Archer Warrick March 11th,20XX

Destia supported my heavy body through the doorway and gently helped me get onto the bed. My clothes were sweaty and gross, but I’d already taken off my jacket a while ago and I couldn’t very well ask Destia to help me change out of the rest of them.

Even though she had mentioned that she had done it a lot during her stint at the hospital, I didn’t feel like I would mentally recover from it.

I wondered how she could still move, but it was probably because of her ability.

Once I thought about it a bit more, it made sense. Someone that could run faster than a car and still be able to move around with ease surely wouldn’t find the amount of energy we’d burned while dancing to be taxing.

My primary worry was about singing and dancing at the same time. I’d thought I was in pretty good shape before, but as of now I could hardly breathe, never mind sing.

We’d repeated the choreography about four times in a row so hopefully it would get better during the actual performance when we only had to do it once, but I had little hope.

The choreography was so insane that I couldn’t believe they had created it with intentions of ever performing it. One section they had elected me to do involved getting up onto Destia and the choreographer’s backs and flipping off it.

I’d successfully done it, but to do so while singing would be a task I wasn’t sure I could achieve.

Ahh, I was so tired.

The dancing itself hadn’t been that difficult, or well, it had been hellish, but I could keep up enough to pass. What had been much more annoying were the details.

My face hurt as the choreography required me to change my expression with more variety than I’d used for the past two-and-a-half years. Even worse was how I had to maintain these expressions while moving so hard.

Cherry and Tenzin seemed used to it and brushed through the back-to-back rehearsals with ease, but they struggled with getting used to the new positions. Since there was no way Destia and I would ever go front and center, and even our singing would stay under the track records.

Honestly, I wondered if I even needed to sing. It wasn’t like I looked anything like the person I was substituting for, and my voice sounded nothing like hers as well. As far as I’d heard, they weren’t planning on recording Destia and I and mixing it with the original track, so it would probably be better if we didn’t sing at all.

I decided to bring it up to Joyce but simultaneously decided to do it when Eva wasn’t around.

She was only eight, but she held such a repulsion to lip-syncing artists, and she somehow liked my singing a lot. While I was flattered by her high regard, I wasn’t as confident as to think everyone else would share my baby sister’s opinion of my voice.

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I was sure she would be against my suggestion to lip-sync or to simply not sing and focus on dancing, but maybe if I had Destia suggest it to her and emphasize how difficult it was to do in general, never mind with only four days of training,

Aside from my many worries about dancing, singing and standing on a stage in front of more people than I cared to think of, there was one more giant problem I needed to worry about.

My powers tended to go absolutely haywire when I was stressed out and surrounded by a bunch of people with high emotional states, and aside from the school incident that had happened half a month ago, the worst place for me to be was the place I had directly volunteered to be in.

Surrounded by screaming fans and the general audience on the last day of a music festival. Regardless of what emotions they would feel after watching our performance, it would hit me like a brick wall.

It wouldn’t be too bad if it was positive emotion, but if I had to be hit with the annoyance, distaste or pity of over five thousand people while my powers were heightened, I just might fall into a coma.

Even as things were, I’d found myself relying on my powers to read the dance teacher’s mind and incorporate her critique before she verbalized it. While it was cheating, and I could tell that Destia had noticed, I was too tired to care much about morality.

I’d restrained myself to only thoughts about dancing and could adjust my form enough to not stand out among the group.

My hands tried their best to cringe as I remembered I would be the only guy in the group, but they were too sore to do any more than twitch. It wasn’t like there weren’t any mixed-gender groups, but the balance was usually much more fair, and they would have been marketed as such from the beginning.

While Destia easily blended in with the other pretty and athletic-looking girls, I stood out like a sore thumb. I was shorter and; I was ashamed to admit, smaller than they were. It was probably because of my age, or at least that was the reason I’d chosen to blame, but it was still awkward.

I feared that they would try to dress me up as a girl, but thankfully I hadn’t ‘read’ any such intentions.

Then again, if I was made to look like a girl, no one would be able to recognize me after.

“Archer?”

Destia knocked on the door as she walked in and set down a tray full of snacks that very definitively didn’t go well together.

Cheese-flavoured chips and chocolate cookies intermingled with mint candies and artificial gummies. The drinks were no better and ranged all the way from lemon juices to sugared milk.

Destia didn’t really eat with the rest of us in the dorms, but the few times she had, her plate always towered much taller than everyone else’s. I knew it was a side effect of when she used her abilities, but it was still a sight to see.

I got worried that she would try to force me to eat some of it with her, but thankfully she arranged the snacks onto a different tray she had layered under the one I’d seen and left a regular glass of milk and an apple on my tray. There was a set of graham crackers as well, but the way she looked at them made me feel like she would get to them before I did.

She tore into the first pack of chocolate cookies and washed them down with a tall glass of orange juice, a combination I knew was terrible by the grimace on her face. I wondered why she didn’t just eat them in accordance with how well they would go together, but after she ripped open the third packet of gummies in less than four minutes, I realized how pointless organizing them would be.

“Try not to judge too much. I lost so much fat today I can feel my body shrivel up. The teacher gave me a video of our progress with some commentary so we could try to incorporate it into tomorrow’s lesson. They also gave us a guide to the parts we’re covering, vocally I mean.”

I was mentally exhausted as well since I’d abused my powers so much earlier, but I didn’t dare complain and sat up to watch the video on the tablet Destia held up.