Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When I appeared in my Warehouse, the first thing that I noticed was that my HUD was back. I could see my Minecraft hotbar and hearts and everything. Checking my inventory, it was empty, just as I left it before I went to Girl Genius. There was a difference, though. The armor section was missing the slots to put armor in, instead just showing the little mirror of me, still in my clank body, and wearing all the bags and backpacks that I had gathered to carry all the stuff I was taking. 

I closed my inventory, and looked around. There were some new things in the Warehouse. The first I noticed, and largest, was a huge metal building, no decorations or frills, basically just sheet metal and I-beams forming a mysterious rectangle. 

Before I could investigate that, or anything else, I saw Astra approaching, annoyed.

“I thought I wouldn’t need to give you any rules like this, but here, I’ll spell it out for you: no clear spoilers.”

Ah. She was mad about everything I told the OT3. “Sorry…”

She facepalmed. “Not everything . Mysteriously hinting at the future, or talking about what’s already happened or not happened is fine. You only crossed the line before the battle with the Beast.”

Oh. Hmm… I didn’t think there was that big a difference between those… where was the line? It was too unclear; I would definitely mess it up again!

She looked at me, unimpressed. “Just remember this is for my entertainment, and you rehashing the whole plot to them in a bad summary that you all then try to follow is boring!! It’s not that hard, just don’t give them every little detail!” In her frustration, her voice pitched up to an almost whiny kid voice. I remembered that she could read my mind and tried to un-think that. 

Astra gave me a dangerous look.

“I can’t control what I think!” I pleaded with her. 

She crossed her arms. “Fine. Any other questions?”

“Um…” Oh I wanted to ask what was with the Totem… “Why didn’t my Totem of Undying pop when Aaronev killed me? I mean- probably good that it didn’t since he’d’ve tried to study it- but…” does it even work…? 

“You weren’t dead, just fully powered off. The definition for dead is less clear-cut for robots, but you weren’t. As for whether it works…” 

She snapped her fingers, and I felt a blazing, all consuming agony. For a split second, I looked down and saw myself disintegrating, my vision fading, before a metallic KRA-KOOM filled my ears, and gold and green particles exploded out from my chest. I saw my Minecraft hearts bouncing with regeneration effect as the metal of my arm (just the right one, we hadn’t had time to repair my left) knit itself together before my eyes, impossibly mutable for a while as it melted back into shape, and then hard metal once again as it finished. 

Shaking, I looked up at Astra with awe and fear. She took and gave life in a heartbeat. Easily, like plugging and unplugging a phone. She was a god and I would never dare to question her again.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic. It was just a demonstration. You’ll get a new one at the start of the next jump anyway.”

“O-okay.” I said in a small, shaky voice. 

“So, ready for the next Jump?”

“sure.” I could look at my new stuff later. If I didn’t take another Drawback that made me not be able to access my Warehouse. If Locket really isn’t in effect anymore.

“Oh yeah. I didn’t tell you? Drawbacks lose effect after the Jump they’re for ends. Oh! Speaking of which, I have something new for you along with your Jumpdoc!” She looked excited about it. I was… tentatively hopeful. 

She handed me the Tablet. “Notice anything different?” She asked excitedly, like she wanted me to guess about a new haircut. Something she was proud of.

At the top of the tablet, there were tabs, like a browser. The first one was labeled Jump Document (Unselected), the second one, which was the active one, was labeled Universal Drawbacks Supplement And Generic Perk Supplement!. The ‘and’ and everything after it were in a different font, like they were tacked on later.

It looked kinda like a Jumpdoc, with just Perks and then Drawbacks. At the beginning it said one Perk was discounted per Jump, so… would this follow me from Jump to Jump?

“Exactly! In every Jump from now on (Unless I change my mind, of course.), You’ll get to access this document and buy things or take Drawbacks from it! The offerings might change Jump to Jump, but I’ll try not to take away Perks you haven't bought yet.”

“Uh- Okay!” More choices were always good, and it wasn’t like she was forcing me to take any of the Universal Drawbacks. I did notice the document looked a little… patched together, with different fonts on different Perks. (Most of the Drawbacks were the same font, but a few looked a bit out of place) Almost as if they were copy-pasted from a bunch of different places. The Perks looked useful, though, so I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

The top also had a helpful little CP total, which was currently empty. I guess that was because-

“You haven’t rolled for your Jump yet.” She was hovering right over my shoulder, like she was on the edge of her seat waiting for me to get on with it and roll for a Jump. Well, her want is my command. I didn’t want her to kill me again. 

“Oh, C’mon, you barely even died.”

I switched to the Jump Document (Unselected) tab, and looked at the randomizer wheel. 

This time the options were: My Little Pony (I felt like I remembered that from the previous wheel, but I wasn’t sure. That was before I got my better memory, after all. I wondered if I could ask to look at what Perks I already had so I could figure out what gave me that.) 

“It was the Spark and I’ll add that to the GPS.” Astra interrupted, impatient.

Back to it next was: Magnus Archives (I felt like I remembered that one too. Were these all going to be the ones I didn’t roll before?) Sky:Children Of The Light (I… think I remembered that one. Flight would be cool.) Grrl Power (I… don’t think that was on the wheel before. Also huh, that would be… pretty dangerous I think? But also if I got to be a Super it’d be an opportunity for a fair bit more power than I had.) Portal (That definitely was not on the wheel. Also… how would that even work? There weren’t a lot of background characters in that game.) Stray (That… was a very generic name. It could apply to a lot of things. Wait… was it… There was this cat game… Was it that?) Generic AI (That’s… an odd media title. Was it even a media title?) Generic Super Academy (Okay I don’t think that’s-)

“Generics are worlds that aren’t in your media. (... usually… whatever.) The title is based on the common trope of the world.”

“Oh. So… Generic AI is just a world with AI?”

“Something like that. Don’t worry about it too much.”

“Ok.”

I guess I should roll now. I didn’t even really know which one I was hoping for- I noticed Astra giving me a level look. Okay Okay I get it, stop dawdling. Rolling now. I clicked the wheel.

GENERIC SUPER ACADEMY

I guess I’d be figuring out the deal with Generics sooner than later. I scrolled down to see the document, and was faced with a litany of randomizers. Apparently these were to determine the nature of the world I went to. There was an option to choose the result for free, but letting it randomize gave me 50cp for each roll, so I went ahead and rolled everything. It wouldn’t let me keep reading until a choice was made, and there would probably be super powers on offer, so I’d need all the points I could get. 

I got: 

School Campus: Your Academy is based on a normal school campus. It might not be openly a school for metahumans, but it is openly a school. (1050cp)

Secret: No one knows about your school, except the people who attend or work there and the direct sponsors of the school. Students are given direct invitations only, and only after being pre-screened as being worth the effort of the faculty to extend said invitation. (1100cp)

Religious: Your school is part of a religious organization, such as the Vatican or Buddhist temples. Alternatively it could be something like with Camp Half-blood from Percy Jackson, where the “students” are demigod children, if that’s how your particular world rolls. (1150cp) (A religious school… not sure if I like that. I suppose it’s better than Villain though. Depending.)

Well-Equipped: You probably have a Danger Room equivalent, sophisticated labs and workshops, and the faculty are known experts in metahuman science and training. These are likely to be run by people already experienced in the world of superpowers, and tend to be better tailored towards teaching the students how to use their abilities. Retired super-people tend to be the faculty here. (1200cp)

Custom Design: Decide for yourself, either an option above or something of your own design. Maybe it works like military reserve service (one weekend a month, two weeks a year), or maybe it is an after-school program. Whatever, be creative and have fun. Typical age is up to you. (1250cp) (cp for getting to choose what kind of school it is age-range wise? Awesome. I’ll wait to pick based on other choices though.)

Ancient Institution: Your school, in one form or another, predates most currently existing nations. It is, at the very least, over a thousand years old, and must have some major backing to still be around after all this time. Expect tradition to be an extremely strong focus here, with little tolerance or leeway granted to those that act out. These types of schools can afford to be picky with who they accept, and are unlikely to entertain students that do not meet exacting standards. On the other hand the faculty here tend to be the most experienced around, and are well positioned to teach their students everything they might need to know about living with powers. (1300cp) (That combines… interestingly with Religious. Not sure if I’ll like this school. …if it doesn’t last very long until graduation I wouldn’t have to stay in the school very long…)

Extremely Rare: There might be a dozen or two dozen metahumans in an entire state. At this level, if the metahumans are fairly weak or try to stay concealed, there may be large portions of the population that do not even believe they exist. Your school probably contains most or all of the young metahumans in the nation. (1350cp)

Average World Power Tier: National Tier: This is the level of many of the X-Men or Avengers, powerful enough to be respected forces on their own, but only world-shaking when working together. This is the highest average level at which society will resemble the real world at all. At this level normal people aren’t expected to be able to deal with super-people unless they’re equipped with their own super-tech armaments and support. (1400cp)

Average School Power Tier: Street Tier Relatively low-powered, similar to Worm (with exceptions like the Triumvirate or the Endbringers). Powers tend to be at the tactical level, like Daredevil or Wolverine. This tier has the least effect on society as a whole, since most of these metahumans could be defeated by a sufficient number of well-trained and equipped normal humans. (1450cp) (So the people at the school are less powerful than most Supers? Great.)

Next was the Sex roll, and the Age roll after it was greyed out, saying I had to pick the school age range first. 

I was kinda really hoping for F this time, out of F and M.

And I got it! Okay, great. Cool. Awesome. … Still kinda wanna opt-out of being human though. 

So, just gotta pick an age-range and we’ll be on our way. … How mad would Astra be if I made it just a month-long thing?

“6 months minimum. But 6 months is fine.”

“Okay. 6 months it is then.”

I made it a short (6 month long) post-highschool job training thing. Like one of those shorter and cheaper college alternative thingies. 

The age wheel un-greyed out, and was split in half between 17 and 18. I got 17. Ok. 

Now onto the document. I read the whole thing before making decisions again, I thought that was a good idea. It was… long. And the powers looked really good. Like really good. Also I felt cheated that I rolled Street Tier for the school, since it was the only roll that meant I didn’t have discounts of powers of that type.

“Actually. You do. Street tier powers are 50cp cheaper for you than the base price of the power, before you add tier price.”

I re-read a bit. “Oh. Cool!”

Anyway, that Spark-enhanced memory really came in handy, since I decided to make a plan before buying anything, and it meant I didn’t have to constantly re-read to remember what was on offer. 

I had several general goals with my purchases. Obviously I wanted to maximize power, and more than that maximize powers that would improve my life generally, rather than just win fights. (I wanted to be able to win fights too, though. I wasn’t going to let something like what happened with the Beast happen again. Or with the Geisters, for that matter.) In addition to that though, I wanted a theme. Astra had reminded me how the real point was entertaining her, and themes make better storytelling. It might also help me pick powers, but really most things can be part of a theme if you look at them right, and the powers were vague enough that that wouldn’t be that hard. 

I was re-considering my plan for the third time when Astra waved her hand in front of my face. “Still alive in there?”

Oh! “Ah- yes. I have a plan now, so I’ll get to it.”

She lounged mid-air, with a casual grin. “It’s fine.” 

I watched her warily.

“Oh c’mon, you don’t have to be scared of me.” she pouted, “Just, y’know, don’t be so boring!” 

But what even interests her? (and how can I not be scared of someone who has killed me with a thought?) I thought my time in Girl Genius was pretty interesting, but she seemed unsatisfied.

“Oh, no! Don’t get me wrong; Girl Genius was great!” her face fell from a grin back to annoyance. “I took you out so you wouldn’t ruin it with too many spoilers.” 

“Ah.” 

Okay, to the build. First up is Drawbacks again, because I don’t really feel comfortable letting my balance tip into the negative. I knew that it would probably be fine so long as I paid it off with Drawbacks afterwards, but it still felt more risky somehow.

First, from UDS:

Shut Up Jumper! [+200 if Single Jump]: You cannot speak. You must find another way to communicate. If you gain telepathy, you cannot use it to mindspeak. You must use some other methods of communication, be that written word, sign language, charades, mind pictures, drawings, empathic signals, etc. Cannot be taken twice in a row

(1650cp) It would be annoying, but not a real problem since I could just write everything down instead. I was kinda worried about the not being able to take it twice in a row (What if I needed those points next jump?) but honestly this jump seemed to have a lot of really powerful things on offer. More than I suspected would be available in a world like Sky: Children Of The Light, at least.

The rest of my Drawbacks were from Generic Super Academy.

Inhuman Appearance (+50cp, +100cp or +200cp)

Your new powers came with some physical alterations that can make social interactions unusual and can make keeping a secret identity very difficult. For +50cp, this is minor, like unusual hair or eye color, or sharpened teeth. These changes can often be hidden easily enough. For +100cp, your changes are more extensive and difficult to hide, such as being an anthropomorphic tiger or having transparent skin.

(1750cp) I took the 100 point version. Here is where we start with my idea for a theme. I like the idea of light and darkness, and in Girl Genius I already did a lot of things relating to light, but I felt like my need for light was betraying my edgy night owl roots, so this time I’m going the opposite direction. I’m going to be a being made up of pure darkness/shadow. 

Unusual Physical Requirements (+50cp, +100cp, or +200cp)

You have biological needs that differ from the human norm. For +50cp, this is something relatively minor, such as being an obligate carnivore or needing regular doses of sunlight, or even needing alcohol as a digestive aid.

(1800cp) Leaning into that, I’m making it so I need regular doses of darkness. Not like I need to be in the dark all the time, just sometimes to recharge. 

Special Weakness (+100cp, +150cp, +200cp, +250cp, +300cp, or +400cp)

A substance exists that has the ability to weaken you, neutralize your powers, or maybe even kill you. The value of this Drawback is based on both rarity of the substance and the severity of the weakness. This drawback can be taken up to three times. An extremely rare or unique substance like a single magical weapon or rocks from a destroyed universe is worth +50cp, a rare but accessible substance like the mass of meteors that hit the planet the day you arrived or were born is worth +100cp, and a common substance such as wood or a cleaning chemical is worth +200cp. For +50cp, your weakness is painful and difficult to deal with, but not completely debilitating. Think of it like being exposed to high grade tear gas or a taser. For +100cp, your weakness will shut down your powers or make you physically helpless. For +200cp, your weakness will kill you fairly quickly.

(2050cp) You might be able to guess where I’m going with this. Specifically, I’m getting 250cp, 200 for a very common weakness of bright light. Now it has to be bright enough to be annoying for a regular human, so maybe not so bad as all direct sunlight… in the evening or when it’s cloudy it might be fine… Anyway. I got the 50cp for it just being very painful and hard to deal with. The description says it isn’t quite debilitating, but a taser sounds pretty bad. I guess I’ll see.

Outed (+100cp)

You can’t seem to keep a Secret Identity. No matter how you try, people seem to be able to figure out who you really are. Maybe a pair of glasses aren’t enough to disguise your face?

(2150cp) I don’t think I want to bother with a Secret Identity anyway.

Freaks and Geeks (+50cp or +100cp)

You are not part of the popular crowd, and you never will be, no matter how you try. For +50cp, this means you will never be part of the school’s A-list or elite social circle.

(2200cp) 50cp to not be a cool kid? Sounds fine to me.

Bullying Problem (+100cp)

Your school has a problem with bullies, and for some reason the faculty is unable or unwilling to rein them in. Expect to have clashes with them on a fairly regular basis.

(2300cp) This one I’m less excited about, but my plan doesn’t necessitate being friends with the other kids, and it’s a source of conflict that’s unlikely to get me killed or severely injured.

Ineffective Teachers (+100cp)

The teachers at your school are just not very good. They are not going to be able to help you figure out your powers or develop new uses. Good luck on your own.

(2400cp) I was hesitant about this one, but I’m hoping I really can just figure out my powers myself. And it means I can spend less effort paying attention in class.

Detentions (+100cp)

Somehow, you keep ending up in detention or other school punishments. You might be innocent, you might be guilty, but either way, you are getting punished a lot. If you’re a Teacher you’re the guy that’s in charge of detention and making sure all the students there do what they’re supposed to be doing.

(2500cp) Again, doesn’t sound nice but won’t kill me, and adds tension. Plus, well, how many stories have the troublemakers in detention turning out to be the heroes?

Real World Consequences (+300cp)

Despite the existence of superpowers, this world works in a realistic fashion. So, when you throw a person through a building, people get hurt and the building might just come crashing down. Watch the collateral damage, or you might end up with a major kill count. This effectively increases the “grit level” of the setting. Whereas before it might have been like a four-color comic world, now it’s got more in common with a deconstruction like Watchmen.

(2800cp) I’m not really planning on doing real super-brawls or whatever, so I’m hoping I can avoid being in a situation where I would throw someone through a building. Either way, I think I’d be worrying about collateral anyway, so this just makes that worry founded.

And that’s it for Drawbacks!

Okay yes, that was a lot of Drawbacks. But most of them weren’t so bad, and I felt the powers were worth it. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I wanted to confirm my purchases in the GPS first. The GPS had a lot of things that seemed really useful, but since I knew I would be able to buy them later, I tried to limit myself to just what was immediately necessary. So as much as Return(The ability to go back to a world while in between Jumps) comforted me that I could go back to Girl Genius, or Warehouse Portals(being able to instantly create portals to my Warehouse, picking the size and where they were in the Warehouse, instead of having to wait by a door for an hour) almost sounded like a power in and of itself, I didn’t get them, or the other tempting things. I got:

Willpower (100 cp) - You have strong willpower by real-world standards and can easily motivate yourself to put full effort into anything you attempt, even if you don't like it.

(2750cp) As the first GPS perk I bought this jump, it was discounted to half price. I had always wanted more willpower, but I think for Jumping I needed it. I think my Spark helped for adventure-related things, but it wouldn’t help for things like just using a power a bunch to make it stronger, or doing homework when I wanted to do something else.

Trauma Proof (100 cp) - Barring supernatural intervention your priorities, sense of morality and beliefs only change how you desire them to. You are immune to any form of PTSD or other trauma-induced mental disorders.

(2650cp) I… needed this. I think the… thing with Aaronev and the Geisters messed me up a bit. And, well. I took the Drawback that made this world realistic. And Magnus Archives was on the spinny wheel both times. And it’s hard to analyze yourself and tell if you have mental problems, so better not to risk it. 

Lone Survivor (100 cp) - You do not suffer any difficulty resulting from isolation or loneliness. Your social skills do not degrade and you are guaranteed not to start having conversations with a volleyball.

(2550cp) Speaking of which, I could already kinda tell that this constant moving around- never being able to keep in contact with friends, was going to be a problem. There was another Perk in the GPS that also helped with that, by making friendships not degrade over time and making me able to personally care about a theoretically infinite number of people. I wanted it, too, but it could wait. I hadn’t made that many friends yet. But I had no reason to expect I’d make any as an unpopular, bullied, resident of detention, so the surviving loneliness was more urgent. 

Now for the actual perks in the document. It’s split up into Perks that are based on the Origin you pick (Which was what was really next) and Powers that have their own pricing system, and finally Items which are back to the Origin-based system. 

I picked the Origin

Mysterious

Maybe a mishap in the science lab opened a portal and you fell through. Or maybe that goth kid finally managed to summon something. Or you could be an android built by the nerds in the workshop. Regardless, you don’t really have a place in this world, but the school administration has decided to give you one. You can be a true Drop In, or have an origin story in this world that explains your presence somehow. Either way you are guaranteed to be going to school, and will be provided a minimum level of habitation (such as a dorm room and access to a cafeteria).

Since it had good Perks and was the best explanation for my being a weird shadow-person. 

Next in the document were general Perks, available for every Origin but still not Powers. Most of them I was ignoring, but of course I was still taking the freebies.

Academy Graduate (Free for All Origins)

This is the very basics. If you didn’t know this stuff, you could never graduate from the Academy at all. And, lucky you, you get to start out with it. You have very basic self-defense training, enough control over your powers to not accidentally hurt yourself or others, a minor grounding in the science of metahuman powers, hopefully enough knowledge of metahuman law to avoid going to prison, and a basic general education to the level appropriate for your school.

(2550cp) This was fascinating because it seemed to promise I’d have everything I needed to graduate before even entering the school. Sure, only to graduate with a D or something, but still. It also implied that I’d start with some world knowledge, which was useful because this was the first Jump I was going to with no meta knowledge. 

Most Common Superpower (Free for All Origins or 50cp)

You have the incredible good looks that comic book heroes always seem to have. Chiseled features, defined muscles, perfect curves, flowing hair, no matter what you are at least an eight out of ten, and you stay that way no matter how dirty you might be or how much you might get beat down. You will retain your fit and attractive appearance, even without exercise or proper diet, as long as you consume enough calories to avoid starvation. You will either heal perfectly, without any form of scarring, or your scars will enhance your appearance in some way. Even if your appearance is inhuman in some way, you still manage to be this attractive. As an additional bonus, you have perfect control over your fertility, and menstrual cycle in the case of females. Any sexual partners will believe you when you tell them you are protected, as long as you are telling the truth. Your voice is equally incredible in some way, whether it be sexy, commanding, soothing, or just pleasant.

(2550cp) Obviously I did not pay for the upgraded version. Well, okay the upgraded version was a little tempting with just magically not getting dirty and being perfectly elegant and not having to brush my hair, but. I was not that vain. It was interesting that these free appearance boosters seemed to be common. There was one in Girl Genius, too. Anyway, the most practical part was really the ‘fertility control’ which meant that I could never have periods again. I didn’t have vivid memories of them anymore (It’s not like I had them as a Clank or in Minecraft), but I remembered that I hated them, and I knew that having to remember pads on adventures would have been a pain. Luckily, I’ll never have to think about it again!

Four Color Comics World (Free or 100cp)

Where’s the fun in living in a comic book setting (or whatever) if it doesn’t look like one? For the duration of this jump you can choose to have everything appear as if it was being drawn by an artist of your choice, and no one will find this weird or strange. For an additional 100cp you can take this effect into future worlds with you, and change around the art style as you desire with, again, no one commenting on or questioning it.

(2450cp) I-shut up! Okay yes I bought it, but look! I had gotten used to living in Phil’s art style. It’s fun. And Minecraft was fun, with the pixel style. And I barely remember what the real world looks like and I’m a little worried I wouldn’t be able to tell any realistic people’s faces apart. Plus. I don’t know. It’s fun. Astra might enjoy it. 

And that was that for the general Perks, so now the discounted ones for Mysterious. 

People Can Sometimes Surprise You (100cp, Free for Mysterious)

People fear what is different, or so you have been told. Yet, that has not been your experience at all. As long as you are not acting maliciously to harm them, people are fully accepting of the things that set you apart, be it your origin, your social customs, your inhuman appearance, or your amazing abilities. They will treat these things as interesting but unimportant details, and will judge you on your actions and personality alone.

(2450cp) Free is free, getting out of shadow-person-phobia is good. 

A World To Explore, Only One Life To Explore It (200cp, Discounted for Mysterious)

This whole world is a mystery to you, and you only have so much time to discover its wonders. Forgetting part of your experiences would be a tragedy, but you don’t have to worry about that. You have a perfect memory, with instant recall, unlimited storage, and perfect indexing. You are immune to any attempt to remove, add to, alter, or otherwise tamper with your memories in any way. You are also immune to being harmed by your own memories. Seeing an eldritch being the first time might damage your sanity, but just remembering it will not. This perfect memory is fully retroactive.

(2350cp) You might wonder why I’m buying perfect memory when I have perfect memory. The reason is that this is a lot more comprehensive. It’s retroactive, so I should be able to remember things from my home world, and the specific wording of the Perks I got in Girl Genius and Minecraft, and it’s guaranteed to have unlimited storage and stuff so I don’t need to make a Well of Memory like Albia. 

Out Of Context (400cp, Discounted for Mysterious)

You are not quite normal, even by the rather abnormal standards of your peers. Your unusual origins have resulted in your abilities also being slightly unusual. Not enough to alter their function, but enough that your powers are not vulnerable to manipulation by outside forces. Your powers and internal power supplies cannot be drained, suppressed, weakened, stolen, copied, altered, controlled, or otherwise manipulated against your will by anything short of Jumpchain fiat. You also have the ability to turn any of your powers from fully off to fully on, or anywhere in between, and you cannot be forced to use this metaphorical dimmer-switch against your will, not even if you’re mind controlled or similar.

(2150cp) No one but Astra can mess with my powers. And I can turn off or weaken any power that’s getting in my way. So, if I had to avoid getting carried away by Spark fugue, I could dim my Spark until I was free to indulge. 

That was it for Perks in my Origin, but I was getting some from the others, too. Specifically,

Pay Attention, I Am Only Going Over This Once (100cp, Free for Legacy)

Your parent/mentor was not a professional teacher, so you learned to pick up on things quickly. You learn, train, and otherwise improve your abilities and yourself five times faster than you otherwise would.

(2050cp) Improving 5x faster pairs very well with

Living Up To Your Potential (400cp, Discounted for Normal Kid)

Those Legacy kids are always bragging about how their mentor is some major hero or villain, how powerful they are, how skilled they are. But what those kids forget is that most of their mentors started out just like you, a Normal Kid. They fought their way to the very top, and so can you. You no longer have any limits to how far you can train your abilities. You can always get more powerful, more skilled, faster, or in some other way better. This applies to physical and mental abilities, skills, and anything else you put the time into training. What’s more, you will never lose what you earn through time or disuse. Your skills will never get rusty, your strength and speed will never decrease, and your powers will never weaken. Even abilities that should be static and unchangeable can be trained up.

(1650cp) Being able to improve all my abilities without limit. This power seems incredible. Could I train my Spark into being a God-Queen? What would improvement on something like Lone Survivor even look like? 

Anyway, that brings us to the main event. Powers. For which I was generously given 600cp, to be spent only on Powers. Because I was going to buy far more than that many powers, I’ll make this simple and add it to my cp total. (2250cp) Each power has a tier to pay for, and customization that can change the price, so these are a bit more complex.

Required Secondary Powers (Free for All)

You have the often implied but equally often never stated ability to have your powers work in ways that won’t hurt or adversely affect you. This works for powers purchased in this specific jump and for any future powers you gain that are at least superficially similar in nature to the ones purchased here.

(2250cp) Well, that one’s not that complex, just useful. Also incredibly vague but I won’t think about it too much because I think the point is it means you don’t have to think about it too much. 

Cloning/Duplication (300cp)

You have the ability to multiply yourself in some way. This could be an innate power, you could have a flash-cloning device implanted in you, maybe it is a spell, or you are summoning doubles from extremely similar alternate realities. Regardless, your clones will obey your commands, will flawlessly coordinate with you, and will always acknowledge you as the original. They appear around you, spreading out as space fills and they possess all of your abilities except this one and they possess any items that you are wearing or holding, up to your own mass in weight, but these items disappear if taken from the clone. A clone that is killed is unavailable until it regenerates, which takes about an hour, but that time can be lessened by Regeneration powers or abilities. Fanwank responsibly, please.

