“Okay, explain to me exactly what you are trying for again?”
I was looking at Doctor MacKillan. For some odd reason, when I decided to start monkeying with my class loadout, they had assigned her as my new course counselor. There were still two days until the new term started, but the Academy tended to be very flexible with course loads, due to the special needs of its powered students.
“I want to switch to a hunter track.”
She looked a little surprised. “I thought you had your heart set on going full support? According to Mindy, you already have dozens of offers of sponsorship from corporations, some of which have very hefty price tags attached.”
I nodded, “I did, but I had it driven home to me just how fragile the situation is. I have a few advantages that nearly no other alpha possesses, and I no longer feel… good about the idea of sending teammates into conflicts without risking the danger myself. I was being selfish, trying to straddle the fence between a peaceful family life and the hero track, and while I am still not convinced about the whole model of modern morality thing, I am willing to become a soldier on the line against destruction. My grandfather was a real soldier, I can do no less.”
I’d researched Adrian’s claims, and while the adventure movies, fiction, and surface stories for children claimed a million different contradictory reasons for the crash, he hadn’t been exactly lying. Human history was filled to the brim with violence, warfare, and horror, to the point where it looked like we thrived on it. If anything, the crash brought us together as a people more than anything else in history, even as it threatened to eat our world.
Did you know that in old New York in 1921, murders, and violent killings, both domestic and crime-related, exceeded the number of deaths from any other cause? And don’t even get me started on cities like Chicago and Detroit. Hell, modern Detroit is more or less a lawless haven for supervillains, and even it is better run and managed by a warlord with the uninspired name of Earth-Lord than the place was in 1918. The Great Lakes have a lot fewer and smaller kaiju than the coasts, but even the lawless folks pulled together to beat back destruction.
Even modern-day criminal organizations were far less violent than they used to be. Sure, we had illegal drugs, but we also had pebbles, buzzers, blitz, and white-out which were totally legal, non-addicting, and safe as long as you didn’t try to drive a back-hoe afterward. Most illegal drugs were illegal for very good health reasons, especially since even physical addiction was fairly easy for modern medicine to break.
But if a cartel made it a regular practice to leave a trail of bodies behind them, sooner or later someone like the Hanging Judge or Specter would decide to clean out the lot of them, and those guys were both terrifying and thorough. They were technically supervillains because they had no problems attacking baselines and tended to leave their own field of dead, but as suspected class fives, few were willing to tackle them when things had progressed to the point that one of them decided to make an example.
Sabrina had, in fact, gotten back to the school in a huge hurry. Apparently, the herbs and plants we had gathered had been enough, even without my contribution, for her to create some kind of salve that deadened her scent and essence signature, and she shocked the hell out of the wall guards when she simply rode in through the Jersey gates on an old bicycle.
And, of course, the moment I’d given her my own collection that the Maxwell collective had returned, she’d been off to the labs to work on her own power advancement. She hadn’t been out of the lab for days.
I sighed, “It’s like this. While my products are not exactly gadgeteer tech, they also cannot be mass-produced. Once I get some problems ironed out, I will probably get a day job designing custom costumes like Ochre, or maybe semi-power armor, custom jobs, and get to work on some bigger projects I have in mind, like possibly an inter-city wireless network.
She leaned forward on her desk, “Wait, what? How would that work?”
I smiled a little, “I don’t really understand programming logic, but I do know perfectly well how variable wavelengths and digital encoding work. It might have to work like an old-style telephone switchboard, but long-distance analog links, maybe even to other countries around the world, are perfectly possible without fragile hard links. Imagine if a class 6 kaiju shows its head, and monster hunter teams from Chicago, Empire City, and Sonic Beach all show up to give it an instant bad day? Zero casualties, even.”
“The transport guild would throw a fit.”
“So? It’s not like they won’t still be needed, they just won’t be carrying as many messages, and they might be carrying a lot more physical goods. I have seen some of those guys, they could really use the exercise.”
She laughed and started poking around on her keyboard, “You already have business management courses completed for your public ID. Unless you want to go for a master’s.”
