Sam clenched her jaw as she attempted to lift the shuttle from a dead stop. Ten minutes of effort passed before Cassandane allowed her to stop. The vessel had not budged in the slightest. Sam wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. "I failed my 'do or do not' challenge just like Luke."

"Are you making cultural allusions again?"

"Making cultural allusion I was. Much confusion in you."

Cassandane's only response was to push the shuttle into the air with a casual effort. Sam relaxed in her seat for a moment before resuming her clearing training. For the past twenty-four hours, every moment of free time had been dedicated to the task of clearing, often under the direction of her mentor. She had made a lot of progress. A small ball of residue nestled in a natural dead spot of her mind far from the normal currents of precursor. Finding the proper spot to stockpile her residue had helped tremendously with the following step, of compressing the residue.

As the shuttle flew upwards, Sam squeezed the ball of residue with a cautious intensity, wary of destabilizing the stockpile. The experience was much like compacting a snowball to an icy consistency. At a certain point, it became almost impossible to increase its density. That was where she found herself. "What am I supposed to do if I can't squeeze it any tighter?"

"Keep trying and you'll discover the solution on your own. It's not something that can be hastened with discussion." Cassandane's expression turned introspective. "Erral Quincy walked all of Nallit's new recruits through the basic steps. Nallit provided plenty of motivation, but he never had a word to say about how to clear or become a full paragon. In the end, a lot of his success training us can be attributed to Quincy's efforts to save us."

"Nallit didn't teach you?"

"He taught us a lot. The topic of how to become a full paragon never made it into the curriculum for some reason. Maybe he preferred to watch his students desperately struggle to beat the one month deadline."

Sam abandoned her efforts to compact the ball of residue. "He killed them at the end of a month if they couldn't ignite."

"Tortured them to death in front of the students who had yet to succeed."

"That must have been terrible. Did you ever talk to someone about everything that you went through?"

"No, Sam. As disciples of that man, we were complicit in the destruction of our world. Discussing those events would have destroyed our reputation. The fleet had a need for heroes and their best options had just murdered Chekowan civilians. Further degrading our image might have made it impossible to form a governing body and launch towards another solar system."

"Well, if you ever need to --"

"I do not," Cassandane interrupted. "Back to work, Sam. I want you strong enough to lift a shuttle into orbit yourself in the next few days."

Rather than resume clearing, which she had grown to loathe recently, Sam decided to play around with creating psuedo material constructs. Build a pattern of gravitas, then leak some animas into it. In her hand, a nebulous object flickered in and out of existence. That was about as far as she could get with that particular synergy. Once the block of steel she was modeling had momentarily solidified, but she had never repeated that success. The reverse of building constructs was energy manipulation -- creating a pool of animas and then coaxing it to create light with a dab of gravitas. She had worse luck with that. In fact, so far the only synergy she could implement was creating a continuous kinetic field on an object, which Sam considered borderline useless to someone with a kinetic field.

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Once they were out of the atmosphere, Cassandane had Sam take over the shuttle. With the lack of atmospheric drag and the momentum build up from their ascent, Sam managed to keep them moving towards the Angelship, though what she did could be more accurately described as increasing the time it took for them to stop than lifting into orbit. She dutifully followed the navigation instructions on the computer screen until their speed dropped enough that Cassandane had to take over once more.

"When you are strong enough to lift the shuttle, this is how you would toggle it to a more efficient mode. You can see I'm using the 'direct route' option, but you also have the option for 'curved trajectory' and 'orbit up'. The third option is the least strenuous but most time consuming. It has you fly a complete orbit of the planet, constantly ascending as you do so. A lone paragon should be able to manage it. Once we get you to that level of capability, the fleet will recognize you as a valuable asset." Cassandane pointed to a setting on the screen. "There are also motors that can be activated to assist with takeoff and atmospheric flight. I'll have to teach you how to charge the batteries so you can use that."

After unloading a massive amount of food, they returned to the Earthside supply depot with Sam handling most of the descent. Towards the end, Cassandane took over to ensure a survivable landing, her corona ballooning out to encompass the entire vessel and cancel its downward inertia in an instant. Because the force acted simultaneously on everything, there was no physical stress from the abrupt action. However, because the force acted on everything, the occupants had to deal with a sudden sensation of vertigo as the sensation of gravity vanished.

As Sam loaded the shuttle with aluminum struts and panels, Cassandane went into the office. Over time, the rest of the crew vanished as well, until Sam worked alone. She had enough experience by this point to know where and how the cargo should be stacked, but she still felt a surge of annoyance with her coworkers. "Sure, make the new girl do all the work. Have fun sipping champagne and eating caviar while I lift heavy things. Don't worry about me. I'm just singlehandedly doing the work of four people. No big deal."

"Hey, Sam," the cargo master called.

"Hey, Kiri, I was just talking to myself about how nice it was working by myself."

"There is news on the television you should see."

Sam followed the cargo master back to the office, where she found the entire crew and the staff of the depot standing before a flat screen that had not been there just a few days past. No one spoke as the news story of a hospital attack was delivered by somber reporters. Photos of deceased medical staff streamed past on one side with their names and positions in the hospital. Unsure of what exactly had happened, Sam moved to stand next to Cassandane. "What happened?"

Her mentor only pointed to the screen, where video of a greasy-haired man wearing a tank top had appeared. The man licked his lips as a security guard shouted at him from behind the cover of a support column. The man clenched his hand into a fist and the guard collapsed, his head blurred out to censor whatever horrific injury had just appeared. Sam placed a hand over her stomach, suddenly nauseous. "Did that man just use the kinetic talent to kill someone?"

"Yes," said one of the depot staff. "Somehow the talents have begun spreading among the locals. They have been covering this story all day."

"Marius," Cassandane muttered.

"This is like 9/11 all over again," Sam said.

"Those men need to be hunted down before they act again," the cargo master said. "The Chief Executive will send Zellar Wilson to take care of them."

Beside her, Cassandane's posture went stiff. "Shuttle crew, back to work. The fleet needs these materials in orbit."