I thought I walked into a trope.

It looked like a classic dojo if the dojo was designed to deal with guys that could bench-press a semi. Then again, that’s probably precisely what it was for.

Sitting at one end, on a mat, was an old man. Or at least I think he was old. He had a white beard, and wrinkles around his eyes, but the guy was huge, like professional wrestler huge.

I glanced around and looked at him. “Eastern studies?”

He was sitting cross-legged, or maybe lotus. I’d never really paid any attention to the mystical side of martial arts. I mean, I got the philosophical implications, but the whole concept of ‘learning martial arts so you never have to use them’ struck me as hypocritical. With great power and all that, and the whole ‘chi’ and ‘invisible martial arts’ stuff was proven to be a complete bucket of hogwash when alpha abilities weren’t involved.

“Are you my teacher?”

He nodded, “For this, yes. Not going to be your ancient mentor, though.”

“Why’s that?”

He coughed a little and then pushed his way to his feet quickly. Geez, he had to be seven feet tall. “Couple of reasons. First, I’m not as old as I look.”

I nodded, “You don’t look that old.”

He laughed, “Don’t try kissing my ass. I know what I look like. I didn’t awaken till I was thirty-five and spent half my life in the box killing sandworms. Your age tends to slow down when you awaken, but if you pop late, you start late.”

“You were killing sandworms as a normie? That’s pretty impressive… that you are still alive, I mean, you must have been pretty good at it.”

He nodded, “Yep. The second reason is that I know the tropes. I am not going to try and convince you to be a superhero, I plan to teach you exactly the secret technique rather than acting like you aren’t ready for it, and I don’t plan on dying to the super-evil dude or monster to let everyone know that the situation is serious and to give you the drive to triumph with only memories of my wisdom to guide you.”

“Secret Technique?”

He nodded, “Yep. Have a seat, grasshopper.”

I shrugged and sat down cross-legged. So far, this class was at least entertaining. “So is this the part where I start calling you Sensei?”

He shook his head and flopped down, almost thunderously. Clearly, he had a bit of physical enhancement, probably increased density. “Naww. The correct term would probably be close to Senpai.”

“What does that mean?

“Well, a sensei is more of a revered teacher. Not necessarily older, but definitely the teacher. The senpai, though is more like, I guess, a tutor. A more experienced student that’s just far enough along the path ahead of you that they can help you get your bearings. And that’s just the Japanese I know from watching anime when I was a kid.”

I nodded, “Is this the class?”

He smiled slightly, showing off a couple of missing teeth. “This is YOUR class. You are in a unique position, that I am betting you are aware of, but don’t think we are aware of.”

I glanced around to make sure I knew where the exit was. Yep, right where I left it.

“Do you know who I am?”

I looked at him closely. “You look familiar, but I am having trouble placing you. I bet you are… a teacher!”

He chuckled, “Good guess. Right now I am teaching the tactical math and combat resilience classes, and now this.”

“Combat resilience?”

He nodded, “Fighting after someone breaks your nose. Probably not a course you are going to need, all things considered. It mostly involves pain suppression, making hard choices under pressure, and concentration through distraction, all things you have proven again and again you are not a slouch at.”

“What are you talking about?”

He rolled his eyes, “You are a very clever kid, but Vilnet is run on BSA servers. It has a very important role, letting people blow off steam with a minimum of fuss. Don’t worry, you aren’t on the hook for umm… Diabolus, Technotron, or even Earthmaster, although I recommend leaving him dead. You pissed off some real baddies with the laughing gas stunt, and one of the nastier drug cartels had to evacuate, which let half their network get pulled in and cost them almost four billion in lost profit and product.”

“Really? I am just off the hook like that? How did they find out? I covered my tracks.”

He laughed, “You see, that’s why you are in this school. You covered your tracks reasonably well for a civilian. Alphas, though… let’s just say that anything on the computer can be traced by technopaths, so if you are a real villain you can’t trust any machinery that you haven’t custom-built yourself. If you write things down, you are vulnerable to information manipulators. If you keep it to yourself, You are vulnerable to clairvoyants. If you even keep your schemes from yourself somehow, you can still be noticed and thwarted by seers.”

“In your case, though, the only felony that could be traced against you is malicious mischief, and even that is debatable since SSS is a fully licensed stunt company.”

“I did a lot of property damage…”

He smiled, “Yes you did, and you always got at least a verbal agreement from the owners of those properties. THEY could be charged with insurance fraud, but hiring out-of-work crisis actors to be your kidnapping victims was brilliant.”

