SIXTY-SEVEN: Goals

 

Alden sent his list of links off to Stuart. And after some contemplation, he decided if he was going to try sharing human culture with somebody, he should probably start engaging with it again himself.

Time to be brave. How hard can it really be to mingle?

He stood in front of the fridge, staring at the community activities calendar for the day. He had a more detailed version pulled up on his interface, too. They went all-in on the programming here at intake; virtually every minute from six o’clock in the morning until midnight curfew had something on the schedule. There were tours, classes, board games, athletic events, guest lectures, nondenominational religious services, a scavenger hunt, a mocktail party, and even volunteer opportunities.

Alden wanted to pick up litter along the bike path. It sounded like a peaceful job almost nobody else would choose to do. Since that defeated his whole purpose for the day, he selected an educational group tour called Government Buildings and Procedures.

It’s not the most stimulating option, he admitted to himself. But it’s got things going for it. It was one of the for-credit opportunities, so there would be people. But there were other classes and tours happening this morning that sounded more fun, so there probably wouldn’t be a ton of them. And, more importantly, it didn’t seem like an activity where everyone would be showing off their powers.

Just by walking through the dorm halls over the past couple of days, Alden had realized that power displays were a huge part of introducing yourself to the other teens in intake. What’s your name? Where are you from? What can you do?

He was hoping to get to know other new Avowed in a setting where he could just say what his skill was without it being appropriate for them to ask him to do tricks with it.

I’d like to at least have some normal conversation before I have to brush everyone off or get into the whole ‘I can’t use it right now’ thing.

He headed out, stopping by the counselor’s desk to show Neha his face and prove he was engaging with people. She hadn’t told him to do that. Nobody had. But he was aware that there was a certain amount of concerned watching going on in this place.

Not just of him. But of several people in unusual situations.

None of his new neighbors had caught on to any anomalies with Alden’s presence, as far as he knew, but he’d heard them talking about others. There was a Wright who’d registered and regretted it, and he kept trying to escape from Anesidora by stealing boats. If he didn’t knock it off, they were going to have to take him out of intake and put him in more restrictive housing.

And there was a Morph Brute who had come to the dorms after spending weeks at the island’s healing hospital. Her own brothers had set her bed on fire while she slept when they found out she was an Avowed. It had made global news.

I bet she hates it that everyone knows that about her.

He stuffed his hands into the pocket of his hoodie as he crossed the drive that separated his apartment tower from the one that was dedicated to Brutes. The tour group was supposed to meet there in the lobby.

Most people get to keep their tragedies private. But when you have one that hits a certain level of gruesomeness, suddenly the rest of the world feels like they have a right to stare at it and comment on it.

He entered the lobby and blinked in surprise at the decorations. Ten-foot-tall bronze statues representing different Brute types dominated the space. They stood on raised circular platforms, and there were cushioned benches around each of them. One statue was of a shirtless man holding up a globe like the Greek god Atlas. And there was a woman mid-run, her hair streaming behind her. Alden was pretty sure the man with his mouth open and his arms spread was supposed to represent the vocal subtype.

We don’t get cool statues in our tower lobby. Unfair.

Probably it was because they couldn’t rep all the class subtypes without turning the lobby into a thicket of bronze, but they could have done a mural or something.

<<Why do they get statues?>> someone said behind him. <<We don’t have statues in our building.>>

<<Almost a third of all Avowed are Brutes. It’s easier to make lots of people happy by catering to them. Or maybe they just get more donations from former residents of this building.>>

Alden glanced over his shoulder to see two guys nearby. They were staring up at the statue for audial Brutes. His interface informed him that they were speaking Spanish and Urdu.

“Are you here for the tour, too?” he asked.

Of course they were; it was the thing starting in the lobby of this building in a few minutes. But you had to begin a conversation somewhere.

<<Yes,>> said one of the guys. He poked around at the air with a hand, and a moment later, a custom name tag appeared beside him with his personal details.

He was seventeen. From Pakistan. He was a C-rank Meister of Staves.

His friend popped a name tag up for himself, too. He was sixteen. From Costa Rica. He was a C-rank Meister of Torches. He enjoyed fishing. And he was looking for a girlfriend.

