I was on top of the student hall, watching Empire City across the bay as the sun slowly set behind the buildings spread out before the wall, leaving glittering traces of each sunlit ray before the disk could disappear behind the architecture seemingly forever.

It had gotten a bit cooler, so I wore a light jacket over my tank top. Training under Mister Bob had gone on a lot longer than either of us had suspected, but he considered it important enough to call central and let them know that I would deal with my other classes later.

In with the good air, out with the bad.

Bob had referred to the ‘shapes’ of spirit energy as essence, but once it was inside me and purified to the point I could use it, he called it chi. I didn’t really care about the names for it, as far as I was concerned it was just the energy I used to accomplish power tricks. Neither of us had any idea of the actual ‘shapes’ I absorbed best since apparently, spirit energy could have as many identities as there were subatomic particles in the universe, but we were experimenting to find out where absorbing energy worked best, and right now that seemed to be at the highest point possible.

In with the good energy, out with the bad.

A lot of the air pollution from as recently as forty years ago was gone. This was not only because the industry moved mostly underground but also because Widgeteer and Tinker tech were much better at stripping stinks out of the air. There was still enough to give the sunset sky those brilliant oranges and yellows that made the skyline so distinctive, but the air smelled clean, at least much cleaner than the reprocessed, flavorless air in the subsurface.

In with the good spirits, out with the bad.

Bob suspected that with the ease that I kinetically neutralized swaths of air, some kind of air shape was at least one of my ‘aspects’, or daos. I didn’t know if it was that, or the shape of air pollution, or urbanism, or the Dao of height, or it could be anything at all… but I did know that standing up here, taking deep lungfuls of city air, churning it around in whatever I used to store energy, and then imagining that I was breathing out the stuff that I didn’t need or couldn’t use, I’d already regained nearly half my energy in only most of a single day.

I couldn’t sit zen or do any of those weird meditative poses stuff and get anything useful out of them, yet, I just did these weird and slightly unnatural breathing exercises, and it worked even better when I was getting in some exercise. I jokingly told Mister Bob that I was using the Dao of action, but he took it utterly seriously and said he’d look into Katas, or Martial arts exercises, that could help enhance cultivation through action.

In with the shapes of energy I could use, out with the shapes that harmed my advancement.

The weird part was that I wasn’t entirely certain he was wrong. Working out and keeping moving had always seemed to help me recover energy more quickly, although carb loading just seemed to enhance my own body’s reserves… apparently I, and every other thing in existence, also seemed to create this spirit energy with every single action, and keeping my body fully fed and rested increased my recovery innately.

The concept was simultaneously cool and creepy. I know Bob said that the idea of spirit energy and soul would make scientists shit a brick, but in this world, a widgeteer could make a freeze ray out of a banana peel, three space Lego bricks, and a squirt gun. Atheist types or not, it was hard as hell to argue with the evidence of your own senses. I bet that some of the big brain types that hadn’t gone nutty yet might be able to find out more.

In with the good magical chi hopium, out with the bad.

I needed to go down and probably find the Gym for some sets, but it was nice out here. Nice and surprisingly empty. Like I said, I wasn’t exactly an introvert, but occasional privacy was wonderful. No social obligations or people to stay away from, no constant quiet yammering pounding at the walls of my seclusion, no loudmouths with incessant meaningless questions to distract me from…

“The sunset is beautiful, isn’t it?” I heard beside me. If I hadn’t grabbed the awning support, I might have gone over from sheer surprise. Okay, there was really no chance of that, but I was cursing myself for relaxing my own situational awareness, as I glanced at Mindy, who was dressed in civvies. I still had my mask but had taken it off to dine on the smells and tastes of the sunset air.

I nodded at her silently, turning back to watch as the final rays of the exposed sun vanished behind distant buildings. Mindy was respectfully silent until the sky started to darken and lose the last lustrous hues of approaching night.

In with the good air, out with the bad.

Mindy was beside me, fiddling with the long, silvery ponytail that she’d tied her hair back into, and she spoke again,” So…. Do you come here often?” with a hint of a smile.

I glared at her, “We have been here for two days. I don’t do anything often yet.”

She sighed and nodded, “They have me in something called remedial martial arts. Right now, that means I get pushed over again and again and again, apparently until I learn how to fall over right. I don’t like being ostracized by being the special needs kid.”