I shook my head, “Not if I run a small side business. I got that figured out before I came to Kellar. I have zero desire to try and run a multinational. I also need free time and lab access, and as much as I hate it, I will need to pick up some serious stem courses. Definitely advanced programming logic, and probably advanced biogenetics.”
She nodded, tapping at the keyboard. “You said you have an eidetic memory?”
I nodded, “Something similar to eidetic memory. I can flash freeze. That’s sort of my whole superpower.”
She nodded, “In that case, what you need are training labs, not classes, and tutoring. Classes are there to help drive the information home, but I assume you can pick up nearly any book and memorize it in a couple of minutes?”
I shrugged, “Hours if I really want to understand it. But yeah, that’s why I was thinking logic classes if I can get them, or yeah, tutoring and labs if they would work out better.”
She nodded, “you’ve already taken Kaiju tactics, what did you think?”
I sighed, “Good for taking naps or studying. Nothing but rote memorization of data. If 102 is the same, I am skipping it. I’d rather take biogenetics to figure out how to take them down, most of them are animals, and teamwork is a much better course.”
“Power exploitation?”
I smiled, “A decent start, but I’d honestly get more out of something more hands-on. I am not a gadgeteer or a shapeshifter, and while I wasn’t truly mislabeled, I’d rather look into power exploitation and energy instead. It fits my power signature better.”
She nodded, “Good, I was going to make the same recommendation. Your sponsor suggested Doctor Kearns, and I can see why.”
“Doctor Kearns?”
She nodded, “Elemental energy production and motion. Firefly. Your sponsor said that some of your energy problems had been resolved and that you would get a lot more out of physical power training courses. I was going to suggest advanced telekinetics, but I assume that’s still a no-go?
I nodded, sighing. “Kinetic transfer, you know that flash freeze and restore thing? more like an energy brick than a telekinetic, but the elemental courses might be more helpful since a kinetic shield is a lot more like an elemental air product than telekinesis.”
She nodded, “you know that some of these classes are going to put you into contact with second and third years, right? Not uncommon, but you are getting a bit of a reputation, and reputation means rank challenges.”
I shrugged, “Do I have to answer them?”
She shook her head, “Not really… your chosen path, even on the hunter track, is weird enough that your rank placements will probably have almost no effect on your eventual graduation options. On the other hand, it’s a good way to settle bets and favors, and it’s amazing training in most cases. Please pardon the expression, but dick-waving contests are sort of an important part of public perception, even if the majority of our graduates don’t possess them.”
I nodded, “On that note, Is there someplace to post requests for tutors or professionals from other tracks? I am still fairly broke, but I get the feeling I am going to need to look for a flack, preferably a baseline, to play interference, plus, you know, lab tutors.”
She smiled a bit brighter, “As far as hiring an agent, that is super easy… I mean, the non-alphas who come to Kellar are usually here specifically to train in the side issues of dealing with alphas, and I can put in a call to one of the PR professors about that right away, he could find and send you some promising prospects, and working with you would actually offer school credits. Just give me a list of what you need. Specialist tutors are also offered credits or are even paid for by your grant as long as they aren’t on academic probation. I will get you hooked up. Would non-alpha tutors work?”
I nodded, “That would be great.”
She smiled and tapped at the keyboard, and then printed out a tentative schedule.
Power exploitation, energy lab, Doctor Richard Kearns.
Advanced Biogenetics for alpha manipulators, Doctor Emmanuel Juarez.
Intro to alternative martial arts, Master Kelly MacTavish.
Advanced artificial Intelligence and programming logic. Lab 603 (Instructor TBD)
Radiology and materials lab (advisor tbd)
Teamwork 102
“Two things… advanced biogenetics for alpha manipulators? That’s pretty on-the-nose, isn’t it?
She nodded, “It really is. Doctor Juarez offers that course specifically for the rare alpha manipulator that attends, we usually get one every couple of years, It’s technically a mandatory course, as is ABAM 102 and 103. Bio-manipulators capable of handling microorganisms, virii, and bacteria are extraordinarily dangerous, so 101 is basically a safety course. You know, “Don’t release a plague’ and such. I sometimes teach ABAM 102, since it’s usually micro-medicine, but Emmanuel handles 101 and 103 because it gets into pretty esoteric stuff.”
