I was surprised, and I noticed Chinook, as she was starting to head towards the door, seemed surprised, and she turned to watch the conversation.

“Why is that?”

He put his glasses back on and leaned against his wooden desk. “Teamwork training is mandatory credit for support lines, even for research and logistics.”

I nodded.

“The problem is, that remedial teamwork usually gets three types of students. Team-oriented rushes, like you and a few others, civilian prospects, and combatants that have… serious troubles with passing the basic teamwork classes, often due to handicaps or unwillingness to study and pass the basic teamwork courses that everyone is required to pass.”

“Civilians have it because they usually have a tough time during the combat exercises, not the schoolwork. Training to survive a logistic strike is very difficult, and a civilian has to be in top shape, both mentally and physically, to deal with it during an exercise. A baseline or a civilian alpha with no physical enhancements has an uphill battle, but taking remedial teamwork before passing basic teamwork gives them a decent enough scoring boost even if they still drop below the threshold in exercises. The school will consider them qualified for non-combat roles, especially if they can get through search and rescue training exercises.”

I nodded slowly, useful information. “But what does this have to do with me?”

He sighed, “We only have two full support alphas in the class. That means that our teamwork training has only been able to field two full support teams of ten, which is larger by far than most field teams. With a third full support alpha, I could make three teams of seven, which is not an unreasonable team size. When we need smaller team training, I’ve had some of the more versatile combats taking on support roles, but they need to train as full combatants in smaller teams as well.”

I sighed and shook my head. “I really can’t do it, not yet. Not that I wouldn’t be interested, but I still have no training, and I can’t afford the power expenditure.”

He sighed and nodded, “I understand.”

“However. That being said, It’s during off time. I have a few abilities that might help in an emergency. I would be happy to keep an eye on things just in case someone gets hurt or an attack strays.”

“You can stop a stray attack?”

I nodded, “My healing is close-range only, but I have a bit more leeway with my ability to soak up kinetics.”

He nodded, “I meant to ask about that. Your power is odd. Powers usually come in clearly distinguished groups. How can stopping attacks, merging things together, and healing all be part of the same power?”

I thought about it, how much should I explain? “Well, it’s all about motion. There’s a reason I call myself Blueprint. Normally, my power only works on the tiniest scale and burns a ton of energy to do something new. But I have an eidetic memory for micro-mechanical details.”

“What do you mean?”

I chuckled, “How stuff is put together on a small scale. For instance, most humans are put together in the same way. If someone gets a cut, I already have a good idea of how their skin and muscle cells are supposed to work, and if it’s within a few inches, I can move the cellular structure back into its proper alignment and help replace the damage with copied cells.”

“A few inches?”

I nodded, “Yeah, that’s why I don’t call myself a proper healer. I can do surface stuff, but if your upper leg has a compound fracture, that’s probably too deep a wound. I also had to educate myself on exactly how humans are put together.”

He looked thoughtful, “If someone had skin cancer, could you fix it?”

I shrugged “Beats me, I haven’t tried. Maybe, maybe not… I mean, cancer isn’t technically damage, it’s something caused by your own body, so I don’t know if I would help it or just make it worse as I replicated the mutated cells. I mean, maybe someday I might be able to, but I will need a hell of a lot of training first, and it’s a lot easier to work with inorganic substances.”

He nodded slowly, “You really need power assessment and training.”

I got a little nervous, that wasn’t the direction I intended the conversation to go. I did not want the BSA to know everything I could do, even if they could help me grow more powerful. I didn’t trust them that far, and getting my powers picked apart by a professional team would make it very difficult to conceal certain things.

“Is that mandatory?” I wondered if I was going to have to ditch this school so soon after getting accepted.

He shook his head, “Not mandatory, but strongly encouraged. While every alpha ability is different, there are broad similarities that can certainly help in training. Most elementals can project or solidify their element, use it as a defensive field, and many of them can use it as a movement ability, for example, so we have a decent database on how to train elementals.”

“Unique powers like yours, though… well, we have a decent power database. If we can find out your abilities, we can try and match them to other, similar powers we have on record, and that might offer ideas, training methods, and power expansions that you might not otherwise consider.”

“A database that might be cracked by any cyberkinetic with a grudge, that lists all of your exact abilities and possibly weaknesses?”

He sighed, “Nothing is guaranteed, and I understand your concern, but after a few years, most of that gets out as public knowledge anyway. There are five major wikis that I know of which are rundowns of each hero and villain’s powers. We have some of the best security around, but nothing is perfect, and civilian witnesses alone add to the databases.”

“On the plus side, though, it looks like you are clearly support. It’s unlikely you are going to build up a rogue’s gallery or a nemesis personally, and knowing a weakness is the best way of preparing to have it exploited, right?”

