“So what’s going on?” Mindy asked. “I checked on you, and you were completely lights-out. I was really worried, but the Doctor said you were suffering probably a minor concussion and energy exhaustion.”
I nodded, smiling as I grabbed a slice of pizza. It was cutting into my limited funds, but it was worth it to get food near the sub-floor dormitory lounge. “Yep, remember how I was trying to expand my energy? I think I succeeded. Not a whole lot, but enough to make a serious difference.”
My energy budget had more than doubled. Falling off a roof sucked, but I guess technically it was worth it. I’d also gotten a bit tougher, and breathing in energy had gotten a bit easier and a lot faster. Five hundred and fifty energy points, and it was a little easier to align molecular structures as well. I still couldn’t hold a candle to even most class twos, energy-wise, but with the right preparation, I’d made it my job to hold my own.
Also, once I got in a minor reset, which only cost me fifty points! I felt great. I wasn’t going to try it, but I kinda needed to test… and at that level, testing it was sort of amazing. The problem was, for a lot of the things I wanted to try out I did NOT want to be under the all-seeing eye of BSA, or even the tentative trust of Senpai Bob. They knew what powers I displayed when I was working the SSS angle, and what I had shown them, but there was a lot of stuff I needed to experiment with that I never wanted to see the light of day, like finding out if my dissolved form could travel faster, now.
“So what does that mean?”
“That means that I might be able to make a bigger impact. I still can’t recover my entire pool in a single day, but I am a lot closer to that now, and for that reason alone I owe you big.”
She shrugged, “If you can use it for healing, I doubt very much you will owe me anything. So you figured out how to expand your energy? How does that work? And how will it affect our teamwork?”
I thought about that for a moment, “Well, I might be able to improve your armor more easily, and as far as healing, I have no idea, I haven’t really had a chance to test it yet, but from what I can tell, it has improved slightly, so my range might also have improved, but I’m not willing to hurt anyone to test it.”
She looked at me thoughtfully, “The more I get to know you, the more I realize that you are both brilliant and blind.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed, “You come up with ideas and uses for your abilities that are amazing. You get these strokes of brilliance and dive right into them with almost no fear. And then you completely miss the most obvious stuff right in front of your face. I don’t get it.”
“What did I miss that was so obvious?”
She sighed deeply, “The clinic? It’s nearly the end of the semester. In a day or two, higher-year students are going to start frantically scrambling to improve their rankings. That means injuries and lots of chances to test your limits with healing.”
I nodded, “Oh,” since she had a very good point. Test my short-range healing AND my energy recuperation. In retrospect, I probably was a complete moron, since just knowing a small part of my abilities already clued in other people about ways to use them that I had never even thought about.
***
Okay, chock one up in the ‘Paranoia’ column. Like the other early entries, Abbey had remedial courses until the new semester started. She didn’t join Mindy and me in early-morning exercises, as was becoming the norm for us, but at breakfast, she met us and turned out to be really chatty.
She was tapping at her glasses, “So basically, when I read a knowledge base, it’s displayed on a reflective surface, and the inside of a pair of glasses is the best way for me to visualize the information.”
“Is it like technopathy?” I asked, curiously.
She shook her head, “It’s a unique ability. I can’t control computers, although I can read, decode, and alter a lot of the data stored on them. But it’s not really about computers. I can do it if I am standing in a library, or just about any place where data is stored in any form… written, computer code, art, even photographs.”
“That sounds a heck of a lot more powerful than class four,” Mindy remarked, before taking a big bite of a breakfast burrito.
Abbey smiled, “It would be, but it’s very specific. I can’t go fishing for information unless I know what I am looking for, and it only works on one data point at a time.”
“what does that mean?” I asked.
She looked thoughtful, “Okay, say that you umm… accidentally took a selfie of yourself in the bathroom mirror without your shirt on, and someone found the image and put it on the internet. You know how they say nothing disappears from the internet? Well, I can make it disappear. Even if it’s been renamed, changed formats, or been photo-manipulated, I could still disappear them all, even the hardcopies that people printed out would turn blank if they were close enough.”