At Cosmic Tier you can create up to one hundred copies of yourself that can last as long as you wish, or up to one thousand copies that can only last up to one hour before disappearing in some way. Any of your clones can become the new real you if your original body is destroyed, meaning you can only truly die if all copies are dead.

Power Limitation

In order to customize your powers, you can choose to make them limited in some significant way. Maybe your flight is provided by wings, making you a bit less maneuverable and requiring more space and an atmosphere to fly. Maybe you need a source of fire to create more, or your magic might require blood sacrifice, or your mind control requires you to speak to your target. Whatever the limit is, it must be noticeable, requiring accommodation or creating significant inconvenience, but it reduces the cost of that power by 50cp. For a cost reduction of 100cp, this will majorly impact that power in some way, reducing its usefulness by roughly half. These limits are not Drawbacks, they are intrinsic parts of the power, and therefore they do not go away at the end of the Jump.

Price of power: 400cp. (1850cp) So, Cosmic Tier adds 200 to the price, but I’m taking the 100 version of Power Limitation to discount it back to 400. That limitation? They appear without anything I’m wearing or holding. Yes, that means they appear naked, which limits when I can duplicate to when I can find them clothes. It also means that I can’t duplicate a deathray, or tools, so if they were going to help me build I’d need more tools for them. 

“Yes, I’ll let you get away with it.” Astra said, answering my unstated concern. “It might not be quite half the usefulness, but it’s funny. You also didn’t mention you’re only doing the 100 copies version of Cosmic, not the 1000 temporary ones.”

“Oh, I thought the default was picking one.”

“It’s not really clear. But taking the interpretation that you only get the 100 version makes the generous interpretation on the Limitation more fair.”

Wait… She doesn’t know what it means exactly? She’s also interpreting it? She didn’t write it? Huh… I wonder who did. But I should get back to it.

Creation (600cp)

You have the ability to create objects from nothing. You also have the ability to design the intended object as if you had a mental CAD system.

At Street Tier you can create objects no larger than a small car. You do not need to fully understand how these objects work, but they are limited to mundane technology and objects. Nothing living, no magic, and no super-tech.

Price: 550cp. (1300cp) The whole street-tier giving me a discount because it’s the school average is very useful. Anyway, I wanted the National version that’d let me make Sparkwork with Creation, but it was a lot more expensive and theoretically I should be able to train this up to that. Plus, I can make the materials needed to make Sparkwork, which might be more satisfying anyway. 

Enhanced Healing (200cp)

Like it says on the tin, you’ve got a healing factor. What precisely it can do and restore depends on the tier, but regardless of what type you have you age gracefully, and can expect to live for hundreds of years at least.

At Street Tier you’ve got a healing factor capable of recovering even from severe injury in no more than a day, and you can recover from minor injuries in a few minutes.

Price: 150cp (1150cp) This is pretty good. Again I can theoretically train it. (Though that sounds painful so maybe not.) But it should also go well with Duplication. 

Exotic Force Manipulation (300cp)

You have the ability to control, manipulate, and generate a specific force, energy, or concept, such as magnetism, gravity, the strong or weak nuclear force, temperature, time, space, darkness, holy energy, corruption, or weather. You may buy this multiple times for different forces. You have an intuitive understanding of the force you control. 

At Street Tier this force can be powerful enough to easily destroy a large automobile or can shield against similar attacks. Manipulation of the energy is basic, not allowing for fine control.

Price: 250cp (900cp) The force I’m picking is, of course, darkness, to go with the theme. Maybe Time or Space would be more powerful, but… messing with time is dangerous and I’m trying to stick to my theme. 

Flight (100cp)

You have the ability to soar through the air as you will, and can fully exploit 3d movement for all it’s worth. The exact mechanics of how this is done depends on the Source of the power, but in general, no matter the source, they all have the same mechanical effect. You have just good enough reflexes to not smack into things at whatever level of flight you have, but they are tied into your flight power and have no practical use beyond not flying into things accidentally.

At Street Tier you can fly at around 100mph, and suffer none of the normal complications of moving through the air at such speeds.

Price: 50cp (850cp) Mostly I just wanted to be able to hover, and not take fall damage, and… well even slow flight is very useful.

Inviolate Body (100cp)

Your body is a temple, as they say, and you benefit from such via several supernatural abilities related to it.

At Street Tier you have no need to eat, drink, breathe, produce human waste, or sleep, and are not adversely affected by environments with extreme high or low pressure such as the bottom of the ocean or the upper atmosphere or extreme temperature such as near the heart of a volcano or Antarctica.

Price: 50cp (800cp) To a certain extent this is just making up for the fact I’m not going to be a clank anymore. Also it makes sense for living shadow to not need these things. Also by now I’ve mostly forgotten how to do things like make sure I have enough food to live, so I’d like to continue avoiding needing to. 

Inviolate Mind (200cp)

Your mind belongs to you and no other, and any that would attempt to gainsay this are in for a very rude surprise as your mind actively rebuffs them. 

At Street Tier you are highly resistant to attempts to mentally control you, attempts to read your mind can be resisted with an active effort, and supernaturally boosted attempts at persuasion are less likely to work on you.

Price: 150cp (650cp) Probably would have taken this at a higher tier if I was smart… and could afford it. Mind control sucks. Hopefully this will be enough for everything I face here. 

Shapeshifter (300cp)

You have the ability to alter your physical form, gaining the physical capabilities of this new shape. You could be a werewolf, the avatar of some cosmic energy linking all animal life, a macro-sized sentient virus capable of taking virtually any form, a liquid metal robot or a number of other things. Basic use of a new form, such as standing and moving around, is instinctive.

At Cosmic Tier your form can be virtually anything, including energy, and can change at will. You could be a ball of light or a wave of gravity, or even something that technically does not exist, such as a field of darkness.

Price: 500cp (150cp) Why would a creature of darkness need to stay in one form? Mostly I took Cosmic tier to be made of darkness, but I didn’t add a power limitation because. Well the rest sounded really cool too. 

Miscellaneous (50cp)

This power is used to represent minor superhuman abilities, like Spider-Man’s ability to wall-crawl or shoot webs, the ability to summon a particular weapon to your hand, the ability to see infrared light, to breathe underwater, or something of a similar scale. This power is always Street Tier and it can be taken multiple times to represent multiple minor abilities.

(100cp) I’m taking this for being able to see in complete darkness, because my theme doesn’t really make sense without that. 

Anyway. Next I wanted to take Super (Re)Size Me so my shapeshifting could go just a bit further when it came to size, but I since growing and shrinking were sold separately, I calculated that I could only afford it if I took Street Tier and then halved the amount it let me grow/shrink as a Limitation. But that was a kinda overly complex way to do it…

“Here. I’ll let you add a size range of like horse to crow to your Shapeshifting, and let you train that up as part of your shapeshifting, in exchange for those last 100cp.”

That… was not a very good deal, but I guess it made up for the good deal she gave me on all the Street-Tier powers

“Exactly. I giveth and I taketh away. Hehehehehe.” Astra did a little mid-air loop to emphasize her point. At least she seemed to be having fun now. 

Anyway I had zeroed out so you’d think I was done but surprise! The item section gives a 200cp stipend. So now I have (200cp)

Costume (Free for All Origins or 50cp)

You have a costume of your own design that always looks good on you. It does not provide any powers, but it will never be harmed by your own powers or movements, and will alter itself to always fit you perfectly. It will remember any upgrades you make to it and is self cleaning and maintaining. For an additional 50cp you seemingly have an unending closet full of different variations of your costume that you can wear, each of them benefiting from the same properties as the base uniform, if you ever feel like switching things up.

(200cp) I’m taking the free version. The 50cp version would be very useful for my Duplicates, but still not worth it when I can make them clothes with Creation. 

Full-Ride Scholarship (Free for All Origins or 100cp)

Supers are valuable, and the Super Academy doesn't let them starve or go homeless or fail for lack of proper equipment. Your Jumper can rest assured that the Academy will cover their tuition, room, board, textbooks, school supplies, etc., and provide a reasonable spending allowance in addition. This does not interfere with and is not affected by any other source of income the student may already possess. This will cover reasonable research costs for faculty or students interested in such. The Full-Ride Scholarship is for the duration of this jump only. However for an additional undiscounted 100cp you may have this apply to any future jumps that feature you being in any form of school.

(200cp) Again, free version. 

Training Facilities (100cp)

You have all the facilities and equipment needed to train in the use of your powers, including a Danger Room equivalent. This can be attached to your Warehouse or added to any other property you possess. Any injuries are healed as soon as you leave or the training program ends, and if you or anyone else dies inside they’ll just be booted out, safe and sound.

(100cp) There are a few powers I got here that I want to train, but trying to do so in the wild would be very dangerous. Like Inviolate Mind. Mostly Inviolate Mind.

Mysterious Book (100cp, Free for Mysterious)

A strange book that you woke up with. Every time you close and open the book, the subject matter that is displayed will change. It holds any and all information that exists in written form in your current world, but you have no way of controlling what it shows. At the least, it's a neat novelty item. It will never contain memetic or otherwise similarly harmful material.

(100cp) It’s free for me, so why not? I don’t expect it to be too useful, though. 

Cell Phone and Laptop (100cp, Free for Normal Kid)

And other essential items. You have the basic devices most kids seem to possess, a smartphone, tablet/laptop, video game consoles, and whatever else seems to fit. These devices are indestructible (though they lose this feature if you try to make armor out of them), never run out of charge, always have a top-quality signal and bandwidth, and never cost you anything. They also will connect to any form of wireless network in their normal range, without needing a network key or password. The quality of them will likely vary depending on how advanced this world is, but they’ll automatically update to maintain cutting-edge tech whenever something new comes out, so long as the tech is available to the public. They will not downgrade if you go to a less advanced world.

(000cp) If I made a phone or something with Creation, I would need to get a data plan. I don’t even know how to get a data plan. This seems to solve a lot of that hassle. 

And that was it. I had made my choices. I didn’t feel ready (I kinda wanted my Totem) but I would be getting it when I got there. I just had to. I just had to commit. 

I hit confirm, and the familiar pattern of stars that seemed to accompany Astra teleporting me filled my vision.

Chapter Text

The sensation of floating fell away and I tumbled forward onto a hard concrete floor. I turned just in time to see a tear in the middle of the air, like an unstable portal ripped into existence, before it closed up and revealed an unfinished room, with pipes along the ceiling and walls. In the center was a lanky boy, looking terrified of me. 

My first instinct was to greet him, but I quickly discovered I had no mouth, and remembered Shut Up Jumper!, the Drawback that meant I would not be able to speak for my whole time here. 

I decided to wave instead.

He ran away. 

I took stock of my surroundings, and myself. The hallway itself was pretty barren. Looked like an access tunnel or something; not made for the general public. I was wearing what I assumed to be my Costume; a simple purple dress, a purple cloak, and purple boots. My skin was Vantablack dark; I looked 2-D because it didn’t reflect any light. I was also wearing a backpack. I assumed it wasn’t part of my Costume because it was not purple, but it also wasn’t one of the ones from Girl Genius that I had been wearing when I Jumped. It was also heavy. Inside was a heavy blanket, a laptop, a tablet, a phone, and a tome of a book with fancy metal embellishments on the cover, but no title. There was also a three-ring binder with a fair bit of lined paper inside, and a pencil case filled with HB pencils, office style pens in red, blue, and black, a pink eraser, a single black sharpie, and one of those plastic manual sharpeners. At the very bottom, hidden under everything else, was my Totem of Undying. The eyes were green again, proving that it was indeed a new one.

The devices were clearly Cell Phone and Laptop. I opened the book, saw a recipe for Deviled Lettuce, and decided that my suspicion that it was the Mysterious Book was confirmed. The rest I just had to assume was from Beginner’s Chest. So it gave me a backpack, a blanket, and school supplies. 

I held the Totem in my left hand. I immediately wanted to put it down. In Minecraft it felt natural to hold something in each hand all the time, not that many things took two hands, and it’s how the game is played. Here it felt weird. I needed to put it on a belt or necklace or something. Of course, I didn’t have any of those things, but I had Creation. In theory I could make them. 

I spent an embarrassing moment just trying to will a belt into existence, before I thought of Academy Graduate. With the indexing in my head provided by A World To Explore, Only One Life To Explore It, I went over everything Academy Graduate taught me. The info about my powers was… scarce. It was just about Darkness Manipulation, and it was how to let go of shadows so I’m not controlling them, and how to prevent myself from casting a shadow. (At this point I noticed I was not casting a shadow.) The self-defense was just some rolls, some throws, and some dodging strategies. Super early martial arts stuff, not much more than I got from A World To Explore, Only One Life To Explore It and the fact I took a few Aikido classes as a kid. The most interesting part was actually the science of supers and general education. Apparently all supers were either descendents of Gods, or gifts from them though Rifts in reality, with the power from the Rift either going to a normal child or coalescing into a being itself. The gen ed gave me basic knowledge of a version of English that was apparently spoken here. It had similarities to normal English, but was different enough that they’d definitely have trouble understanding my English. The name of the planet we were on was apparently Viea 7Se, fifth planet from the sun in the Viea 7S system, a system run by the Gadidae Federation.  And everything else it taught me I already knew, because it was basic math and science. 

The boy came back, hiding behind a larger girl who had horns. Darn, I ran out of time to learn how to use Creation before someone found me. The girl lowered her head at me, as if she was going to ram me. I waved my hands in front of me to try to communicate that I didn’t want to fight. 

She approached slowly, but still with a dangerous expression. I held up my hands in surrender. She stopped in front of me, and looked me over. All I could do was silently await her judgment.

“Can you understand me?” She asked.

I nodded quickly, and hesitantly reached for my bag, which I had left on the floor nearby. She stepped back to let me grab it. I took out the three-ring binder and pencil case, and wrote on the lined paper.

‘ Hello. I mean no harm. ’ 

She smiled, and looked back at the boy, who was still at the other end of the hallway. “Seems it’s not as bad as you thought.”

He cautiously stepped forward. “It’s… not [a word I didn’t know] kill us?”

“No, it says it means no harm.”

“It talks?!”

I started writing ‘ I can not talk ’ as I thought that’d be the next question.

“Well, it wrote . I [word I assume means don’t] think it can speak.”

She looked back at me, and I held up the paper.

“Yeah it says it can’t.” (The info from Academy Graduate didn’t include ‘can’t’, but I was pretty sure of this one since it had the same structure as what I assume is don’t.)  

He continued to slowly approach me and the girl, who turned back to me. 

“Hey! I’m Saavi and [I couldn’t understand the word but she gestured to the boy] Claye.” She waited a beat, and when I didn’t start writing, continued, “What’s your name?”

‘ Elzerei ’ 

“Elzerei?” She pronounced it ‘eel-zee-rai’. I tried to coach her through correct pronunciation (el-zer-ay) in writing, but I didn’t have a good instinct for what letter corresponded to what sound,  and I couldn’t always understand what she said, and it took me a while to write compared to speaking.

After a while she just decided to call me ‘E’ and I gave up and went with it.

Claye said we should tell a teacher about me, but asked me to lie and say I came from the big Rift in space instead of one he made. As a more complex idea, this took a bit longer to get across, and we started to develop a system that if I didn’t understand something, I would tilt my head in confusion and they would rephrase it.

I agreed, and they started leading me through the building. It didn’t take long to leave the back hallways and get into the main building. It was a strange combination of grand arches and wall paintings, normal boring classrooms and offices, and a few high tech futuristic machines glimpsed through interior windows. 

Where we were going was apparently one of the normal offices. The door was unlabeled, and the thin window beside the door was frosted. Claye knocked softly. Saavi nudged him, but then we heard a quiet, stern, masculine voice through the door.

“Come in”

Claye opened the door, but let Saavi and I enter first. 

The man sat behind a tall desk stacked with papers. He watched us severely over his glasses. I waved awkwardly. He raised an eyebrow, and looked to Claye for an explanation. 

“I found it- er- her. She came from the Rift.”

“ The Rift? Or one of yours?” He said it mildly, but from Claye and Saavi’s reactions I could tell that it was important. They were worried. Claye seemed to always be worried, but Saavi was too. 

“The-the Rift.” Claye insisted. 

“Really.” He did not sound like he believed it at all. “And what does she say?” He looked at me.

I covered where my mouth would be with my hands, and luckily Saavi got it.

“She can’t talk.”

“Fine. [he said a word I didn’t know and did a thumbs up] if he’s telling the truth and [he said a word I didn’t know and did a thumbs down] if he’s lying.”

I nervously did a thumbs up. I didn’t think we were going to fool him, and I didn’t know the consequences for lying, but I wasn’t going to betray the first people I’d met. I fiddled with my bag, trying to decide whether to take my totem back out. 

“Mm.” He looked unimpressed. “And how did she get this far without being spotted?

“She-”

The man stood up suddenly, and slammed his hands on the table. “I don’t believe you!”

We all took a step back.

“Okay! Yes she [said too quickly for me to get] rift I made but nobody saw and it closed right after!” Claye defended himself.

The man (Teacher?) sighed. “Thank you for your… eventual honesty.” he said bitterly, noting something down on one of the many papers. “I will be scheduling you another section of Power Control.” 

Claye just looked down sadly, but Saavi argued. 

“That means both of his [word I didn’t know] are Power Control! You’re taking him out of Powers And Technology!”

“Choosing one’s own classes is a privilege for those who can keep their powers from being a danger to others.”

“But that’s not fair! It’s not his fau-”

The teacher cut her off. “Saavi. Leave.”

She looked ready to argue, but Claye waved her off and she went.

The teacher sighed, and spun his chair to face his computer. “I can’t do all of it, but we might as well get your new friend into the system. Do you know if she can read and write?”

“Ah- yes. She had some trouble with a few words but that’s how she talked to us.” 

“Mm.” He produced a pad of paper and a pen from his cluttered desk, and handed them to me. “Name?”

I wrote ‘ Elzerei ’, thought better of it, and wrote, ‘ call me E ’ after it. 

He looked at my paper and then typed on the computer. I couldn’t see what he wrote. “Powers?”

That was a hard question. I bought a lot of powers this Jump, but I didn’t know how to use any of them yet. I also had abilities from my previous Jumps, but I was unsure if they counted as powers properly and I wasn’t sure how Minecraft powers would work in a realistic world. 

He noticed my hesitation. “How long have you been here?”

‘ Half hour? ’

“Mm.” He typed something else, then leaned over and wrote ‘ new student; undiscovered powers ’ and his signature. (which was an indecipherable squiggle.) “Take this to lab 2. Claye will show you the way.”

And so we left. I trailed awkwardly behind Claye as we passed through mostly empty hallways. 

Pretty soon, he asked, “Do you know what the lab is?”

I shook my head no. 

“They’re the rooms where people are allowed to use dangerous powers. Lab 2 is where they usually test new supers.”

I nodded slightly in understanding. I did want a chance to test my new powers, but I was worried I wouldn’t be able to use them on command, and they’d think I didn’t have any powers. 

Once we got further, the hallways began to have more people in them. Claye quietly explained that the area around the labs is usually crowded. It wasn’t enough people for me to think of it as crowded, but it was definitely less empty. The people ranged from looking completely normal to much more outlandish like me, but the majority were human with a few stand-out features, like Saavi’s horns. I saw elven ears, unnatural hair and eye colors (though the hair could just be dyed well, I doubted anyone was wearing cosplay contacts for a normal school day.)

Three students approached us, a normal-looking girl, a girl who looked to be made of lightning, and someone with steel-grey hair and eyes. 

The normal one was clearly the leader, and spoke first. “Hey mud! Who’s your new [word I didn’t know]?” Several other students turned to look.

Claye cringed. “Hey Adley”

She stomped her foot. “That’s Savior to you.”

“Sorry, Savior,” he said quickly, and started inching away from her. I followed. I assumed these were the bullies from the Bullying Problem Drawback, so I knew I’d probably have to stand up to them eventually, but I thought it wiser to get a handle on my powers first. 

“You didn’t answer my question.” Adley said dangerously. She approached me, her lackeys trailing her. “Who are you?”

I kinda just backed away a few steps.

“She’s E. She can’t talk.” Claye said, also backing up. 

She looked me over consideringly. “Who’s in charge here?”

Reluctantly, I pointed at her. All the bystanders seemed to be on her side, and I didn’t want to start a fight yet.

“Huh? What’s behind me?” She feigned ignorance and exaggeratedly looked behind her. A few people in the crowd laughed. “I’m afraid you’ll have to say it.” She grinned wickedly.

“You.” Claye said quietly.

She turned on him. “Speak only when spoken to, dirt,” she spat. He flinched away. 

“Well, if you can’t tell me, I’ll have to show you. Della?”

The lightning girl stepped up. “Remember to listen to us from now on.” she said before holding her hand out towards me.

I really should have seen it coming, given all the buildup, but I still was completely caught off guard when she shot lightning at me. 

It was instant. One moment she was just looking menacing, the next I was writhing on the floor in incredible pain. It was worse than when Astra dusted me! I couldn’t focus on anything except the feeling of being burned alive, every nerve screaming. 

When I woke up me and Claye were alone, in what looked like a storage closet.

“Oh, good, you woke up. I was getting worried… Della usually has enough control not to do serious damage.” 

Oh… then it might be my light weakness that made that hurt so much. And I would almost certainly have to face Della again. Great. Even if she missed me it would probably still hurt a lot. 

Still, by the time we got to lab 2 I felt mostly fine. Even emotionally which was really weird. I knew it was Trauma Proof keeping the event from scarring me emotionally, but instead I felt… weirdly empty. I mean obviously I was mad at the bullies for hurting me, but… I felt the emptiness of not feeling something I knew I should be. I tried to ignore it. It was a good thing to not get traumatized. 

Anyway, we got to the lab. Claye showed me to a desk, where a man seemed to be dozing off.

I looked at Claye, nervous and not sure what to do.

“Oh, Professor Alixer always naps when he gets the chance. He’s nice, though, so you’ll be okay.” He pulled out a phone and checked it. “I have to get to class.” He offered me an encouraging smile. “Good luck!”

And I was left alone with the sleeping Alixer. I put the clipboard on the desk in front of him, but he didn’t react. He looked so tired, I felt bad about waking him up, but that was what I was supposed to do. I knocked softly on the desk. No reaction. Probably I would have to poke him. Before that I took the clipboard back and wrote ‘ I can not talk ’ on the top page, so I’d have the response ready. 

Then I got up my courage and poked him softly on the shoulder. He sat bolt upright and an orange forcefield pushed me back. This obviously surprised me, but on reflection the most surprising part was that he had the control to push me back softly. 

“Yes? What’s on fire this time?” He asked blearily. 

I waved, and pointed to the clipboard. It still had bits of my conversation with the teacher who sent me, but that was probably fine. 

He squinted at the paper for a bit, and then squinted at me. It seems he agreed that the room was too bright. (It wasn’t bright enough to hurt, but it was still annoying.) 

“You’re E. New student who can’t talk and doesn’t know their powers.”

I nodded. 

“Any idea what your powers might be?” He gestured at the clipboard.

‘ shadow/darkness, make things, self-copy ’ My theme, and the two powers I was most looking to learn. Flight and shapeshifting too, of course, but they didn’t beat being able to make my own materials or have more hands to turn them into Sparkwork with. 

He turned around the clipboard to read what I wrote, and his eyes widened a bit. 

“The room there,” he gestured to the empty white room that the office we were in overlooked, “is for power testing. Why don’t you go in there and see what you can do?”

Chapter Text

I did as told, but the room was bright enough to make my skin prickle and eyes burn. 

“I’ll turn down the lights.” Alixer said through a speaker by the window to the office.

I relaxed a bit as soon as he did, and nodded at him in thanks. Then I looked back to the ground, trying to figure out how to use my powers. It certainly did not come as easy as Minecraft mechanics. I thought back to what I had learned from Academy Graduate, specifically that my not having a shadow was something it had taught me to do instinctively, rather than just a trait of what I was. It taught me to control my powers, but I think that meant how to not activate them accidentally. So the first step was to give myself a shadow. 

First, I took off my backpack, and put it on the ground. Once I stopped touching it, its shadow began to reassert itself. The white environment and dispersed fluorescent lighting meant the shadow wasn’t that strong, but it was enough to properly determine the direction of the lighting. I turned from it to where my own shadow should have been. It looked surreal, like I was badly photoshopped into reality. Which went well with my 2-D looking skin. I forced myself to focus. Shadow. I tried to will it into existence. Nothing happened. 

I focused harder, imagining it extending from my feet, like a lightsource directly above me was moving to the side. Finally it appeared, sketchy at first, like I was drawing it in, but soon it became a much deeper purple than the shadow cast by my backpack. Once it extended far enough that I could see my head, I saw that it had two holes in the head, like white eyes watching me back. Soon it began to darken and extend on its own, further than it should have been able to, almost matching my own height. It darkened to the same pure black as my skin, the white eyes almost glowing in comparison. Then she blinked. I knelt down, and held out my hand for her. With an effort, she managed to pull her hand from the 2-D floor and hold mine. 

I pulled myself up with the standing part, so I could stand fully. I was half-naked, and I walked to my bag to get my blanket and cover up my new half. Walking with four legs was a bit awkward, but easy to get used to. Opening the bag was harder. I kept getting in my own way. My connected arms could not grab things, and my other arms were too far away from each other. I would need to disconnect myself again. I closed my eyes, and focused on the connection, on the shape of shadow that needed to become two separate hands again. Slowly, carefully, I disentangled them from each other, and I opened my eyes. 

My copy stared back at me, and I stepped out of the way, letting her get the blanket herself. She wrapped it around herself, granting a modesty that she didn’t fully need, given that we were basically just silhouettes. Still, I understood the impulse, and decided I wouldn’t try more Duplication until we had more privacy and hopefully more clothes. She also took out the binder and pencil case, and took out some paper and pens. One pen she tossed my way, the other she started to write with. 

‘ hello’ She wrote it in normal English, not whatever version they spoke here. 

‘ bonjour ’ I replied, and she gave me an annoyed look, her tall white oval eyes changing to annoyed half-circles. I wondered if my eyes looked like that; just empty almost-glowing white ovals. ‘ what do I look like? ’ I asked her. She drew a quick doodle of me, which looked almost exactly like her but wearing my Costume. 

Below it she wrote ‘ and me? ’.

I wrote ‘ the same. ’.