Torches? thought Alden, pondering the tag. Did you fight with the torches? Or illuminate things with them? Did it depend on how the Meister built their talents? Oh, wait. It’s probably not old-fashioned torches. Maybe it’s more like welding torches?

Magic welding actually sounded kind of cool.

He tossed up the name tag he’d made for himself. He’d kept it simpler than they had.

 

[Alden – 16 – Rabbit]

 

<<Rabbit!>> shouted the maybe-a-welder guy. <<Do you know her?>>

“Um…who?”

<<The most beautiful girl in the world is on the Rabbit floors. She’s an S-rank. She—>>

“Natalie Choir,” said Alden. “I’ve met her.”

Mistake.

The other boy’s interest level in Natalie wasn’t quite in stalker territory by Alden’s estimation, but it was dangerously close to it. The guy missed two polite attempts to change the conversation topic and one much less polite one.

Fortunately, his roommate wasn’t as dense. He started talking about the upcoming tour loudly, and things got more normal.

Both of the Meisters had arrived over two months ago. They were a few weeks away from overstaying their welcome and getting kicked out of the intake dorms. Their counselors had told them it was time for them to start participating in some of the for-credit activities—like this one—or else they’d be forced to sit through a month of much less fun orientation classes with the slackers when they started school.

So that’s how it works. Alden had wondered what the “punishment” for being a total non-participant during your intake period might be.

Both of the boys were happy to have been chosen as Avowed. And they were pretty relaxed about it. They were interested in the fact that they now had powers, of course. But it was in a more casual way than Alden had expected.

The Meister of Staves was enjoying a combat class with a few older Avowed who had the same subtype. He thought it was a good hobby and an impressive art. The Torch Meister liked his stat enhancements. Neither of them were thinking of their abilities as something that would be the main focus of their futures.

Maybe they’d level a little, maybe they’d get some cool spell impressions, maybe a job here or there—they weren’t stressed about it.

For them, the big perk of being an Avowed was getting to live here on Anesidora. As far as they were concerned, they were already on top just by reaching the island. Whether they ever got summoned or not was pretty irrelevant to them, except for the obvious monetary benefits.

“But…you know you could get summoned to fight or do something dangerous, right?” Alden asked, addressing the question mostly to the stave user.

The torches were for magic welding, so the other boy was more likely to be summoned for work, not combat.

The two Meisters exchanged glances.

<<It could happen? But C-ranks with combat classes don’t get summoned much. And when we do, it’s usually more for appearances than dangerous fighting according to the other Meisters. Getting a deadly job from the aliens is like being struck by lightning, isn’t it? You can’t walk through life worrying about it.>>

<<Exactly,>> his friend agreed. <<Anyway, if you don’t want to leave Earth, you just don’t train your powers too much, right? High ranks are one thing maybe, but low ranks with low levels are completely different.>>

<<We just get to live here.>>

<<And get hot Avowed girlfriends.>>

<<I’ve been looking at the boarding facilities for the schools, and they’re almost as nice as intake.>>

Okay. So that’s how it was. Probably Alden was the one who was being unrealistic for immediately wondering what they were going to do if they ever got lethal assignments from the Triplanents…instead of asking them about their favorite things to do on the island and what school they were planning to attend.

They loved Anesidora. They were happy to be here.

It is a very high standard of living.

Alden had known that, but he hadn’t really thought about what it meant for people other than himself.

Sure. You were trapped. Especially if you didn’t have the highly-marketable talents that would get you a superhuman job in another country. But despite Boe constantly joking that Alden would starve to death because of the price of things on the island, even poverty on Anesidora was pretty cushy.

Basic healthcare was free and high quality. Education was free, high quality, and mandatory—in one form or another—until age 21. There was no such thing as homelessness. Once you were out of school, they would give you a very small but undeniably clean and comfortable apartment to live in if you couldn’t afford one on your own.

You even had internet access through your interface if you wanted free entertainment. Although Alden had decided just this morning that he hated browsing that way. It felt really intrusive.

I need to buy a laptop, he thought as the tour group finally set out.