I chuckled, “You sound like you have dealt with that exact thing.”

He nodded, “I wasn’t always a teacher. I spent almost ten years as an alpha interceptor, and five years as a guard at the pen.”

I nodded and noticed that Chinook had left while we were talking. I wondered if the conversation had disturbed her. “I will consider it, and I figure I have four years to decide, right?”

He chuckled, “No, you have about two weeks. This is the Kellar Academy, not Empire City College. Power training is a regular part of all programs, and knowing which power training program you need to go into might help. You wouldn’t want to get shuffled into mass projection training or something that requires academic re-shuffling, you know?”

I grinned, “I promise, any power training I wind up in will probably help me in one way or another. Like you said, my ability is unique… Who knows? Maybe learning to create a miniature fog bank might be as important as figuring out how to restart someone’s heart someday.”

He chuckled, “Your choice. I will look forward to seeing you on Thursday.”

***

One of the advantages the academy had was a series of large, underground training rooms that were extremely durable, and were designed for personal training, sparring, and experimenting with potentially dangerous abilities without worrying too much about collateral damage or potential bystanders. They were generally monitored for safety, but the monitoring could be turned off manually from inside the room as easily as the lights.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

I was experimenting with my new abilities post-whatever, the new energy flow patterns, and while I wouldn’t say I was amazed, I was certainly pleased.

Direct momentum manipulation had increased to almost seven inches, and after careful study, I had decided that ‘momentum’ was the best description of my power shape or dao. The dao of momentum also just sounded cool as hell, and fit all the clues.

My blueprinting was sort of like photographic memory, where I could take a snapshot of all of the current locations and movements of an object, including myself, for later reconstruction, and I was able to trace or replicate a blueprint out to nearly ten feet now. I still couldn’t replicate a car, for example, but it was a hell of a lot better than only being able to handle a couple of feet at a time. The fact that my blueprint ability completely curb-stomped Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was just more proof that it was magic.

My energy expenditures were also a hell of a lot better. Disassembly teleportation was considerably faster, although some of the old transport limitations based on density still applied, but while disassembled I could move at nearly fifty miles an hour instead of the fast sprint I was limited to before. Right now, I could disassemble and then reassemble at least six times before I was nearly completely drained of energy from a full tank, which was sweet. Still not a great combat maneuver, since, while I could break my body down quickly, it still took at least a minute of solid concentration to restore my full blueprint.

By the same token, if I had to do a full restore, it would probably be a lot cheaper too, although I wasn’t ready to almost kill myself to test it. More importantly, if someone I had already blueprinted needed a full restore, I could do it all at once as long as they were close to normal sized rather than slowly resetting a section at a time that I had to do with a shorter range.

If I had to use a cultivation mythology term for what the ‘sense’ I used for blueprinting was called, I’d probably call it spirit sense or divine sense. It wasn’t like I had a third eye or anything, I just could take a snapshot of the way all of their body’s particles were moving and their positions. I imagined that if I ever had to do a full reset on someone, they’d probably lose just about everything, including memories, since I took their last blueprint, but again, that wasn’t something I had a safe way of testing, and I sort of blueprinted people instinctively when they were within my range. All I had to do was pay attention to them for a moment and their new specifics became part of my memory.

Right now, the more interesting part of using that power sense, was that I was starting to get a feel for the way their spirit particle shapes looked, and even the way they moved inside of the bodies of other people with powers. I couldn’t manipulate them directly, I think something about their soul prevented me from doing so, but it was a ton of conjecture.

My Wu breathing was working much better as well. Much faster. It would still take me most of a day to completely refill if I was in an area where there was a lot of the kind of spirit particles I needed, but now that I could tell the other spirit shapes, I was able to sort of block them out from my breathing, which helped enormously.

Other Alpha’s flows were weird, though. Some of them seemed to instinctively rotate their energy, just like I had learned to do consciously, and the energy seemed to reach out through their bodies. Brick-type alphas especially seemed to just naturally run their energy through their body as it slowly moved, and I had to wonder if that was why they had such extreme durability. I still had a lot of blockages preventing me from running energy through my body the same way, but I had plans to attack each of those in turn, starting with all of the little blocks in my main torso.

Most alphas just had a sort of wellspring in their core, one which I seemed to lack. I couldn’t see the connection between them and the q-rift, but pure, unformed spirit energy just seemed to flow into their core constantly, like Jeb’s black gold. The faster their spirit rotated, the more rapidly the energy mutated into whatever shape they needed most, and when I got close enough, I was starting to fill out a mental database of what those powers could be.