“I’d think you’d have gotten used to that by now,” I teased with a snicker.

She stuck out her tongue at me and barked, “Why I oughta… If you weren’t my sidekick I’d give you such a pinch!”

I chuckled, surprisingly comfortable with the turn the conversation took. “you’d have to beat me first and to do that, you have to learn how to fall. If it makes you feel better, when I got started in martial arts, I had to do exactly the same thing… I was already fairly beefy for my age, so I just kept getting more and more pissed off that this shrimpy Russian girl kept pushing me over. I even took a swing at her.”

“What happened?”

I grinned, “I spent some quality time counting ceiling tiles and wondering why my ribs hurt so much. She was teaching Sambo. I figured, you know, big guy… that whole ‘size doesn’t matter thing’ was bullshit. Technically, I was right, if both fighters are trained it matters a lot… but me, I didn’t know Jack, so I might as well have been a hundred and fifty-pound Pinata.”

She looked nervously at the roof gravel for a moment and then looked back at me. “I hate to do this, but you are a class six now. A lot of the stuff you do is… interesting. I have to ask you.”

“The answer is yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, you can spend lots of money on me, wine and dine me, and then brag about how you caught the best-looking guy on campus and how amazing I was in bed with a two-by-four, a dishwashing brush, and a live hamster.”

“Asshole,” she smirked. “But seriously…”

“The answer is sort of, I helped. Mostly with some of the flashy stuff. I have a pretty good working knowledge of fireworks and can trigger fuses from a ways off. I watched the fight, too. I can do some cool sparkly special effects, I had fireworks stashed all over the warehouse, and I still have microkinesis… Flash paper is super lightweight, and you’d be amazed at how easy it is to direct Roman candles with even a hint of telekinesis. D did the heavy lifting, I just made it look good for the cameras.”

“And the bomb? And him disappearing in a hail of sparkles? Pyrokinetics aren't known for being able to teleport. Fly, maybe, but he was there one second and gone the next.”

I shrugged, “Armor stopped most of it and I healed the rest. The sparkles thing was pure stage magic, which you fell for beautifully, I might add.” Bob may have figured out a lot more about my abilities than I was comfortable with, but the teleportation… every time I’d made a ‘miraculous escape’ I’d made sure that it looked like stage magic. It might be slow, but it was my escape plan, and I might need it someday, not to mention it would open up a barrel of cats I wasn’t ready to try to herd up again.

“But there was so much blood…”

I nodded, “Yes, and he’s totally fine. You just caught both of us by surprise. I tend to try and coordinate the special effects, and if I’d known you were able to combine your kinetics with your Ice for more than just personal defense, I’d have probably set up better counters and more effective bystander ward-offs, so I feel a little responsible as well.”

“So terribly responsible. Did you get hurt too?”

I shook my head, “Naw, I wasn't close enough. Still, if you wanted to pay off the D-Man, he probably wouldn’t turn down a new set of riot armor… You kind of fragged the last ones beyond my ability to repair.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She nodded slowly, “I can probably do my best with that. You know, I still get the sneaking suspicion that you are just bullshitting me, and you and D are the same guy.”

I chuffed, “Are you kidding? I mean, he’s a fire elemental. I’m just a fixer. Sure I help rig things up to look more exciting, but that’s pure PR. Besides, after that blast, I’d probably be covered with scars. Do I need to take off my shirt to show you again?”

She smiled slightly, showing off just a hint of cute overbite. Sooner or later I would have to make squirrel jokes. “You might.”

I sighed, turning back towards the stairs. “Maybe I should add no flirting into that deal. I am not here to meet girls. No offense, you are clearly a ten and a half on a scale from one to ten, but I have no intentions of turning into a man-slut.”

She mulled that over for a second, “Really, ten and a half… is there a way to get to eleven?”

I nodded, “Yeah, but you would need to have been born with red hair and freckles. I am one of those awful guys that automatically adds two points for natural redheads. Technically that could get them up to twelve.”

She snickered, “And if I told you I was born with red hair and dyed it and my eyebrows to match the whole Glacier Girl aesthetic, and that it takes a lot of base to hide freckles?”