There were about thirty of them. Most people had come because they needed the credits, but a few had chosen this tour because they were super enthusiastic about the fact that they had voting rights now. You were a legal voter on Anesidora the second your Avowed feet touched the ground, and they actually wanted to find out how the government worked.

Their guide spoke mostly Mandarin, and in the way that a lot of native born Anesidorans did, he sprinkled in tons of loan words from other languages.

They took a train through F-city, stopping at the capitol building. It was an unusual, trapezoid-shaped structure made of glass and black stone that reminded Alden of the hot lab on the Leafsong campus. This was where the High Council did their thing. The group toured the council chambers, and they even got to meet a few of the class representatives who were in their offices.

The current Rabbit councilor was in. The Rabbit rep never had much power on the council unless they became President, but maybe because of that, she was more willing to talk to the tour.

She was a short woman with silver corkscrew curls, and she did a brief double-take when she saw Alden’s name tag. She didn’t react at all to the name tag of the one other Rabbit who’d come today. Alden assumed it meant she knew who he was through some kind of gossip. It was a little concerning. But she didn’t say anything about it when she shook his hand, so he decided he liked her fine.

The tour was over after four and a half hours, and Alden, feeling highly successful about talking to other people without coming across as someone who’d been living on a moon for way too long, gave himself permission to break off from the group.

They were all going to see a movie together.

He picked up an order of stir-fry from a restaurant and went back to the dorm. He wanted to read his auriad book and practice his logograms.

And he needed to think.

Only a couple of people on the tour planned to seriously pursue leveling their Avowed talents.

A lot of the others said they did, but either they didn’t mean it or they hadn’t actually considered how to go about it. They were almost all going to attend the general high school programs in F-city. Those included some cultural training for life as an Avowed, in case you got summoned, but they didn’t cover power development at all.

Well, there weren’t any high ranks on the tour. Alden was sitting on the kitchen stool, watching the logograms shift while the System translated the first spell in his book for him. It’s not like they could get into a serious hero track course.

He’d been the only B in the group. Everyone else had been C or lower.

But doing a hero-prep program at one of the Apex high schools was far from the only option for developing your Avowed talents. Even for low ranks, there were leveling-track programs of other kinds that split your education between academics and more class-focused learning. If you wanted that.

They were considered more time and labor intensive, but…

I expected more people to want that. Who just gains the ability to do magic and then doesn’t do much with it?

Maybe he was thinking about it wrong, though.

Most people didn’t spend all their time “leveling up” in normal life. It wasn’t like Alden had been doing aerobics to level up his body before he’d been selected. Or seriously striving to expand his mind. He’d been taking advanced classes in high school and lots of consulate extras. But if he was being honest with himself, he’d always just liked keeping busy with school. So that shouldn’t count.

It was probably more uncommon to run at your goals full-tilt and laser-focused than it was to kind of…stroll in their general direction.

But he’d thought he would encounter a lot more ambition than he had so far. More than in regular high school.

I guess I subconsciously stuck too many Avowed in the insanely dedicated category because my real-life experience was all with Hannah. And she was a workaholic by any measure.

Maybe the most useful thing he’d learned on the tour was what normal here on Anesidora actually looked like.

He called Boe to leave his daily voicemail.

“I’ve been thinking that living on a demon moon made me confused about who I am and what I want to do now,” he said in a conversational tone. “Upon reflection, that’s not accurate. What it made me unsure about is long-term career choices.”

He took a sip from a bottle of blackberry soda. The vending machines in the dorm were free and they had drinks from all over the place. Trying them all was a mini goal.

“Honestly,” he said, “being a hero sounds so damn horrifying right now. If someone walked into this kitchen and said, ‘Alden Thorn, run with an injured child on your back for days until you are bloody and broken,’ I think I’d have to ask if the kid was Kibby or not.”

He split open another soy sauce packet and poured it over what was left of his rice.

“I’m not sure it’s in me to do something like that again. To deliberately put myself in a situation where I know I might have to. For her—a thousand times. But maybe not for someone I don’t know.”

He took a bite and swallowed. “I’m…really so disappointed in myself. For not being the person I imagined I was. Was I naive before? Or am I a coward now for not wanting to go through something that terrible again? I don’t know. But I do know who I am at this moment. Better than I thought. And I know what I want to do next.”

