Bob, or Senpai Bob, had been right. Tai Chi had been sort of an eye-opener. While a lot of the traditions about energy were… a little out there, the core philosophy about working on energy flows had been extremely useful, and as a form of meditation, it was vastly superior to the hard martial arts and straight-up exercises I’d been using before.

Which was why I was practicing my Tai Chi. It was only two weeks into the new semester. I still hadn’t gotten access to any radioactive materials, and I might not until at least the third year, my request for material from the regular vault had been enthusiastically approved by my new power exploitation(transformation) teacher, GrimFang!

No, I wasn’t trying to emphasize his name, his superhero Identity really was GrimFang! With the exclamation point. His form was perma-shifted, meaning that his powers had left a permanent stigmata on his body, which happened frequently for certain types of powers. Supposedly, down in Bolivia, there was a group of people that had Stigmata like Jaguars, that actually bred true. Because of the single-chromosome nature of the powers, it was awakened at birth, and they apparently had a much higher male alpha population as a result.

In the case of GrimFang! However, he jokingly referred to himself as ‘Florida Man’. His awakening had something to do with two cases of beer, a cute girl, and a U-Haul pickup truck bed filled with over a dozen overcrowded and angry alligators.

He was enormous, with over seven feet of corded muscle, covered with occasional green and yellow scales as well as a thick, powerful tail. His face was mostly human-like, with odd-looking reptilian eyes, but he had a hint of a muzzle, with two broad nostrils and sharper-than-average teeth.

On command, he could shift into an even larger form, where his full head became a sort of dinosaur-like, his legs thickened and his feet grew longer to support a digitigrade stance, and his scales grew thick enough to qualify as full-on class four armor. He called it his battle form, and he could also shift into a gigantic Alligator, which was also class four but allowed him incredible aquatic mobility.

Apparently, my teacher’s physical oddities didn’t affect his love life much, though, since I saw him with a number of extremely attractive alphas on a regular basis. And by a number, I mean having an ever-changing roster of two or three cute girls hanging off him when he wasn’t teaching was not unusual.

His teaching style was simple. Every person’s power was different, so he encouraged and gave advice and ideas on how to stretch powers into different forms. Transformative powers were not all about getting bigger and stronger or flying faster, making bigger fireballs… That was part of them, but it was about flexing your abilities in unusual ways.

His advice was interesting, but not terribly useful since he mostly focused on physical transformations, although I did have a transformative power, in the form of blueprints, and the idea of creating a ‘battle blueprint’, a short-term secondary reset that could enhance certain abilities at the expense of others, was exciting… although it would have to wait until my energy pool was much, much larger.

Unlike most alphas, my physical mass would have to remain the same. I couldn’t pull matter from the ether, or return it when I was done with it, and the idea of a battle form that would require me to eat for hours ahead of time and then ‘dispose’ of the remains when I reset back sounded disgusting, but I already knew that I had a shift ability in the form of my dash, and it helped to cement a few ideas I had for improving my energy levels.

I’d had a few social nibbles of my own. Both power exploitation and basic teamwork were ‘costume’ classes, and there was one woman in teamwork named Talisman, an exquisite dark-eyed number with hair that resembled Akyo’s, who made it very clear that she was interested in seeing me without my costume. Her ability was creating tiny statues that created temporary boosts in physical ability, and after the third time I politely begged off having any social contact, she let me know in no uncertain terms that she could create talismans that improved virility to superhuman levels.

Paranoia wins every time, though… I was interested, but I had a lot more important things to do than be added to someone’s harem. Besides, I was sort of starting to like Candace, we’d started working out together in the mornings, although I wasn’t going to ask her to go out or anything.

I’d even come clean to Mindy, and her reaction was surprising. “Operation Security” she had answered. “You didn’t know me, and considering what you were doing, I can’t blame you a bit.” Although, on some level, I still think she blamed me for her being the last to know.

So, with the materials for suits secured, I’d started to make a new set of suits for the rest of the team, including myself.

And I was doing Tai Chi in the tunnel.

Yes, I’d gotten a decontamination chamber. Basically, it was a portable full-steam setup, where the water was reclaimed and placed into hazardous storage until I could empty it.