“That’s incredible.”
She nodded, “Yeah, but if you wanted to say… change your driver’s license to say you were twenty-one, I could change the license, and all related databanks would say you were twenty-one, but that wouldn’t affect your school records, medical records, birth certificate, social security Identification, yearbooks, or anything like that. Each of those is a different data point. That’s why I wouldn’t do it… I mean, technically even people’s brains would change the information because it’s just data in the end, but changing everything to make you twenty-one would take forever and there would always be massive holes because I can’t think of everything.” She was chewing on the stem of her glasses again. Not a flirt, a bad habit.
“It’s class four because I can also fish out data if I know enough about what I am looking for. The BSA considers that very dangerous, even if it’s not something that can level buildings. Also, stuff has to be in a contiguous network. That means that the people who have read it have to have regular social or other connections with each other, or there has to be a data link or something.”
“So if like, some secret agents took analog snapshots of documents, and then destroyed the original documents, it’s no longer contiguous. I can’t find the documents unless I find some other way of tracing them than the original. That’s why I wouldn’t make a good spy… since wireless networking became impossible, most countries and even companies keep their secret information on disconnected networks or even isolated servers, or even as a paper file in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door that says ‘Beware of the leopard’. I have a short initial tracking range.”
I grinned. “Still completely kick-ass power, though, even if it’s mostly harmless.” At which Abbey giggled. “It’s an amazing support power. Do you have a tertiary?”
She nodded, “Yeah, but it’s kind of a useless tier-two power. I mean, I think technically it’s complementary because if I didn’t have it I wouldn’t be able to read or manipulate anything I traced. I can display what my primary power tells me on any reflective surface. I can also use it to make cosmetic changes, so I can alter stuff with my primary.”
“How does that work?”
She thought about it for a second, and then said, “I came into the cafeteria this morning wearing a green sweater.”
I looked at her sweater, which was most definitely orange. Kind of a Velma look.
“No, I watched you walk into the cafeteria wearing that sweater. I remember thinking that you looked like you stepped right out of the mystery machine.”
She smiled a little, “You are wearing an Aerosmith tee shirt under your hoodie.”
I nodded and unzipped the hoodie. “Yep. It was my grandpa’s.”
She chuckled, “This part is always hard. Okay, I was wearing a green sweater, but the moment I told you I was, I altered the data so that I was wearing this orange one. It changed cosmetically, but it also changed your short-term memory and your memories of your personal monologue to match. I mean, I don't have any direct control of your memory, only that data point. Just like your tee shirt when you walked in was a Rush tee shirt. I guess your grandpa gave you a Rush Tee?”
I thought about it for a second, and suddenly I realized, yes, it WAS supposed to be a Rush Tee! My grandpa hated Aerosmith and called Tyler an overhyped man-whore. He didn’t give it to me, it was part of my inheritance. But you are right.”
She nodded, “My power changes short-term memories, but long-term memories always develop… holes, eventually. And I apologize, I usually wouldn’t do that if I can help it.”
I shrugged, “Rush, Aerosmith. They are both a couple of really friggin’ old bands I couldn’t care less about. I don’t have any emotional attachment, since my grandpa died long before I was born, I just grabbed a bunch of stuff when I left home and this was one of the shirts.”
Mindy looked confused, “Wait, when you say a band tee shirt, you mean like… an original concert shirt?”
I nodded, “Yeah.”
She rolled her eyes, “You know those are worth like… thousands of dollars as collector's items?”
I shrugged, “I’ve been wearing it for years. It’s not exactly holy, but it’s not out-of-the-bag untouched either. It’s probably worth about twenty bucks, which is how much it would cost me to replace it with another tee shirt.”
Abbey looked confused, “But I thought you could repair stuff, right?”
“Right?”
“So why don’t you just repair it to mint condition, and then sell it?”
