Elizabeth gathered us up and we left the training arena, We then joined Holly and the others.

It was a quiet but quick walk back to our base. The long convoluted journeys that we had previously endured were now a thing of the past. We reached the complex of barracks long before the other teams that were still forced to wind back and forward across the alleyways.

Elizabeth told my group to move downstairs and that there was now a living space set aside for our team.

We found a shared living space with three sleeping spaces. In each of the bedrooms, there was an additional Somehow it was clear that Lara and I were expected to share one space. And for some reason which I did not understand, Ester was bunking in with us as well. Each sleeping space also had a private washroom and toileting facilities.

With Fanny demonstrating how she felt about Robert, although he still had a serious case of hero-worship, they ended up sharing a room. Fanny would not take no for an answer.

This left Boris and Adam to take the last room.

We all settled in our new rooms. I was distracted as I could somehow feel the other groups being formed with Shamhila and Dakota.

Lara tested the bed by bouncing on it. And exclaimed to Ester, “This won’t do, you need to get better beds. I suppose that we should get one for you” looking at me.

“Unless you are planning to replace all the beds in this entire hall, You can just forget about that idea. “ I replied.

“We are not going to have differences in how people are treated. Somehow I have a strange feeling that your aunt is not going to agree either.”

Lara’s face closed down, but there was this complex web of emotion that I was able to read in the complex web of energy that sat in my mind's vision that represented Lara to me. A combination of awe, respect, and love thread though with a violet line of terror. This thread had a sense of being very new.

Lara snapped “stop reading me it is very rude. You force a connection and don’t even have the understanding just how personal that a connection like you have made is.”

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I had little knots of emotion for each of the team members over and above what my Hud was telling me. But Lara was a complex web of knots and tangles all bound into a beach ball in comparison. Yet rotating around that ball was a tight golf ball, that was compressed, hard and tough. This was still many times larger than the other knots. It was clear that Ester was more than just another member of the Sphinx sept. She and Lara had some type of important relationship.

I kept catching myself daydreaming, my concentration was all over the place, I become fascinated by the flickering of the time candle, then a noise would surprise me and all I could do was try and identify what had caused it, only to jump to the sounds of my blood pulsing in my veins.

Minute by minute my attention switches from nonsense to nonsense. During this time, I would feel a flash of knowledge bounce between my river system and Lara’s. Our systems were becoming interconnected. The delta of streams of power moved from a single layer to a three-dimensional layering. There were still aspects that lived deep in the ground and flowed high in the sky. But where there were common skills I found that the streams merged and flowed in between the layer that was Lara and the layer that was me. Those things that were purely Lara’s gave a hint of function but I was unable to feel any sense of a visualization from them. For the shared flows it seemed that sometimes my visualization was strong and at other times Laras was stronger and more complete. Mostly Lara’s visualizations expanded how I understood a skill, but oddly three stood out in that my visualization completely overwhelmed hers.

“Basic Improved Senses'' was a stream that we both shared and while Lara’s had much more power flowing through her system the vision was limited and did not result in many eddies downstream. While I had not empowered the downstream eddies my understanding of the physical world had resulted in many proto eddies that were just shadows but with her power flowing down through the stream, many were activated.

“Rare Possibility” this one I had expected not to be in the common set, but somewhere she had gained related skills. While I had the passive skill at a high level, there was a long stream that flowed in and then out of the skill eddy but the amount of power that it was able to draw was limited. Some skills from Lara had formed eddies in the new flow, but it was clear that while there was a skill available there was insufficient power now flowing in the stream to power either of Lara’s skills or my rare skill. Both of us lost skills to a lack of power; these were just the most obvious.

Both of us had the “Fast movement” movement skill to an uncommon level, yet in my vision, aspects of blink, teleport, shift, blur all tied up with the visualization. Some of which were part of other streams in Lara’s delta, But they seemed to be migrating about the new web of flows that were forming. And were now tied to the root movement skill chain.

Both of us slowly but surely became encapsulated in a fog of confusion. With our skills in constant flux. Neither of us was able to focus for much more than 10 minutes at a time. That evening Ester was able to get us stripped, wash, and put into our be