“I can’t believe you tried to fight attendant Don,” Peter laughed. “Isn’t he like the biggest guy here.”

Zed said nothing. He kept his lips in a thin line and continued walking. He was in one of the hallways of the institute with three other boys from his class. He was silent as they talked around him and made fun of his situation.

Peter was the oldest of them at seventeen years and was going to be eighteen in three months, which meant he’d be leaving them for his advanced classes soon, whatever those were. He had hair the color of sand, as if he spent most of his time at the beach, and his eyes were brown as mud if mud was somehow pretty to look at. He also had what instructor Jayden called mischievous lips, on account of the fact that they always quirked up like he knew something no one knew.

Despite being the oldest of them, he was not the tallest. That position went to Nurifa who was taller than most of their instructors. He was African and spoke with a tight accent. He didn’t know which part of the continent he actually came from so nobody ever asked. At least not sincerely. Often times it made him the subject of a few jokes, but never anything too serious.

Nurifa walked beside Zed in their uniform navy blue jumpsuit with a white inner shirt that peeked out from the top where he’d failed to zip the suit all the way up. Like all of theirs, it was made of comfortable material with belt loops at the waist, which was odd since they didn’t use belts.

“I heard you were fighting so hard you’d’ve broken your arm if Miss Loretta hadn’t let go of you,” Peter continued, now laughing. “Then you went ahead to punch Miss Patricia in the arm. Just what were you thinking?”

Zed groaned, rubbing a hand down his face in embarrassment. He couldn’t believe he’d actually thought he had magic. He wasn’t even seventeen yet. Everyone knew mages awakened to their powers at eighteen.

“I hate mind magic,” he grumbled.

“Is it the hallucinations again?” Anthony asked from beside him, adjusting his always drooping round spectacles. While he and Zed where the youngest in the group, he had at least three inches on the boy.

Zed nodded.

“Well, I for one love it,” Peter interrupted, turning so that he walked backwards while facing them with both hands behind his head as they turned a corner into a busy hallway that brought them closer to their rooms. “Wasn’t instructor Tilda your mind mage? Doesn’t she have, like, level seven security clearance or something like that?”

“Yes,” Anthony answered, happy to talk about his favorite mage. “She’s strong enough to hold twenty children in one dream without assistance, and her research on the mind and its influence on what kinds of powers a person awakens is ground breaking.” He paused, giddy, as if allowing all he’d said sink in. “Do you know that she’s the strongest mind mage there is at category two Rukh rank? I still can’t believe I’m working with her.”

“First,” Nurifa corrected, raising a finger, “you’re not working with her, you’re just a child in an experiment she’s working on in a big military institution.” He raised another finger. “Second, she’s not the strongest mind mage, maybe just the strongest in California.”

“And third,” Zed said, “I still hate mind magic.”

“Well that’s just you,” Peter told him as a hurrying staff in a green jumpsuit just barely avoided him on his rush to wherever he was going. He scowled back at the boy as he past them and Peter gave him a friendly wave, smiling with all teeth.

“What did Doctor Shaquifa say about it this time?” Nurifa asked as they took another turn. This one was a short cut that cut through a section of the building. They weren’t sure what laid on the other side of both walls that enclosed it into an almost tight space but it was left mostly unused so no one cared. They’d been using it ever since Peter found it last week, and it cut down the trip to their room by at least five minutes. So they wouldn’t stop unless they were asked to.

Zed answered his friend with a shake of his head. “Nothing. Just that I should keep using the breathing technique she showed me anytime I was panicking.”

“Ha!” Peter laughed. “That lady’s a quack. Always has been. You remember the time when I was wetting the bed?”

Anthony’s face scrunched up in disgust. “Who can forget. Your mattress would smell for days then we’d all get punished for being dirty.”

Peter laughed harder this time then put his hands in his pockets. “Good times. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. I went to meet her and she said it was a psychological misinterpretation of me missing my parents that caused it.”

Nurifa raised a suspicious brow. “And it wasn’t?”

“Nope. Turns out alcohol before bed makes you wet yourself.”

Anthony’s brows furrowed in confusion. “But you were never drunk.”

“No, but I was always sneaking a few glasses of the good stuff the instructors think we don’t know they keep in the cafeteria before lights out.” He smiled impishly. “All I had to do was learn how not to drink too much before bed.”

Zed shook his head, trying to work the logic and failing. “I don’t believe you. They’d have smelled the alcohol on you.”

“And we didn’t,” Anthony confirmed.

Peter shrugged, unfazed. “That’s cause I’m that good.”

Nurifa sighed like a tired adult before turning the discussion back to Zed. “And the things you keep seeing?” he asked. “Does she still think they’re all in your head?”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“In fairness, they kinda are,” Anthony said timidly.

“She believes they’re psychosomatic.” Zed rubbed his arm where Sassan had shot The Berserker and they turned another corner into a hallway with blue metal walls and floor. This was where most of the twenty-seven children housed in the institute stayed. “She says the words I see are some kind of mental defense mechanism or something.”

Anthony touched his glasses again and Zed was beginning to think they might just be too big for the boy. “That means something that’s—”

Nurifa cut him off with a wave. “Thanks, but I know what psychosomatic means.”

Anthony looked down. “Oh.”

“What’s that?” Peter asked, puzzled. Anthony brightened and he waved the boy down. “Not the psychososomething. The mental defense mechanism.”

“Uhmm,” Zed mused, trying to find a way to explain. He snapped his finger as an answer came to him. “It’s like my brain understands that I’m dreaming but don’t know, and it uses them to make sure I stay on task.”