Mindy had her hand over her mouth and was sort of snorting, laughing I guess. Right. This is yet another case of coming up with brilliant ways of flexing my powers while utterly missing the most obvious potential uses.
“Because…” I thought about it for a few minutes, “Because I didn’t think about it?”
Mindy looked at me suspiciously, “She has a good point. I mean, you are kind of broke, right? I am sure your old job paid pretty well, but it couldn’t have been that great. Why didn’t you head to a junk shop or a dump and just start finding stuff, fixing it, and then reselling it online? Or you could have made a mint restoring artwork or even old VCR tapes and hard drives so that their data can be recovered. I bet that the BSA would pay you your weight in silver if you could crack a hard drive that’s been reformatted and zeroed out.”
“I don’t know if I could do that, the hard drive thing, but I might be able to fix an old VCR tape or cracked CD… my repair isn’t that awesome.”
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
I used a little of my newfound energy to quickly reset my brain. Yeah, it’s confusing, don’t try this at home, but I could actually see the fading spirit particles where my short-term memory had been changed, and suddenly remembered putting on my Rush tee-shirt this morning, and yes, she had been wearing a green sweater.
“Please don’t do that again,” I said. “That’s kind of invasive.”
“Oh!” she said, “Okay, I fixed it. I promise.”
I looked down at my hoodie and the tee shirt beneath was Rush again, and it had always been Rush. With another minor twitch, I remembered that it had been Aerosmith a few seconds ago.
“That’s matter manipulation. That’s sort of a big deal.”
She shook her head, “It’s not big enough scale to be a big deal, I guess, and I have so many restrictions. It has to stay within expectations, and it can’t affect other people physically… like I couldn’t turn you blonde. Something about other people, especially alphas, makes it not work. And staying within expectations means I couldn’t like… turn your tee shirt into solid gold, or even a more modern band’s shirt. It’s a sub-power of data manipulation, after all. That’s why I am training for support.”
“So here’s a question,” I said, “if that bathroom selfie picture was on a screen or a printout, and someone took a picture of that screen, would that picture disappear too?”
She shook her head, “I don’t think it would. It’s not contiguous. Just like if they put it on a hard drive and flew to Japan with it… the range is way too far.”
I suddenly felt a lot better. Matter manipulation and mental manipulation were both scary powers, even if, in her case, it was very limited.
***
“Anyone want to tell me why the ELC 1200 has such a short range?” Mister Dexter was looking directly at one of the girls in the front of the classroom where we were auditing remedial teamwork.
“Because of elves?” the dark-skinned brunette replied, looking a little confused.
He sighed, “Sort of. However, if you don’t come up with a better answer, you might be repeating this class. The ELC-1200 uses ELF frequencies to cut through the q-brane interference. The problem is, that it would be useless if the antenna was half a mile high. What is the other reason?” he glanced back at me, “How about we hear from one of the auditors?”
I sighed, “Because ELF in greater strengths is seriously toxic, like sticking your head in a microwave, except it’s at the other end of the spectrum.”
He nodded, “Exactly. That’s one of the reasons you also want to keep your communications to less than ten seconds unless you were one of the lucky alphas with resistance to radiation across a broad spectrum.”
He pointed at the screen, where an ELC-1200 pocket communicator was shown disassembled. “So remember. Twelve hundred feet, or around four hundred meters, is the absolute maximum that you can use to send data communications in combat unless you are lucky enough to have a communicator on your team. That is why we are trained in Morse code.”
“That’s why your combat team carries repeaters. If you don’t drop a repeater at least every thousand feet if you are going into active combat, you will lose connection with your backup, guaranteed.”
I sighed, that reminded me of the downside of being support-focused. I wanted to be the ‘chair guy’, but the chair had disappeared when quantum interference had gotten too strong for decent wireless communications.
