I was in group E, Echo in NATO speak, which was all four people with the gun essence.

Believe it or not, the training was boring. Outright dreadfully boring. They didn’t teach us a thing. We got two trainers, Mr. Maleux (do not ask how Americans pronounce that) and Mr. von Bülow.

Well, they taught us terminology. So we used „lesser monster cores“ to test „ritual circles“. I’ve learned the lesson. Knowing that you are under pseudomilitary discipline raises motivation.

We may have been to valuable to have us clean toilets, but were we too valuable to be used for weapons research? I am sure somebody was eager to get our EEGs while we were doing rituals. To be honest I would have been eager in their place and I would have advocated implanting the electrodes.

You may deem that petty in the extreme. We got powers from out of this world and were bored training them. You know, I am sure being an air defense guard in Hiroshima was boring until the 5th of August, 1945. It does not work that way. Doing the same circle over and over to calm ambient magic is boring. Especially if after each time somebody takes out a small metallic rod, flashes a yellow light and your work is undone. It left time for contemplation. Preferably not about the bodily orifices you could mount probes in.

For example they wanted us to be as precise as possible before activating the ritual. For this ritual that was mostly pointless, hence they cared about the detection ritual. That in turn meant that they cared about the coins, not the lesser cores. That told me nothing because in the game you got a fixed amount of coins per time. I refused to believe in the reality of an almighty system, regardless of how many games I had played.

You know that admiring the Greeks for insights about the limits of your knowledge is a lot easier, if you had no skin in the game? And in my defense our instructors shared our boredom. But they had their phones. One of them honestly was playing PokemonGo. That very much looked like they were not under Captain Carstens’ command.

Had we had a coup and I was on the way into the ruling magic class? Was that the reason we were not going into a lab for study? They already knew everything there was to know or was the situation a sort of a forced cooperation and we were protected because the magical people could not allow other magical people to be vanished for fear of setting a precedent?

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Lunch again having been sandwiches dinner was a treat. The group wordlessly agreed to stay together. We shared our powers with each other. That was safe. Quiet contemplation and the blossoming understanding that for practical purposes the country was under martial law was eroding old certainties. I wasn’t sure that our conversations were private. They’d expect us to talk about our abilities.

I got looks of pity. I am old enough to not care. If I got honest pity I’d take it.

Lisa had what the examiner called a counter-execute. Her bullets would heal her by draining her opponent if she had suffered a serious injury. Outright ghoulish, though I kept that opinion to myself.

Markus had something called the „eye of the infantryman“. He could see if somebody was aiming at him. That opened a deep can of worms in terms of how the universe works.

Werner was the ordinary one. He conjured – not „materialized“ – a hunting rifle with a scope, including magic ammunition.

Before we could turn the conversation to something possibly clandestine, the TV was switched on and we were treated to the sight of floating monster in the shape of starfish made out of mud streaming out of a mine in Angola and suffocating the miners’ families living in a shanty town next to the plant.

No more warnings about sensitive viewers. Did the government want the shock value? No official announcement. Our handlers let us simmer in our own juices. Or they were waiting for somebody to mouth off to identify the unreliable.

This was no longer the country I had been living in. Or was I paranoid? All I had was oddities and indications. Including merely assuming that I could not talk safely to anybody.

Curfew had started. Nowhere to go outside the building. I headed for the games room. Take what you can get. A few people were looking to start a game of darts. It turned out to be a relevation. I took a dart and the world warped. The area I could hit looked – for lack of a better description – brighter than the rest of the world. I contemplated my target and something else led my arm. A hit on the inner ring of the twenty, exactly where I wanted it.

I had found my racial power.