Mindy’s energy, for example, was water-shaped. I wasn’t sure that it was water as much as river, however, since it seemed that it was closer to my preferred shape than it was to Aquilla’s. Water plus motion equals river, or maybe flow. Aquilla, one of the alphas in our remedial class, was water as well, but her abilities involved being able to breathe indefinitely underwater, move through it at high speeds, and push it around for attacks and defenses rather than creating it. Ice summoners seemed to be an almost completely different kettle of fish… each alpha I met seemed to be an entirely new set of data on how energy shaping worked.

I still couldn’t summon, of course. That involved, from what I sensed, pulling a huge amount of spirit energy from wherever alphas got it, and then just forcing it all to take on the shape of whatever they were creating out of nothing. It seemed to work well for them, but without that wellspring, I was still limited to my own efforts. If I tried to, I could probably force some of my energy to take the shape of another kind of energy, and thus technically create molecules from my own energy, but I was technically robbing it from my own body’s resources and power rather than summoning it from somewhere else. It was expensive and probably just a huge waste of time, but I was glad I knew how to do it.

And I discovered my new favorite material.

Carbon. Oh, carbon. I wanted to write a sonnet on carbon. It was incredible stuff. Forget diamonds, diamonds were seriously overrated. But carbon was what made iron into steel, and as per suggestions, I tried making fullerenes and nanotubes.

To Cohen a phrase, Oi, Vey! Building the first nanotube was a bit of a nightmare, but honestly, once I had figured out how to construct both single and double-walled tubes, it got a lot easier. The trick was the valence electrons, which almost lent themselves to carbon co-links better than any other material I had ever tried to work with.

Fullerenes were awesome, but compared to the strength, utility, and sheer versatility, multi-walled graphene nanotubes were just sheer awesomesauce. Stronger than diamond, potentially flexible in ‘giant’ sheets, which I was quickly blueprinting when twisted one way, it was incredibly conductive, but when twisted the other, it was a near complete insulator. Its thermal characteristics were also extremely mutable.

The biggest problem with nanotubes has always been creating them to a long enough length, especially for multi-walled nanotubes, but I didn’t have that problem. Normally they were measured in nanometers, but I could measure them in millimeters before their complexity grew out of hand. Just for S and G, I even managed to create a simple transistor contained within the structure of a C-70 fullerene, or soccer ball type.

Organic molecules are made with carbon, that’s pretty much what organic means, that they contain carbon. Obviously, something like silk contains helium, nitrogen, and oxygen as well, but even with the scraps I brought with me…

A few hours later, I was gleefully blueprinting the stuff I had made, when the door alarm chirped, letting me know someone was outside and trying to get my attention.

“Is he cackling?” Abigail asked as I happily waved around the two plastic baggies, one that had a series of fine translucent hairlike threads, and the other containing what looked like a few grains of sand and a small black disk the size of a pinhead.

“I think so,” Mindy replied. “Can you grab some of those hard-boiled eggs and a bottle of water? He missed all of his classes yesterday and I don’t think he’s slept since Monday night.”

“Wait what? What day is it?”

Mindy looked at me closely, concern written on her features. “It’s Thursday morning. What were you doing?”

I giggled again before I could stop myself, and then I realized I was incredibly tired. I missed two days of sleep! If I wanted to be ready to keep an eye on the teamwork exercise tonight, I’d HAVE to grab some sleep and miss today’s classes. Then again, the joy of auditing remedial courses was that missing a couple of days was meaningless.

“These!” I said, holding up the bags triumphantly. I was no genius, and my gifts had done all of the heavy lifting, but I was still stupidly proud.

“I found him the training rooms. I don’t think he ate or drank or used the bathroom for almost two days. You stink, buster.” Mindy remarked, glaring at me, “As your sponsor I am officially complaining.”

“Does that mean no sex and I sleep on the couch?” I asked drunkenly, not even realizing what I said until I realized that she was a very interesting shade of red. “Oooh, pink!” I added, thoughtfully pointing out her blush.

“You can sleep in your bed AFTER you have a shower!” she remarked angrily, and I guess it was fortunate that I’d already been to the bathroom once. Bowel control for the win, or I’d probably stink a lot worse.

“What has you so excited?” Abbey asked.

I put the bags on the table, quickly swallowing two eggs and drinking the entire water bottle. “Those!” I remarked triumphantly, “Mindy is a supergenius, and so are you. I want to have your babies!” and then I laughed as both of them started turning pink, before turning around and stomping to the shower. I barely managed to stay standing long enough to soak myself, my clothes, and the floor, before stripping and getting a little more heat as I sat on the floor of the shower with the drains.

After a few minutes, I managed to stumble back to my feet, turn off the shower, and drip my way back to my room, completely ignoring the fact that a bunch of other students were getting ready for breakfast and early classes except for the weird noises they were making.

Oh right. I forgot clothes. By the time I realized that I was naked, I had already flopped wetly into my bed, barely pulling the covers over me before I was zonked. I don’t think I even remembered to close the door.