“Then I’d kick you out of my room and never let you in even to study. I have my goals, and panting over a superheroine is not on the list.”

“Speaking of studying, can we change and head to the gym? Apparently, my homework is to get in some cardio, and I suck at maintaining focus when I am by myself… the whole remedial leper thing is bugging me.”

“You didn’t have fitness yet?”

She nodded, “I did, but it was just time in a team sports class, like high school but with more plastic surgery. Miss Pringle, she’s the improvised defense instructor, Said that all of us who have NOT spent the last few years working out have to get in regular cardio… something about it affecting our power growth.”

I nodded, “It’s true. Being an alpha is like a force multiplier, but both your power strength and your body attunement depend entirely on your fitness, and that fitness can also help guide your power growth.”

“You know this?”

I nodded, “I lived this. Remember what team I was on? A lot of amateur cowls are in it specifically because heroing is too much damned work, and sooner or later being a walking burrito catches up with them… even the pro PR girls that ignore physical training wind up getting themselves accidentally caught, often by normies that are just in better shape.”

“Okay, here’s my room,” Mindy said, pressing her palm to the lockplate. “See you in fifteen minutes. Actually, I just realized I need to deal with my makeup before I get there, so I’ll meet you at the pool in twenty!” she added before slipping into her room.

The… pool?

***

Whew, I had sort of thought it might be a trap, but when I got there she was wearing a nice one-piece dark blue swimsuit instead of a bikini or something specifically designed to attract attention. She hadn’t been lying, though, with her makeup cleaned off she did actually sport rosy pale freckles. She might have been pulling my leg about the red hair, though, or else her bleach and dye job was pretty amazing.

She was a really good swimmer. I had some experience and had spent a summer learning some professional swimming techniques, and I also was fit, which helped, but she swam like she’d spent every summer at the beach. I had joined her in the lanes of the subterranean double Olympic pool, and while I had the endurance to keep swimming after she finally had to stop and pant for a while, her speed and grace through the water made me look like a clumsy amateur.

When she was resting, I flopped with my elbows supporting my weight behind me at the rail, and looked at her curiously, “Why?”

“Why what?” she panted. I was sort of panting also, but that was because I was trying the breathing technique again here, in a wet environment, in case water was one of my shapes. It was decent, at least better than the dojo deep underground, but it still didn’t hold a candle to the energy I was pulling from the kinetics of the natural air currents up on the roof.

“Were you serious about being a redhead? If so, why would you change it?”

She tilted her head back against the railing, staring up at the ceiling as she started scissoring her legs to hold her against the side of the pool. “Stephen. The same guy that told me to hire a stunt company. I am not actually cold, I am water, but ice is a hundred times more useful than steam, or at least it seems that way, and I can manipulate ice also.”

“So he told me that if I wanted to go the ice route, I needed the look, but neither water nor ice users looked right and popular with red hair. Fire and Earth could pull it off, and my force secondary was fine with anything, but the name, the hair, the costume, those were all designed to encourage the brand.”

“Did it?”

She nodded, “I got a scholarship here. If I had walked in off the street, it might not have worked.”

“So you are water control, and can run the temperature up and down, and yet still control it as ice? Can you control steam and water vapor?”

She nodded, “To some extent. I mean, my power levels are way low, but the powers trainer said localized weather alterations were not outside of possibility.”

“Jeez, you are definitely a class five. No, if you had walked in off the street this place would have snatched you up if you’d been bald and weighing three hundred pounds. And PR wise… well… I don’t know about this Stephen guy. I mean, I appreciate him sending you my way, but being a red-headed cold controller would attract attention, and full-on water elemental that looked like that would be PR gold.”

“How do you mean?”

“Think of the headlines, “Frosty shows off fiery temper as she drops the Gladiator!” Don’t get me wrong, the silver hair thing is definitely classic, but classic also means that it’s been done about a hundred times.”

She laughed, “I guess I can see what you mean. Every team wants an ice elemental but usually already has one. The powers teacher was pretty insistent that I not focus exclusively on cold too. I figure branding is probably still important, but maybe it’s better to focus outside of the mainstream.”