It turned out that the vapor and pressure outlet that kept the tunnel itself decontaminated had gotten badly corroded over time and was somewhat damaged, and they’d installed a new lock at the head of the tunnel, but once I’d proved that I could handle the radiation and penetrative toxins from the old tailings that were farther down, I’d been allowed to install the decontamination chamber at the lock and use the tunnel for ‘power training’. Apparently, it wasn’t the strangest thing they’d ever dealt with, not by a longshot.

I couldn’t go all the way down the tunnel to the bottom safely, not yet. Hell, with the lock installed, I couldn’t even breathe safely because of the toxic fumes. There was simply too much radiation for me to absorb its momentum safely, and breathing toxic fumes wasn’t something I could draw power from… after a few minutes it would do enough damage to my lungs that I’d need a reset, which would waste the power I’d manage to absorb.

Solution? A helmet and light hazard suit. The helmet was my own design. By my own design, I meant I’d ripped off some publicly available designs, banged them together into a similar design like the one I’d made for Mindy, and added a set of miniature compressed air tanks. They were only rated for half an hour, but considering how easily I could filter and recompress the air inside of them while I was training, they could last as long as I needed.

I’d also been monkeying with the electronics. After much fumbling, I’d found a bios chip from an old smartphone from before the faafo, and I rebuilt it into another set of carbon microcircuits along with five other Superchips. It was hilarious that I was wearing enough computer power to run all of the city’s infrastructure including traffic control on my head, and using it to run software that was barely better than ‘Hello World!’.

Right now my HUD has an energy gauge, based on the original quantum displacement meter, a very basic graphics program, and text viewer with a downloaded power listing from one of the wiki sites, an oxygen gauge, and… clock. Okay, it wasn’t exactly something to be proud of, but getting everything right had tapped just about every bit of my programming knowledge.

Abigail was after me to take advantage of the power and storage of the systems by installing something called a Development AI. I knew just enough about programming to know that an AI was nothing of the sort, it was a comparison sort program that could assign weighted values to things to assemble other things.

The problem is, that the weighted AIs she was interested in were all created by Alphas, and I was paranoid enough that I didn’t want to stick a potential backdoor to an enemy into the place where I might have to control things like life support. 2001’s HAL would only be possible if someone actually programmed it to behave that way, but what a cyberkinetic Alpha could do if allowed to install their own version of a master control program was a little terrifying.

As I ran through the exercises, I interspersed them with some of the qigong I’d seen and learned online. Tai chi, at its core, was actually intended to be a real martial art. Not a great one, but decent for self-defense and weapon use, and helpful for energy flows. Quigong, on the other hand, was designed to be almost exclusively for energy flows… but between the two of them, I was putting together a pretty good method for working out my energy method. The proof was in the corner of my HUD, 723 energy.

Each time I took a pass, I tried to circulate that energy through the blockages. So far, I had limited success, but as my soul container stretched out the compression or whatever in the spirit energy increased, slowly. I felt like there was a chance I could finally blow them out, and each time my energy pool spun I accumulated more momentum.

Each rotation I tried to squirt energy towards the blockages, my body going through the modified forms of qigong allowing me to gather energy even without inhaling the poisonous air, but currently, the energy was still wispy and thin, it was like trying to move a stack of empty cardboard boxes with a house fan. The blockages wiggled a bit, but without some external effect, it just wasn’t enough… I was hoping that ‘condensing’ the energy would be more like a firehouse, or if I was even stronger, a pressure washer.

But it seemed like a catch-22 situation, at least currently. As I exercised, the power built, but it stretched out my soul chamber more, rather than just compressing it. I needed… something, other than a simple vortex, but it felt like the only way to increase the complexity of what I was using was to allow it to flow through the energy channels that were blocked.

That was probably the biggest problem I had with momentum as my spirit concept or dao… Things that resisted momentum, like the really solid sorts of energy, were hard kryptonite. I was actually pretty sure that some of the Daos literally rejected momentum, and I was slowly labeling the shapes as I puzzled out what they might be.

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So far, I tentatively labeled rigidity, steadfast, stolid, and unyielding as the worst offenders. It was strange naming them as concepts, but while they were similar, they were not all exactly the same spirit shape. Then again, some concepts were so similar to mine that I could easily convert them. Concepts like speed, motion, forthrightness, and even more elemental concepts like air and ambition seemed to slide right into my energy pool to be purified into something I could use.

The weirdest part was that I felt like there was a second pool of energy, somewhere deep beneath the one I used, with a type of energy that I wasn’t able to interpret. Every once in a while it seemed to spin out and reach into what I was doing, changing it somehow.