We considered each other for a moment. I had lots of thoughts I wanted to share with her, to talk out, but I didn’t want to write them down. It took too long. Apparently we could recombine, and would do so accidentally if we touched. I suspected my boots were the only thing that stopped us from starting out merged as just some weird person-shadow amalgamation. But it would take knowledge of shapeshifting to properly go back to one person, since when we merged we ended up as an amalgamation of both of us. So I guess the next thing to work on is shapeshifting.

‘ shapeshifting? ’ I wrote, condensing my thoughts into something easier to write.

She nodded. 

We stood up, and backed away from each other and our bag. 

I tried to ignore her, and instead focus on my left hand, which I held in front of my face. I used a similar idea as before to try to elongate my fingers, visualizing them extending and remembering long sunset-shadows, where hands could be long, elegant talons. It worked. I could feel myself changing, though it wasn’t painful. My stomach did flips though, when I looked at the unnatural, spindly thing attached to my arm. I started to panic at the idea that I wouldn’t be able to change it back, but I pushed it to the back of my mind, reminding myself that this was only my left hand anyway. Instead I closed my hand, and felt how every place that my skin touched my skin was an opportunity to fuse them, and I did so. That was more like letting go, giving up on the difference between shadow and shadow. I turned it into a blade, sharp on the side the pinky would be. Then, I tried to change back. At first, I was trying to reverse each step along the way, but it went more smoothly and I skipped the talon-hand, as it much more easily reverted to its natural state. That was a relief. I looked over to my copy, and saw she was still swinging a knife-hand through the air. Great minds think alike I guess. 

The next thing to try was a full-body transformation, of course. If I wanted to be able to recombine with my copy, we would need to figure that out. I decided the easiest thing to try would be a cat. 

First, I thought it would be less disturbing if I did the transformation quickly, so I tried to do one of those ‘transform into an animal while jumping’ moves that look so cool in animation or CGI. This ended with me just squatting on the floor embarrassed. I closed my eyes, and changed my pose to a more catlike one. I tried to focus, to feel my form changing. I tried to picture it. It wasn’t working. I understood that a full-body transformation would be harder, but what was I doing wrong? What did I do before that I wasn’t now? (And why were these powers so much harder to figure out, the version of Shapeshifting I got said I could change instantly.)

I snuck a glance at my copy, who was also sitting still with her eyes closed. Though with her eyes closed she just looked like a proper silhouette, and I had to look at the direction of her limbs to tell she hadn’t just turned to face the wall. 

I did turn away from her, not wanting to get distracted. Then I tried again. Okay. What was different about when it worked? Shadows. I started by thinking of myself as a shadow. In my mind’s eye, I imagined a shadow-puppet show, where I was both the shadow and the puppeteer. I moved my hands in the light of day, and the image on the cave wall changed. 

I opened my eyes and I was a panther. I wanted to laugh . I had shown them all . Even my copy , who had only managed to turn into a housecat. I stalked over to her, knowing my eyes were wild with madness and victory . 

She took a step back, her empty white eyes wide. I smiled a fanged smile at her, and offered her a paw. She looked concerned for a moment, before she stepped forward and accepted it. 

A jolt of fear destabilized my fugue, and I stumbled on an awkward six feet as I tried to reconcile two sets of memories. I remembered solving the shapeshifting problem in a wondrous discovery and metaphor about the shadows on Plato’s cave , and I remembered finding it though a strong will to keep trying, and slowly feeling out what the act of shapeshifting felt like, and what I had to do to activate it. Like trying to move a muscle in an extra limb, slowly wrapping my brain around a concept it wasn’t made for. 

The second method was the one I used to properly recombine (back into a humanoid shadow). The first was a wonderful breakthrough , but it was done using the Spark, and I didn’t have any tools or materials. I didn’t want to wind up breaking down their lab room for parts. 

“You good in there?” I heard from the speaker.

I gave Alixer a thumbs-up. 

“Okay. uh- knock on the floor if you need help.”

I nodded, and then went back to trying to ignore him and figure out my powers. I really wanted to figure out Creation. First, I decided to make another copy. (After all, having a copy work on a problem with me in tandem before wound up with two different solutions, and I now had access to both of them. Having my copies figure out things for or with me was going to be very useful.) 

This time, I turned into a cat first (just a housecat again). I realized that my Costume did in fact change with me, and thought it was kind of silly to be a cat wearing boots on my hind legs. Almost like I was copying a certain specific cartoon character named after that trait… 

Anyway, I duplicated myself again, though this time I ran into the problem that my front paws stayed connected with my copy, and had to manually shapeshift them apart like the first time I had accidentally connected with my copy. She walked over to the blanket (which I had left on the floor when I turned into a cat the first time), picked it up in her mouth, and transformed back into our natural form, barely managing to keep the blanket mostly covering her. 

I also turned back into a humanoid, and then faced away from her. I didn’t want to get distracted while I attempted to figure out Creation. I decided to start with shadows again. If my shadow created another me… I looked at my bag, still in the center of the room, still casting a faint shadow. I walked over slowly, my eyes fixed on the shadow. 

Still, instead of trying to manipulate the shadow of my backpack, I took a fresh piece of paper out of the three ring binder. I set it on the ground, and turned my right hand into a scalpel, carefully cutting the shape of a wrench out of the paper. I picked up the paper wrench, barely looking at it, my eyes fixed on its soft, blurry shadow. I tried to tap back into the Madness, just a bit, just enough to make it back to the sun, where I could cast shadows on the cave wall . 

Before my eyes, the shadow deepened, edges gaining clarity as the shape of a wrench was clear on the floor. I focused on it, willing it into existence. When I decided it looked solid enough, I reached out and grabbed it, focusing on the separation between it and my fingers. 

I pulled it from the floor, and in my hand, shining in the fluorescent lighting, was a black steel wrench. 

I looked over to my copy, eager to share my discovery , to see what she achieved and found that she had transformed her left hand into a walking stick that was still clearly attached to her. I deflated in an approximation of a sigh. Were my copies dumber than me ? Disappointing .

Walking over to her, I flipped the wrench in my hand. 

She looked up and immediately rushed over to look at the wrench. Knowing what she wanted to know and already bored of explaining it to her, I grabbed her arm as she approached. 

Again I stumbled, the jarringness of two conflicting emotional states combining (and going from two legs to a strangely arranged four) throwing me off. Still, it didn’t take too long to get my bearings and properly recombine, though the moment I did I almost regretted it. The next obvious step was making a new copy, to have two of me that are up-to-date on my breakthroughs.

Instead, I packed up my things, including my new wrench, and left the chamber, going back the way I had come to get to the office. 

I found Alixer at the desk, a notepad in front of him, head supported by one hand, though as I stepped closer his eyes opened. With a valiant effort, he managed to turn to me. 

“Figure out your powers?”

I nodded. 

“Great. Go talk to the headmaster about enrollment… their office is… C248… down the hall, up the second staircase, immediate right…” he gave garbled directions, interspersed with him forgetting the order or correcting parts. Of course, I memorized all of it, but I still wasn’t sure it was wholly accurate.

Despite that, he clearly needed sleep, and was too tired to be coherent anyway. So I walked off with a concerned glance back. I didn’t need sleep now, but I remembered what that was like. I silently wished him luck as I left. 

Chapter Text

Wandering the halls alone, guided by uncertain directions, was terrifying. It reminded me of Sturmhalten, of Castle Heterodyne, of every time I walked into the wrong room in school. The fact I was going to meet the headmaster didn’t help. What if they were busy? What if I was being a nuisance? Still, I walked on. I was told to, however incoherently, and I needed to get properly enrolled in the school. It was the point of the Jump, and I didn’t want to know what Astra would do if I tried to go off the rails like that. I didn’t really want to try to escape the school anyway. Even with the super elements, I understood school. It was sometimes annoying and difficult (it was sometimes torturous), but it wasn’t dangerous. This one might be more dangerous than the ones in my home world, but still. Probably less dangerous than the wider world. Staying in school was the safe option, for multiple reasons. So to the headmaster’s office I went. 

Most of the hallways were strangely empty. Some were more busy, and even the empty feeling ones had a few people walk by every now and then, but it still felt odd. When walking down the hallways with people, I worried about someone like Adley showing up. When walking down the empty ones, I worried I had stumbled into a restricted section.

Mostly I tried to focus on following the confusing directions. I remembered them perfectly, but when he had corrected himself, did he mean to disregard the previous direction or a set of them? Quickly, I ended up backtracking as the school didn’t seem to match the directions. What second staircase? I could only find one before we got to a turn! 

After an absurd amount of time searching, I started to get a basic feel for the layout of the building. It was complex, and I definitely wasn’t finding all of it, but I began to realize that none of the rooms I was looking at had the C prefix to the room number. In fact, most of the room numbers didn’t have letter prefixes at all. I wasn’t even in the right general area. Hmmm. I had basically two options to speed up my search. Find someone else to ask for directions (meaning I’d have to find someone with the patience to deal with reading my question, and probably have to try to explain my situation all over again.) or I could just find somewhere mostly empty, make a bunch of cat copies, and have them come back to me either when they found something or after about two hours. I was a little worried about losing track of my copies, since I didn’t want to… leave bits of myself behind when I Jumped. But there was a lot of time between now and then to find each other, and we had A World To Explore, Only One Life To Explore It. They would remember the way back. If some were still missing when I left to talk to the headmaster, I’d just leave a copy behind to tell them where I’d gone.

Because I’d have to stay there for a while, the empty area I picked out was a broom closet. It had a light switch, and it felt so good to just be able to put down my bag and sit in the dark. Of course, I could still see perfectly well, but being in the dark felt like, I don’t know, like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. (Okay, being able to put down my heavy backpack was also very nice. I’d been walking for too long.)

So I turned into a cat and started making copies. I decided to only send out 90, in case I needed copies for something else, but I was frustrated enough with the size of the school that I felt 90 might be necessary. Plus, making so many copies was good practice. By the time I got to 20, I got bored and started figuring out how to make more than one at once. (Under the correct lighting, a person can have multiple shadows. With my Darkness Manipulation, I can have as many shadows as I need at the time.) It still took a while to ramp up past two at a time, and as I tried for four at a time (and as I had more copies existing at once), I began to get more and more tired. The last 10 I did one at a time because I was just too tired. I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to make it to 100 if I tried. But that didn’t matter. I had sent my 90 copies to go search, I could just curl up, rest, and wait. 

According to my phone, the first one came back around an hour later. She excitedly hopped up on a shelf in front of me before holding out her paw. Even before I took it, I suspected she had found what we were looking for. 

I left a copy of myself in the closet to tell the others where I was going. (After testing to make sure my copies could combine with each other without me.) I left my backpack with her. It was too heavy to make it where I was going. I hoped the headmaster had paper and pencils.

Apparently, all of the school except for where the C-rooms were was underground. When I had gone up there, I saw the ground outside the windows and realized it. It certainly explained the odd lack of windows down here. I suspected that the above ground section was the normal school, after all, according to the rolls the school was secret but housed in a school. 

Getting there was certainly enough of a hassle. I had to squeeze through the mechanism of a secret door that I didn’t know the passcode to. It required both my cat form and a bit of shapeshifting on top of that to get past the smallest parts. Luckily, the mechanism seemed to be pretty old compared to a lot of the tech in the academy. I’m not sure I could squeeze through something newer. 

I tried to stay hidden, just like I had last time I was up there (since I had snuck in, I doubted I was allowed up there…), but it was a lot harder keeping hidden as a shadow person than a shadow cat. I only made it a couple of doors past the entrance before someone pulled me aside.

“What are you doing?! Everyone knows Academy students can’t be up here in Super [word I didn’t know]!” 

I just stared up at her, not knowing how to communicate everything to her without my papers. 

“Ugh, [word I didn’t know] Supers, always thinking they can do whatever they want.” She grabbed my arm. “Come with me.”

I followed, trying to give her a confused look, but she wasn’t even looking at me.

After a bit, she asked “Do you know where we’re going?”

It took a bit for her to run out of patience. She still didn’t look back at me.

“The headmaster’s office! I’m putting a stop to this behavior once and for all! You’ll be lucky if you get out of detention before you graduate!”

Ah. I get it. This was all somehow set up for the Detentions Drawback. I looked up at the teacher, now almost sad instead of afraid. How much did the Drawback affect her? Was she always this high-strung? What about Alixer? Did it cause him to send me up here, to be falling asleep mid-sentence? How much of my journey was invisibly set up around me? I remembered having this same question about Klaus and putting it out of my mind. Maybe I should ask Astra next time we talk… 

The headmaster’s office was pretty much what I expected. A high desk in the middle of the room, two chairs in front of it, clearly for a parent and their misbehaving child, it had some of that old style of building that I’d seen in the basement, with a wood floor, ornate bookshelves, and curtains on the windows. Someone (the headmaster?) was sitting at a smaller desk that was behind and to the side of the big one, at a computer. 

They stood, and walked to the big desk, their demeanor changing as they sat regally at the desk. They were the headmaster.

“Yes, Ms. Taln?” The headmaster asked.

“I found this Academy student wandering around the civilian building.” Oh! C stood for civilian!

The headmaster peered down at me assessingly. “Have you a defense for yourself?”

I thought for a moment, then pointed at myself and mimed writing on the desk. 

“Ms. Taln? A pad of paper and pen for our student?”

Ms. Taln did as she was told, and once again I could communicate. (I really needed to learn to Create paper and pencil) 

‘ Hello. I am E. I can not talk. I am new student. ’ They watched silently as I wrote.

“Hello E. I am Headmaster Angel. I’ve been expecting you.” Their voice had a strange melody to it, an accent I hadn’t heard before.

I tilted my head, hoping they would explain.

“The Academy is the center of Super society. It is where we learn of our culture, and are taught how to hide. Many would see the descendants of the gods wiped out, or use our loved ones against us. For this reason the Academy must stay secret.”

I nodded, and Ms. Taln looked smug.

“This is why you will be receiving detention during the next two days.”

Ms. Taln looked disappointed. I was a bit worried. Not receiving the amount of detention Ms. Taln wanted for me just meant I’d end up getting in trouble for something else later.

“Students are only allowed to leave the school in a school-approved (or in your case, created) Civilian identity, or by surfacing as a Hero or Villain somewhere far enough from the school.”

“Don’t give them ideas,” Ms. Taln grumbled.

“Of course we encourage all our students to pursue either the Heroic or Civilian routes, but our school is open to all descendants of the gods. It is the government’s job to punish lawbreakers.” They smiled. “It is my job to protect my students.”

Oh interesting. I had no plans on being a villain, but I found the implication that the school in some way protected them was interesting. 

“Now, while you’re here, why don’t we work out your class schedule and living situation?” Headmaster Angel said. Ms. Taln seemed to get the hint that it was time for her to go.

They beckoned me to the side desk (I brought my paper and pen), and pulled up a bunch of forms on the computer. We spent the next two hours or so deciding on things like my class schedule, living situation, accommodations, Civilian identity, and so on. 

For classes, 4 were required, and students were encouraged to take 2 electives. Required classes were: History Of Demigods, Laws, Supers, and Superheroes, Maintaining a Civilian Identity, and Power Control, which was a lab class. Lectures were held for 2 hours on three days a week, and labs were 3 hours 2 days a week. For my electives I picked Powered Combat and Workshop, both labs. 

“Are you sure? Taking three labs means having a 9 hour day. We usually encourage students to take one lab elective and one lecture elective.”

‘ I’m sure. ’ I didn’t need to sleep anyway, and from the description, those would be the only classes that would actually be useful to me. 

Anyway that meant my labs would be on Thursday and Friday, with my lectures on the other days of the week. 

There was student housing on campus, so obviously I was going to be using that. They gave me a room number and directions to where to go for keys. My roommate was apparently named Kirst.

They talked about getting me some text-to-speech software on a phone or something, and I told them I had a phone but left it with one of my copies. (I had told them about the powers I had figured out in lab 2 as part of our conversation about class choices.) Once I told them I didn’t need to eat, they just said they’d have the money for my meal plan added to the meager stipend supplied for textbooks and the like. They also said they would tell teachers to listen to me if I ask them to turn lights down, though I didn’t think it’d be a problem in most classes.

For Civilian identity, they eventually agreed I didn’t need one. At least not yet. Usually they try to encourage all students to maintain some kind of Civilian identity, since it’s necessary for any official job and can be a necessary escape from Super life. However they acknowledged that I didn’t have any connection to the outside world, and wouldn’t be able to pass as human. 

“That’s all.” Headmaster Angel took me to a secret door in their office that seemed to lead back into the underground complex. 

They gave me a long look, seemingly considering something. Like they wanted to say something, like they were sad.

But all they said was, “Until we meet again.”

I walked down the stairs, and they hesitated as they closed the door behind me, but still said nothing.

The directions to the person with the keys started there, so I started to follow them. Once I found hallways I recognized though, I veered off course. I had some things and selves to retrieve. 

In the dark supply closet, wearing a simple dark purple dress I had not seen before, was my copy. She perked up when I entered, but then looked concerned. I held out my hand for her, and she nodded, accepting it.

I was worried because two of my copies had still not returned. I had mapped almost the entire school, and I had no idea where they might have gotten lost. Reluctantly, I created another copy to stay in the closet and wait for them. She put on the dress I had made while I was waiting for me to come back. I picked up my backpack, and cleaned up the supply closet of a lot of the random stuff I had made on my trips and while waiting. I ended up making another copy (and she made herself another dress) just to help me carry it all. I couldn’t wait until I was at my room and could go to my Warehouse. (I didn’t before because I really wanted to make sure random people wouldn’t be able to get in.) 

Getting the keys was… awkward and scary. The person was clearly busy with something else, on the phone. I stood there silently for like 10 minutes before they even saw me, and then when they asked what I was there for, it was with an impatience that I knew wouldn’t wait for me to write. 

“If you aren’t going to say anything you can leave.” They said, not cruelly, but just indifferently. They clearly had other things they’d rather do than deal with me. 

I took my phone out of my pack, and struggled through the unfamiliar user interface to find a text to speech function. The keys person looked at me weirdly, but went back to their phone call, opting to ignore me.

“I was told to come here to get my room key” The robotic voice said from my phone. They looked up, startled.

“What?”

I hit play again. “I was told to come here to get my room key”.

They sighed. “Name?”

“E”

They looked at me expectantly, waiting for the rest. 

“Or Elzerei” It pronounced it wrong, saying ‘el-zee-ree-ai’. I shook my head. “E L Z E R E I Pronounced Elsa Ray” That time was close enough. I had figured out that trick to get fake voices to say my name back in my home world. 

They managed to find me in the system, and did get me my key. When I tried to thank them with the text to speech, I took too long and they asked if I wanted anything else with an annoyed voice. I still played the thanks before I left though, I was almost done writing it anyway.

Chapter Text

When the door to my dorm room clicked open for my key, I sagged against it in relief. Finally, after so long trying to navigate this place, I was- well, not home, but home for now. 

The room was apartment style, like the dorms at my home world college, with a common area separated from individual rooms with locking doors. I had a roommate, but my room was mine alone. I could go to my Warehouse without worry of someone following me in. 

My room was barren, of course, with just a dresser and one of those plastic dorm mattresses on a wire frame bed. No door other than the one I used to get in. I was hoping there’d be a closet or something. I didn’t know what happened to the other side of a door I used to get to my Warehouse, and I didn’t want to find out by Kirst using it to get in by accident. 

My copy was unpacking our things into the dresser. I nodded before returning my focus to the problem at hand. I would just need to create a closet door. I closed and locked the door of my room, blocking out the light in the common area. The dark seemed to help me with Creation, and I was making the biggest thing yet. 

Slowly, carefully, I pulled a wardrobe from a shadow on the wall. It was simple, basically just a dark wooden box with two doors on the front, only a couple inches taller than me. 

Then we spent the hour of waiting time trying to figure out our phone and laptop UI. I did the laptop and my copy worked on the phone. After a while, she knocked on the floor and pointed to the time on the phone, and then the wardrobe. I was nowhere near done figuring out the laptop, but she shooed me toward the wardrobe. I looked at her questioningly and she rolled her eyes and then held out her hand. I took it.

I had figured out how to use the phone and was confident I could figure out the laptop too while I explored my Warehouse. I was hoping I could play some video games while I was busy in the Warehouse. I separated out a new copy again, not even having bothered to properly transform into one shape. That was kinda trippy. I remembered wondering what my copy was up to, but I also remembered figuring out the phone and being frustrated with my original for not understanding the laptop. I remembered being excited about going to my Warehouse (I still was) but I also remembered rationalizing that since my original was going to the Warehouse, I could relax and play video games while she did all the important (and therefore tiring) things. Of course, since I was the original (somehow I could always tell, even though the only difference was that only the original could make more copies) I was the one who was going to the Warehouse. I had to take a moment to remind myself that this was what I wanted to do and was planning to do, since I also remembered planning to not do it and let my original do it. 

It didn’t take long to shake some sense back into myself, and open the door. My Warehouse was… very bright. Even before stepping through the door my skin stung, and I closed my eyes against the glare. Maybe my copy had the right idea. Still, it was my duty, and it wasn’t as bad as Della’s lightning, only a bit worse than lab 2. With my hands around my eyes I managed to spot the metal building, and more importantly, its door. 

After taking a moment to steel myself I sprinted for the door, and frantically pulled it open, in pain the whole time. Inside was a bit better, but skylights let in too much of the light. (The sky looked dark, but the direction of the shadows told me the light actually came from somewhere up there.) Still, the slight improvement gave me enough time to search the room. It was full of wonderful mechanical tools; cogs and wires and pistons galore, but what I was looking for was a lot more- Ha! There! 

Dramatically, I pulled the hefty knife switch, and huge metal panels slowly shifted on a beautiful machine of large pistons to cover the skylights and plunge the room into darkness.. The most overengineered blinds. They were beautiful. 

This was clearly the Worthy Workshop I bought in Girl Genius. I was tempted to just get to work making something, but there were a couple more doors than the one I came in, and I wasn’t sure, but the interior of this room looked smaller than it did from outside. There were probably more rooms. 

There were! … they also had skylights. After several rounds of running around the room like I’m on fire while looking for the light switch, I had found all my labs. I had 5, and they were themed. The first one was mechanical, the two attached to it were chemical and biological, then there was an Optics lab, and finally the last lab. It was bigger, but much more barren, but while all of them were strongly reinforced, it looked built to withstand almost anything. Ahahaha, Abombitable. Of course. All the labs were part of the same big metal building. Interestingly enough, there was no basement, though they cut into the white material of the outside floor with their own metal floor. 

As much as I wanted to stay and build in my new shiny labs, I suppressed the urge (and probably my Spark… I knew I could suppress powers with Out Of Context, but it was strange how instinctual it was. I had thought it would be more… intentional. Hopefully it would be once I got more practice. 

Anyway, I couldn’t just stay and Spark, I needed to explore the other things in my Warehouse. I still didn’t know where the Girl Genius Box Set and Parisian Collection from Girl Genius were, and from Generic Super Academy I had the Training Facilities to find. Plus, I had Minecraft builds I wanted to do! But all of that meant braving the light of the outdoors. I had two options. Either find a way to defend myself, like a hazmat suit, or build something to block out the light. Or… actually both! To build something I’d need to spend time out there, which would necessitate some defense unless I wanted to be in pain the whole time, but I didn’t want to have to wear a hazmat suit to enter my own home. House. Warehouse. 

So I made a couple of copies, who made themselves dresses and gloves. I realized this was brilliant and made myself gloves. They would let us pass materials between us without getting thrown off by merging back into one person by accident. Anyway, I went to the Optics lab to start working on sunglasses. They looked at each other and didn’t follow. I didn’t bother to figure out what they were up to, I’d find out once I’d made myself shades. 

Now, yes, with Creation I could just make normal shades from nothing, but I wanted something both stronger and able to be incorporated into the rest of the suit so there wouldn’t be any gaps for unfiltered light to pass through. I started with using Creation to make a pair, but then I used the optics equipment to analyze them. They were… a lot more complicated than I expected. I knew sunglasses polarized light, and my optics degree told me what that actually meant, but as for how they did it… that was harder to decipher. I also discovered that they filtered out ultraviolet light, and as I took them apart, I figured out that the mirroring was actually separate from the polarizing. There was a lot of carefully scraping layers off and experimenting with how that changed the light that made it though, making new shades and starting the whole process over again but with different methods. Eventually I decided modern fabrication methods were too advanced for me without being able to see any of the actual process instead of just the end result, and I just worked on using Creation to make different sunglasses until I had the strongest ones and then just made a couple paines of that exact kind of glass. 

Only after all that did I realize that Minecraft tinted glass could do just the same. Oh well. We could use that for the light protection building. Anyway, I found my copies pretty quickly in the Abominable lab, surrounded by a bunch of fabrics, a few papers, a sewing machine, and one of them wearing a plague doctor outfit. Oh! That was clever! 

I took off my gloves and offered them my hands. They accepted, taking off their own gloves. After a moment of adjustment, I separated back into three, and they understood the plan. With their help, I replaced the lenses of the goggles with the glass I had made, both on the first plague doctor outfit I made and a couple more they made. 

Once we were all suited up, I opened the door back into the main Warehouse, and we were free to explore. First, now that I was outside and not panicking, I realized that Astra wasn’t there. I didn’t exactly expect her to be there, since she had kind of implied it was my space and I assumed she had her own space and wouldn’t want to just hang out in my Warehouse all the time, but still, I had never been there without her before. 

Back in the main area, as it were, was the door in, which was just a closed door with nothing behind it. Of course, when I opened it, though it was my dorm room, and my copy annoyedly squinting at me from a new desk, the laptop open on it in front of her. I closed the door again, thinking an apology she couldn’t hear. In a pile on the ground was a pile of clothes, all the way back from my home world. The only things I had from there. I picked up my cloak tenderly, feeling the dried paint on one corner, remembering how much of my life I’d worn it for. It needed a place of pride. I didn’t even have my belt, I wasn’t wearing it when Astra took me. 

I gathered up the rest of my original clothes, bringing them to my starter Minecraft storage area. With Minecraft blocks I made a little pedestal, and put an armor stand on top, from which I hung my clothes. It wasn’t much, but… I wanted to preserve the memory. A meaningless sentiment, maybe, with A World To Explore, Only One Life To Explore It preserving the memories better than any keepsake ever could, but still. 

There were two more mysteries in the area by my chests. A mysterious cardboard box, and a small, rectangular, wooden room with only one door. Or, well, it was small compared to my labs anyway. It still looked bigger than my dorm back outside the Warehouse. 