Now, if you wanted to actively engage with your team, you had to be close. This was a major focus of some of the courses like combat logistics I would be taking next semester, but remedial teamwork was sort of like combat logistics for dummies. Of course, if your team specialized in criminal interception, you might have a decent detective crew that fed you patrol and interception coordinates but never came within a mile of a super-fight, but those guys were an entirely different team, and worked more like a police force… once they gave you your mission, you were done talking to them.
In my case, if I got the job I wanted, I’d be closer to the action than I liked. Maybe not up in a super-criminal’s face, but that could happen too. Maintaining and coordinating contact with my team was going to be every bit as much my job as making sure they eat, train, and have all the tools they need to do their job. If the team leader was the quarterback, I guess I was angling for assistant coach.
The teacher sighed. “Alright. Thursday we are going to be running our last exercises. Next Monday will be the final exam. Both of those contribute heavily to your total score for the course. Auditors, obviously you won’t be taking the exam, but if you choose to participate in the exercise, a good subjective score will be reported for your introductory teamwork course next semester, assuming you don’t wind up in remedial teamwork again.”
“Chinook, Blueprint, could you please wait a few moments after the break?”
I nodded, and the rest of the students started taking off. It was interesting the way that many of them, like me, were wearing somewhat shapeless ‘school uniforms’ that were basically form-fitting coveralls, except that most of them wore decorated masks. There were only three males in the class, and two of them were wearing brown coveralls instead of gray, which meant that they were either class one or two supports or didn’t have any powers, potential civilian contractors that still wanted to get involved in hero teamwork.
To be honest, most support teams were predominantly normies, even the ones that were close-in combat support. Much of our job didn’t involve using powers at all, and it was a little-known fact that for every professional hero, there were usually a dozen civilian supports, from mechanics to PR, detectives, and researchers to emergency workers and crowd control specialists. Many of them trained alongside their teams even if they were never going to get involved in the slug-fests of the primary combatants.
It was an even less well-known fact that more than a few vigilantes were pure human, with no powers at all, and yet they still managed to rack up scores against lower-class villain types. Equipment, training, experience, and intelligence often made more of a difference than a random power or two.
In the nineties, there was a street vigilante named the Hanging Judge, who specialized in taking out class two and three murderers in Kansas City, usually lethally. It wasn’t until after his death from cancer that his memoirs and legacy were discovered by his family. He wasn’t an alpha at all, a pure normie, who got his start taking out and robbing drug dealers. He used the proceeds to get decent equipment, and using his talents and intellect, as well as enhanced gear, he took out over 21 known alpha killers as well as a score of normie serial killers and lethal enforcers. Even though he was technically a criminal, he was a hero to a lot of vigilantes and even normie police officers on alpha response teams.
After I went down to the front of the classroom, Mister Dexter was sadly shaking his head at Chinook, the young lady who had answered the question about ELF transmitters. Good-looking body, of course, and her mask was decorated to look like a hawk or eagle, with feathers and a beak painted on the front instead of a holo-disguise like a lot of us used.
“I get that you want to go back to the nation, but even solos have to get a decent grounding in teamwork, especially if you ever get called on to help stop an invasion. If you don’t get at least a seventy on the written test, you are going to be repeating remedial, and despite being the right ethnicity and powerset to work as a solo, the nation’s not going to want to support you unless you pass at least introductory teamwork. You are good at working with a team on the exercises. All I can say is please stop worrying so much about your ranking and put in some study time before Monday.”
She sighed. “I am only rank twelve. If I refuse a rank challenge, I could drop a huge number of slots by year two. I am just not very good at memorizing all those little facts. I know that only fourth-year challenges really count, but if I can get to at least the top ten, next semester I get to start off with challenge restrictions and will have a lot more study time.”
“Sorry for eavesdropping, but challenge restrictions?”
She turned and looked at me, her eyes opened wide, and she stammered for a moment, her mouth dropping open a little under the edge of her mask, before she coughed, and nodded. “Ye..uhh...yes. Challenge restrictions. There are three restriction categories for the ranks. The top ten, which is category one, the runners, which are rank eleven through twenty-five, and the strivers, which is everyone below rank twenty-five for each competition.”