If I was right, that meant I actually had a second power, and my suspicion was that it was whatever let me make blueprints. It was very weak, and it seemed to follow an odd sort of path that implied that it had its own… dantians I guess? But it was very definitely a different energy route from my momentum-based powers, the ones most easily identified and manipulated.

My suspicion was that it was sort of in passive mode, and hadn’t been awakened like my momentum control. Again, that left me in a state of confusion, because I didn’t really have any idea how to awaken it beyond the very minor (although important to me) ability to memorize patterns, or if I should… I mean, what kind of a risk would it take to awaken whatever true power it might have? Was having two powers activated even a good thing?

Most importantly, why didn’t anyone know this stuff? I wasn’t an innovator… give me a good tutorial or a plan and I could perfect it easily, but this flailing around in the dark thing was infuriating.

I finally felt like I was finished, with my energy at 725, but to improve my compression significantly I’d probably have to go deeper, and I wasn’t confident in my ability to strip the energy from the radiation before it penetrated and started doing damage… although, if that what it took to start compressing, I’d probably do it eventually in hopes that I could build up enough compression for a change in density before I had to restore.

Unfortunately, the steam decontamination cleaned off toxins from the suit but didn’t help my own feelings of dirtiness. The suit was stifling, but necessary, and I was soaked in my own sweat and the nastiness of getting at least some of the toxins and secondary buildup out of my system. I mean, I could feel the obstructions peeling away, but it was taking forever.

Once my suit was clean, and I made sure I wasn’t lugging around any excess, unabsorbed radiation, I stripped the suit, steamed it again, and hung it up outside of the lock to air out and dry.

The suite was empty as I walked in, which was not really much of a surprise since it was close to midnight on a Friday. I had to hit the tunnel during extra-curricular time, and I’d had to turn down an invitation to go out to dinner with them, settling for a quickly gulped down cafeteria dinner before I went to meditate. They were probably still out or had already headed to bed, and I quickly headed to the showers.

When I came out wearing a towel over shorts, I noticed that Abigail was sitting at a table, eating a bowl of cereal. I started to move past her but she waved a spoon at me before quickly gulping her mouthful and saying, “Hey Jacob!”

I smiled a little, “Hey Abbey, what’s up?”

She coughed a little and pointed her spoon at the chair across from her. “I got ya a few things. You’ve worked so hard making sure we got our armor, and you are working hard in your classes and spending time training and working at the clinic, so I figured I would start trying to research some stuff for you.”

I nodded and cracked my knuckles. “Awesome. I’d say you didn’t have to, but I know how fast you can research stuff.”

She nodded and held up a data stick. “This. It’s only partially translated, but one of the teachers, the one that teaches energy control and eastern studies, Doctor Reynolds, told me you were looking for this, and gave me a few clues on what to look for.”

“Have you seen it?”

She nodded, “I kinda had to transfer it. It was from the Serenoid invasion in the 90s. Most of it was pictures, and whatever language they use is mostly pictographic so it’s almost impossible to translate, but Doctor Reynolds said you might be able to make use of it. He also said to blueprint it and destroy it, and not to look at it on a machine attached to the network. Honestly, to me, it’s gibberish, a bunch of pictures of weird aliens doing weird alien things.”

“Thank you!” I said, taking the memory stick. It was a simple USB 5 plug-in, maybe a couple of terabytes total, but I intended to run through it and blueprint it as soon as possible. Apparently, senpai Bob intended to come through, but probably couldn’t get permission to let me see the diagrams, and this was the best way to get around those restrictions.

Abigail smirked a little, and pulled off her glasses, “Does this mean you owe me?”

I nodded, “I sure hope so. Why, do you need a favor?”

She nodded, “Yes, I do. But I want to save up enough favors that when I decide to call them in, you are helpless to resist. Besides, You kind of already did me a favor. The armor is awesome and sexy, and the half-silver faceplate is perfect for my projection.”

I shrugged and ran with it. “The armor isn’t sexy, that’s all you. The half-silver thing was just kind of obvious when you described your power since glasses could get knocked off in a fight. But in the end, the armor is designed to adapt to almost any body type, you just happen to have a good one.”

Abbey was turning red, “Thank you umm…” She glanced at me and then stood up, heading to rinse out her bowl in the sink. “We have our first teamwork exercises tomorrow, so you should probably try to get some sleep.”