I checked it out first, and it was full of boxes, each with all sorts of steampunk outfits inside. My Parisian Collection! A lot less useful now that I could make my own clothes with Creation, but still nice. One thing I noticed, though, was that a lot of the outfits came with sigil pins. That made sense, Girl Genius outfits had sigil pins almost more often than not, but what surprised me was the symbol. I had never seen it before, it was just three stylized four-pointed stars. Still, I had a suspicion of what it meant. Astra was very associated with stars (obviously), it was her who gave me the outfits, and she was my patron. It was almost certainly her symbol, though I also suspected it had been changed slightly to fit in with Girl Genius sigils, since it fit so well into the style. I held one, debating wearing it. 

Astra had given me- well, almost everything I had ever wanted. Not exactly, of course, but this Jumping thing was my dreams come true. I had superpowers! I was a Spark! I was a better artist than I had ever dared dream! I had met and befriended Agatha Heterodyne! She promised me immortality , if I played her game right. But Astra had also killed me, offhandedly, just as a demonstration. I had met Aaronev, and been at the wrong side of his wrench. I had faced more danger than I ever had back home. But it can’t be Girl Genius without the danger, without Aaronev, even, really, and I had chosen to go to Sturmhalten, with full knowledge of the danger involved. Sure, she trolled me with having me start Girl Genius naked, and some parts of the game got on my nerves, like the roll for sex at the start of each jump, or not realizing that the Locket Drawback would also lock out my Warehouse, but that was just the nature of the game, and the nature of the game was also giving me awesome powers every time! But she did kill me. And she didn’t even seem to understand why it upset me. One of my copies nudged me, pointing at the door. Right. Yeah, okay. I put down the sigil pin. I’d wear it if Astra asked me to, but… I wanted her to at least understand why I didn’t want to die, even if I’d come back after, before choosing to wear it myself. 

My copy led me to the mystery cardboard box, which was now open. My other copy was reading- wait… that was… LOOSE LEAF PAGES OF GIRL GENIUS?! I immediately dashed over to read over her shoulder. I didn’t recognize the page. NEW PAGES?!! I vibrated with excitement, using all of my Willpower to not just snatch it from her. Grabbing tightly onto my own arms, enough to feel my nails through the thick cloth of my outfit, I forced myself to look back at the rest of the box. It was the Girl Genius Box Set, with hardback books of every comic volume neatly arranged. They didn’t take up the majority of the box though. That was taken up by huge packets of printer paper, stapled together. On them were printed all sorts of fanfic, complete with the AO3 site layout, or the Fanfiction.net, or Tumblr. Some of it wasn’t even fanfic, there was the Wiki, random discussion online, fanart and cosplay pictures even. It was heaven . And my copy was hogging all the new pages. I gave her a dirty look, realized she wouldn’t be able to decipher it through the plague doctor mask, and just stared at her, hoping she’d get the picture when she noticed I didn’t stop. 

She didn’t notice, she was too absorbed in the comic. If I could have growled I would have. Instead I slowly flexed my fingers and then found a fanfic to read while I waited. Huh. That was odd, now that I thought about it. Astra said time was frozen in my home world, but there were new Girl Genius pages? How, if Kaja and Phil were frozen in time? Plus, several of these fanfics were dated to after I had left. Who wrote them? (I mean- they had attributed usernames, but. But how could they be written if my world was frozen in time?) I put that out of my mind, and picked a new fanfic to read. That probably wouldn’t tell me how it existed, but it would be entertaining. I browsed a bit before settling on one called Laurentius Heterodyne And The Green Fever. It was hard to focus at first, since I wanted to be reading the new pages my copy was hoarding, but quickly I was enthralled. It was so nice to just be able to relax and read fanfic. At some point, about 6 chapters in, I started crying. I wasn’t really sure why. It fogged up my goggles and I took the packet of papers into the mechanical lab, so I could take off my mask and wipe at my tears. On a whim I went into the chemical lab and analyzed them, unable to taste them with no mouth. Salt water. Normal tears, even though I was a shadow. I started crying harder. I sat on the floor of the chemical lab, wearing half a plague doctor outfit, crying. I didn’t really know why. I couldn’t even tell if I was happy or sad. 

One of my copies approached me, new Girl Genius pages held carefully in her hand. She was tearing up too, her mask left on one of the tables. She offered me the pages. I waved them away. I would read them later. Instead I hugged her. She hugged me back tightly, though avoiding skin-to-skin contact. We didn’t need to combine to understand each other, and I, at least, wanted the company. Eventually, my other copy came back, and joined us in hugging and crying. Even if it was only by my copies, it felt good to be understood. Even when I couldn’t understand myself. I couldn’t put it into words, but they got it. They knew. 

Uh. Yeah after that. Um. Pity party? Girl Genius celebration party? Which is odd since it was only like a day since we were there. Reading it should have felt different after actually meeting the characters, and it did! But not nearly as much as I expected. And I shouldn’t have missed reading it so much when I was living it, but I did. There was something special about it, about… consuming content I loved, just as an outside observer, getting to rejoice about the story without worrying about myself, or the characters, at least not in the same way I worry about real people. Plus, it felt like it had been longer since I had been there… I guess having like 7 days worth of memories from remembering all 88 explorations of the school I did might be throwing off my sense of time. It was never that good to start with but. Yeah. So we hugged and cried for a while and I finished the fic and I read all the new Girl Genius pages. And maybe I cried about that too. I don’t know. Don’t judge me. 

Anyway then we put our masks back on and we went back outside. I dug through our storage, crafted some tinted glass, and threw them each some. I only crafted two with the hope they could use Creation to make more. Anyway, before I joined them in making the light shield, I wanted to find the Training Facilities from this jump. I could wander around on the ground, I could grab my elytra and rockets and hope I could wear it over my plague doctor outfit, but really, it was high time I figured out my Flight ability. 

I got a stack of dirt and pillared up four blocks. Just enough that failing to fly would hurt a bit. Then I jumped off. 

I heard the thud as I hit the ground, and lost a heart of health, but it didn’t hurt. Huh. I mean, yeah, HUD from Minecraft promised I could take damage to my hearts instead of feeling pain, and that worked in Minecraft, but it hadn’t worked since then. What happened? I took off a glove. Yup, that still hurt. And I didn’t lose any hearts. Oh, was it because it just put me in pain and didn’t actually damage me? Was it because it was a Drawback? Was it that HUD only worked with Minecraft-y damage? For a split moment, I considered getting a knife, and then I shook my head. Focus. Hey, maybe, I thought with a hope I didn’t believe, I wouldn’t have to find out! Anyway, it didn’t take long to regen the heart I lost, and my hunger bar didn’t go down at all. Thanks Inviolate Body. So I could just make a dirt stair and keep jumping until I figured out how to miss the ground (fly).  It took several more attempts, and I was starting to think I might be doing it wrong when I didn’t take any damage from one of the jumps. I tried again and once again I seemed to fall slower, and I took no damage. A couple of tries later and I started to figure out what I was doing, which metaphysical muscle was the flying one. It wasn’t too much longer before I could just float up, not needing the dirt at all. (Of course I took it down then. No point in leaving an eyesore.) 

What was I doing? Right, Training Facilities. I floated around looking for them. I couldn’t float any faster than I could walk yet, but it gave me a good vantage point. Honestly I was surprised it was taking this long to find. Save the part occupied by my things, the Warehouse was an empty white plane. Unless it’s far enough away to be past the horizon (which would imply a globe instead of a flat plane? I couldn’t actually tell which we had here…) it should be visible. 

Ah. There it is. I had to look at the ground. Embedded into the ground was a hexagonal door. One of those flat industrial vertical doors with two sections that move sideways into the wall. The door also seemed to be that futuristic white metal, marked out by it’s different texture and a black and yellow striped border. There was a little (also hexagonal) podium by one side, with a screen on the top. It’s UI was simple, with the only obvious controls being ‘start training session’ and ‘open door’. Tempted as I was, I was just exploring for now. Once I looked through the training facility and figured out its deal maybe I’d take it for a spin, but I thought it’d be better to understand it first. I had to be out of the Warehouse for classes in the morning, (Tomorrow was Wednesday and I would apparently be going to my lecture classes then. They had started Monday so I would be behind already.) so I couldn’t get too distracted. Plus… I was the Original, the Jumper. It was my responsibility to make the plans, and keep track of things, and make sure we weren’t missing anything. Any copy could do the training and benefit us all with it, but only I had the responsibility to make sure we weren’t late for class, or to plan how we were going to find our two missing copies, or to make sure the copy I left in the closet didn’t go insane from boredom. 

I also had the responsibility to know what all was in my Warehouse though, so I hit ‘open door’ on the touchscreen. 

Inside was an unlit, futuristic staircase, with a landing that had a similar podium on it. Everything seemed to be made of the same white metal material, and the walls had a subtle hexagon pattern, like they were made with hexagonal panels. 

At the bottom of the staircase there was a glowing screen in the wall that displayed a map. According to it, the training complex included a large danger room (whatever that meant), long flying practice tunnels, a shooting range, a study/office, a weight/exercise room, and a pool. 

That was… more generic than I really expected. For some reason I expected something like a room for each of my powers, but I guess that wouldn’t be as useful in the future once I had more. Oh well, one of the biggest benefits was just that I couldn’t die during a training session, and I assumed this ‘danger room’ had enemies or traps for me to practice fighting. To a certain extent anything it was missing I could build, or I could practice fighting against my copies. I just hoped it did have a way to train my Inviolate Mind, since that was really the only thing I was struggling to think of how to train otherwise. I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait until some future Jump gave me mind reading or control powers. (I wasn’t sure I wanted mind reading or control powers. Maybe reading… but mind control? There weren’t a lot of ways to use that that weren’t evil.) Technically Generic Super Academy had offered them, but I skipped over them without even really thinking about it because there were other things I wanted more. 

Anyway, I figured that the rest of exploring the Training Facilities would be fairly time consuming, and my copies wouldn’t need the anti-light suits down here. (The only light came from dimly glowing screens.) So I made three copies with the idea that they’d figure it out (and maybe actually do a training session or two), and then I went back to meet up with the two I had assigned to make the tinted glass roof. 

It seemed to be coming along. Tinted glass stretched over our main area from a bit higher up than the roof of the labs. Instead of going over that roof though it just went down to meet it. On the glass was one of my copies, carefully placing glass by crouching on the edge of the block. The other one was flying in front and placing blocks faster for it. 

I flew up to them and immediately the flying one threw some tinted glass on the blocks nearest to me, gesturing at me and then at them. I got the memo and picked them up, joining her in flying and building. Honestly the roof looked too low down to me, but I wasn’t going to criticize her and we could change it later. After honestly not very long I got antsy and thought I should probably be working on something else, so I threw the glass back to the flying one and started flying toward the door back out of the Warehouse. I wanted to check on the copy I had left in our dorm, and the copy I had left in the closet. I was most worried about her honestly. (Well, I was most worried about the two missing copies, but I was trying not to think about them because there wasn’t that much I could do for them.) 

The flying copy followed me, hands on her hips. I didn’t know how to communicate that I had other things I had to do, so I just continued to the door out. She followed the whole way, seeming annoyed with me. And then opening the door got me the clatter of a phone hitting the ground, as my copy in the dorm startled and hid from the light. This was going great. Anyway, I closed the wardrobe door again and started taking off my plague doctor outfit. Once I was back to my Costume (which I was wearing underneath) I offered my hands to both dorm copy and flying copy. (I should really start naming them as I make them. But wait… since each copy is always a new copy from who I am, and who I am is always a combination of every copy that combined to make me… wouldn’t that mean I would have to be constantly coming up with new names every time I made a copy? Not 100 names but a theoretically infinite number of names…) 

The dorm copy took my hand and I focused for a bit to sort out the new memories. I remembered figuring out the laptop UI, and then going back on my phone to look up what video games were worth playing here and how to get them. One new email and new social media account later, I was scrolling fanart for games I had never heard of before. 

I blinked both pairs of my eyes, and then separated back into original and new copy. My flying copy still just watched me, expression unreadable behind the plague doctor mask she still wore. My new copy went and picked our phone back up, checking it for damage. I’ll admit I wanted to pick up the laptop and join her in trawling Swimmer (social media platform that was originally live-streaming based but had developed a posting system that had gained basically equal use and became a major hub for written and image content too. I had found out all of this in a Netplex search. (Their version of google)) but I was the original. I had a responsibility. 

Eventually, my flying copy took off a glove and took my hand. Stabilizing from that combination took a bit more effort than last time. I had been really annoyed with my original for making me figure out if it was even possible to use Creation to make tinted glass. My other copy hadn’t even managed it, which meant I had to make double the amount and give her some too since my original had left us so I couldn’t do the sharing-info-via-combining trick because I wouldn’t be able to make a new copy. So when my original came back I wanted to give me a taste of my own medicine. I- that was a horrible sentence. Anyway, I now got why I was mad at me, but also I really was doing something important and I figured it out without my help anyway so it was okay. I did wonder how I figured out making tinted glass, and flying, when my copy that was still building the glass roof didn’t. We were the same person! And that kind of thing had happened several times now, where one of us can find or figure out something that the others don’t. 

Anyway, I made a couple new copies, one just by separating from the part of my body still in the plague doctor outfit, and the other one I gave the plague doctor outfit I had taken off. They both went to the Warehouse to finish the tinted glass roof. I had a more important job; go back to the closet and make sure my copy was okay. And then maybe trying to look for the two lost copies. I didn’t like the idea of not knowing where they were. 

I found her curled up in the corner as a cat, using the dress she had been wearing as a blanket. I was right in front of her before she stirred, ear twitching like a real cat. Even before she offered me her paw, I relaxed. She was doing okay.

I took her paw, and had a surprisingly easy time resyncing as it were. I hadn’t quite just napped the whole time, but basically. I had curled up and written stories in my head, exploring how much easier it was when I didn’t forget the majority of what I thought up. I was kinda annoyed to realize that I’d have to go back to work rather than just being able to keep chilling and continuing the story. Still, I made a new copy who could do that, take her place cat-napping and making sure we don’t miss the missing two if (I mean- when.) they find their way back from whatever is holding them up. 

So that was a lot more useless than I thought it’d be. I guess I could’ve just stayed and helped with the tinted glass. I guess I should go help with the tinted glass. And maybe figure out a better communication method. 

At the dorm, I gave my copy there a paper saying to go in the Warehouse like an hour before class to tell me so I can be ready. Then I went in, made sure the entrance area was fully dark (we shouldn’t need a full hazmat suit just to enter the Warehouse), made myself another plague doctor outfit to deal with the light, and worked on the tinted glass roof the rest of the night. After we finished the basic version I actually went and started a huge dome version because the low roof was bugging me. Though I realized that if it’s going to be a permanent thing I should really replace it with something that we can switch between fully transparent and tinted, and maybe fully opaque while I was at it. I also made some more copies to help with more builds under the roof, like a better storage area that had room for both Minecraft chests and a way to keep non-Minecraft items, and making a more aesthetic exterior for things like the Parisian Collection or Worthy Workshop. Of course, we took breaks, mostly to read Girl Genius fanfic. 

Chapter Text

Music blared suddenly, interrupting the near-silence of the Warehouse. I looked up suddenly, disturbed from my peaceful fanfic reading-uh I mean definitely working on the tinted glass dome I had outlined. Definitely. 

Holding our phone and standing in the doorway was the copy I had left in the dorm and told to tell me when it was time for class. Ah. She tapped the screen for emphasis. I flew over, until I saw the time was in fact 8am. An hour before our first class, History Of Demigods. 

Oh shoot! I hadn’t drawn yet! I made a copy to make sure I was ready for class and then scrambled for pen and paper. Technically I had drawn a… self portrait to see what I looked like, but that didn’t count, it wasn’t enough, I barely tried on it. So I quickly did another few, of me, of my cat form, of a crow because I was thinking that was one of the things I’d try to turn into next. It wasn’t long though before my copy buckled a belt around my waist, jostling my drawing hand and messing up my lines. When I turned to face her, she just handed me a zip-up binder, and grabbed my hand. 

I rushed out the door, one hand holding my binder, the other patting myself down, feeling my belt pouches to make sure my phone, mini-sketchbook, dorm room key, and Totem of Undying were all there as I left my dorm room.

Finding my history classroom wasn’t hard, since I knew most of the school’s layout from my search for the principal's office. Getting the nerve to enter the classroom was harder, but I was early and it was empty, so I just picked a table that seemed out-of-the-way but not so out-of-the-way to be obviously slacking. Also between ceiling lights so it was slightly less bright. Then I started doodling in my mini-sketchbook so I wouldn’t get caught out having not drawn again today. Not needing to sleep and the Warehouse not having a night/day cycle was really gonna mess up my drawing every day. And my sense of time but that might just be a write-off. A few students tricked in. One had glowing white hair that made me have to look away from her, I didn’t really pay attention to the others. 

Eventually, a man with glittering light blue wings, matching hair, formal attire, and an air of authority entered the room. The chatter of the rest of the class dulled. Clearly this was the teacher. Still, it was before 9, so he just sat at his desk and waited for the rest of the class to come in. His wings looked translucent, like they were made of magic, not flesh and blood. I wondered if he could selectively have them phase through things, but soon noticed that his blazer was built with a hole for them, secured by buttons. I looked away before he noticed me analyzing how his clothes were made. Then I realized I should maybe tell him I was new to his class.

Before I got to that though, a student with a slight yellow glow and transparency to them, almost like they were only a hologram instead of being really there, sat next to me. Luckily they didn’t glow bright enough to hurt. But I didn’t want to immediately get up and seem like I’m avoiding them, so I wound up procrastinating until attendance. 

“New student, um, eel zee ree?” After a moment to realize it was me, I raised my hand. Once he noticed me I wrote ‘ call me E ’ in my mini-sketchbook and showed it to him. He had already moved on to the next name by the time he saw it, but he was nice enough to give me a nod, so he’d probably try to remember to call me E next time. 

The rest of attendance taught me that glowy hair girl was Lilya, the kid sitting next to me was Kyris, and paying attention during attendance plus perfect memory meant the unique experience of knowing the names of every person in the room… except the teacher. 

Over the course of the two hour class period, we learned about how once our school taught the Demigods, before humans (our teacher seemed to resent their arrival…) ever even came to the planet. There were no records from the time of the Gods, so we didn’t even know the names or domains of all but a few, guessed and pieced together from oral histories. Despite this, our teacher never even entertained the idea of the Gods not being real, yes they were missing, disappeared so long ago we barely have record of them, but no one seemed to object to them being taught as historical fact. Interesting. On the one hand, there was magic here, clearly, so gods were possible, on the other I mistrusted such flimsy records as support for the existence of gods. The teacher, who at some point during the lecture managed to introduce himself as Professor Knox, used visual illusions to supplement his lectures, and to scare any student that dared murmur to a friend or doze off. A couple times I was not listening and he made an illusion of fire in front of me. It was made of light so it still hurt darnit! Not very much but still! Harming a student! Not like I could say anything though. 

Luckily it wasn’t too long before class ended, though we only had 5 minutes to get to our next class. I really did not miss that. On my way to my next class; Laws, Supers, and Superheroes, I considered checking on the copy I left in the closet. Eh. After that class I’d be free for an hour for lunch, so I could do it then.

I was early, and the teacher (who was already there) recognized me immediately.

“Ah, my new student, E, yes?”

I nodded.

“I am Dr. Elaena.” She nodded primly to herself before getting something from her desk. “Now, before next class I’ll expect you to have your own copy of the textbook, but for now you can borrow mine.” She handed me a book entitled ‘Beginning Supernatural Law’. “You can sit where you like.” 

And so I found a seat. I skimmed the book a bit, but it seemed incredibly dull so I decided to wait for her to lecture. 

“Hey” another student whispered to me, standing over my desk, sounding annoyed. “You’re in my spot.”

Surprised, I looked up at him, a tall boy with long, elven ears and dark red eyes. Silently, I started picking up my things. As soon as he could claim his seat, he immediately ignored me to talk to his friends sitting nearby. I stood awkwardly, surveying the classroom looking for an out-of-the-way spot. There weren’t any spots that weren’t next to someone though, so I sat next to a kid with long pink hair and bright pink eyes. Even their skin looked pinker than average. They didn’t say anything so I assumed it was fine. 

I didn't need to sleep, and it was still hard to stay awake through class. I definitely spent the whole time doodling and playing on my phone. Luckily she wasn’t as harsh on people not paying attention… but no one really acted out either. There was more murmuring than in History, but her lecture was complicated enough that you had to pay attention to keep up. (I was only barely keeping up honestly, there were definitely some bits I think I missed. Plus, worst of all, she assigned homework! We had to read a couple pages of the textbook and submit a response in the ‘digital classroom’. Wow I did not miss homework. 

Luckily for my sanity, Dr. Elaena did give us a few breaks in the middle of class to get water, go to the bathroom, chat, whatever. During one of them the kid sitting next to me asked if I understood what she was saying about power licenses. 

‘ I think it’s like we have to have a license from the super government people to use our powers in public and not get in trouble, but we can’t let the normal government people know, ’ There were a lot of special terms for different parts of government that I hadn’t really understood, but there were a lot of things about one section of the government needing to know something, but at the same time making sure those forms didn’t get to the bigger government in charge of them. It was pretty confusing.

“But why?” pink-hair asked, “and we’re on break, we’re allowed to talk.”

‘ I can’t talk ’

“Oh, sorry.”

‘ And I don’t know why ’ 

They sighed. “I guess we should ask.”

I lamented that Dr. Elaena didn’t do attendance out loud as pink-hair approached her and started to ask their question. If she had, I would know pink-hair’s name. 

Listening in, I learned that superpowers and magic in general were a secret from the greater galactic civilization, so while the local government made up of people with powers wants to make sure everyone has control over their powers before going out into the world, all of that bureaucracy has to be kept secret from the national government, since they need to be kept in the dark about powers existing at all. The part that got really complicated was the parts of the national government on Viea 7Se, the local government that was run by people without powers, and how that interacted with the government of people with powers. The way she was talking I couldn’t tell if it was one or two or maybe even three political entities there. 

Ugh, this was giving me a headache. I had avoided the complexities of politics in Girl Genius for a reason, and here the politics were more… modern, more like my home world. More complicated. I did not feel like trying to figure them out. 

I had basically checked out when pinky sat down by me again. I definitely missed the later half of that conversation. Ah, well. I won’t be here after school, so I don’t have to destroy myself for good grades. All I have to do is graduate and then I won’t have to deal with this complicated world anymore. 

“Hey, what did you get for number 5?” pinky whispered, glancing at my worksheet subtly. We weren’t expressly told not to work together, but no one else was really talking. 

I moved my worksheet so they could see it better, showing them my answer to how often power licenses needed to be renewed. Once we graduated and got them, we’d need to do some paperwork every four years to get them renewed. If we didn’t, we’d have to go to a specific office and do a power control test, and turn in a bunch more different paperwork. It sounded really annoying and like exactly the kind of thing I’d forget to do. 

They looked at my paper, with answers filled in for most of the questions. “How do you remember all this stuff?” 

I shrugged, and wrote in the corner of my mini-sketchbook, ‘ good memory ’. 

“And here I was hoping you’d tell me some kind of trick for it…” they muttered. 

Anyway, by the time class ended pinky and I were getting along pretty well. I still didn’t know their name, but I knew their power was shapeshifting, they hated worksheets (though doesn’t everybody), and they were good at math and bad at memorization. They offered to go to lunch with me, and I agreed, but said I had to check on something in my dorm first. (Well, not said, technically, wrote, but same difference. They were patient enough to wait for me to finish writing, so we could have pretty normal conversations.) 

Of course I was lying. I actually had to check on closet-me and see if any of my lost copies came back. 

Oh shoot. The closet door was already open, with a janitor standing in the threshold, probably getting cleaning supplies, since that was most of what was in the closet. I quickly looked away and kept walking. He hadn’t noticed me looking yet, so I could still pretend to be a normal student. But how was I going to get in there now? 

In my mind’s eye, I pictured the hallway behind me, where he was looking, what I might be able to hide behind. I considered the invisibility cloak that was still stashed with all the other things I had taken out of Girl Genius, and how long it would take me to go get it. Rrrgh, too long. I needed to get back to lunch so pinky wouldn’t think I was rude. Hmm.. the hallway was pretty empty. Tentatively, I snuck over to a dark spot. I’m sorry.

I made another copy of myself and watched her use Creation to make herself a dress and a cloak. She gave me a glare before she walked up to the janitor and tapped his shoulder to get his attention. 

While he was distracted, I turned into a cat and snuck into the closet, beelining to the hiding spot I had left my copy in.  She was still there, curled up as small as she could be. As soon as I approached she tensed up. I wanted to warn her first, but we had limited time and I didn’t know how I’d get her attention anyway. She was hiding her eyes so she’d just look like a shadow, but that meant she couldn’t see that it was just me. I placed a paw on her back. 

The reintegration of two minds into one was more difficult this time. I had spent so long running- I was glad I had a fair bit of practice with it. Especially since we were still in a hurry. An intentionally incomplete analysis of my new memories told me I still had one copy missing, so I made a new copy to wait again, before rushing out. 

As I left I brushed past my copy that was distracting the janitor to update her on everything (which was the quickest fuse with a copy then unfuse out a new copy that I had managed to date) and then sped off back toward the lunchroom, turning back into a humanoid as I went. 

Once I was safely away from the closet, I started properly unpacking my different sets of memories. I had been one of the missing copies, and had met and combined with the me who was still waiting for me. I had been so late because a group of adults (teachers? ) had noticed me and started attacking me! I had to run and hide, and getting back was a lot harder when I had to make sure that I wasn’t being followed. Interesting. Why had I been attacked when none of the other mes were? Because of where I went? Who I encountered? Anyway, slipping into small spaces is easy as a cat, and even easier when you can shapeshift, so I wasn’t in that much danger of being actually caught. 

Chapter Text

The cafeteria was busy. I spotted pinky relatively quickly, hanging out with a group of students, one of whom I recognized from my History class. They glanced up and seemed to notice me, but they just looked back to their friends, as if they hadn’t. 

I debated leaving. I didn’t need to eat and I didn’t need friends. I was leaving the world after 6 months anyway, there was no point. If they didn’t actually want to hang out with me, that was fine. But… it was possible that they really just didn’t notice me, and it would be rude to say I would eat with them and then leave without saying anything. So I walked up, and waved. 

“H-hey..” Pinky said it nervously. (I needed to learn their name…) The others whispered to each other, one asking pinky who I was. They explained, haltingly, that I was in their Law class and couldn’t talk. 

