NINETY-EIGHT: Blossoming Tentacles

98

“You’re all idiots.”

Lexi Roberts—smug bastard—said this while examining Alden, Lute, and Haoyu on Monday morning. It was 6:45, he’d just come in from a run, and he looked disgustingly energized standing there drinking an iced black coffee from the campus shop.

“I got up at two o’clock to use the bathroom, and none of you were here.”

“Kon and Mehdi’s group decided to go all the way down to the stadium in F,” Haoyu groaned while he trudged across the kitchen toward his slow-cooker. “To see a spell performance. It took a couple of hours to get back through all the traffic. I regret it.”

“I regret nothing,” Lute mumbled into the top of the dark wood table that they’d chosen to match their huntski lodge theme. “I was eating mochi in a tub surrounded by beautiful, friendly Rabbit girls when the volley ended at one.”

“Were you?” Haoyu asked.

“Of course he wasn’t,” Lexi scoffed, rolling his eyes.

Without looking up, Lute pointed across the table at Alden, who was trying to will himself awake while he chewed on a vegan protein bar the North of North gym recommended. It was supposed to taste like cookie dough.

I wonder if whoever made this has actually eaten cookie dough, or if it’s just a phrase they’ve heard people with tastebuds say before.

He swallowed the chalky, artificially sweetened monstrosity. “He was in the tub. We calculated it at one point, and he spent almost five hours yesterday in tubs. He’s the cleanest person on campus.”

“Alden’s intake friends are excellent. I’ve changed my vote about letting guests come over if those are the guests.”

“Oh no,” said Haoyu, staring into his slow cooker at the oatmeal he’d put in last night. “I don’t think this is right.”

He dug a spoon into it, and when he lifted it, an oatmeal and dried fruit disc came out. “I think I need to add more water.”

It slid off the spoon and hit the counter.

“Did that just bounce?” Lexi asked, blinking at it.

Alden nodded. “That was a definite bounce.”

******

Maricel was already in the lecture theater by the time Alden made it to Preparatory Sciences, and when he went over to sit with her, he was relieved that she seemed at ease. They talked about homework until Finlay arrived and turned the conversation to their upcoming gym class.

“Whatever we do, I want to make a proper show of it for the instructors,” he said, ripping open creamers and sugar packets and pouring them into a hot tea. “You know? I don’t want them to think, Och, we made a mistake with that one! He’s not quality material.”

“Something tells me you won’t have that problem,” said Alden.

“You never can be sure. At the party, when I told Mehdi I was in this course, he said it was for the ‘remedial students.’ Did you two know that?”

“Yes,” Alden and Maricel both said.

“What’s that about? I never was a remedial student before. Not top of my class, but never the bottom either. Well…I suppose we’re not the worst of them. They didn’t even give Jeffy the option to test out at the end of the quarter. He has to take it now and next term.” He chugged his tea, then stared down into the cup. “I think I need another.”

After that, it was off to Engaging with the Unexpected. Alden sat beside Andrzej, in what he privately thought of as the B-rank section. The discussion for the week would be on a series of three different superchaser incidents. There were so many examples for Instructor Marion to draw on that he hadn’t been able to limit himself to just one.

“All right,” said a third year girl, leaning back in her chair. “Before he gets here, we all agree that the correct response to the chaser-turned-flasher who visually assaulted the hero is just a strategic accident with a spell impression, right?”

“Can’t flash what you don’t have,” said her friend, holding up a hand for a high five.

Several people laughed. A couple sighed.

“I’d love to strategic accident a lot of them,” a boy said. “It would solve at least half of the issues we discuss in this seminar.”

Andrzej muttered under his breath in Polish and shook his head.

He wasn’t much of a talker in class. Alden found it surprising now that he’d seen him at the B-list—where he was quick to share ideas and eager to chat. This was a discussion-based course, so Andrzej couldn’t be completely silent. But his usual habit was to share three opinions, each spaced about twenty minutes apart, and then fade out of the conversation again rather than ardently defending his point.

Alden didn’t know if he disliked arguing in general or if it was the particulars of this class and its participants that made him keep his head down.

The girl who was always typing away on her phone on the opposite side of the room suddenly said, “Knock it off with the strat acc jokes. He’s coming.”

A few seconds later, Instructor Marion breezed into the room. “Morning everyone!”

“Good morning!”

The use of “strategic accidents” had been banned at the beginning of the quarter. Anyone who mentioned accidentally doing violence to fix problems got thrown out of class and marked absent for the day.

Not because violence was never the answer. Violence was, according to Instructor Marion, a valid tool and a subject worthy of serious and respectful consideration.