I was a little surprised, “I did? I got those guys behind the hardware store. Only two hundred bucks apiece for two hours of work. I got a pretty good return on my investment.”

He nodded, “Yeah, they were doing a video spot for a manufactured protest against Buddy Time Mechanicals hosted by Six News.”

“Huh,” I said thoughtfully.

He shrugged, “Not really important, but after the third Technotron appearance, The Champions wanted to recruit you. Seers told Chrome that if she tried to pull you in, you’d run, but if she waited, you’d show up here.”

I nodded, “Still thinking about running. I tried to do the hero thing, and it didn’t work. I work better behind the scenes.”

His eyebrow raised, “Do you? You are aware that filming your exploits for hero PR was the whole point of pulling your capers, right? And nothing is ever lost on the internet.”

“Shit,” I replied.

“That’s why you are here. This is not a history class. Do you want to share your powers better than you did when you were trying to get one over on a bio-controller? Or should we just keep pretending that all you can do is cheat on coin tosses and heal minor boo-boos?”

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“I don’t want to be a superhero, not anymore. I am perfectly fine with being an assistant.”

He nodded, “That’s fine. I’ve seen your tapes. You’d make a third-rate superhero anyway.”

I looked at him in surprise, “Really? Reverse psychology already?”

He grinned, “You’d make a third-rate superhero right NOW. So how long does the burn last after a full restoration?”

I sighed, “If I am at low energy, which I usually am after a good show, if I am hurt badly enough to need a full restore, I get to look forward to being a zombie for at least a week. Maybe more, and at least another week or two to get back to full energy.”

“So, if you had unlimited energy, or at least the kind of pull that most class fours have, How far could your powers go? That’s what this class is going to be about.”

I laughed, “Is that before or after I get a golden Unicorn from Santa Claus?”

“After.”

“Got a pencil and paper?”

He nodded and walked over to a classic Asian-inspired table underneath a painted picture of some bald dude with a sword, a fox, and a bunch of ideograms down the side. In a moment he returned with a clipboard and a pen that he offered to me.

After a moment I put a big ‘264’ on the paper. “This is my maximum right now. When I started I only had one hundred and six energy. Each point equals about one calorie, or the energy required to raise a kilogram of water about thirty-five degrees. A decent low-powered fire flash, once you add in the power to project it to its target intact, costs me about ten points to be strong enough to ignite clothing. Fortunately, that’s not how I do it.”

“What I do instead is ignite a few molecules of hydrogen, and keep them stable through the flight. Much lower difficulty, and it expands when I split off the energy. It also makes a truly impressive-looking fireball, which will cause small scorch marks on most flammable objects, or ignite things like pyrotechnics for about a single point.”

He nodded, “So you can control molecules?”

I nodded, “To some extent. That’s how I merge things and adjust their molecular or crystalline framework in metals. Give me ten pounds of pig iron, charcoal, and unlimited energy, and I could make you a breastplate that could bounce an armor-piercing Depleted-uranium tank round. Of course, the impact of that tank round would still kill you from hydrostatic shock, but that’s what special padding and stuff is for. I don’t have the technical know-how to fix that easily.”

“Most alphas with access to the ether have an amount of energy roughly equal to their class ranking times a thousand. Not every time, of course, but it’s a general rule that’s mostly held for me. If I were a class four, for example, I would have around four thousand energy and be able to regenerate about a hundred and eighty energy per hour. That’s where my namesake comes into play.”

“With four thousand energy, given the right materials and an example of, say, an enforcer helmet, I could replicate the helmet. It would cost me about three thousand, and I could use the remainder to improve it to the point where even Man-Ape would have trouble giving it the Samsonite treatment.”

He watched me as I was cribbing numbers on the sheet. “You just figured that out off the top of your head?”

I chuckled, “I have had a lot of experience figuring it out. Cold is the same way since it’s all about molecular movement, but there are fewer shortcuts. I can shoot ice pellets like a machine gun, but they have to be tiny, and even a handful costs me a ton of energy. When I play the cold elemental game, I need a lot more props to sell it.”

“Electricity is easiest, but it’s harder to control. Unlike an elemental, I have to pay attention to things like relative conductivity and set up the right sort of low-pressure ionized pathway to shoot it. It also doesn’t do much damage, but it looks impressive.”

“So basically, your power, your microkinesis, is based around moving molecules?”