The others were mostly nice, though. I was gestured to an empty chair and welcomed in, though they didn’t bother to ask me to contribute or wait for my reply. Still, pinky had me worried that they’d just tell me to get lost, with how guilty they looked. Eventually, I learned pinky’s name was actually Edam, and that most of this group had gone to grade school together. I also learned that the new popular game (at least with them) was a plot-heavy game called Lacrima’s Fallen, and apparently none of them could agree on what the ‘good ending’ was, but they all agreed that Lalka (the main character) deserved to truly escape her bindings, both metaphorical and literal. The disagreement was over which ending actually achieved that. They had all apparently played it, so I got a lot of spoilers. Still, I resolved to try to get it after class. Oh- well. After detention, actually. I had to go to detention after class, I almost forgot. 

At the end of lunch, just as we were discussing how we should probably leave to get to our next class, the familiar face of Della approached us, wearing a smug grin and tailed by a student I hadn’t met yet, though they looked mostly normal, save the stark white hair and bright red eyes. 

“Ha, look at you; making friends ” Della spat at me. “Well all you losers better remember; she’s at the bottom of the chain.” 

I could see immediately how everyone at the table backed up. Edam and a few others looked conflicted, but one from the back jeered, “Makes sense. Not much for conversation, that one.”

Luckily, Della (and a moderate portion of the bystanders) just laughed. Della showed off a few sparks in her hand, I flinched, and she walked off, satisfied in her victory. 

None of Edam’s friends talked to me as we left the cafeteria. I couldn’t blame them. Probably that whole stunt was just Della making sure they knew friends of mine would be targeted. A warning. 

I went to Maintaining a Civilian Identity alone. Part of me hoped no one would try to befriend me there, if I was just going to be a danger to them by association. But that wouldn’t help Claye. I needed to figure out some way of dealing with Della. Eventually.

As soon as I got there my teacher enthusiastically introduced himself to me as Aibel, and said we were going to be working together to find Civilian identity solutions for everyone, so that everyone had the opportunity to live a normal life. Huh, that sounded… a lot less like a normal academic class. And as I walked to find a seat, I noticed that most everyone there looked nonhuman, most obviously so. In the back of the room, an inhumanly large student crouched to not hit their head, and I wondered how they made it through the door. Another student had large dragon wings and was covered in scales. Someone else was confined to a large fishbowl on wheels, with buttons and stuff on the inside they used to control it. They had two legs, but still had a mermaid aesthetic to them. Some students looked closer to baseline, like one with a long tail that looked like it was made of metal but moved smoothly, or one with smoke trailing around them and coming out of their mouth whenever they opened it.

The only person that looked fully human was Claye, and Saavi, who was sitting next to him, was one of the more human-looking people in the class. Oh, cool! People I knew! And… well I got the impression that Adley (and by extension Della) were already bullying them, so my hanging out with them… probably wouldn’t be harmful to them. Hopefully. I went to sit next to them. 

“E! You’re in this class?” Saavi asked, waving me over.

I nodded, smiling, and sat next to her, putting her between me and Claye. 

The class was very chill. Aibel could not control his classroom, but people mostly stuck to their own groups, and ignored Aibel’s heartfelt attempts to help with making a Civilian identity. I did, too, passing notes with Saavi and Claye, talking about our schedules, (apparently I had Power Control with Claye, cool.) talking about how well I’ve been adjusting, talking about my powers, talking about Claye’s powers, (He makes rifts in reality, through which eldritch creatures can escape. I’m the first example of one not being immediately hostile. He’s gotten better at controlling it, but still sometimes accidentally makes rifts when he’s scared or stressed.) talking a bit about Saavi’s powers, (she can turn into a goat at will.) talking about the class, (no one takes it seriously because most people in Aibel’s class have already given up on having a Civilian identity. Rumor has it he’s the only person willing to teach Civi to this class.) and all sorts of other things. 

I was not paying attention because I had no plans to make a Civilian identity. My Outed Drawback would ensure it didn’t work anyway, so bothering to try would just be an opportunity to fail. I did ask why Claye and Saavi were in this class, since they were two of the people there that would most easily blend in. Claye said he was there because his powers activated frequently enough for it to be too dangerous for him to leave the school, and other Civi courses had field trips out to practice. Saavi said she picked this class so she could keep Claye company, and horns were harder to hide than you might expect. 

All too soon, class ended. By then it was 4pm. I still had two hours before my detention, so I went to my dorm. I checked on the copy in the closet, but there was no change, and she was okay. Restless, though. The only thing that convinced me to make a new one there was that it had worked , one of the lost copies had found their way back, and probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had a copy still in the closet to greet them. So it was necessary. 

Back in my dorm, my dorm copy was at the desk playing on our laptop, with our tablet to one side. She squinted a bit when I entered and let the light from the dorm common room in (though it wasn’t bright enough to hurt us, so I assumed she had just gotten used to the darkness), and waved at me. 

I waived back and then leaned over to look at the tablet screen, wanting to see if she’d drawn anything. She rolled her eyes and offered me her hand, which I took. 

Did you know staying home and playing video games and drawing and watching videos and shows and stuff while a different you goes to school for you is awesome? It is. Anyway while I had been going to school and stuff, I had been trawling Swimmer, both posts and watching streams, I had been playing some browser-based games, I had found a bunch of games to buy once I figured out how to access our money stiped from the school, I had found the Youtube equivalent, Eyequarium, and watched… well a lot. And I had done some fanart for an Eyequarium show that I liked. 

I smiled, made a new copy who could go back to that, and opened the door to my Warehouse. I had left it active in the wardrobe door because I trusted my copies to not let anyone else find it, and it let them interact and do what they wanted. Plus I didn’t know yet if I could remove the Warehouse connection with my copies inside. 

Anyway, the inside of the Warehouse was comfortably dark, with the dome of tinted glass (oh nice, they finished it!) protecting me from the harsh light. Inside, two copies were flying around the storage system, which looked a lot more properly built up than I had last seen it. It looked more neat and organized, if you ignored the large number of papers scattered everywhere. I just shook my head lightheartedly and let them work, since surprisingly it seemed that they were actually in the process of making the Warehouse more home-y. Usually when left to my own devices without any pressure to get things done, I just chilled and did not get things done, so I was proud of them for working hard and doing things. 

Now I knew I had left three copies working on the dome, so I wondered where the third went off to. I checked the labs, which were empty. That was interesting, I kinda expected at least one of my copies to have had some Sparky idea and gone to the labs with it… but on that note I hadn’t really been very Sparky since I got here, not randomly at least. A couple times to push through and do something difficult, like when I was first figuring out my powers, but not that much. I guess I was suppressing it with Out Of Context almost all the time, so I could keep myself under control. Having that solution for making sure I didn’t Spark out at… inconvenient times was good, but doing it all the time had its own flaws it seems.

Anyway, next I went to the Training Facilities. The dome didn’t cover the entrance, but my copies had made a glass hallway so it was still accessible without having to brave the light. The door was closed, and the screen on the podium warned that a training session was in progress. Hm. It did have an options menu available though, so I clicked on that. While there were several different options and buttons and menus, it seemed that my real choices were: enter and join the training session, enter and not join the session, but be in actual danger from whatever training they were doing since I wouldn’t have the session reassurance of everything being healed when it ended, I could also end their session from the outside, but they might be annoyed at me for that. Finally, I could send a message to the people in the session. That’s what I picked.

‘ Hey, it’s the Original. Class ended and I wanted to know what yall were up to. ’

It wasn’t very long before the reply came. ‘ Give us a bit to finish this game and we’ll stop the session and you can see ’ 

And so I sat down and waited. I took out my phone to play on it, and then realized it didn’t have service. Oh. Makes sense I guess. Darn. Back in my home world I would have had games downloaded on my phone that I didn’t need service for, but I hadn’t done that yet here. Oh well. Back to the daydream I had been working on in the closet I guess. 

Soon enough, I was broken out of my daydream by the sound of the door opening. From it flew four of my copies. Ah I see. I left three there but apparently one of the ones working on the dome joined them. Probably after it was done. They all had different outfits, but the one that stood out the most was the one wearing a wooden crown. She looked at the others smugly before offering me her hand. I took it.

I had just won a game of Splendor (a board game from my home world that my copy had recreated for us to play) against my fellow copies. This won me the right to be the first to fuse with our original once the facility had told us I was here, so I could explain everything we had accomplished to me! We had figured out the UI of the facility screens, and that there were a lot of cool customizable effects we could apply to make training more challenging or to facilitate training specific things. We could change the pressure in a room, the light level/color/etc, the gravity, the composition of the air. We could have robots or turrets attack us, we could fill a room with a laser maze, we could close rooms off from each other, just… all sorts of things. 

What we had been training just now was Inviolate Mind. We found a setting to have the facility attempt to read our thoughts and print them on a nearby screen, so we could practice hiding our thoughts from it, and we found a setting to have the facility attempt to mind control us. It only had one command available, the command to stop; do nothing. That was scary enough, I was glad there weren’t more there. It was enough to train against, there would be no benefit to having more. Anyway, we had both of those active (on a low strength level) during our Splendor game, and the challenge was to think about your move, resist the control, and keep your mind unreadable the whole time. It was a real challenge! I mean, the control was on a low enough power that it mostly just made moving a bit more tiring and take a bit more will, and while preventing the mind reading was a bit harder, we still hadn’t figured out a good punishment for failing at it other than the others knowing what you were planning in the game. Which… even without reading it on the wall it could be pretty obvious just from the cards and coins you were getting.

Still, I think we were improving, and once I recombined with the other three, we could merge our strategies and be even better! 

Without bothering to shapeshift back into one figure, I offered my hands to the other three. It took less time to sync our memories, since there was less new information.

Next I thought about what I should have my copies train. I wasn’t bothering to shapeshift back into one humanoid figure because I knew next I’d create new copies, and they wouldn’t have to bother to dress if I did it by disconnecting the connected hands, because the clothes would already still be on the bodies. Anyway, training Inviolate Mind wasn’t necessarily immediately useful, since as far as I could tell there was no one with mind reading or control powers at the school, but it was still very important, because mind control was scary , and if the user was smart and powerful, your first encounter with it could also be your last moment of free will. Plus the more powerful I got, the more important it was that I not let anyone turn that power against me. 

But on the other hand, the much more immediate problem was Della. She wasn’t a real risk to my life or free will (if she killed me the teachers would be very mad and she knows it, and she can’t do mind control… or if she could I’d have expected to know by now), but she was getting in my way, and hurting people (and hurting me). And she was controlling me with threats, since I had no way of fighting her. 

So I wanted to do both. Well, I could! That was what being able to make so many copies was for! And while Splendor was better with four people, there was no reason to limit myself to having four copies training at once. Actually, the more copies I had training the faster I’d improve, so the better! I mean, two copies training for one hour seemed to be less improvement than one copy training for two hours, because they have to basically learn the same things, and can’t learn more advanced things until after they learn the beginning things, but still. Having two copies train for two hours seemed to be consistently better than one copy for two hours, since they end up going down slightly different paths in their learning, and once I recombine with both of them, I can synthesize the two methods to create a fuller understanding. And having the copies working on different things instead of the same thing shouldn’t have the problem of learning the same thing multiple times at all! 

So, I made four copies by disconnecting the hands, with the idea that they’d go back to training Inviolate Mind, probably by playing Splendor. Then, I kept making more copies. I made 60 more, to have a full stack of 64 training, and I guess 69 currently existing, counting the missing one, the one in the closet waiting for her, the one in my dorm, and the ones playing with the storage system. Heh, funny number. 

Anyway, while I wasn’t going to be strict about what they were supposed to do, (basically anything was fine as long as they stayed in the Warehouse) I needed to prompt them with different things to start with or they might just all try to do the same thing. So I had 12 working on Darkness Manipulation (I wanted to learn more about that since I think I’d only scratched the surface so far), 12 working on Creation (it’s just so useful!), 11 working on Shapeshifter, 10 on Flight, 5 on Inviolate Body (by using the pressure and temperature settings in the facility), 8 more on Inviolate Mind (probably just in groups of four also playing more Splendor, unless they come up with something else), and 2 I encouraged to go to the labs and make something, since I thought it was sad we hadn’t engaged our Spark in so long. (Well, it hadn’t really been as long as it felt, but still.) Plus, maybe they’d make a solution to our Della problem (other than just wearing the plague doctor suit all day…). 

Once I had all that sorted, I set alarms on my phone for 5:00, 5:30, and 5:45, so I wasn’t late for detention, and… I guessed I should do my homework. I went back to my dorm.

In my dorm I tapped the desk in front of my copy and used Creation to make a paper saying ‘ homework ’. (A trick I had learned to communicate with my fellow copies in the Training Facility, since it’s faster than writing once you get the technique down.) She gave me a tired look but nodded. 

All too soon, it was time for me to go to detention. (and we hadn’t even gotten that much homework done. Still, it was a while until it was due so it was fine.) 

One interesting thing was that the school had a dedicated detention room. It was plain, white walls, individual desks, and a larger desk at the front for the supervising teacher. In it sat Alixer, dozing off. There was no one else in the room. I quietly found a seat in the back and started playing on my phone. I was early, but also it was early in the school year-er, half-year. Maybe I was the only one with detention today. Maybe I could let Alixer sleep through the whole hour and he would be more able to survive with that extra sleep he so clearly needed.

Unfortunately for both of us, another student walked in. He looked normal, except for his bright red eyes and singed gloves.

“Sleeping, and he still-” as he mumbled, the boy casually raised his had to point the palm at Alixer

Before firing a red beam of hot death at him! I flinched, and sat lower in my seat. Alixer, though, was fine. A small orange forcefield floated between him and the boy, and he looked at the boy with an expression of tired frustration. 

“Find a seat, Camryn.”

Oh. I suppose I underestimated him. I-wow. Those are some reflexes. And everywhere I’ve seen him is somewhere that might come in handy… The power testing lab, on my schedule to teach Power Control, and supervising detention, where apparently there are violent students willing to just take potshots at people.

Speaking of which, I nervously watched Camryn as he walked to the back of the classroom, sitting just a few seats away from me. I was slightly relieved he didn’t try to sit next to me. 

There was a tense silence that stretched on for long enough that I figured Camryn was probably not going to attack me, so I slowly went back to looking at my phone. 

“E, no phones.”

Damn. Fine. I put it away. And was immediately bored. Stupid- I had already done this for too long in the closet. At least there was comfortable! And I was safe enough to daydream/maybe nap! (Not needing to sleep did not mean I couldn’t , I think I did nap a bit in the closet a couple times… still, not getting tired meant that sleeping was more difficult. Plus, even in the closet I didn’t want to let my guard down enough to be able to sleep deeply.) 

I tried to daydream anyway. It was harder, my mind kept spinning back to how Camryn could probably just kill me with that laser, and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it. Sure, I mean, in Girl Genius that kind of thing had happened, too, but I- I was always doing something about it. Or I was unable to do anything. Here, the only thing stopping me from running from Camryn, getting behind something his lasers couldn’t pearce, was social convention. That I’d get in trouble with Alixer. 

It was a long detention. Camryn kept trying to use his lasers on his desk, which Alixer consistently blocked with his forcefields. (he could project them so far from himself… I wondered if he was one of the most powerful people on staff.) Still, I jumped every time, and so each time Camryn got bored and used his powers, I was knocked out of whatever daydream I was distracting myself with. 

But nothing really happened, and then the hour was over and I could go home. Or- well, to my Warehouse. 

As I left, I made a paper for Alixer saying ‘ see you tomorrow ‘

Chapter Text

That night I watched Eyequarium, trained, worked on Warehouse build improvements, hung out with my copies, that sort of thing. (I did do a little homework but it was so hard to care about enough to work on.) It was annoying that we had to be in the dorm to do anything on the internet though. Also my Warehouse and dorm were quickly becoming covered in tiny slips of paper with words on them that made no sense out of context. Sure, we could write in notebooks and actually keep track of things, but we had perfect memory, there wasn’t a great method of keeping things organized anyway, and using Creation was just so much faster. 

All too soon, it was 8am again, and I had to get to class. Today was labs instead of academics, so it started with Powered Combat. I had already drawn, so I had a bit more time to prepare. Plus I didn’t have to figure out how to make myself a belt. So I spent a bit of time recombining with some of my copies that had been training, so I’d be prepared. Though I created new copies in their places. There should be no reason for me to need to make more than 41 new copies during the school day, and more copies meant more time to do things, so keeping a large number of copies out at once just made sense.

When I got to the lab, it was empty, save for a woman flying laps around it. I lingered outside the door for a bit, so she noticed me before I decided to enter. When she did, another her appeared beside her and flew down to open the door for me.

Oh! She made copies of herself too! I wonder if she had any tips…

“Ah, fresh meat. And early, too! That’s a sign of good discipline, that is. Name and powers?”

I didn’t really want to tell her all of them. It seemed everyone here had just one or two, and I had bought… so many. But she seemed like the type who’d get mad if I revealed secret powers I hadn’t told her about, or only introduced them one at a time, so I’d have to tell her about anything I wanted to work on in her class.

 I made a paper saying ‘ self-duplication, shapeshifting, shadow manipulation, creating things, flight ’ Those were kinda all of my active powers. I mean I didn’t say about being a Spark, but that was hard to explain and I could say it was part of Creation, with how vaguely I described it.

Her eyebrows rose when she read it, and her other self stopped flying to look at me.

“Quite a collection you have there.” She said it with the same gruff but energetic tone, but this time it sounded a bit strained. 

She told me to address her as Ms. Tira, and led me to the corner of the room, where there was some exercise equipment, and had me use my flight to lift weights as we waited for the rest of the class to come in. 

My flight had no trouble lifting the small weights that were the limit of what my arms could handle comfortably. Ms. Tira hadn’t given specific instructions, but I remembered that for mundane lifting weights you really shouldn’t go too far above what’s comfortable or risk straining something. 

It wasn’t too long before the rest of the class arrived, and at 9am sharp she had us stand in a straight line (with her copies, one for each of her 20 students, correcting posture and ensuring discipline) and call out our names for attendance. The copy hovering behind me seemed annoyed when I slipped her a paper instead. 

Then we did warm-ups, which were basically being told to show off our powers. I figured I’d do something combat related and turned into a panther and then made a new copy. Ms. Tira had me reabsorb her though. (Well, she actually said to “dispel your duplicate”, and looked a bit unnerved when we merged into one. She shook it off quickly though.)

Next, she assigned us into pairs, and said we would spend the rest of the class sparring.

My sparring partner had introduced themselves as Val during attendance, and looked normal apart from the grey streaks in their long brown hair. During the demonstration, they had shown off some kind of gravity manipulation or something, throwing a pencil across the room and slowing it down so they could walk over slowly and still catch it. 

“The rules are simple. Each pair fights each other until one gives up or leaves their sparring circle. I’ll be watching every fight so try not to hurt each other too much.” While this was said by a version of Ms. Tira standing in the middle of the lab, surrounded by the sparring circles, each pair of students had two of her duplicates floating nearby. 

Once the center Ms. Tira finished speaking, the one seemingly assigned to me led me to one side of our sparring circle, with the other leading Val to a spot across from me. Once we were in place, one flew up above us, and the other flew to the sidelines.

“Greet each other” the one to the side directed. 

Val looked at me. “Hey.” 

I waved.

“Sorry if- well. This might go rather quickly for you.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant by that, so I just shrugged and gave them a thumbs-up.

“Salute” Ms. Tira commanded, and we did so.

“Ready?” I shifted into what at least looked like a combat stance. Val did the same and said yes.

“3” I watched Val as they tensed up.

“2” I tried to come up with some kind of plan. Turn into a panther and-

“1” -sink my claws into the ground so I couldn’t be thrown around by gravity?

“Fight.” Val let out a breath, and suddenly the room was a blur. Before I even started to try to turn into a panther, I was stumbling, outside the circle, and Val stood in front of me. 

Wh-what had even… I looked around. All the other students were still fighting, and one of Ms. Tira was floating beside me.

I handed Val a paper. ‘ What happened? ’

They read it. “Where did you…? Um. My power is time manipulation. I slowed you down in time and then just pushed you.”

Oh. I see. The other students did seem to be further along in their fights then they should have been. Hmmm…. I put my hand to my chin, studying Val. Time Manipulation was incredibly powerful, and meant that I had to react instantly or just lose, like that, but…

Anyway, I handed them another paper. It’d be rude not to answer their question. ‘ I can’t speak, but one of my powers is to create objects. ’

“Ah, that explains attendance. What’s your name, by the way?”

‘ Everyone calls me E. Rematch? ’

“Nice to meet you. And sure, though I’m not sure what you’re planning to do differently.”

Ms. Tira had us back in position quickly, though her attention seemed to be elsewhere. Still, she had no problem leading us through the ritual of starting to spar.

“Salute.” We did so. Val seemed casual and confident, but they still watched me carefully.

“Ready?” As Val said yes and returned to their fighting stance, I crouched a little, already visualizing my plan.

“3” The timing needed to be perfect.

“2” I needed to act the moment I heard the word fight

“1” I tried to clear my mind, think only of action.

“Fight.” I flew straight up as fast as I could. I felt something brush my foot, but in seconds I was up and away. 

I looked down, and for a few moments the scene was surreal. Everything moved so fast. Even Val, standing still and looking up at me, twitched like they couldn’t stand to be still. Then they let go, and time flowed normally around me. 

They looked a bit worn out, as they watched me cautiously from the ground. I circled them from the air, not sure how to continue. My plan had just been to get out of their range, somewhere that even with me slowed down in time they couldn’t take advantage of it. 

“Stalemate.” They mumbled, seemingly trying to both watch me and search their environment for something.

I squinted at them, thinking. To break the stalemate, we needed range. But I didn’t have to look around to get something to throw.

I used creation to make myself a bow and arrow. Val’s eyes widened. I hesitated to fire. I didn’t want to hurt them. My brain conjured images of arrow piercing flesh and I winced, holding both bow and arrow in one hand while I rubbed my arm awkwardly with the other. 

Val gave me a level look, their fear hidden. I continued to hesitate.

From outside the ring, Ms. Tira interjected. “We have healers. Stop holding back!”

Wasn’t it her that said we shouldn’t be hurting each other too much?

I pulled the bowstring taught, arrow knocked. I closed my eyes, banishing visions of arrowhead tearing through flesh, and I opened them, aiming at Val.

As soon as I fired, the arrow slowed to a crawl. Oh. Duh.

Val caught it easily out of the air. I sagged in disappointment, trying to re-think my strategy. I hardly noticed when the world sped up around me, just the jolt and crack noise of me losing a heart. Time ticked on normally again by the time I spun around, looking for the source of the damage, instinctually switching to my empty 9th hotbar slot, reaching for golden carrots that were not there. Well at least my Minecraft instincts were well intact.

Val was no longer holding the arrow. Did- did they throw it at me? 

I waited for my heart to regenerate, one half at a time. Val watched me, tense and waiting to see what I would try next. The two Ms. Tiras watching us seemed painfully bored. 

Any attack I made, they could slow down and dodge, and physical objects they could throw back at me, slowing me down so it was impossible to get away. Darkness Manipulation might- no, slowing me down would almost certainly slow that down as well. Plus, all I’d managed practicing last night was changing the shape and intensity of shadows. Not something that’d get them out of the ring. No, I needed- I needed to take them by surprise. They could walk circles around me as long as they had their power active, but it seemed they couldn’t keep it active forever, and… huh. Could they use it on multiple targets? 

Midair, I shapeshifted into a panther again. 

Val looked around themselves nervously. Smart, they probably figured me out already. 

Flying above the ground, annoying fluorescent lighting from multiple directions, it wasn’t hard to cast multiple shadows. Surrounding Val, four of my copies pulled themselves from shadows on the floor. 

Immediately they rushed Val, and while the one in front of them slowed down, the other three were unhindered. The two to the sides slowed down just a bit, though, to let the one behind them barrel into them, and-

And suddenly Val wasn’t there. Val was at the opposite side of the ring. My copy turned around, confused, just before the edge of the ring. All of my copies were moving in real time now, but I had spotted Val’s now location before they had, with my vantage point. 

My copies spotted them, and charged again, but again Val sped out of the way.

In the moment between moving and my copies noticing, they met my eyes.

“This is pointless. I give up.”

“What?!” Ms. Tira flew into the ring, facing Val. “But it was just getting interesting!”

My copies stopped and stood around awkwardly, so I went back to my normal form and flew down to reabsorb them. 

“She won. I had no way of attacking her main self, and her duplicates could just keep attacking until she tired me out. It was a battle of attrition and I was losing.”

Ms. Tira seemed annoyed with that, but she just folded her arms.

Val turned to me, and laughed a bit nervously. “I shouldn’t have shown off like that.”

I tilted my head in confusion.

“The moment you made those copies, you had won. I…”

I walked closer to them to hand them a slip of paper. ‘ You wasted energy dodging? ’

“Something like that. I- Well, I can speed my time up, but-” they fiddled with their hair. “It’s not good for me to do often. I shouldn’t have used it in training.” 

They- I looked at their greying hair again, at their face. They wore the same clothes as the other students, held themselves in the same way, if maybe a bit more carefully… but they looked… older. 

‘ When you speed up your time you age faster ’ I guessed.

They laughed bitterly when they saw the paper. “You could say that. You could also say that I always have, and always will, age at one second per second, just like everybody else.”

I nodded. It made sense. Their power didn’t affect the way they aged, but speeding up their time relative to others also means speeding up their aging relative to others. To have gone grey at ‘18’, they must have overused it in the past, but I couldn’t blame them. I would have done the same. Even now, with a power that gave me more time without that problem, I envied them. Not- not actually. The deal Astra gave me was better than the deal they had gotten from this world. But I wondered if I should have chosen time instead of shadow as my element to manipulate. … No. I was doing theming for Astra’s entertainment. She was giving me power I dared not dream of, I had to hold up my end of the bargain and be entertaining.

Ms. Tira had us spar a couple more times, but at this point each bout was just determined by who acted first when she said ‘fight’. If I got a chance to fly out of range, I won, and if Val slowed me down before that, they won. 

And so, about halfway through the class, she had us all switch sparring partners. 

My next sparring partner was a guy named Levi. I hadn’t been watching him during the sparring, but he had demonstrated the ability to fly and to turn into like a mist version of himself. He looked just a bit see-through all the time, but when he used his power it was like he was barely there, and he could flow around objects like mist. 

At first, our battle was mostly just proving we couldn’t really hit each other. We could both fly, and our flight was stronger than our muscles, but it seemed we could fly at about the same speeds, since pushing at each other in the air didn’t really go anywhere. 

