitely. We should patrol the Poudre district this weekend and try to keep them suppressed. Otherwise, they’ll be the biggest threat in our gallery, just by virtue of being everywhere,” Bianca said. She cleared her throat. “I think right now, our priority should be on them, homework, and classes. I don’t think Sister Sly will be much of a threat. She looks outgunned by the others. And Livestream and Theseus are one-man shows. Not a real problem if we keep working on our teamwork.”
“So you think we focus on the hardest target first?” I asked. “Theseus?”
She shook her head. “No. Theseus is a corpo villain now. He’s probably not going to make huge waves—he’ll just go after other corporations. And Livestream’s got his thing going. He’s been a vil for a while, and he hasn’t seen fit to expand. He’s Gourmet but with a little more ambition. So, really, it’s 3V1L or Sister Sly, and 3V1L’s proven it’ll grow out of control. Think of our focus as pruning, not uprooting.
“Alright. Do you want to stay over tonight? We’ve got the same schedule, so I won’t wake you up in the morning,” I asked. Then I hesitated. “Actually, I’ll totally wake you up, but it’ll be for a reason, not because I’m singing in the shower or something.”
Bee looked away, staring at the fuchsia-framed mirror. Then she nodded slowly, walked up, and wrapped her arms around me. “Yeah. Yeah, we could give that a try. Just don’t sing too loud.”
I started talking, but she stood on tip-toes and pressed her lips to mine before I could say anything. Then she pulled away. “But only because we’ve got the same schedule.”
Her face looked deadly serious, and my heart started sinking. Then she winked. “So, what’s for dinner?”