“But it comes with consequences,” he’d said last week after tossing a guy out into the hall. “Planning to use violence and squirm away from those consequences by saying, ‘I had a little oopsie,’ is not an acceptable approach to engaging with the unexpected.”

Alden had wondered what kind of lunatics he was going to school with that made it necessary for that to be a class rule…until these superchaser scenarios. There was this one married couple who made money videoing working superheroes up close and personal. Their country didn’t consider their actions to be interference, so they couldn’t be prosecuted. But they liked to run into the path of oncoming spells and projectiles to get unique footage for their channel.

Some of the unique footage came from Avowed having to perform dangerous stunts to dodge them. They were creating circuses on purpose.

It wasn’t like they deserved to die, but they did deserve to be locked up in a punishment closet so that they could engage with the darkness of death and gain knowledge of what they’d done wrong. Alden had written this down in his private notes as the Klee-pak Solution. Having it there was his way of venting, but he had enough sense and self-control not to present it to a human audience.

He pulled out his laptop and went over his less private notes.

In prepping for this class, he had decided to try to dodge the big moral questions everyone liked to fight about. After everything that had happened with Boe over the past week, he just wanted to quietly figure his own way through those things rather than having twenty different opinions flying at him—all of them presented with a vibrant certitude that made him feel lacking.

Instead, he wanted to talk about the complications presented by superchasers in general, and since the best way to steer conversations was to start them, he raised his hand.

“I think we should discuss how superchasers themselves aren’t unexpected. Once a hero or a team has stalkers, they know they’re going to appear at public events or whenever action is taking place somewhere the chasers can get to in time. Their presence is a given; it’s only the exact type of chaos they’ll cause that’s hard to anticipate. So we should talk about how knowing a difficult incident is more likely to occur than usual changes a hero’s preparation and response.”

Andrzej looked up. “I agree. We should talk about strategies for…ah… how do you say… <<composure maintenance>> during frustrating moments that are caused by people a hero might have personal problems with.”

“Translation for you all,” said the girl with the phone. “The B’s want to talk serious business this week instead of penile rights.”

“Penile rights are pretty serious, though.”

“My rights in that area matter a lot to me.”

Instructor Marion blinked around the room. “What exactly do you all mean by penal rights? Have you been discussing legal systems?”

“Yes, Instructor.”

“That’s definitely it.”

“We think the law should do a better job of protecting superheroes from civilian interference!”

******

<<I call this one bad long arms that make flower shapes,>> Lute whispered, leaning forward on his learning cushion and holding out his hands to show Alden a series of signs.

They were in the classroom for Conversation IV, and they were alternating between talking about the assignment whenever Instructor Rao was paying attention to them and talking about wordchains when she wasn’t.

Alden watched Lute’s wiggling fingers closely. And his wrists, elbows, and shoulders. Lute hadn’t been kidding when he said the chain was difficult. He’d been doing a shorthand version of it last night on the bus. The full gesture set that Alden would be practicing involved a lot more motion.

<<Blossoming tentacles?>> Alden suggested, texting him the English translation at the same time.

Lute liked to name his motions himself so that he could remember them more easily. Alden knew perfectly well that the Artonans had their own names for common hand signs, but Lute’s way had some benefits. There was a good chance that “blossoming tentacles” was going to stick in Alden’s mind better than whatever the real name was.

<<Blossoming tentacles!>> his tutor repeated, grinning at him.

Lute was wearing his toucan shirt with a green eyepatch, and his high-tops were in his lap. He’d decided not to give the shoe victimizers any more opportunities.

Alden repeated the gestures, and Lute gave him an odd look.

<<Wrong?>> Alden asked.

<<Not very wrong. Do it again. Less fast.>>

Alden started the sign at the level of his forehead and drew his arms down through the air as he went.

<<Stop there.>> Lute reached out and adjusted the angle of the first knuckle on his left middle finger. <<Like this. Go. Less fast.>>

Alden started back.

<<Stop there.>> Lute rotated one of his wrists slightly outward and adjusted the distance between his hands. <<Go.>>

Lute had completely forgotten about behaving like they were doing the assigned work. He got up on his knees to stare even more closely at Alden’s fingers. But Instructor Rao just sighed and walked past them when she did her next round of the classroom. Alden supposed she was grateful they were some of the only students not slipping other languages into their sentences today.

<<Stop. Do it from the beginning again.>>

When they left thirty minutes later, Lute watched Alden take his shoes from his cubby and sniff them. “You think they’re going to get you since they couldn’t get me?” he asked, tying his laces.