Well, that is before I got my copies involved. Then he went intangible and we really couldn’t hit each other. It got really pathetic after that. I think he was trying to catch me by surprise for just long enough to push me out of the ring, but I was watching him the whole time. Eventually, I realized that while it was mostly intangible, mist could still be affected by outside forces. I made a giant fan- not the electric kind, I wasn’t confident I could do the mechanics, just one of those hand fans that’s basically just a half circle of fabric with boning- anyway, I made sure we were on opposite sides of the arena and used it to blow him out of it. Took a couple copies ready to grab him if he became tangible, but I pulled it off.

Class was really close to ending when Ms. Tira gave me my last sparring partner. She was named Poppy, had fire hair, and had demonstrated basically firebending. I didn’t like my chances.

It was over very quickly. She slowly filled the ring with fire, forcing me out. I think the only reason the fight lasted so long was so she could give me time to run away. It hurt a lot. I didn’t lose any hearts, but it- well, it felt like I was burning up. 

I was glad that I had an hour lunch before I had to go to Power Control class. Probably I should’ve gone to the cafeteria, but. I was tired. I didn’t want to see Della again. I checked on my closet copy. Combining memories of being cooped up and wanting to do things with being tired and wanting to do nothing made for an interesting mental state, but at least my new closet copy would get the rest that I wanted/didn’t want. If my missing copy didn’t come back by the end of detention, I might just leave a note in the closet for her instead. 

Then I went back to my dorm, and played on my phone. I downloaded some free games on it too, making sure some of them didn’t require internet connection so I could play them in the Warehouse later. 

Chapter Text

I went to Power Control class, reminding myself that Claye would be there and want to see me, so I’d be abandoning him if I skipped. 

The first thing I noticed in the lab was Alixer. He was sitting in an out of place office chair, talking quietly with the one student who had gotten there before me. Oh, of course. Of course he taught Power Control. It seemed like he was half of the school’s system for keeping students from hurting people with their powers. 

I waived at him as I entered, then took a seat on the floor in a corner. It was darker there. I played on my phone more, which did let off enough light to make up the small difference between the corner and the center of the room, but I didn’t care. I was tired and I wanted to not be there, being on my phone was close enough. 

I had missed that. Having an escape. A distraction to go to when I was too tired or anxious to deal with the world. I didn’t want to admit it, but as much as I missed Agatha, the familiarity of a modern world was comforting, even apart from all the powers I had gotten from going here. And I was free of the Locket. Agatha would understand that relief, at least. Even if it was… even if what I was free to do was not sleep, instead of needing it gone to think properly. 

Claye came in, at some point, and sat by me. I lowered my phone for a second to give him a mouthless smile, before going back to my game, but watching him from the corner of my eye.

“How’s it going?” he asked eventually.

I put away my phone. ‘ Tired. ’

“Yeah.” He put enough feeling into it that I knew he’d had a rough day too. And it wasn’t even 1pm yet.

I looked at him. ‘ Wanna talk about it? ’

He sighed heavily. “It’s nothing. Just have Power Control all day today… and tomorrow I guess.” He looked mournfully at the center of the room, with Alixer and a growing group of students. Class would be starting soon. 

‘ Ah. Tiring first class of the day, not ready to do it again? Understandable. My first class was tiring too. ’

“What’d you have?”

‘ Powered Combat. They had me spar with a fire user ’ I shivered slightly, remembering the pain. Not as bad as Della’s lightning that first day(not as bad as when Astra killed me); Poppy let me escape, but still. Not pleasant. 

Claye made a face in sympathy. 

And then class started. The objective was, in short, to learn how not to use your powers. How to, even in a stressful situation, not tap into anything beyond the abilities of a normal human. Which of course meant that any student who already could keep from using their power in normal circumstances would need to be put in a stressful situation to practice. The goal for the first day was just to see how much stress you could withstand before instinctively resorting to your power. 

Thankfully, the measurement was done one at a time, and any use of your powers was enough to mark the point at which you used them, so some like Poppy (who was in this class too) failed immediately for passive effects that were disruptive to the world around them. Apparently they weren’t chill with fire hair. Sorry, bad pun.

Anyway, Claye and I chatted for a while while we waited our turns- or, my turn, really. He had already done this test earlier today. He didn’t elaborate on how it went, but his expressions told me it was… not great. I didn’t press. We talked about lighter things. Video games, memes. He recommended me a show to watch, and told me where I could find it for free on the net. 

Eventually, though, it was my turn. Claye wished me luck as I walked up to where Alixer was testing everyone. It was visible to the other students, but a ways away and most were busy in their own conversations.

“Have you ever used a power without meaning to, or gone further with it than you intended?”

I thought for a moment, remembering. I remembered screaming in the face of Klaus Wulfenbach, incensed at an action I knew he would take, needing to be threatened with a gun to back down. I remembered hazily destroying every scrap available to me, repairing myself over and over, mad scribblings on top of one another in a ritual I barely remembered, the neon green light of acid sewers burning to keep me alive, (the Geister cutting off my head in one clean stroke). I remembered just barely keeping myself from experimenting on the substrate of my consciousness. I remembered ice and wires and pulling my left arm apart to make into something more .

‘ No. ’ I handed him the tiny slip of paper, gripping it a little too hard as I fought down my Spark. Not in this world. Not with the powers from this world.

Belatedly, I remembered the headaches, every time I tried to use a Minecraft power while in Girl Genius, and how every time had been an accident. Still, I met Alixer’s eyes silently, keeping to my lie. 

“Sure.” It didn’t exactly sound like he didn’t believe me, but it also didn’t sound like he did. He turned away, and for a moment I thought that might be it, he might just believe me and say I passed. Then he turned back with a complex device in his lap, small enough to hold but too big to be really handheld. My pulse quickened. I stared at the device, facing down competing urges to take it apart and to run away. He turned it in his hands, facing one facet towards me.

I almost didn’t hear him when he continued. “Sorry about this. Hold still.”

Then he turned a knob on the device, and the section facing me began to glow. It was an array of LED lights, and with each passing second, they got slowly brighter. 

I closed my eyes immediately, but that didn’t help much. Almost immediately after I realized what was happening, I felt the warning dull pain cover my skin. I curled up, clawing at my arms as the light got more intense, feeling it sear into my skin. I willed myself to stay still, to withstand, as my skin felt like it was boiling . I wanted to scream but I had no mouth, only burning, boiling, shrieking skin . 

When I opened my eyes, I was floating just below the ceiling, in the rafters above the fluorescent lights, and the pain was… abating. 

On the ground Alixer nonchalantly wrote in his notes. I heard quiet snickering from my fellow students, though at least Claye was looking up at me with concern. 

In a fit of rage, I Created a banner in my hands, letting one side unfurl to reach the floor. On it, written vertically, it said, ‘ WHAT THE FUCK ’. Once I was sure it was read, I let it drop and Created another one, reading, ‘ WAS THAT FOR?! ’ 

The snickering of my fellow students grew to muffled laughs and whispers. I was unsatisfied, still wishing I didn’t trade away the ability to scream them all into submission . 

“Swearing. Detention.” Alixer said, unmoved. “And it was to see if you instinctively used your powers under pressure.” He sounded bored, like he was being made to repeat himself

I made a paper saying ‘ Oh, yeah. Because people are going to point floodlights at me every day ’ But he had already called up the next student. 

I ripped it up as I flew back down to sit with Claye. 

“Are you okay?” He asked as I approached. I wanted to laugh bitterly, but all I could do was throw the torn up paper at his feet and sit, hunched in on myself, beside him. 

I didn’t watch as he pieced it back together into something readable. Didn’t take out my phone either. Didn’t feel like looking into its LED glow. 

Eventually I went on my phone anyway. Found a webcomic to read, to lose myself in. To try to forget the pain and stress. 

Alixer finished testing everyone before the end of class. Nobody looked happy about it, but there were only a couple others that really blew up at him like I wanted to. Once he was done, he told us to practice controlling our powers ourselves until the end of class. Which sounded like one of those things where the teacher just asks you to keep yourself busy so they can do something else and say you’re working. 

Still, he was insistent enough that most people at least tried to pretend they were practicing. Reluctantly, Claye got up and started practicing. I had been ignoring him (which I was starting to regret) so he didn’t explain. He just stood up and focused on a strange shimmer that appeared in the air in front of him. It didn’t look real. I hadn’t gotten a good look at the rift I had come in through, though now that I thought about it, the crackling not-colors that formed a thin line in front of Claye now had also surrounded the edges of that tear in reality. Now they were more pronounced, though, like instead of taking a knife to the multi-layered fabric of reality, he had scratched away just a couple layers, exposing the maddening half-real interior. 

I just watched for a bit. It was fascinating . Seeing the structure of reality as it frayed, trying to process the appearance of something that wasn’t fully real, to name the colors, the textures, the indescribable difference as the white light of reality had frequencies torn away, prismatic pieces separated out. I wanted to replicate it, I wanted to draw it. 

Still, I tore my eyes away. I did need to learn to better control my Spark, (and that- I carefully did not try to describe it- display wasn’t helping) and, well, all my other powers too. Which really meant I needed to learn to control one specific power. Out Of Context, the power that, among other things, let me turn my powers off and on. 

So I sat there, trying to figure out how to turn my Minecraft HUD off. It was the most obvious passive power, though since it hadn’t been there in Girl Genius (that would have been painful), it must have had some other way of being turned off as well. Or Locket just turned off true always-on passive powers as a small mercy. 

Anyway, after a frustrating while of sitting there, accomplishing nothing, trying to just bend my brain in different directions until my powers did what I wanted them to, I was startled by my hotbar disappearing. It was frustrating and unsatisfying, like when you brute-force a poorly-made puzzle, but now that I knew how, I could flip on and off my HUD with a thought, like pressing F1. With a little more thought I learned to change the transparency of it by turning it partially on and off. Class ended soon after I figured out how to turn off just the hotbar while still showing my hearts

I waited a bit as everyone shuffled out, watching Claye to see if he wanted to talk. (I felt I should apologize to him) But instead of starting towards the door, he went further towards the wall and sat down again. Right. 3 sections of Power Control, like the mysterious person I had met the first day said. 

‘ Sorry for ignoring you ’ I looked away when I held out the paper to him.

He took it, and I looked back, more hopeful.

“‘S Ok. Power Control testing isn’t fun…” he rubbed his arm nervously. “I’m glad you’re feeling better?”

I thought for a bit before giving him the next paper. ‘ Yeah. I need to get to my next class, but. Good luck. ’ 

Chapter Text

It wasn’t a long walk to the lab where Workshop class was. Despite leaving Power Control a bit late, I was still early. The room was different from the other labs. They were barren and white, like we were the experiment and they were controlling for variables. They weren’t empty, and both teachers had brought out supplies, but they still reminded me of a mix between a school gym and a sci-fi operating theatre. This lab was a lot more like what I had gotten used to calling a lab. It was full of tools and parts and machines. A Sparky lab. Sure, it was still more sci-fi than steampunk, but that just made it more interesting ! I walked in slowly, already trying to analyze the advanced tools and machinery. I couldn’t identify everything at a glance, but I could identify some device’s functions; multiple 3-D printers, for different sizes and materials, cutters for things from wood to metal, soldering irons, something that might be a futuristic forge. Nothing looked the way it would have in my home world, but the uses were still the same. 

It made me want to make something . Sure, I had all the tools I could want in my Worthy Workshop(from Girl Genius), but they were all in the Girl Genius style, from that time period. Nothing like this. In Girl Genius I was held back, I knew about modern advancements, but not enough to recreate them, instead having to struggle or switch directions entirely, intentionally avoiding modern advancement to spare myself the frustration of just making myself a worse version of something I could have bought in my home world. I didn’t have the opportunity to use my Spark along with modern science. Here, now? I had more than that. This was a spacefaring society . It was futuristic tech . I needed to learn everything . How had it not been the first thing I did?

“Wh- Hey! Don’t touch the- “

It was so much easier to take something apart when I could use Creation to make any wrench or screwdriver or whatever I needed. Though apparently a double-sided fire-piston wrench was too much for it. Bah! Stupid power, can’t make even the most basic of Sparkwork- guess I’ll just have to make it myself.

But when I finished the wrench, and looked up to put it to use on the machine I had been taking apart, I saw solid, faintly glowing orange light, the machine slightly obscured behind it. I reached out, and sure enough, it was smooth under my fingers, like glass. I looked around, and it was all around me, surrounding me in a tight bubble. Outside, I saw Alixer, his hand out and eyes glowing a matching orange. 

Damn him, always getting in my way, thwarting me-!  

No. I put down my new wrench carefully, trying to rein in my Spark. Without the wrench in my hands, I noticed more outside his forcefield. More people, one talking to Alixer, their voices muffled by the barrier, the rest were further away, maybe talking in tones too hushed to hear through the barrier, maybe just watching in silence.

I took one more moment to steady my nerves, push down my anger. (He was just doing his job. I had to remember that.) I still didn’t feel like apologizing, though, so I just tapped on the forcefield, looking at Alixer.

It looked like he sighed, before a small hole opened, and the sounds from outside clarified.

“You understand why I can’t let you take apart school property.”

I glared at him, rage boiling underneath the surface. I wanted to yell at him, to make him understand that I would have put it back together again, good as new- better , even! Back on Castle Wulfenbach… well. They still might not be happy about you taking apart someone else’s tools, but they wouldn’t do this . 

I closed my eyes for a moment, pushing down the anger that had nowhere to go.

‘ I would have put it back together when I was done ’ I pressed the paper against the smooth dome of my imprisonment. 

He rolled his eyes. “Be that as it may, I’ll still be seeing you in detention for the next month, at least.” he sighed. “I do have a class to run, still. Will you be able to behave for the rest of yours, or shall I take you to detention early?” 

I wanted to yell at him so badly.

‘ I’ll behave .’ I wasn’t sure that I meant it. But no. I should. If I didn’t he’d just get called back, and I’d be caged again. I was really starting to understand why he was so tired all the time, if they had to call him for every incident like this. And, mad as I was at him, I still wanted to let him sleep. I couldn’t get that image out of my head, from when I’d first met him, of him sleeping at his desk, clearly accidentally. It reminded me too much of myself, back in my home world. Or my dad. (I tried not to think about him though, or risk thinking about how much I missed him. How much I longed to tell him about my adventures, to ask his advice on my powers, or my plans, to come back and tell him he could quit his job, he wouldn’t have to spend long nights or sleepless days on it anymore, we could just be immortal and free to do whatever we want, forever. Me, my parents, my friends; everyone I cared about. (What about Agatha? part of me whispered, but I shut it down. She could take care of herself.) That was why I had to keep going. I didn’t have enough power to do that yet. To say that and for it to be true.)

When Alixer finally brought down the barrier, I was calmer. More determined. I had a mission, and while yes playing with all the pretty tech would probably help with it, (The more I learned, the more I could do with my Spark, the longer I could survive in any world Astra sent me to.) this was a long game and it’d be better if I could learn from the teacher and not get kicked out of the class. 

So, yeah. The rest of class was, well. Excruciatingly boring. The teacher (the woman Alixer had been talking with, named Marina) just had us doing lab safety the whole time. Or really, she had me doing lab safety. None of the rest of the class listened to her. (I only did under threat of Alixer’s return.) She did vaguely explain what each of the machines did, but only enough to explain all the ways I wasn’t supposed to use them.

My classmates didn’t help. Mostly, they ignored me and the teacher loudly, making her repeat herself and take even longer to explain things I could tell in a glance. Sometimes, they bothered me. Called me teacher’s pet for listening, even though I didn’t have much choice. One boy who wore safety glasses like a fashion statement told me I wasn’t a real scientist because I didn’t have to maintain my tools if I could just summon them from nothing. It took a lot of will not to make him regret that . 

Once she was done with her lecture, she had us take a lab safety quiz, classic rules; 100% or you retake it. It was dead easy with perfect memory, just parrot back what she had just said. Half the class got it first try. The rest of class was spent on Marina desperately trying to get the rest of the class to pay enough attention to take and pass it. We weren’t allowed to work with any equipment before passing it, but she didn’t seem to have the authority to enforce that rule on students who weren’t tearing apart the equipment. 

I had an hour break for dinner, before detention. I spent it in my Warehouse, building a deathray. A nice hefty one. The kind Agatha preferred. The kind I hadn’t made, when I was actually in Girl Genius. The pretty explosion it made in the too-bright Warehouse sky was almost a good enough substitute for yelling at someone. 

Too bad I definitely couldn’t take it to detention. Not to mention that using it without wearing the plague doctor light-protection outfit would probably hurt a lot. 

Detention was boring, of course. I was one of three in there today, but it didn’t make much difference. We still weren’t allowed to do much of anything, and Alixer was still incredibly quick at using his forcefields to block any bad behavior.

I did end up letting my closet copy go after that. I felt so cooped up after just an hour, I couldn’t keep making her go through that. I did leave a note for if- when. my missing copy got back. 

And it continued on like that for the next few weeks. Classes were generally boring and/or painful, apart from Workshop, which was always far too tempting. They did eventually let me take apart a few things- individual tools given to each student, demonstration materials, that sort of thing. Not the actual workshop machines. 

Powered Combat was basically just supervised sparring. Power Control was. Well it did go a bit better as time went on. Once they knew about my Spark (if not by name) they started me working on controlling it, rather than just seeing how long they could burn me before I used my powers to try to get away. Still, it wasn’t like they had any tips. They didn’t even know what the Spark is, just gave me some interesting tools, maybe riled me up a bit, and said don’t go crazy. 

Academic classes were boring, of course. Or- no. I learned interesting things in them, about the world I had gone to, its history and structure. The assignments were boring. Readings and lectures would often say the exact same things. Maybe good renforcement if you could actually forget things, but a waste of time for me. Most of the work was busywork. And, well. I was leaving when I graduated. Probably never to return, even once I bought the option to Return to past worlds. There just wasn’t that much here worth going back for. Claye and Saavi were nice, but… they had their own lives. I wasn’t needed here and there was no one that I’d miss like Agatha, Tarvek, or Zeetha. 

So when I learned about the war between demigods and colonists, won by the Gadidae Federation colonists due to better tech and the fact that even fully human children born close enough to the Rift could develop powers some of the time, or that the war is what made supers go underground, or that to this day the planet of Viea 7Se kept the existence of superpowers a secret from the rest of the Federation, or that there’s an entire system for making a legally distinct super identity for people who keep it separate from their civilian identity, it’s just fun facts. Just interesting information that I’ll probably never end up needing. 

And rounding off the things I had to do every day was Detention. And it was worse because I had it on weekends too, unlike my classes. I would say I got to know Alixer very well there, since he was also there every day, but no. He just stared tiredly at us, preventing us from doing anything and scolding us for even talking. I just tried to keep busy enough that the opportunity to stare at walls and make up stories in my head felt better.

Of course, all of that only took up a tiny percentage of my time, really, because while I, the original, had to go to class and detention and everything, my copies could do the actually useful and interesting stuff. I usually kept at least 50 copies in my Warehouse, and then I recombined with them and I remembered everything, I remembered being the me who did it. So most of my time was spent out of class, in my Warehouse, practicing my powers, building (in the Minecraft way), building (in the Sparky way), drawing, maybe doing homework (but usually not), and just chilling. I also spent a fair amount of time on the net, though that was limited by having to be in my dorm on my laptop or tablet, or on my phone but I kept that on my original so usually I couldn’t use it because I was busy. 

Powers-wise, I hadn’t managed to stretch anything past what was outlined in the descriptions when I got them, but I did figure out a lot more tricks. The one I was the proudest of (and worked the hardest on) was using Creation and Duplication simultaneously to Create clothes for my copies as they were being made. It was nothing special, all I could manage in that time was a dress and cloak, not even shoes, but it was enough. It meant I could create copies whenever I wanted, without having to be embarrassed or make sure no one was watching, or making sure I was in cat form first. (I still hadn’t figured out how to make my copies start out in a different shape to the one I was using when I made them.) Anyway it did leave me with the secondary problem of always having a ton of extra cloaks and dresses from reabsorbed copies. This wasn’t so bad in the Warehouse, where I had infinite space and having lots of fabric was cozy anyway, but it was a pain in school, where I’d have to lug it around for the rest of the day after Creating it. 

So far I had two possible defenses for sudden light attacks in the works, but neither was ready for real use. Number one, which I had thought of first, was to Create something opaque between me and the light. A heavy blanket or something. The problems with this were that I still couldn’t really make something that big that fast (but I was working on it), and it didn’t exactly let me move or do anything. Fine against the sun, maybe, but probably not Della, who only seemed to be getting more precise with those lightning bolts. The other solution was Darkness Manipulation. Theoretically, I could use it to create an area of darkness around myself, absorbing the light before it got to me. This would leave me fully free to act… except that it was very hard for me to absorb that much light with it, or to create shadows too far from where they should be. Ultimately, it was the more useful solution, but it would be even harder to pull off. 

I hadn’t made too much progress with everything else. I was flying smoothly, I could Create any small mundane thing I needed on a whim, even stuff with simple moving parts, like a stapler, I could suppress my powers on purpose, and to different degrees, including suppressing only parts of them (though there were several powers I didn’t dare test this on).

Shapeshifting was interesting. I did manage turning into both a shadow-horse and a shadow-crow, testing my size limits, and was starting explorations with, well, material. My natural state was a being made of solid shadow, a strange material that reflected no light and had a texture similar to what it was mimicking; skin, feathers or fur. It was soft, and velvety, and under my hand it gave easily. It took focus to feel the texture, to not let grabbing my own arm become fusing my arms together in some pretzel shape. Not much focus, but I knew that it threw off my impression of its texture. 

But I knew that was not all. I could make that living-shadow material sharp, giving myself claws or sharp, pointed fingers. Sometimes, when I was scared or exerting myself, I could feel that I had a heartbeat. Which implies blood and organs and that sort of thing. So I experimented with what I could be made of. So far I had been unable to change the appearance of the material, but I had managed to create the texture of metal, smooth and creating a satisfying clunk against a table. Unyielding for anything but me.

I still practiced Inviolate Mind and Inviolate Body using the Training Facilities, but for both of them I didn’t really notice a change. I mean, I noticed that the lower-powered levels of pressurization, or temperature, or mind-reading, or mind-control offered by the facility were having less of an effect on me, and I could increase the difficulty to get the same effect as before, so. It was working, I just- since I wasn’t using them outside of training it didn’t matter very much. I was almost tempted to not bother, but I knew that when they did eventually come up, I would very much regret it if I didn’t work on them. 

At some point. Well, I had found out that this world had tabletop roleplaying games too, and I had so much more free time since I had me going to all my classes for me, and I thought making physical versions of the rulebook pages I found online would be good detail practice for Creation, and then I ended up mentioning it to Saavi… 

I accidentally started running a ttrpg for Claye and Saavi every Saturday. And since it’s the only artistic project I actually had any obligation to, I started doing more and more of my daily drawings about it. They played a couple of mer-people trying to infiltrate a modern human society (well. Modern for this world. It still felt futuristic to me.) and find a member of their school who had been caught by a fisherman. It had been two sessions and they already had me having to make up a new building on the fly.

The sessions were held in Claye’s dorm, since he didn’t have a roommate.

A month and a half into the school year, and four sessions into our campaign, I tested food made with Creation on them, as well as Minecraft carrots. (It had been my turn to bring snacks and I really did not want to figure out how to properly buy food here.) They didn’t die, though apparently my grapes tasted incredibly sweet and not very much like grapes. 

It was almost two months in when I entered my dorm, having just gotten out of detention, and saw a stranger. Well. That’s not true. I saw myself, as I expected to. Five of my copies, more than usually stayed out in my dorm room rather than the Warehouse. Four were dressed in the simple cloak and dress I had taken to making my copies when I made them, practically a uniform at this point, but the fifth… She wore a heavier, larger cloak, which hid travel-stained thick leggings, a t-shirt barely visible under a denim vest, and a belt with several pouches. Her hair was tied up into a messy ponytail, and her boots were tough and practical.

I put my hands on my hips, glaring at the others to explain. 

Quickly, I was handed a note. ‘ This is the missing copy! She found her way back! ’. The one who handed me the note gestured to the differently dressed copy, but it was hardly necessary. 

I held out my hand to the missing copy, an offer. She looked nervous, shook her head, and pulled a sketchbook out of her belt. She flipped through it for a moment before showing it to me, pointing at what she meant to say.

‘ Hello. ’ She skipped over some lines, to, ‘ I want to recombine with the original ’, then she backtracked to, ‘ I need some time to settle ’. Then she turned the sketchbook back to herself, flipped through more pages, and started writing. 

I couldn’t talk to her while she was writing, since to read what I said she’d have to stop, so I turned to another of the copies there and asked, ‘ how long has she been back? ’ 

The reply I got was ‘ a little over a half hour or so? ’

Before I got a chance to reply, though, the missing copy looked back up at me, turning her sketchbook back to show me what she had written. ‘ You may want to prepare yourself as well. I went through a fair amount. ’

I nodded seriously, and told her, ‘ take all the time you need. The others can show you what we have set up. I do want to learn your story, but it can wait. ’

One of my copies there took over for me, and soon enough the formerly-missing copy was watching Eyequarium videos on our computer, boots, belt, and vest discarded, cloak wrapped around herself for comfort, and sketchbook out on the desk beside our computer, ready for when she needed to talk to us. 

It was nice, having her back. Like a weight off my chest, not having the background worry of what happened to my missing copy from way back on my first day. It was nice knowing she wasn’t dead, it was nice knowing I’d soon know what happened to her. It was probably not a part of my power, just a part of the way I thought, but I felt like a missing piece had been returned to me. I knew (generally) where all my copies were. I felt more whole. 

A few hours later, my formerly missing copy approached me, looking a lot calmer.

She held out her sketchbook to me. ‘ Ready? ’

I nodded, and held out my hand.

She took it, and the familiar sensation of combining with a copy overwhelmed me.

By this point, usually, I could fully reintegrate in a fraction of a second, smoothly threading together my two trains of consciousness into one and continuing as if nothing had happened. That did not happen here. Our thoughts, our feelings, our memories were too different. We swayed on four feet, and felt hands guide us by our cloaks to sit on the floor. We stared straight ahead, vision blurring between two sets. 

I focused on the present moment, shapeshifting back into one body. My memories were a muddled mess, but I could agree on the present, on the stable floor under me, the feeling of the wood grain under my fingers. 

The room was new and familiar. The copies surrounding me were intimidating and friendly. I absentmindedly ran my fingers through my loose hair, which was mostly free of tangles and completely free of dirt. I closed my eyes. I was ok. I was me. I was both the original and the copy that got lost. I was the two consciousnesses threaded into one. And I was ready to take a look at my new memories. 

And so, I finally knew, finally remembered, the story of the copy that had been separated from us.

Chapter Text

Back when I was in cat form, searching through the Academy for the headmaster’s office, I had found a machine. I didn’t know what it did, at the time, but it was big and complex and beautiful, and all thoughts of my mission vanished. The others could take care of it. I wanted to know about the machine.