“And Intro to alternative martial arts?”
She laughed, “Your advisor, Bob, demanded that one. Alternative martial arts is a… sort of weird category covering a huge variety of mysticism, soul energy, mental resistance training, and some eastern concepts that he said might be very important to you.”
I nodded slowly, “No instructor for Teamwork 102?’
She smiled, “More like floating instructors. Remember, teamwork courses are mandatory for pretty much every alpha student, and half of our normies take them as part of their support framework. We also have guest instructors, although we don’t start getting crossover students until teamwork 105, year three.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Crossover students?”
She nodded, “Other Alpha academies, Supercop training facilities, and even emergency responder Alpha training programs send alpha and promising baseline students here for our higher-level teamwork training. Kellar is the best for a reason.”
I sat up, “So, it looks good, I guess. Will I have enough time for free study?”
She nodded, “courses and labs are about six hours a day, total. Considering your absolute lack of need for study hall due to your blueprinting, you might even want to pick up some of the extra-curricular stuff, and maybe get your social interaction going a bit. We have teams, both baseline, and alpha, for everything from political activism to air hockey, lots of clubs, and even sponsored clubs by people like the transporter’s guild, tinker’s alliance, new Crusaders, and the enchanted forge.”
I chortled, “An Air Hockey team? Seriously?”
She laughed, “Not that kind of air hockey. Think soccer meets volleyball, with a hint of Quidditch thrown in. It’s a brutal sport, but it’s very popular and a bunch of hunter and hero paths use it for training. It’s even pretty popular among the sports fan crowd since most matches are televised. I am sort of surprised you’ve never heard of it.”
I shook my head, “Never really was a sports fan outside of extreme wrestling, weightlifting, and the winter games.”
She smiled, “Shall we wrap up then?”
I nodded, “Thanks, how do I look up the clubs and stuff? I am still kind of broke, but I might have time to look into an employment placement program.”
She laughed, and then looked at me cautiously, “Wait, what? Seriously? I thought you were joking. Like a princess baby whining about being too broke to afford a twenty-thousand dollar pair of Jimmy Choos. Have you talked to your sponsor?”
“Huh?”
She sighed and slumped at her desk. “you’ve been letting her screen your contracts, right?”
I shook my head, “No, I figured that’s why I needed to find an agent.”
“Sweety, Have you even asked her for your school account?”
“My what?”
“Your school account. Your… allowance, for personal expenses from your scholarship. Like what you use to buy shoes and ramen noodles and stuff in emergencies? Where do your active rewards from school activities go?
She tapped her screen a few times. “This.” and swiveled the screen around so I could see. three thousand dollars with my name on the account? I quickly memorized the account number.
“Where did that come from?”
“Do you honestly think a full-ride scholarship, especially with certain extra-budgetary bonuses from specialty corporations, doesn’t expect you to have your own needs, like clothes, non-cafeteria food, transportation, and even sanitary stuff and books?”
I shook my head, “No, I thought it was just tuition.”
She shook her head, “Go talk to your sponsor. She probably doesn’t know about hers either… the packet they give a sponsor is a gigantic folder full of paperwork. Stuff like marketing bonuses, team fundraiser income, and dividends that hit the school instead of directly to you go into that account too. She has your pins and card numbers, but based on the fact that neither of your accounts has been touched, I bet she just lost them in the paperwork.”
“Tomorrow is the last free day before the new semester, and there will be a club fair in the arena tomorrow if you are interested.”
***
I had a few bucks left from my ‘career’ but I’d been saving them frantically until I could get a side income. It was nice, once I’d actually found out that Mindy had, in fact, had no idea that we were getting an income, and I was now the proud possessor of a Kellar student account with three thousand, three hundred, and one dollars in it. Right now, though, Mindy and I were headed for the Arena, to check out the club fair.
“I can’t wait to see if there’s an art club. I like to think I am pretty good at ice sculpture, but all the techniques I know are kind of traditional… I bet there are actual frost alphas that might know power techniques for advanced sculpture!”