He paused.

“Come out of hiding if you want to find out what it is, Boe. Otherwise you can just suffer from your own curiosity. Talk to you tomorrow.”

He ate the last few bites of his lunch and finished his reading.

The first spell in the auriad book was complicated. This wasn’t a wizard kindergarten textbook for sure. He had no way of knowing if it was actually advanced, but it was definitely more advanced than he’d been expecting.

She has a lot of faith in my fingers and my authority control, doesn’t she? he thought as he studied the method.

When he mastered it, the spell would create a small crushing shape around objects at close range. About the size of an apple. And the things inside it would get very crushed, since it said it could turn “even a stubborn stone” into powder.

Neat.

He tucked the book back in his magic bag and locked it, wincing again at the bite of the id chip against his sore authority. He’d been wondering how secure it really was in there. As far as he knew there wasn’t a population of dorm thieves. But on the off chance that there were, it was going to be hard, bordering on impossible, for Alden to get his hands on another auriad book of this quality if anyone stole it to sell to wizard paraphernalia collectors.

“All right, System,” he said, shoving his takeout garbage into the trash. “What would it cost to store my magic messenger bag in one of your warehouses?”

It immediately gave him a list of options, along with prices that frankly hurt.

The System warehouses held the Wardrobe items and whatever things other classes could purchase before they were sent out to their new owners. There was tons of stuff for Wrights from what Alden understood.

But it didn’t do post-purchase storage for free. And it cost even more to store things that were totally personal and not class-related. Like a bag of books. Over the course of a year, if he had the bag stored and teleported to him on a daily basis, it was going to cost like two hundred grand.

But nobody was going to rob the System of its Artonan-made goodies unless they wanted the Triplanets to take an aggressive interest in them. So it was undeniably safe. And convenient.

 

Maybe the bag can’t be stolen at all because of the lock. Maybe it knocks thieves out or attacks them. How do I even figure that out?

“Hey, I know you know how my magic bag works,” he said to the System hopefully. “And I respect the fact that you don’t usually answer random questions. But since it was a gift from another System, maybe you’ll tell me? Do I even need you for storage?”

It didn’t answer.

“Fine. Be that way.”

He let the System disappear the bag and the books to one of its overpriced hideaways. Then he left the apartment and headed for the elevators.

Halfway down the hall, he passed by a dark-skinned girl with long braids. She was sliding fliers under doors.

<<Stop!>> she said, whipping around to hand him a flier. <<You need us.>>

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The System translated the flier for him. It turned out the Rabbit girls in Room 802 had complementary skills, and they had used them to set up their own in-apartment salon. Like Natalie, a lot of people who’d taken the class were business-minded. They were planning on their skills being a big part of their future careers, either here or for the Artonans.

Maybe that was why I was a little surprised by the others on the tour.

<<Your hair,>> said the girl, staring at Alden. <<I can help.>>

Alden smiled. “It’s that bad, huh?”

<<Asymmetrical is a fine look. But that’s too hacked up.>>

He knew it was. Met-oosa’s party haircut had required wires and gel to look good in the first place. And then it had grown out for months. It was significantly longer in some places than in others. And on top of that, he was growing a ton of new hair thanks to Rrorro.

<<You look like something bad happened to you,>> she concluded. <<I’ll fix you for free, and you can decide to pay me if you like it.>>

He’d been planning to take care of it eventually. He hadn’t even been here a week yet. “I’ll probably take you up on that.”

She looked satisfied.

He went downstairs to the counselor’s desk. Neha was there with her feet propped up, watching television on an Artonan-made tablet. Like the kind from the lab. Alden hadn’t actually seen anyone else using one on Earth before.

“Hey,” she said. She spied the flier in his hand, then glanced up at his hair. “Good choice.”

“Wow. I must be hideous.”

She snorted. “Of course not. You just look like you ran afoul of some cursed scissors. What’s up?”

“Goals,” he said. “You asked about them. I have some.”

She sat up straighter. “Do you want to duck into the counselor’s office for a private chat, or—”

“No. It’s not private. We can schedule something more in-depth for later. I just realized I do have some things I’m already sure about, and you said you usually kept track of peoples’ goals. So I wanted to tell you.”