It was a teleporter, I discovered much too quickly, accidentally activating it when I had been trying to analyze it. Trying to jimmy open the access panel with my claws had apparently been… overambitious, for the amount of experience in a cat body I had. 

Anyway, I found myself in a strange place. Since I was definitely not supposed to be messing with those machines, I hid as soon as I heard footsteps. From there I spent a long while mapping out wherever I had found myself. People approached before I could take a look at the corresponding machine on that side, and at the time I figured I was still in the same facility. 

I’m not sure how long it took to figure out I wasn’t. It wasn’t that big a place, but I had to make sure I wasn’t just missing some kind of secret passage. 

Once I finally realized I had explored the whole place and hadn’t seen anything I recognized from before getting teleported, I panicked a bit. I had to get back to my original. I was gone for way longer than we had planned, and yes I had learned useful information, but she would worry about me.

And, well, I was worried about me. I left my Totem Of Undying with my original, and well. If I died we wouldn’t stop Jumping, everything would still be okay. Heck, the description implied my original would be able to make a replacement after I’d been dead for an hour.

But as far as I can tell, my memories would be lost. I would die, experience the dreaded nothingness of just- not existing anymore. Recombining wasn’t like that, didn’t feel like that, because I remembered being both of me, copy and original. There was no break, no loss of experience, no loss of self. Two trains of thought folded back into one. 

But dying? My train of thought just. Stopping, lost forever? That was terrifying. (Would my original even notice? It’s not like I had been keeping all 100 copies summoned. No, don’t think about that.)

I was no longer in the school. No longer where I was supposed to be, no longer safe. And I had no idea how to get back. 

I spent a while longer in the new facility, trying to get at the teleporter. But it was frequently used, and the more I tried to watch it, the more my luck with stealth ran out. It wasn’t long before I realized I’d need to find another way, that trying to use the teleporter would just mean getting caught where I wasn’t supposed to be. I didn’t think I could survive a beheading as a shadow.

So I went outside. The night sky was beautiful and alien. A World To Explore, Only One Life To Explore It meant that I could recognize how not a single pattern in the stars was recognizable. No constellations, nothing. It wasn’t dark enough to see that many stars anyway, but the confirmation that I was on a different planet. It was interesting. The architecture was futuristic, but I was surprised to see it wasn’t a super populated area. There were large buildings in the distance, but here seemed to be mostly forest. The exit had been in a small, put-together building that wasn’t really a cabin but still had some of that feeling to it. Definitely somewhere not meant to look like it housed the kind of businesslike sci-fi facility I had just come out of. 

Daybreak sucked. Direct sunlight hurt like hell, and there weren't that many places to hide in the forest. I had been walking toward where I had seen buildings, but had gotten tired partway through. Sprinting from shadow to shadow, trying not to yelp when the sun scorched my skin in between, was not a good time. I was lucky to find an outcropping of rocks, one leaned against the others enough to make an almost-cave. Enough to hide under, anyway. I don’t think the trees would have been enough once the sun was properly overhead. 

I worked on Creating myself some clothes so I could be humanoid again. It took the whole day, but when the sun had finally set and I crawled out of my hidey-hole, I wore a purple cloak, t-shirt, thick leggings, and hiking boots. 

By the time I made it to civilization, I also had a belt, with a pouch for a sketchbook and pen. I was, however, tired and probably filthy. I really wanted to wash my hands, since as paws they had been on the ground. 

The streets were quiet, probably because it was the middle of the night. I had no clue how to start looking for the Academy. All I knew about it was that it was secret and it was a school. Not promising. 

So that was how I spent the first few weeks. On the streets, hiding during the day and searching at night. I did want to talk to someone (that’s what I made the sketchbook for, after all.), but to keep out of the light during the day I had to retreat to dark alleyways, underpasses, that sort of thing. Sometimes I saw people there, or when I was out and about at night, but they didn’t seem keen to interact with me, and nothing about them indicated that they’d have any idea about the Academy anyway. Asking about it might just get me in trouble for spilling the secret. 

I experimented with my powers a little bit. Managed to use Flight, get on a rooftop at night to get a lay of the land. Used Darkness Manipulation a couple times during the day, just to nudge a shadow from close to me to over me

It was a while before I witnessed my first super battle. It was day, and I was hiding to the side of an underpass, where the bridge supports hid half-hearted graffiti and the dirt was littered with trash and broken bottles. 

I was startled by an unearthly wobbling noise, and the sudden appearance of a man beside me. He was caked in dirt, and blood oozed from a gash on his forehead. The state of his clothes suggested it wasn’t his only wound. He stumbled in the darkness, and I caught him before he could fall on the broken glass. 

Apparently, he hadn’t seen me, and he startled badly. 

“Please,” he begged, “let me hide here. I’m too tired to teleport again, but if she catches me…” he trailed off, watching the road warily as a woman flew down the center of the underpass, looking around with sharp eyes narrowed. I used Darkness Manipulation to make the shadows on our side of the underpass just a bit darker, and she seemed to pass us by. 

As I Created him some bandages, the man explained that she was after him because of his powers, a teleporter was too useful a thief to ignore, or let go free. He had been hoping no one in this city would find out about his powers, and he could leave that life behind, but he ran out of cash, took something small, and now has local supers after him again. 

Once she was gone I took him closer to the side of the bridge, where there was enough light for him to read what I wrote in my sketchbook.

I ended up agreeing to try to help him hide, in exchange for access to soap and running water and someplace to put my things. It was nice having a place to stay, though I was on-edge the whole time.

Turns out it wasn’t baseless paranoia, either, because after a few weeks of staying with Kayne, the people who were after him figured out where he was staying. 

Staying in underpasses and dark alleys is even worse when you’re on the run, and trying to keep pace when you fly and have to avoid sunlight, and your friend teleports and has to eat and sleep. It sucked. 

I did ask him about it; about using my panther form to pick a fight and get them to leave us alone. He didn’t want me putting a target on my back, and a super fight in his apartment building would be dangerous for everyone else there, anyway. 

A confrontation happened anyway. It was only a matter of time, really. Kayne ended up having me Create a tent and sleeping bag for him, so he could sleep at night while I kept watch. There was still just the one woman, but the whole tent would be harder to hide, and Kayne was still asleep. 

I turned into a panther, thinking natural weapons would be useful. We were at the edges of the forest, far enough away from buildings that I figured we were safe from causing too much collateral damage.

Her first move was to pick me up, and only after I flew out of her grasp did I realize her plan was to drop me from a height. She didn’t know my powers. Good. She turned in the air to face me, and she looked… scared. I guess multiple powers like that isn’t common. I didn’t have long to contemplate though, before she flew off faster than I had ever dared try to fly yet.

I thought that was it, until. Well. One moment I was flying, watching her fly off, the next, a single moment of seeing the tread of a boot, a loud crack and a pain in my head. 

Then I was waking up, dizzy, nauseous, and with a pounding headache. 

Eventually, Kayne helped me figure out what happened. She kicked me in the head, using her flight for momentum. Of course, this gave me a nasty concussion and knocked me out. It was lucky that the noise woke Kayne up, and he got me out of there while the woman was holding her foot. (Apparently kicking that hard had some backlash. It was hard for me to feel bad for her though.)

Kayne decided that this was the last straw, and unless I objected, we were going to the authorities about this. He explained that had been trying to avoid them, since he had his own criminal past that he didn’t want them looking too hard into, but he said he couldn’t let his fear be the reason I died, or got roped into the criminal world.

So the next morning I found myself hiding under a parasol and a long cloak while he led me to a police station. He did the talking (of course) and had asked me the questions he knew would come up, so when the topic came to my missing I.D., or lack of proof of graduating from the Academy, he knew what to say. 

It was surprisingly smooth, the way he brought them from basically ready to lock me up, to planning the logistics of getting me back to the Academy with my other selves. He did lie for me. Rather a lot actually, hiding how I left the school, hiding how I met him, exaggerating my injuries, etc. But I managed to not contradict him, and he got them to take me back here, to the Academy, to the rest of me.

And now I had his number, and a phone. 

‘ Hey Kayne, it’s me, Elz. I found my original self… and my phone. ’

I decided not to try to explain the whole thing about having recombined with my original self and therefore kinda being a different person than the one who met him while still also being the same person who met him. Identity was odd when there could be a hundred of you. 

When he didn’t reply I realized it was in the middle of the night. Oh well. He’d see it in the morning. 

Apparently he woke up late, and I wound up texting him in class. Law class was boring anyway, even if it was a bit relevant to his situation. He was glad I was alright, but nothing about his situation had really changed. The woman who was harassing him could fly faster than any mundane police force, and super heroes a) weren’t officially employed by the government, given how supers were hidden from the wider Federation, and b) were too in-demand to waste on a relatively mundane problem like his. For now the best he could do was take refuge in the police station, and they wouldn’t let him do that forever. 

And I couldn’t really leave the school to help. Sure, I could probably sneak back to the teleporter I had found and left from in the first place, but I had already experimentally determined that sneaking around to use it on the other side was significantly more difficult. The police had taken me back via that teleporter, so I still didn’t know any other way into the Academy. 

I ended up asking Kayne, who had gone to the Academy as a kid. (Almost every super had, apparently, since it was the only super Academy in existence as far as anyone knew.) He explained that he was effectively on the other side of the planet, so the teleporters were basically the only way there unless you wanted to spend a ton of time on travel. 

So I couldn’t do anything about it, for now. That was annoying. 

It was two more months later that I realized it was over halfway to graduation, at which point I would be leaving the world forever. Things were going well- I had way more practice with my powers, even stuff I hadn’t really thought to practice, like realizing Minecraftian Inventory could hold non-minecraft things. Usually as non-stacking items, but some things that were small and identical like pens(of the same brand and color) or coins(of the same denomination) could even stack to 64. I also confirmed that each of my copies had a separate inventory, so my total carrying capacity was actually ridiculous. Though if recombining overfilled the smaller inventory of one of me vs two, the excess was dropped as items. This of course led to the realization that I could have non-Minecraft things as Minecraftian floating items, I suppose due to Keep Minecraft Physics. 

Anyway, as well as all that was going, Adley and Della still harassed Claye and Saavi (and me, but I didn’t care as it’s not like it could follow me wherever I was going next), and. Well, Kayne had said he worked something out with the mysterious flying woman, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way. He asked me a few times if I was getting let out on field trips at any point, and it was his offhand comment about graduation that made me realize my time was growing short.

I’d have to wrap up the mermaid campaign with Claye and Saavi. I really wasn’t sure they’d make it to the ending I had tentatively planned before graduation. 

I had wound up getting into the fandom of a relatively big indie video game, and a few comics, and- well, I supposed I should post some of the frankly too many fanfics and fanart I had made in my free time- lest they never be seen by anyone who actually understands the references. As far as I could tell, none of the media in this world was the same as my original reality past a pretty early date. They had Shakespeare, the Epic of Gilgamesh, all sorts of ancient myths and legends that I recognized, but past that it was all different. Sure, some were similar, but never close enough for it to feel like more than coincidence. So I figured the stuff here wouldn’t be in any of the other worlds I went to, either. The media I found in Girl Genius supported this idea too- though honestly most fiction in Girl Genius felt like it could only have been there anyway. 

I made sure to download everything I could so I could play or read it offline. Even if other worlds had internet, it wouldn’t be the same internet.

Chapter Text

I was in Power Control, slowly following the instructions to build a coffee maker (resisting the urge to build a better one instead) while under a light just bright enough to make my skin itch and my eyes burn, when I heard a loud whooshing noise, like someone had opened a window to a hurricane. 

I was about to ignore it. That kind of thing wasn’t too uncommon in Power Control; a student loses focus and their power breaks through, causing a ruckus. It’s not too uncommon for it to be a chain event, either, since that can put more stress on everyone else. A lot of powers could sound like that. I wasn’t going to let it get to me.

And then I heard Claye scream, and I felt a chill run down my spine. I flew up cautiously, just enough to see over the barriers separating me from the other students. They were short, so Alixer could see all of us from his raised platform, without us being able to see each other and get distracted. I needed to know what was going on. 

It was impossible to miss. The gash in reality towered over the flimsy dividers, dizzying not-colors crackling at its edges, squirming unreal shapeless things oozing, creeping out of it. Claye stood in front of it, stock-still and horrified, defended from the writhing things by a familiar glowing orange barrier. As they squirmed against the barrier it glitched slightly, and a fizzing, crackling noise grew louder. When I managed to tear my eyes away from the mass , I saw Alixer straining, eyes shut in concentration. 

That was it. I needed to help, somehow. I started by making four copies on the ground below me, who flew up and joined me in watching, cloaks billowing in the wind the rift was emitting. Probably I should’ve come up with a plan first so we were all on the same page, but, well. I was scared, and I knew that, from a certain perspective, every copy I had out was like an extra life, since my Jumping would only end if all of us did. 

Still, by now I had a fair amount of practice with working with myself; keeping on the same page with my copies. 

One of them darted off, and I didn’t bother to track her, trusting that she had a plan. I worried, of course, about losing her, but I pushed it away, and flew up with the other three, getting over Alixer’s barrier, and Creating bows and arrows. 

It was stupid, yes. Ideally we would have been using deathrays, but it wasn’t like I carried one on me, and they were Sparkwork, so they couldn’t be Created. Theoretically I should’ve been able to Create a gun, but… (I didn’t want to. I was scared of them) I was used to bows and arrows from Minecraft. 

The amorphous things that I fired at seemed to only be partially real, as while three of our arrows struck true, one seemed to phase through the mass of meat and darkness, clattering on the cracked lab floor. Still, the thing from outside reality writhed at the contact, so it may have done something? More importantly, the arrows that struck true did seem to wound it, and it bled an eye-searing rainbow that made my head spin and hands itch. 

I managed to knock another arrow, telling myself that I could collect samples when the thing(s?) were dead and the rift was closed. As I fired I reluctantly admitted to myself that that kind of self-control was not the kind of thing I’d’ve been capable of before coming to this world, before Out Of Context, since using it to dampen my Spark was the only way I achieved that self-control in the first place. 

This time our volley of arrows did… a lot less well. None of them managed to be in the right… extradimensional layer or whatever. They passed through the mass, clattering on the floor harmlessly. Was it learning? Adapting? That was not a good sign. 

“What are you doing?! ” I heard Alixer’s strained voice from below me, “RUN!”

He looked up at me, a panic in his eyes I had never seen before. I shook my head and knocked another arrow. He clearly needed help and I was not going to leave him and Claye to die. (Memories of blood and rails; dead Corbettite monks I should have saved) 

I fired again, along with my copies who hadn’t paused. The arrows continued to slip through the semi-real fleshy mass. We needed a different approach. 

First, I made a new copy with the idea she would fly back to our dorm to get a few deathrays and maybe tell the others what was going on. I didn’t know if energy would work better than matter, but it would be a useful test. 

Next… well, I didn’t want to get close enough to try a different attack method. So I was kinda waiting on the deathrays to be able to do any damage. Still, I did have two goals. Kill the beast, close the rift. 

I nodded to my copies, and flew down to where Claye was panicking. I stepped in front of him slowly, blocking his view of the mass writhing against Alixer’s shield. He had told me before that his control of his power slipped more when he was stressed, so I was hoping if I could help him calm down, he would be able to close the rift and at least prevent any more things from coming out. 

He was hyperventilating, staring vacantly into space, not seeming to even notice me in front of him. 

‘ Breathe ’ The paper I made was larger than the little slips I usually made in the hopes he would read it without thinking. Because he definitely was not thinking. 

“e-eh. E?” Claye stuttered, “I-I-I can’t. Can’t st-stop it. I-”

‘ It’s ok ’ It wasn’t. We needed that rift closed before the things overpowered Alixer’s barrier and killed both of us. But he was panicking, and putting more pressure on him would just make that worse. 

“N-no, it- they’re here and it- it’s my fault.” He curled into himself as he morosely added, “I thought I was doing better.”

‘ We’ll figure it out. ’ Once I thought he had read it, I dropped the paper to take his hand instead, trying to gently lead him away from the tear he had ripped in reality. 

It was a bet on his ability to control himself. He had explained a bit about his powers to me, and as far as I could tell, the rifts he made depended on his power to stay open. Putting separation between him and the rift would help close it (if my theory was right), but possibly run the risk of him opening another one if he couldn’t calm down in time. Maybe. If my theories were right and his holding this one rift open was preventing him from accidentally opening others. 

And then I heard a great shattering noise, like my head was breaking glass, and a lot of things happened very quickly. I pushed Claye away from the rift, and he stumbled back, falling. The crack of losing Minecraft hearts was almost lost in the way the shattering sound still echoed in my ears. I felt an impossible pain, my chest burning with freezing heat that bubbled and cracked from my spine to my ribcage. There was a floaty, unreal moment as, through the pain, I noticed my Minecraft hearts were all empty. Claye desperately scrambled back as my vision began to fade, impossible colors in the corners of my eyes. As my vision swam, I looked down and saw the sharp steel of fleshy darkness that had run me through. I wondered what dying felt like.

And then I heard the familiar KRA-KOOM of my Totem Of Undying popping, realizing all at once that I had kept it on my belt and now had another split-second to act. I jolted forward, instinctively flying away from the danger, surprised that the things impaling me didn’t hold me back. I ignored it though, focusing on Claye. The thorny, fleshy, indistinct branches were mere inches away from where he was scrambling back on the floor. As I went to pick him up, one managed to tear right through his shoe, like it wasn’t even there. 

My momentum hit a wall the moment I tried to pick Claye up. In my panic I forgot I wasn’t really strong enough to pick up a whole person, and I only barely managed to drag him beyond the tendril’s grip. This was bad. I needed to get Claye away from these things, but-

Suddenly, Claye felt a lot lighter, and I managed to fly up with him. I looked up, and saw one of my copies carrying him by the legs, taking half the weight. As we flew him away from the rift, I took a moment to close my eyes in relief. It was okay. We made it out. The monster was still there, thrashing and writhing and roiling, but we had-

Crack. The sound of hearts being lost. I opened my eyes in time to see my copy flash red with damage taken. It was only a couple hearts of damage, but I hadn’t regened to full yet after dying. I only had 4.5 hearts left and I didn’t know what hit us. 

Crack. The damage hit again. 2.5 hearts. I looked around frantically. An odd mist surrounded us, and little scratches were appearing on Claye where his skin was exposed to the air. The regeneration effect from my Totem managed to give me a half heart back before the damage hit again. My one heart bounced in my HUD along with the frantic beat of the one in my chest. I couldn’t see a way of making it out of this.

Crack. Pain. A thousand tiny pricks of pain wherever my skin was exposed to air. My eyes hurt the worst, and I closed them immediately on instinct. The damage hadn’t hurt before, but now I felt it. My hearts were at zero but I wasn’t dead, but I hurt . My thoughts swirled as I tried to use the extra moments to get Claye just a little further away. Pain prickled harshly through me, and I wanted to scream. How was I alive? Zero hearts was dead. Why wasn’t I dead yet, and- owwww- why did it hurt so much? 

I felt woozy, pain and disorientation like when I was impaled before, but this time I had no Totem to save me. I faltered, and dimly I heard a rustle of frantic motion on fabric. It was hard to register it through the cutting, swirling pain that felt like the air itself was made from knives. I was glad I had no mouth, that I didn’t breathe. … Maybe I should do something about that for Claye, who does. I barely felt my arms releasing Claye under the pain, which was increasing to the point of senselessness. A ringing filled my ears, and it was almost soothing. I didn’t feel it when I hit the ground. 

Chapter Text

My original fell, leaving me desperately trying not to drop Claye into what I had to assume was a roiling mass of rainbow-darkness and sharp meat. I refused to look down, so I couldn’t tell. I was at 4 out of 10 hearts, and still taking two hearts of damage at regular intervals, probably due to the iridescent rainbow mist that surrounded us. Unless something changed, I would be joining her very soon. 

Crack. Two hearts. Great. Another copy joined me, catching Claye as he began to slip from my grasp. Then another, and the three of us could move faster than when it had just been me and the original. 

I heard and felt the last crack of taking damage as we finally made it out of the strange cloud. I was at zero hearts, but somehow I wasn’t surprised that I was still alive. I knew it just meant that any damage I took now would hurt . Half of the room was engulfed, and Claye looked bad. He must have been breathing in the sharp, rainbow air. None of the flimsy dividers were still up, and the large room seemed to be empty of people. At least the other students had made it out. But- wait! Alixer! I looked around the room again quickly, but no. I couldn’t find him. He was definitely still trapped in the roiling chaos that oozed from the other half of the room. He was probably dead. The only thing that told me that Claye wasn’t was his shallow and ragged breaths, uneven as he choked and hacked up blood even as I was pretty sure he was unconscious. 

But I couldn’t accept Alixer being dead. No. No! He had done too much for me. He had forced me to learn to rein in my Spark. He was always there, quiet and tired, ready to restrain me if I got out of control, protecting me from the other students, and them from me in turn. He gave so much of himself to keep us all safe. He stayed here even when everyone else had left, keeping up his barrier to protect me and Claye, even though it was Claye who brought the thing here, and I had ignored his command. 

The other two copies and I gently placed Claye on the floor, on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his own blood. As soon as he was out of my hands I flew back to the rainbow chaos, skirting the edges and feeling pricks of pain on my skin when I got too close. I tried to peer through the bright rainbow darkness, looking for any sign of Alixer. Shapes moved, twisted and writhed, but none of them looked human. 

And then I stopped. Something shone, dim but there, real in a way the neon rainbow darkness wasn’t. An orange glow, the color of Alixer’s barriers. Hope flooded my heart. He was there , and alive (for now).

I wanted to just rush in and grab him, but I knew that was stupid. I still was at zero hearts, and I wouldn’t be able to carry him on my own. Going in there and dying would do no one any good. What I wouldn’t do for a golden apple. But my Minecraftian Inventory was empty, save the bow I had Created earlier.

So I started to make a new copy, working on instinct. I realized what I was doing and l looked up, expecting to see a lifeless shadow, like every time I forgot I was a copy, not the original. Instead I saw a new copy, staring back at me in surprise. Then she shook her head, and Created pairs of goggles and gloves, handing me a set of each and putting the others on. 

Then she set her jaw, and flew into the chaos. I blinked, not processing. But I didn’t have time to process. I put on the gloves and goggles, and followed her into the fray. 

It hurt. So much. Like needles slashing through every bit of exposed flesh. I hadn’t paid attention before, but it also slashed at my clothes, usually leaving thin rips and tears not deep enough to reach skin, sometimes leaving gashes, the edges tinted with the same light-eating black of my skin. When I touched it, it came off on my gloves, wet. 

It was hard to see very far in front of me. The goggles protected my eyes, but they quickly became scratched up, and spiked vines shifted in and out of reality, shadows in the rainbow mist obscuring everything in a haze that couldn’t decide if it was bright or dark. 

I could barely make out my copy in front of me, using all my focus to follow billowing purple, and trying desperately to ignore the jagged neon shadows that threatened to overtake me, growing thicker and sharper as I went. It was harder and harder to will myself forward, clench my fists and fly into the things ripping into me, coating my purple clothes in deep black blood. 

And then my copy moved, and I saw the glow of Alixer’s barrier, hovering in tiny shards against his skin, in front of his eyes. Pieces shattered constantly, and the red of his blood refracted in them and the cracks in my goggles, surrounding me with fear and hurt. I rushed forward, joining my copy who was pulling goggles over his shut and bleeding eyes. I Created him a cloth mask, like the kind we had worn for COVID in our home world, hoping it would help him breathe without the knife-sharp rainbow air cutting into his throat and lungs. 

We went to pick him up, but as we did, he rasped, “jus- get out. L’ve me”

I had taken his legs, my copy holding his torso (at this point she was stronger than me, with how the things had cut through my gloves to tear up my arms. Her gloves were cut up too, but she must have still had Minecraft hearts to burn, because I didn’t see any black blood on them.) So I shook my head emphatically at him. I wasn’t leaving him to die. 

He groaned, annoyed and in pain, as we started the flight back. I faltered more and more as we went, vision blurring. I remembered this feeling. The air cutting through me as I carried someone back through the roiling rainbow chaos. The pain as I tried to just get them a little further . I was more covered up this time, but that just meant it took longer as the air cut through fabric and then flesh. And eventually, just as before, I couldn’t hold out any longer. The pain overtook me. I could barely feel myself releasing Alixer’s legs, and when I fell the last thing I felt was even brighter spots of pain; searing and boiling through me. 

It didn’t really surprise me when my… original fell. Honestly, as much as I went along, as much as I felt that same fire, that same need to do something , to save Alixer , I was surprised at how long she lasted. She was starting with zero hearts. Covering up had worked, and I was only taking a heart of damage at those regular intervals, which was probably how she had lasted so much longer than… my first original? 

Anyway, when my original fell, I already had a plan. The ground was more dangerous than the air, but not by much. These things didn’t care much for the effects of gravity, and they phased in and out of existence wherever they pleased. We had found Alixer stumbling on solid ground, and as hurt as he was, he was still awake.

I was out of hearts, but I still wasn’t too injured yet. I managed to guide him carefully to the ground instead of dropping him. Once we were on solid ground I shifted my hold so he would take half his weight, and I dragged him forward as he stumbled on bleeding legs to keep up. 

The trip took a lot longer on foot. I didn’t even touch the ground; my legs were so riddled with gashes that flying was easier. Plus Alixer was taller than me, so I had to fly to keep his arm over my shoulders. 

It was hard to tell just how far we were from the edge of the chaos, but I thought we were getting close. Or maybe I just hoped. But then I heard it. The familiar ‘ZOP’ of one of the deathrays I had made while in this world. The constant churning, wet sounds of the thing from the rift changed in tone at it; higher pitched and louder, more frantic. Wind rushed through the stinging air, making Alixer stumble and me wince. 

I grimaced through the pain and tried to go faster, my arms screaming protest in every gash as I tried to take more of Alixer’s weight. It seemed like deathrays did do more than arrows, but damaging the creature while we were still in it’s smog seemed to only make it worse, and I had no way to tell the other copy I was here. Worst came to worst she might not see me and shoot me. Which would almost definitely kill both me and Alixer. Even if I survived the actual shot, it would slow us down too much. (I already felt like I was barely holding on. The somehow-familiar feeling of cuts all over me worsening and vision swimming from the pain was progressing much too quickly.) 

I heard (and felt the backlash of) three more shots before I dragged Alixer out of the miasma, letting myself flop to the ground beside him, exhausted. It probably wasn’t very long that I lay there ignoring everything, before I felt Alixer being pulled away from me, and I looked up. It was another copy, and she wasn’t alone. We only had three finished deathrays in the Warehouse, but looking around told me way more than three of the copies in the Warehouse decided to come along and help. My vision was too blurry to try to count, especially as they all ran and flew around the room anxiously. 