“So artsy.” I grinned. “I want to know what the enchanted anvil, the crusade, and the tinker’s guild are… also, weirdly enough, air hockey looks like a fun way to get in some extra physical training.”
She looked at me in surprise, “Air hockey? Really? Oh my god, if you like it you should totally go for it, a lot of hunters are also pro air hockey players, but the college scene is where it’s really at!”
“Wait, there’s a pro league? And a college scene?”
She nodded, “There are eight academies nationwide, and some foreign academies. Kyoto, Drago, North Germany, Eyre, Saskatchewan, Paris, and the Godlings from Zealand.”
“Wait, aren’t Eyre, Drago, and Godling magic specialists?”
She nodded, “Drago and Eyre are, Godling is a mixed academy. But Air Hockey has specific rules and limitations that help each academy compete. I still can’t believe you never heard of it!”
I scratched my head and just grumbled something about the story writer never thinking about it as I followed her. “You really think it’s worth trying out for?”
She nodded, “There are a lot of rules and qualifiers, but with your air shield you could be a decent goalkeeper, you are tough enough to be a guard, fast enough to be a forward, have some vertical, and you could even keep outriggers busy. Plus, you get bonuses for wins on your team to your group obstacle rankings and you get good PR exposure.”
“As far as the crusade, they are a specifically Christian monster-hunting crew, sort of like the monster hunters, but a little more cautious, generally better-trained and equipped, but far fewer. Unlike the monster hunters, they take the religious aspects very, very seriously. If you git in, you fit in, but if you don’t, it’s probably not worth trying. Some of them even take vows of chastity, silence, celibacy, and poverty, but no one fails to take them seriously. They don’t get involved in crimefighting, though, at least not the political side, although they have been known to take out homicidal nutjobs, and they always end threats permanently.”
“The Tinker’s guild basically sells temporary or one-shot specialty gear, spells, and stuff. Kind of a junk shop for superhero secret agent stuff. Some of your gear might be a good fit. The enchanted anvil, also known as the armory, though, is all about crafting permanent gear. If you decide to start custom-making armor for people, or weapons, you’d probably seriously want to contact them about it, because buyers tend to work through them to get what they want.”
“Do they take a big cut?”
She shrugged, “Beats me, probably not much though, since it’s actually run by summoners and crafters themselves. The anvil tends to have lots more enchanted than tech items, though, but that might be because of the perceptions of the difference between enchantments and gadgets, though. I am not really sure how it all works.
I smiled and gave Mindy a kiss on the cheek, which almost made her squeak in surprise before she grinned at me, but I owed her for the ice cream party last week. “I will see you in a bit.”
The Tinker’s Guild pavilion was surrounded by all sorts of, well, toys. Nothing dangerous, but definitely eye-catching, especially the little dog-fighting drones and 3d illusions. The Enchanted Anvil, on the other hand, looked like a reinforced pavilion right out of an old Renaissance Fair, set up right on the asphalt lot, with the ringing of an anvil and smoke coming from someplace behind the curtain.
I just skirted past the Tinker’s Guild pavilion. Yeah, it was probably fun, but I had zero interest in trinkets. I walked to the anvil, instead, where there was a desk set in front with a guy that looked like Gimli’s twin brother sitting out front, wearing actual old-fashioned chain-mail and a barbute helmet.
I looked at him skeptically as he eyed me probably just as skeptically. After a moment, he snorted through his large nose and long beard, before turning back to his computer, where I heard the telltale beeps of a certain popular 3d side-scroller.
“Just a sec,” he said, and I heard the level-complete notification, and he took his hands off the keyboard and mouse before looking me up and down. “Something I can help you with?”
I shook my head, “Just, would you be offended if I asked if you are manning the desk specifically because you look like you belong behind an anvil smashing Threodmir or Mjolnir into shape?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. The name's Matt Lindbergh, Earth-Forger. Or to be more exact, heat-based semi-metal manipulator.”
“Oh, that’s really cool… Molecular motion, and you gain manipulation after it’s molten?”