I nodded, “You are a class five, and gorgeous to boot. Water elementals are a lot LESS common than ice, especially if you can control it in changed states… which is probably why you were upgraded to class five. Branding is NOT important to a class five unless you want it to be, and then, your brand is what you make of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“if you decide you want a rose and green outfit, and you want to call yourself something that is not even that related to water like… Harmony, as a class five, will just be considered a clever affectation instead of an off-brand, and people would probably come up with their own associations, like calling you the stunning siren of seventh block. You could probably even dip your toes into a villain look if you want to and that would just make the fanboys pant harder.”

She looked at me curiously, turning over to rest her elbows on the bar and scissoring her legs again. “Allow me to pick your brain then. What would be an off-brand villain look that wouldn’t get me on the supervillain watch list?”

I thought about it, “Okay, how about Rusalka? That’s a murderous Russian water spirit known for drowning men who are attracted to her. Black and green costume, any hair color you want, and the press would eat it up. Even if they’d occasionally paint you as a little grimdark if they got the chance, that would just add to your attractive mystique. Hell, ignore the press entirely, and suddenly there’s this giant mystery that they’d eat like flies on a melted popsicle.”

“Good example, Miss Anthrope. She’s a class four illusionist who works for Redemption. She refuses to talk to the press, and her name literally tells everyone that she hates people, but if she left Redemption even the Flare would snatch her up in a heartbeat.”

I sighed, moving away from the wall and treading water as I tried to concentrate on both that and the breathing exercise at the same time. “Honestly,” I said between breaths, “despite how much agents push it, and the fact that I make money on it, visible publicity only matters to the little guys. It’s sort of a loser’s game because when you lose relevance, you lose support. At higher levels, it only matters to the agents because THEY make money on it.

She nodded, “That sort of makes sense, I guess… over rank four, support isn’t as hard to get?”

I shook my head, accidentally splashing her with water, which just made her chuckle. “Not really. Unless you have a really extravagant lifestyle, working for someone like the Monster Hunters gives you a fantastic support network if you are skilled enough to succeed at it. Bounties, especially, are a huge source of income.”

“I wonder why my agent didn’t suggest that?”

I grinned, “Simple enough… agents don’t get a share of bounties. They care a lot less about your money than they do their own. If they can build your brand, get you into a commercial or two, maybe a straight-to-video movie or possibly even porn as long as they could leverage it for publicity, they get their fifteen percent.”

“Porn? Seriously? And fifteen percent? I am paying Anthony twenty!”

I nodded, “You you think Glamour girl’s sex tape was really a leak or an accident? Heck no… she’s been on The Flare long enough to start losing relevance. She’s still hot, but she’s aging and her Playboy spread was almost fifteen years ago. But now, every teenage boy who’s hunting for superheroes is making a beeline straight to the unauthorized sites to see her bouncing on Johnny Reb’s lap. Especially after the whole Johnny Reb racist remarks thing on hidden access.”

“She’s never had a squeaky clean image, not after getting caught with Repli-Carl before she showed it all for Hugh Hefner, but now she’s back in the news again, not bad for a fifty-five-year-old sex symbol that looks like she’s thirty. I don’t like to give straight-up advice to people, especially about their careers, but would you accept some?”

Mindy nodded, lowering her goggles for another set of laps.

“Fire Anthony. Not for his advice… I mean, it wasn’t really terrible, just not really applicable, and he clearly had no idea you were a class five potential. Not even for the cookie-cutter image, although together they show the kind of talent management skills you’d expect in a grandpa, not a decent agent.”

“But as a known class four, he should have been able to wrangle you at least a decent scholarship for City College, maybe even here. More importantly, he is ripping you off. He knows damned well he’s ripping you off, and is doing it anyway. Hell, he probably expects to get fired the moment you actually meet someone who knows anything about agents. Their usual cut on an active-duty super is fifteen percent, and for a part-timer who they don’t invest much time into, ten or twelve percent is closer to fair. Anthony is flat-out robbing you.”

She sighed, “He already dropped me. I am going to be here for the next four years, probably, which means no profits unless I do some kind of side gig. He didn’t try to get me to do porn, but I bet he would have, since he DID try to get me to let him shop me out to heromates.”

“Heromates?”

She nodded, “Yeah, you know, the little video girls that sit in the corner of your screen and take off their clothes? I turned him down flat. No one gets to see me without clothes except someone ‘I’ choose.” She turned and started doing another lap down the pool.