I smiled, “Oh, tell me more, please.”
She gulped a little. I had no idea why she was so nervous… did she know I was a class six? That was supposed to be restricted information. “Right, you can only challenge one category higher. So the strivers can challenge other strivers for rank or the runners. You can only gain one rank for each challenge, but a lot of the challengers have specialty abilities or can build a combat load-out specifically for defeating a particular person’s weaknesses, like widgeteers.”
“Even a rank sixty widgeteer could build a special weapon specifically designed to take advantage of a rank 11’s weaknesses, and if they win, they go up to rank fifty-nine and the rank eleven drops to rank twelve. There are also politics and cliques involved, and I am not particularly popular, So if the current rank thirteen knows she is not able to take my slot, she could ask a rank forty widgeteer to drop me a rank so she pops over me without a challenge.”
Mister Dexter shrugged, “Technically, doing that sort of thing is not discouraged, because it encourages teamwork… She could do the same thing.”
Chinook nodded, “Yeah, but I am not that popular. Phantom Pane has already had me spooked twice by a specialist breaker to keep me out of the top ten because she knows I can tromp her good because my powerset resists her echoes. If I can get into the top ten, though, only the top 25 can challenge me, and none of them can drop me easily.”
I scratched my head, “Huh. The rankings seem like a game of rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock, devil, scout.”
Mister Dexter nodded, “For the solos, it truly is. No one is going to challenge Flashworks for number one because she’s a class five light elemental, but that’s why,” he looked seriously at Chinook, “getting teamwork specced is so important. Even if you can’t stay in the solos, a good teamwork ranking is often looked at even more seriously than the solo ranks.”
“Devil scout?” asked Chinook.
I nodded, holding up devil horns and then a Boy Scout salute. “Yeah, even more stupidly complicated to prevent draws when larger groups are playing. There are even variants where you have to use both hands at the same time or toss dice. But that’s seriously deep nerd stuff. So widgeteers are almost always at the top?”
She shook her head, “Nope. Usually, they are close to the bottom, because most of them are fragile. Easy knockout, even if they are wearing armor because implied damage is judged.”
“Implied damage?”
She sighed, “Yeah. If I punched you in your face with eagle claw in a duel, and you aren’t innately tough, I could easily put a hole through your head. Widgeteers are usually fragile, so even in armor, I could hit hard enough to splash their brains around inside of their helmet.”
“So if I get in a hit that’s good enough that if I put actual pepper behind it I would win, it’s counted as my victory. I mean, people still get hurt a lot but rarely die. Usually, it’s the tougher alphas that get the worst, though, because if I tap a support in their throat, it’s obviously a death blow… but two bricks pounding it out might have to disable or knock each other unconscious. With big defenses and big attacks, it’s a lot harder for a duel master to make a point decision.”
Mr. Dexter nodded, “That’s why Flashworks is solid number one and Oahu is solidly number two. Flashworks can almost always force a point decision and is nearly invulnerable in her light form, and Oahu never gets a point decision because the more you hit him, the stronger and tougher he gets. Then again, Flashworks will be gone in two semesters. Once Flashworks is gone, you will probably shift to number eleven easily enough, and all you need is an ally that can counter a top ten or two.”
Chinook nodded, “Yeah, but if I get top ten, it becomes that much harder for someone to find a breaker to knock me out of it.”
He sighed, “My point still stands. These credits are very important. Please don’t make me see you again next semester.”
Chinook nodded, “I will do the best I can.”
Mister Dexter turned to me, “Now on to you. I know you are just an audit until the semester ends, but I want to ask you a big favor.”
“A favor?” I asked curiously, no idea what I could do to help a teacher.
He nodded slowly, taking off his glasses and starting to rub the lenses with a cleaning cloth from his pocket. “Yes. I want you to participate in the teamwork exercises on Friday as a support.”