“I see no reason not to take some precautions.” Alden shoved his feet in.

“You’ve got a lunch break now?”

“An hour and fifteen minutes.”

“Do you want to go back to the dorm and practice more?”

Alden looked up. “I thought you had class?”

“It’s theater, and the instructor lets us play around half the time. If I don’t skip performance days and I do the homework, he’s not going to care.”

Lunch back in their room instead of in one of the cafeterias sounded good, and Alden didn’t want to refuse help if wrist rotation and knuckle angle were going to be important components of getting more complex wordchains right.

They headed back, and just a few minutes later they were walking into their apartment.

“Living on campus is so convenient,” Alden said. “Hour plus commutes down to intake were getting really old.”

“Yeah, for the past few months I was only living about twenty minutes away if the buses worked out, and that was still a pain.”

Lute wandered over to look in Haoyu’s cooker. “He’s trying something with chicken and onions. It hasn’t gone to hell yet.”

“Until recently, I was cooking two meals a day every day,” said Alden, grabbing a steamer bag of frozen mixed veggies and tossing it into the microwave. “Using ingredients mutated by a chaos field. Sometimes it even tasted okay. I’ve decided to believe in him. He will master the electric soup pot.”

He opened the cupboard and reached for a can of chickpeas.

“Get me some noodles while you’re there.”

Lute’s personal food shelf—because Lexi did not believe in shelf sharing—was below Alden’s. It was ninety percent an instant noodle collection and ten percent condiments to enhance the instant noodle collection. Alden selected a package that was supposed to be flavored like an “exotic lortch delicacy” and set it on the counter.

“Your hands,” said Lute, dropping his bag on the floor on plopping down in a chair. “They’re slightly enhanced?”

“They are.”

“I thought so!”

Alden was surprised at the delight in his voice.

“Mine too,” said Lute, holding up his hands. “You’ve got your dexterity boosted. For them especially? You see it in the music program a lot. And with some people who love handicrafts. I wasn’t expecting it from you.”

His curiosity was obvious. Alden started to deliver the lie he’d prepped for the interview committee in case they asked why he would waste his limited point supply that way. Quicker, nimbler hands would have helped me out with tasks at the lab on Moon Thegund. It made them feel like a priority when it was time to affix.

He’d decided that was better than blaming the System and saying it had chosen and applied the points in an unusual way without his input. Doing so would imply that this particular stat allocation was important for his skill. It might send people like Instructor Plim on a wild goose chase in an attempt to figure out what it meant.

I don’t want to lie to Lute, though.

This weekend had been fun. Last night had been fun. Lute had volunteered to tutor him.

Well, so what if you don’t want to? You don’t know him well enough to tell him the truth. You don’t even know him well enough to let slip that you’ve got something mysterious going on.

Was there any part of the truth he could share without potentially ruining his life?

“I like it,” he said finally. “I know all of us in the hero development program are supposed to be brutally practical about our stat allocation and talent selection. Especially if we’re not S’s. But I decided to boost my hand speed and dexterity for personal reasons at first, and now I like it so much that I’ll probably do it again the next time I get the chance. For more than the original reason. It’s an aspect of my powers that I enjoy in little ways all the time. I made a typo on my laptop the other day, and I suddenly realized I’d been speed typing for over an hour without a single one.”

Lute nodded. “The points I’ve got are fully baked now. All the hand-head stuff is refined and settled. I basically never miss a note on any normal composition…it makes it feel like the years I spent practicing prior to affixation were a waste, but if I’m not agonizing over that, it can be really fun. And I’ve learned a lot of card tricks. And I bet I’d be a great pickpocket.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“I got all the high scores on a pinball machine in intake.”

“That’s cute. There’s a secret arcade on the Li Jean campus. The games are weird since they’re all custom made, but you should come with me sometime and watch me dominate the uni students.”

“How fast are you?”

“Not the absolute fastest compared to a bunch of uni gamers, but I don’t lose much at all. The System wants Chainers to be very good with our hands and with pattern memorization. It barely gave me any points to spend how I wanted.”

Well, yes. Those would be the enhancements that make you better at chaining. Plus something for his voice, too, I bet. Maybe his hearing as well.

Chainers would be amazing spell casters if they had authority senses. And also…

“It’s a perfect class for a musician,” Alden said. The microwave beeped, and he pulled out his vegetables.

“In some ways.”

There was an undercurrent of sadness in Lute’s voice. Before Alden could ask about it, he cleared his throat. “But about your hands…since they’re way better than I thought they were going to be, and since you’ve actually got a surprisingly good memory for signs—”

“Did you think I was dumb?”