I nodded and got to my feet. “Thank you again,” I said, scratching my chest. “This is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Even if it doesn’t help, it’s at least a step in the right direction.”

She nodded quickly and headed into her room, leaving me to shake my head and head to my own room. Such a strange girl, but a lot safer to flirt with than either Mindy or Chinook… Mindy because she knew full well I was just teasing, and Chinook because the one time I complimented her personally instead of professionally, she immediately started hinting that she wouldn’t mind going out or even staying in. Like there was anywhere to go while we were on lockdown, which we would probably be until at least the end of year one.

Was I being intentionally naive and obtuse? You bet your ass. While I doubted very much that Mindy or Akyo had any real romantic interest, Candace had already made it clear that she would entertain the notion, and Abigail was definitely trying to play the shy hard-to-get game. It was fun occasionally flirting around, but I still didn’t want to get involved with an alpha, especially one like Abbey who could, quite literally, alter my memory if she chose.

***

“What is that?” Kali asked, rubbing her eyes. She clearly had been woken up out of a sound sleep as Princess Pixel called her attention. She was grumpy because a board meeting had gone late, but Pixel almost never called unless it was something profound.

“I was keeping an eye on your new boy toy. He’s using a disconnected system to peruse, get this, the old Serenoid files. He’s going through them like I go through a database, but he keeps making noises like it’s the best thing he’s ever read, and I double-checked, none of the girls are under his desk. He really is that boring.”

“Is he able to translate them?”

Pixel shook her head, “I don’t think so unless he has a linguistic gift we don’t know about, but that would make a grand total of seven nearly disconnected abilities. I’ve been doing database sweeps, and I still haven’t been able to find a common theme.”

“What do we have so far?”

She shrugged, “Temperature control, electric control, Tinker gift, physical enhancement, perfect recall, teleportation, and healing. All of them were technically class four or below, but remember that Graviton was very similar… a single ability, but a real talent for modification… Do you have any idea what could encompass all of those?”

Kali nodded, “Yes, molecular control.”

Pixel’s eyes widened, “Seriously? That’s like a god power. It’s still apparently weak, but we might need to step things up. Do we have someone in?”

Kali smiled a little, “Yes, but besides his armor and the healing thing, he’s not sharing much with his team. Did you find out much about that Crystal girl?”

Pixel nodded, “Yep. The Flare. They actually filed a marriage license, although from what I understand, she has a form of mesmerism as part of her light powerset. He tried to claim that he was controlled when she and his cousin took control of his company, but an independent verification service confirmed that giving her ten percent of his voting stock was his own stupidity.”

Kali nodded, that certainly explained a lot. “So, aside from his odd choice in bedtime entertainment…”

Pixel sighed, “The Maxwells have been agitating. I don’t have definitive proof, but the Academy’s been stonewalling them, and Adrian is acting like he’s going to start throwing his weight around. Interfering might put our surveillance at risk, but… well… if I need to mess with them, I need to start now or we will be playing catch-up.”

Kali shook her head, “Nope, keep in the clear, but keep an eye on things. Like I said, we already have our in, and she can help if Adrian tries something. It might also give us an opportunity to investigate his power in-depth. If needed we can interfere later, but that won’t be your problem, Pixel, just keep an eye on him.”

Princess Pixel smirked, “Right, no one will ever notice the great Kali showing up to stomp one of the Farmer Families. Planning to live up to your namesake? Or should I tell whoever you planted to try and get under his desk? From what I understand from the Academy’s traffic, a lot of girls would jump at the chance. Hell, I’d probably jump at the chance.”

Kali shrugged, “I doubt it will be necessary, but it’s been a while since I had a good fight. As far as getting under his desk, don’t offer that lightly. From what you have supplied, he is in desperate need of a decent coder, and it might come down to getting you closer to him. Keep me updated. I am going to get some sleep.”

Pixel snickered, “Right, gotcha. I have some security camera footage of when he decided to take a walk from the shower to his bedroom without bothering to get dressed. Do you want me to send it to you? I bet you’d be right under the desk with me. Do you want me to interrupt you if you are in a meeting?”

Kali sighed and nodded, “Only if he’s in legitimate danger or we need to intervene directly. I will be… negotiating with the Coopers for the next few days.”

***

Codex shook her head. Dammit, this op was most likely burned.