“Is that why it calls them Quests?” Anthony asked still crestfallen from a double rejection.

“I guess.”

“And how does she explain all the crazy when you wake up?” Peter asked. “No offense.”

Zed dismissed it with a casual wave. Every few days they went into the care of a mind mage and they altered their minds to give them specific world experience, dipping them into a dream state controlled by a dream mage. Sometimes they became a loving father or a genius engineer. Other times they were soldiers on a battlefield or amazing athletes. But each time they were mages in one way or the other; of one specialty or the other.

The simulations were meant to be harmless. They were designed to put a specific kind of pressure on their minds, to work them through certain scenarios and experiences; build a kind of muscle memory reaction that did not leave them traumatized.

It had been working even before Zed had joined the program, and the results so far had been positive according to the institute. But while he’d told his friends about the words, only Doctor Shaquifa knew he suffered immediate effects after being pulled out of the simulation. He felt the pain, the happiness, the fear, the grief. Sometimes he felt the power, other times—like today—he woke up still under the influence of the persona the mind mage had created and drafted his mind into.

Even now, as he walked with his friends he felt empty without The Berserker’s rune markings on his arm. He was also twitchy as if on a deadly mission within enemy territory. Luckily for him he’d done this enough times to pretend he wasn’t affected till all the residual effects wore off.

“Hello?” Peter snapped his finger in his face. “California R and D institute to Zed. What did she say about the strange behaviors?”

“Oh.” Zed started back to the present. “She said it was because my mind is strong and doesn’t come out of the dream as easily as others.”

“I guess Peter’s right.” Anthony adjusted his glasses. “She’s probably full of shit.”

Nurifa turned a quizzical brow on him. “Why’s that?”

“There’s no way Zed’s mind is too strong for instructor Tilda to remove it from a dream she built. I can believe it for the other instructors, but not her.” He turned to Zed. “You really should try a new doctor.”

“And where,” Zed began, already spotting the door to his room just ahead, “will I find a doctor better than the head psychologist in the institute, Anthony?”

The boy shrugged innocently. “Maybe try the neuroscience department?”

Peter shot the boy a dark look but said nothing.

They stopped walking when they got to his room and Zed fished a single key out of his jumpsuit pocket and slipped it into the key hole. The door was a dark green in a sea of blue metal walls that made a quiet click when he turned the key.

“Before you go looking for the head of neuroscience…” Anthony began with a great level of uncertainty.

Zed waited for the boy to continue, and when he didn’t, he turned to face the three boys. They were an odd contrast standing side by side. Peter with his sandy hair and brown eyes. Nurifa with his tall stocky frame and drooping shoulders, brown skin with black wooly hair and heavy set brow. Anthony with his short childish visage, always adjusting his glasses and complaining about his curly, brown hair.

He almost chuckled at the sight.

He was really no better, though. With auburn hair and hazel eyes, he did nothing to add any form of order to the group. Nurifa liked to say his eyes looked green when the light hit them from a different angle but he couldn’t bring himself to believe the boy. Even in the mirror they were always hazel, at best they became an exotic brown.

He was still noting the discrepancy in his friends when he noticed Peter nudging Anthony with his foot. It seemed like whatever Anthony wanted to say, it wasn’t his idea. It was more likely Peter’s or Nurifa’s, and they wanted Anthony to say it because it was hard for Zed to say no to the boy.

Considering Anthony’s reluctance, it would most likely get them in trouble, and that was enough to know Peter was the mastermind behind it.

“Come on,” he said. “Spit it out, I don’t have all afternoon. I need to get some shut eyes if I’m going to get anything done tonight.”

“Well,” Anthony fidgeted. “That’s the thing.” He looked from side to side as if about to pass a sensitive piece of information and his glasses slid down his nose again.

This time Zed pushed it back up for him before he could reach it. “I’m all ears, Tony.”

“Well, we plan on going out tonight…”

That was quite the troublesome way to start an invitation. Zed glanced at Peter and his friend made a point of ignoring him. Figures.

“…And we wanted you to come along,”

Zed leaned back against his room door and folded his arms across his chest. “And where are we going?”

“Cabavi,” Nurifa answered, his voice bland.

That earned Peter another glance. Again, the boy didn’t meet it.

Zed knew Cabavi. In fact, there wasn’t anyone in the institute that didn’t know the place. It was a place where guys from the institute went to get drinks and meet girls. A lot of questionable things boys their age should not be doing went down there.

Zed did his best to keep his curiosity from his face. “And what time are we going there?”

“Nine?” Anthony answered.

“Alright.” Zed nodded slowly. “I should be free by then. And if I am—”he raised a cautionary finger to halt Anthony’s smile“—if I am, and that’s a big if, then I’ll come along.”

“That’s great.” Peter slapped Anthony’s back. “We’ll see you at the west wall by nine.”

Zed chuckled softly, shaking his head and opening his room. “If I’m not there by nine, go without me.”

“We’ll wait till nine thirty,” Peter said as they left, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t get us caught.”

Zed watched them leave until Peter turned away from him before he entered the room and closed the door behind him.

He looked into his dark room and the small smile on his face fell.

----------------------------------------

New Quest: [A Dubious Escapade]

Your amazing friends have invited you to a less than reputable outing. Attend on your best behavior.

* Objective: Escape the Institute 0/1.

* Reward: Pocket memory (Large).

* Bonus Objective: Escape with your friends 0/3.

* Reward: Military knife.

----------------------------------------

“That’s new.”

He pinched himself to be certain and flinched at the pain, dashing his hopes that this was a dream. Not like I expected that to work.

He read it again and sighed.

“This is going to be a problem.”