He nodded, “Yeah. I took Earth-Forger because…” he brushed his hand down his front, “I look like a dwarf, and Glass-Man wasn’t particularly intimidating. I am not a hero though. I might look like a dwarf, but Gimli I am not. Class 3 elemental controller.”
I held out my hand, “Pleasure to meet you, Earth-Forger.”
He nodded and shook my hand, “Likewise. What can I do you for? You look like a hero-type, Are you looking for armor or a weapon or something?”
I shook my head slowly, “No, I am a crafter type myself. I was more interested in seeing what kind of memberships, benefits, and other stuff that the guild offers. I am shifting to the hunter track, but I was thinking of setting up a side gig, especially if it can get me working with other crafters who might be willing to share techniques, ideas, and tech.”
He nodded slowly, “Supertech, not tinker?”
I nodded, “Yeah, but it doesn’t slide so easily into the tech category. It almost straddles the line between tech and enchantment, to be honest, but since I don’t come from a sorcery tradition, it falls more on the geek side than the goth side.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, that’s one of the reasons the guild is here. We try to catch every semester fair, either for recruits or people needing new stuff, but most people who awaken as tech wind up as tinkers instead of crafters. In the end, that leaves us recruiting mostly from the sorcery schools, like the Drago. Do you have any display pieces?”
“Display pieces? Umm...not really. I have a communicator, but my team is off-duty right now. We left our armor and stuff in our meeting area.”
“Our armor? Did you make armor for your whole team? As a first-year?”
I nodded, “I still have some… problems with it, like the hyper-extension locks and secondary feedback, and I still need to find a decent programmer to handle all of the UI’s, hardware extensions, and apps, as well as the AI and targeting systems, but most of the armor, strengthening, myofibers, hard locks, defensive systems, kinetic absorbers, and power systems are ready to go… but without a pet nerd, I have the team using unpowered suits.”
“Wait, powered suits? Are you a power armor crafter? Like Iron Max?”
I shook my head, “Not yet. Like I said, I can’t get it working without better software than I can create. So right now my team’s running around in silica-carbon Proxovan upgrade with extruded compressed titanium nanoweave on the stress points. That, and I can’t do that flying thing… not one of my gifts, and I am not a rocket scientist...yet.”
“Yet?” He looked doubtfully at me.
I nodded and looked around. Noticing that no one was looking, I sparked a bit of carbon fuel between my fingers, so that a flash appeared, a bit like flash paper but more reddish. “Yet.”
He laughed, “What was that? It was a little too fast to see.”
“You have micro-detection?”
He nodded, “I can detect impurities, even if I can’t create them. I recognize a lot of them. I caught a hint of carbon, but the rest was a blur.”
I nodded, “Nothing but carbon and a hint of magnesium.”
“So… do you have samples? Prototypes? If you can do what you say you can, the guild would love to have you… I mean, two at one school, now all I have to do is track down the other guy, but he seems to avoid showing his face.”
“Two?”
He nodded, “Yep, heard rumors of a true crafter named ahh… Blueprint, or something? We managed to get a sample of his armor from a collector, apparently, he blew up a suit and some chunks of it got around. You haven’t seen him, have you? I heard he goes here.”
I sighed, “Guilty.”
“What?”
“That’s me. I lost a suit, but that was some pretty primitive crap, so I didn’t work as hard tracking down the pieces as I should have. I have upgraded my custom version of carbonosilicates a lot since then and added a lot more control nodes to it, but the basic suits are still like that, just with the hardened nanoweave. I just figured powered armor was ridiculous if it restricted your range of motion… individual strength points, like gloves and reinforcements? Sure… but most tinker power armor is utterly impossible.”
His grin was huge, and he opened up the tent behind him. “Would you please step into my parlor, sir? I have someone who would very much like to meet you.”
I looked at him skeptically, “No.”
“No?”
I nodded and started looking around. “I have been kidnapped twice so far. I am not going someplace private unless my sponsor comes with me. Can you wait a few minutes?”
He nodded, “No offense taken. That’s smart, and we can’t cut a deal with you without his approval while you are in training, anyway. Conflict of interest. I will be right here.” he smiled, and picked up a hand-phone.