I nodded, “Sometimes millions at a time, but I need to trigger movement in every single one of them. But as you probably saw, static electricity, heat, and cold are my friends. That and kinetic energy.”

“What does that mean?”

I shrugged, “Okay, this is getting into dangerous territory. My biggest solid mass is about an ounce. What happens if you throw, say, a sheet of aluminum foil in front of a flying airplane?”

“It mushes.”

“How about if the sheet of foil is immune to kinetic impacts, or rather, it becomes an immovable object? My power is moving around molecules, AND stopping them. What if you have a sheet of foil that becomes a completely immovable object immune to any sort of motion?”

He winced. “It rips its way through the airplane. Does that apply to other types of molecular motion?”

I nodded, “That’s how I appear so tough. Fire and cold might as well be warm and cool breezes because getting rid of molecular motion is easy.”

“What about electricity and impacts?”

I shrugged, “Impacts are the same deal. I get hurt, but it’s usually because there is too much mass, or I do something that distracts my attention. A bullet is no big deal. A fist? A normal-sized one I can slow down, at least, but I fist the size of yours, or a big old Mjolnir hammer, or someone throws a car or telephone pole at me, I am pasted just like anyone else, no matter HOW much energy I have.

“Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” he asked curiously.

“Well, there’s a lot of air in between me and a thrown car or lamp post. Only a few grams of air mixture is enough to stop a lot of projectiles. It’s not perfect, but the conversion works pretty well.”

“What happens to the energy?”

“Huh?”

He looked at me closely, “What happens to the energy when you absorb it?”

“Well, heat and cold both require energy to alter their state. It’s like accelerating and decelerating in microgravity. Electricity requires friction, and canceling it out requires me to produce an opposing friction charge.”

His brows narrowed, “An opposing friction charge?”

I shrugged, “That’s how I look at it. My magic is less telekinesis and more... crapping all over the laws of thermodynamics. Newton's laws take a lot more energy to break.”

He nodded, and asked me the question I had been dreading, “Exactly how small a particle can you affect?”

I sighed, “Pretty small. Now, before I start lying to you so that you don’t lock me in a vacuum-sealed coma for the rest of my life, how about you ask me different questions, like how my reset works.”

He nodded, “I assume you can record a current state, and then re-apply it to an existing molecular structure as a quantum observation effect. Is that close?”

I nodded, “Got it in one. That’s how I can replicate things too. Improving things is easy, as long as I know what I am doing. That’s how I could improve stuff… I work on a tiny section, and when that section is set how I want it to be, I spread the pattern around, and my power handles the rest. I had to plumb the depths of the internet to find the molecular patterns for different ratings and blends of steel, and memorizing biological patterns takes frequent and extended contact. I experimented millions of times to find the best crystalline patterns for my needs. I was just lucky that my power handled most of it, allowing me to experiment hundreds of times per second on a tiny scale until I found the perfect set of combinations and alloys.”

“Not that it helps, just experimenting costs me half a year’s worth of energy, only to find I couldn’t create anything big. If you want a five-molecule thick layer on already-decent widgeteer armor that can distribute the force of a ten-molecule thick armor piercing round or a laser, I can do it. You want me to turn medieval plate mail into case-hardened carbon steel that can do the same thing, try someone else.”

“So again, what happens to the energy?”

I looked at him oddly, “What do you mean? I already told you, it costs the same energy coming and going, like thrusters on a spacecraft.”

“Not that, I meant kinetic energy. Where does the energy go if you put a piece of aluminum foil in front of a plane?”

I glared at him, “I don’t know. I am not a sick psychopath that would do something like that.”

He sighed, “Okay, where do you THINK it would go?”

I scratched my head, “I don’t know. Maybe it would convert into heat and blow up the plane? Sometimes friction from bullets hitting an air shield makes them melt. Maybe it just goes into the Ether or the Q-Brane or something.”

He nodded slowly, “So have you figured out who I am yet?”

I shook my head, “Total mystery.”

He smiled slightly, “Well, two years ago I was Jupiter for the Olympians. There was some… conflict, and instead of dragging them through the mud, I moved here to the Academy.”

I shrugged, “That sounds cool. What class are you?”

He smirked, “Class eight. Wanna guess who was before I became Jupiter? I will give you a hint, You and I have something in common.”

I looked at him in shock. There have only been a few class eights in history, but there was only one male. A single one. “uhh… you kept your class hidden?”

He shook his head, “Nope, I was Graviton.”