Alixer was taken away from me, I didn’t track what they did with him. They could see the injuries, they could figure it out. Better than me, probably. I was… done. I wanted to lay on the floor and not get up for at least a day. Maybe sleep for the first time since Girl Genius. 

But a tug on my cloak roused me. Another copy was staring at me, eyes wide, hand outstretched. I debated, for just a moment, but well. My memories that were just mine were all horrible, I felt awful, and being her- safe(..ish) and whole -sounded really nice. Plus, maybe I could drown the memories of pain in whatever better thing she had been up to. With an effort of will, I managed to raise my own shaking hand towards hers, and she mercifully closed the distance and took it.

Crack. I gained 5 hearts-lost 5 hearts. I was at 5 hearts, half health, halfway between the two states combined. My cuts still ached, but not as badly. Well that answered that question, I guess. I was the original, now, I guess. It made some sense, I supposed. When the first original died, the status passed to the copy closest to her. When she died, I was the one closest. All the copies have an instinctive sense, when looking at her(me), that she- that I am the original. I obviously can’t tell, but now I remembered looking at me and seeing it; knowing it. 

I looked down at where I had been lying. My blacker-than-black blood was smeared on the floor. By now I was very used to the sheer darkness of pure shadow, material that didn’t seem to reflect any light at all, and didn’t seem fully 3-D for it. After all, that was what I was made from. But I wasn’t used to seeing it smeared on the floor like that. Seeing what should be part of me spilled on the ground, lifeless.

After a moment of thought, I Created a test tube and pipette to collect as much of the material as possible for study. Above me, the sound of deathrays firing brought a slightly manic smile to my face as I did so. I didn’t dispel it. By this point I had enough practice with Out Of Context that I probably could’ve. Tamped down my Spark as I had grown used to, kept myself in line as I had been. I didn’t want to. Madness was so much better than thinking of how I had died three times today. 

In the corner of the room furthest from the chaos, I started Creating myself tools and parts for a new deathray. It was tiring. I was still exhausted and overwhelmed, and having to Create everything wholesale instead of just getting to start on building was frustrating. Creating simple and small things usually didn’t really take much focus or energy, but some of the tools and parts I needed were more complicated, and I was so tired that the small amounts it took felt like too much. 

A couple copies came over to where I was sprawled on the floor, frustratedly banging pieces of metal together as I once again discovered that the type of join I wanted to use really didn’t work without welding. But welding took so much equipment and I was tired and making it would be so hard . 

A note was shoved in my face. ‘ Do you want to go back to the Warehouse? ’ 

Oh. Yes I really did. But… I shouldn’t. I was the original! I had to be there and make sure everything was okay. It was my responsibility to organize; to make plans and make copies to follow those plans. Combining and making new copies was our most efficient way of organizing, especially with complex situations like this. 

But I was tired. And done. Any copy I made would be too. And I wasn’t even sure I could make a new copy in this state; it was always harder after Power Control, probably because I was stressed or because I had been hurting. This was the same but much more. 

I nodded softly; guilty and tired and wanting to hide. The two copies gently led me out of the room. 

Chapter Text

The Warehouse was a flurry of activity when we entered. Immediately an overwhelming number of copies flew over, but the two with me flashed them notes I didn’t bother to read and they left me alone in favor of exchanging notes with the two who had joined me.

Once I was free, I found a spot for the test tubes of my blood in the (rather crowded) chemical lab of our Worthy Workshop. They weren’t really properly sorted (I wasn’t quite sure how to sort them), but I labeled them and was too tired to figure the rest out. One of us’d do it eventually. 

Then I went through our Girl Genius Box Set, found a fanfic or two that I enjoyed, and curled up in the (bigger than we really knew what to do with) pile of extra cloaks to read and relax. 

Eventually, I was approached by a copy. She hovered delicately above the mountain of fabric I Iay in, like she was trying not to disturb me. 

I looked up at her tiredly, waiting. 

She deflated a bit; tense but like she was trying not to be. Then she held out her hand.

Right. Right. Recombine, learn what happened after I had left. I had my break, back into the action. I set my shoulders, prepared to sift through new memories, and took her hand.

When a panicked looking copy had come to the Warehouse, flying up to people no matter what they were busy with and shoving an explanation in their hands, we were a mess. I had been drawing, and figured out not because she approached me but because I noticed the increased activity as they tried to figure out what to do. They were clustered around the door, increasingly frantic as they all shoved papers in each other’s faces, each trying to get something across to a group too big to all at once read the small text we were used to Creating.

I frowned and flew over, asked someone on the sidelines for an explanation. She handed me a paper explaining about the rift, the thing(s?) coming out of it, and that a copy was sent back to get deathrays. I asked if the three deathrays we had lying around had even been collected and she said she didn’t know. I asked what they were arguing about. She said she wasn’t sure, she was hanging back, waiting for the argument to end and a plan to be made.

That’s what I wanted to do, too. Things were complicated and I wasn’t sure what was happening or what I should do, but maybe after they’re done with whatever the argument is they’ll tell me, and then that’d be so much more simple.

But we were in a hurry, and they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, and I wanted to yell over them and just get everyone on the same page already. Of course, I couldn’t yell. Us not being able to speak was part of the problem. Little slips of paper were terrible for addressing an audience. Actually… huh. I could fly up, Create poster-sized papers with simple, big text. Address the audience, get us all on the same page. Of course, that was terrifying. I didn’t want to. Plus, I mean, we were all kinda the same person. Surely another copy’d have the same idea, and then she could do it. All of us trying that would just be overwhelming and get nowhere. I should just stay out of the way. Except we all think that way, and it’s usually the original’s responsibility to push through that and take charge, but the original wasn’t there. Someone had to. 

I closed my eyes, tried to steady my heartbeat, and took one last look at the squabbling copies. No one was going to do it for me. I flew up, Creating the first poster.

‘ If you have a deathray, hold it up. ’ They didn’t look up. I clapped my hands, as loud as I could manage. 

Finally, attention started to shift to me. I fidgeted nervously under the gazes of the other copies, but I held strong. Soon enough, three different copies in three different parts of the crowd held up deathrays. They seemed to startle upon noticing each other. I mindlessly ripped at the edges of the paper I was holding. 

As I thought about what to say next, a copy flew up beside me. ‘ I’m the one who came with the message. ’ she explained, and I was relieved. She knew more about the situation than me.

I nodded, and took a moment to think about what I’d say. Then a moment to count how many of us were in the crowd. After a few moments, taking advantage of Spark-enhanced basic math and perfect memory, I figured out that 53 of the 64 copies in the Warehouse were crowded around. I tore a little more at the paper, intimidated, but I looked back at the messenger. 

I dropped the paper I was holding to make a small one for her. ‘ There's 53 here. Some should stay to make more deathrays ’ 

She nodded.

I looked at her expectantly. 

She didn’t seem to understand.

‘ You know the situation. How many should stay and how many go? ’ 

She blinked after reading it, probably surprised at being asked for input. We usually just made these decisions arbitrarily, but that was when we were the original, and it was our job to be decisive. 

After a bit of thought, she replied, ‘ 25 stay, the rest go ’ 

I nodded, but then paused. How to do this efficiently… just saying ‘25 of you come here’ would result in awkward shuffling as everyone thinks everyone else will go so they should stay, but also everyone thinks they should go, because everyone else will think they should stay. 

After taking not very long but still probably too long, I settled on making a new large paper saying, ‘ line up in front of me. Once 25 are in line, the rest stay on the ground. ’ I gestured to a space in front of but still a bit below me, so I could see the whole line and count how many were there.

I watched as the line quickly grew, counting as I thought. It was odd ordering myself around like this. I knew it was necessary, and I was pretty sure they didn’t hold it against me, but I still felt bad. Especially that I didn’t have time to explain my reasoning. I didn’t do this as the original, I didn’t have to; the only thing I usually asked of my copies was to recombine with me, and it was always a choice. If I wanted a copy to do something for me, I made a new copy and she understood my reasoning perfectly, wanted the thing done as much as I did, because she was me. But the longer a copy exists the more experiences drift her from the original. Not in a bad way; not enough that she isn’t still me , but it doesn’t take long for us to not know what each other are thinking. 

But the line reached 25, and I had to keep going. I had taken this role, so it was my responsibility to keep us on track. We had people to save, including ourself. 

‘ You 25, stay here and build more weapons ’

Immediately a couple of people in the line looked guilty, and they pulled out the deathrays they had. I facepalmed. 

Luckily, before I figured out how to fix that communication problem, they flew down to the others. One handed off her deathray and the other convinced someone to swap places. I took a moment to be relieved before shaking my head to refocus. 

Then I flew down a bit to address the rest. ‘ The rest of you, follow us. ’ 

Once I figured they had read it, I dropped the paper and tugged the messenger’s cloak to get her to follow me to the door out of the Warehouse. Then I gestured for her to go ahead, and she caught my meaning and led our group all the way to the Power Control lab. 

Of course, from there two sets of memories becomes three. One as the new original, stumbling out of the miasma, one as a member of the crowd, lost on how exactly I was supposed to help before spotting me, wincing in sympathy at the wounds lacing my body, and one as the… the reluctant leader, I suppose. Directing the others was a bit easier like this, since there were enough present, demanding issues that they could just go and try to work on something if they saw a way to help, instead of having to tiptoe around one another to not get in the way. Still, it looked like a lot of us were lost the way I was; not really knowing what to do to help, standing or flying awkwardly while the three with deathrays did everything. 

Alixer and Claye were maybe a bit crowded with the number of us that went to help them, but the other copies were keeping enough back not to be a real problem.

Really, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself either. I (the original) didn’t look to be in any state to resume my leadership position, even after I combined with me and I no longer looked to be on the edge of death. But even if that had fully healed me (and it hadn’t), I still looked shaken in a way that wasn’t useful for this kind of action. 

So it was still my responsibility to keep us on track, except the others seemed to be doing a fine job of going and dealing with problems without being told, and I had no better clue of how to help then they did. So I hovered and watched, anxiously. 

Which is how I noticed me trying to basically Create a whole lab in the corner. It was inefficient; our dorm room wasn’t that far away and that much Creation took time and was tiring. I could see me flagging too, exhaustion clear in my movements. So I found a couple of copies standing around and had them take me back to the Warehouse. I was clearly too tired and shellshocked to help, and I deserved some rest. I could handle this. Well, I really wasn’t confident in that, but I had to handle this. My original clearly couldn’t, and needed rest, and I needed to step up and make sure I could get that rest. 

Soon enough after my original left, people in armor arrived. It was utilitarian and disguised their features, making them all look the same. One of them peered at us, checked a high-tech tablet, and then ordered us to stop fighting; let them take care of it, mispronouncing Elzerei as they did so. 

I frowned, but when the others looked to me for direction, I nodded. They did have weapons, and they looked military enough that I was a bit worried about how they’d react to directly disobeying orders. When they went for Claye and Alixer, though, I had to intervene. Especially since Alixer was still clinging to consciousness, groggily asking questions that they seemed to be ignoring. 

I flew over as the copies surrounding them bristled and turned to one another, trying to decide who would intercept. They didn’t have time to exchange notes before I got there, inserting myself between one of the military people and Alixer.

I caught the last of Alixer’s ignored questions. “Wh’re y gonna do w him?” he slurred.

The military person just pushed past me to check the bandages my copies had put on him. They weren’t particularly gentle about it, and Alixer made a noise of discomfort. 

I butted in again, shoving a paper in the person’s face. ‘ Answer his question. And be more careful! He’s hurt! ’ 

They snatched the paper away, grunting in annoyance before shouting behind them. “Captain! The student is interfering!”

And then one of the other military-looking people came over, still indistinguishable from the rest. “Elzerai, yes?” they mispronounced, “Stand aside; we’re trying to help them.”

‘ Then answer his questions and be more careful. ’ I handed back, my other hand clenched in a fist. Willpower(the perk from the Generic Perk Supplement, that is) was a pretty invisible perk. How does one tell the true limits of their will, when it changes moment to moment? When each situation is different, and even when your will fails, you think you could have succeeded if you had just really, really wanted to. Even so, I thought that I couldn’t have confronted them like this without it.

The ‘captain’ sighed, and turned to the other. “What did he ask?”

“The fate of the catalyst.”

They turned back to me, voice clipped. “That’s classified.”

I stiffened, wishing I was the original so I could make a copy to guard Claye that had heard that terrifying statement.

I almost handed them a threat, but Creating took more thought than speaking, and I glanced at their weapons, their team that was already pushing back the thing from the rift far more than we had managed.

‘ Don’t hurt Claye ’ I managed, the paper held tight enough to crinkle slightly

“You have no say in our operations.”

I gave them the most dangerous look I could manage, Shapeshifting my nails longer; sharper.

The captain looked around a bit. I couldn’t see their expression, but their posture didn’t look scared, just calculating. “Fine. We will not harm him today, if you cooperate.”

I narrowed my eyes. That was a lot of stipulations, but also was clearly a threat, and complaining wasn’t cooperating, and I wasn’t sure if I could stop them from hurting Claye now.

‘ Fine ’ I could try to follow him after all. I had an invisibility cloak, in the Warehouse if the others hadn’t moved it. Actually…

I stalked away, the shadows around me brightening back to the light level they should have been. (When did that happen?)

Once I got to a copy that looked lost, I snapped to get her attention, and handed her instructions.

‘ Go get our invisibility cloak, and keep watch over Claye. I don’t trust that these military people won’t hurt him. Don’t interfere unless you have to though; they already implied they might hurt him if we don’t cooperate ’ 

The message was longer than average, for us, and her eyes widened as she read. After a few moments, her expression moved from scared to determined, and she nodded decisively before leaving. 

With that, well, things were more or less taken care of. I managed to talk a bit to Alixer, (while he had a lot of trouble parsing my papers in his state, larger text helped enough that I got across what I needed to.) and once he accepted that Claye wouldn’t be hurt today, he mumbled something about dealing with it tomorrow and let himself pass out. 

I wanted to tell a copy to look after Alixer, too, but I realized we only had one invisibility cloak. We really weren’t prepared at all! Three deathrays, one invisibility cloak?! There could be 100 of us and we hadn’t bothered to properly outfit ourselves. In Girl Genius I kept a deathray on me at all times; built into my body. I had clearly been far too comfortable here, thinking ‘school environment’ meant my biggest worry would be assignments and classmates. In Girl Genius I knew what was coming; knew it’d be dangerous. Here I had assumed I’d be relatively safe, at least in the school. Clearly foolish, what with Astra wanting me to be interesting . 

I sent a copy to make more invisibility cloaks. After thinking about it a bit, I added that she should update the copies in the Warehouse about the situation, if they’re still there/she runs into them on the way. Theoretically the one I sent to get the invisibility cloak we already had could have done that, but I hadn’t thought to tell her to, and didn’t know if she had. And probably wouldn’t know, since she’d probably stay hidden until we knew Claye was safe. (Unless she had to reveal herself to save him, but I hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.) 

And so the military people cleaned it up. I wasn’t watching too closely, more worried about Alixer and Claye, who they did more checking up on before taking out of the room. When they went, a few of my copies tried to follow, but when they ordered them back, I nodded, and they went. At the questioning and betrayed looks I got as they were taken away, I made a paper explaining my plan, and made sure to tear it up after they had finished reading. 

It took a while for them to get rid of the thing from the rift, but it still felt like less time and effort than it should’ve taken. Their weapons and tools were strange- I didn’t analyze them properly, suppressing my Spark so I could focus on keeping us copies in line. I wasn’t really doing much, but I had to be ready to organize if something came up. I had gotten the original to take a break after all; it was my responsibility to pick up the slack as best I could. Plus, I had learned from fairly early on that I generally should suppress my Spark in the presence of Claye’s powers. They were far too tempting. The inconceivable tearing through reality that hurt to even look at or think about too closely was exactly the kind of challenge I wanted; to parse the unparsable, to see and understand something that was a paradox, too wrong and unreal to ever really be understood. It was so tempting …

I shook my head, suppressing my Spark just a bit more. Nope. Not doing that. 

Anyway. I ended up at the door, exchanging notes with a representative from the copies that had been making weapons in the Warehouse. We wound up deciding to actually let the military people handle it, since I was worried they’d react badly to realizing how dangerous we could be. Plus, my urge to help fight the thing off was in part to try to reduce casualties for them, and threatening my friends made me less inclined to care about that. So we exchanged weapons subtly, hiding them in Minecraftian Inventory slots when not actively handing them over. (One deathray took up one inventory slot; unstackable items, unsurprisingly.) Then that group went back to the Warehouse. I think at least some of them were planning on making sure we were more properly outfitted for this sort of thing in the future.

By the time the military people got rid of the thing, they either got rid of the rift at the same time, or it was already gone, because I didn’t see it. 

The ground under where the rift had been was fractured and cracked, broken and oddly degraded. But it didn’t break through to any kind of lower level. Apparently the tough construction and intentional placement of the lab paid off in preventing the thing from getting to any other rooms. 

But hidden in the rubble of the ruined floor, I spotted a glint of metal, something out of place. I looked closer, and saw it was much more neat of a shape than the fractured rubble and twisted pipes, rebar, and whatever else. It was a simple metal and glass rectangle. 

I flew closer, trying to investigate without getting the attention of the military people who had already told me or my copies to get away from the fighting a few times now.

Still, they seemed focused enough on making sure they had actually got all of it that I could creep close enough to get a proper look.

My phone! Of course! The description had said it was indestructible, my original must have dropped it in the chaos. 

Of course now that meant I had to find some way to sneak down there and get it without the military people seeing me. (I really should come up with something better to call them, but they had said very little, and definitely did not introduce themselves.) 

I managed to notice a moment when they all seemed to be more-or-less distracted by something, and I flew down there, picked it up, and immediately zipped back to a distance far enough that they’d not be suspicious. Hopefully. To my great surprise and relief, none of them seemed to have noticed, and I was free to check my phone. 

Oh. A message from Saavi. Apparently news of something happening during our class got around and she’s worried. Well. I had been just checking my phone for damage. (even though I know it won’t have any, it’s still odd. Though actually I should probably pretend that wasn’t what I was doing. No doubting Astra’s gifts. I did not want a repeat of the incident with the Totem.)

So I explained to her what was going on. In broad strokes, first not to worry her and then to appease the military person who noticed me on my phone and started going over what I was not to tell people and what cover story to use instead. According to the cover story they were school security, and there were only 6 of them instead of the 20 I counted. And they wore normal security guard outfits instead of futuristic armor. So basically an entirely different group of people. 

Anyway, once they made sure I wasn’t going to spill their secrets, they started ushering me out, and this time I let them. The fight was over, and they had already taken away Claye and Alixer. (And I had to trust that the other copy would look after Claye, and that Alixer could take care of himself.) So I led us all back to the Warehouse.

In the Warehouse, I did spot my original, curled up in the cloak pile reading something, but I still looked too overwhelmed, so I decided to give myself a bit more time to decompress before I offered to recombine. 

I spent a while waiting. The others mostly worked on equipping ourselves; trying to make enough deathrays and invisibility cloaks and the like that we could all have one. They got in each other’s way; our labs were only so big, after all, and we didn’t have many multiples of the bigger or more complex tools. 

I mediated a bit, just for the worst few instances, when copies would roughly shove each other to get access to delicate devices, or to insist that the mechanical lab has a occupancy limit, or the one time a copy pointed her newly-made deathray at another. I wound up asking those two to combine with one another, to keep the animosity down. 

It was honestly disturbing; we hadn’t fought each other like that before at all. We had disagreements sometimes, sure, but they were calmly reasoned and we always accepted whatever conclusion was decided on. We were never violent with each other outside of intentional training, and usually not even then. But now we had all separately gone through something terrifying, and they were all trying to use the same limited resources while in Spark fugue. 

I glanced at the original. Surely I had had enough time to calm down by now? Yeah. Yeah it should be enough. 

And so I approached me, and now here I was. 

Chapter Text

I recombined with all of my copies (except for the one who was still off, using our invisibility cloak to keep an eye on Claye), and made a new group of 80. This was routine, I did this basically every night so we would all always be up to date on everything we’ve learned, so we’d stay on the same page and not do things too repetitively. 

It was more tiring this time, though. Having to square away so many perspectives on the event, having to over and over again reassure myself that Alixer could take care of himself, that one partially uninformed copy would be enough to look after Claye. 

Centering myself in the time between recombining and creating more took a bit longer as well, but I did manage to organize my thoughts on all the Sparky projects I had begun, and create a plan for how to have my copies continue them without getting in each other’s way so much. It was so much easier to do it this way, coming up with a plan and knowing it would be agreed to, knowing it would be understood perfectly. There was a reason leadership was my responsibility as the original. 

And so the night wore on. We started off with just a few copies actually working on the deathrays and invisibility cloaks. (And a few working on other equipment projects they had started that used separate tools.) The rest of us worked on making satellite workshops outside of the Worthy Workshop, to allow for more of us to work at once. They weren’t as good; less safety measures, smaller variety of tools, less already available materials, but they had more space to work, and could be used while another copy was working in the main Workshop. 

As they got set up, they were immediately put to use making more deathrays and invisibility cloaks. No two were the same, with different copies leaning on different parts of our knowledge base, or going for different priorities with power, style, or convenience. Deathrays wound up getting priority, since it was easier to think of different ways to do deathrays than invisibility cloaks. 

At some point I had to go to class, and leave them to their work. It was another lab day, and class was awkward and subdued. There were whispers, nervous laughs, people avoiding me. Power Control was canceled. Detention, surprisingly enough, wasn’t, but it was watched over by a different teacher, who refused to say anything about Alixer’s absence.

And then it was the weekend, of course. We managed to finish our goal of 100 usable deathrays sometime Friday night, and the 100 invisibility cloaks were well on their way too. We also had a couple one-off equipment projects, like goggles like the ones I had given Violetta, so I could have vision in multiple spectra again. Though those weren’t nearly as good as my vision as a clank had been. And they worked oddly with my new ability to see in pitch-dark. Once it was too dark, and seeing should be physically impossible, they interfered, and I could see better by just taking them off.

There was something else I wanted to work on that night, though, while my copies made us Sparky equipment. We were trying to make sure we would never be caught off-guard, without the items we’d need to get out of a situation. Like back in Minecraft, when my strongest defense was diamond (or netherite) armor, elytra, and golden carrots. Golden apples in an emergency. 

Now, I didn’t really fit in my Minecraft armor anymore, and even if I did, I didn’t have the levels to enchant 100 sets of it. I couldn’t even make 100 sets. I didn’t have the diamonds, and diamond armor is too not-real of a thing to make with Creation. But… wait…

I took a Minecraft diamond out of my storage, examining it carefully. There were several things that marked it as not quite working under the laws of physics as I knew them, from the way the light shone on it in perfect squares, or the way it didn’t reflect any color from its environment, staying the same beautiful cyan-blue even as I turned it in my hand. 

Then I used Creation to replicate it as best I could. I focused on the parts of it that could be real; a blue diamond cut into a shape made from cubes. It was slow and careful work, and when I pulled the new diamond from the shadow, it was clearly different. It was not opaque, and it shone less brightly in the low light. It was not as vibrant a color, but the light refracted complexly through it, leaving patterns more complex than the square gridded reflections from the Minecraft diamond. 

I repeated the process, making another real diamond that was a poor imitation of the Minecraft one. Then I took a Minecraft stick from storage, went to my crafting table, and performed the real experiment. 

It was a very good sign, when my Created diamonds stacked with one another in my Minecraftian Inventory. I willed Keep Minecraft Physics to work the way I intended it to, closed my eyes for a moment, and placed them into the crafting interface, along with the stick.

When the diamond sword appeared on the other side of the interface, icon perfect and Minecraftian, I wanted to shout a triumphant ‘HA!’. Instead I had to settle for crafting it and holding it up like a prize. 

It was perfect, bright and blue and exactly the way a Minecraft diamond sword should look. There was no hint of the counterfeit diamonds it was made with, no clue that might tell you it was not wholly Minecraftian in origin. 

So. I could create 100 sets of diamond armor. Probably not netherite, since diamonds are a real object and netherite is not. But that still leaves the problem of enchanting, and of having to shapeshift to be able to wear it comfortably, and of it probably looking weird to other people for me to be in armor all the time.

But… if Creation means I can have infinite of any crafting material that is also a real object… I didn’t use golden apples very much because I didn’t have a very good gold farm, so getting them in quantity was hard. But now… if I could make them with just time, Creation, and a crafting table? I could keep a lot of healing items on me at all times. Heck, if I had enough golden apples to eat constantly, I might not have died to the thing from the rift! Well, I probably still would have popped my Totem, but the other two deaths? 

And what about Alixer? What if I could have given him a golden apple to eat? Would it work on someone who hasn’t been to Minecraft, who doesn’t have a HUD or Minecraftian hearts to regenerate? 

I did have to take a break to talk with Saavi. Our ttrpg session was canceled, obviously, since Claye was out (and I really wanted to know where he was, but I had to trust my copy), but she texted me, saying I needed to explain what happened. 

So I did. The note I made to explain it looked more like a scroll, since I went into detail about what I saw of Claye and Alixer’s injuries, told her the real story and the cover story the military people had told me to tell, that kind of thing. I did gloss over my deaths a bit. She didn’t need to hear about how much it hurt. The memories from the mes that died were still oddly fuzzy in a way none of my memories were anymore after getting A World To Explore, Only One Life To Explore It, but by now I had managed to sort them properly, and found they were mostly intact. I was glad for it. The idea of losing those memories entirely… it was too close to death, real death, to having those versions of me having been people who died and I was just… what kept going anyway. I didn’t know if I would get memories like that if one of my copies died instead of the original, and I didn’t really want to find out.

Anyway. I took the explanation scroll back to the Warehouse with me; found somewhere out of the way to store it. I had explained that I had a copy watching Claye, after all. I couldn’t let the military people find it.

By the end of the weekend I had figured out a new inventory setup. In Minecraft my inventory had always been pretty full, with tools, food, rockets, ender pearls, an emergency fire resistance potion- anything that I thought I might need in case of emergency. I knew every danger I could come across, and had something for each one. In Girl Genius, I couldn’t access my inventory at all. I had gotten out of the habit. Here, when I thought to use it at all, it filled up with loose notes (that didn’t stack because they all said different things), or random parts. 

That was foolish; letting that power go to waste. Sure, the kind of thing that was useful to keep on me was entirely different here than it was in Minecraft, but I had 35 inventory slots I could use to carry anything I might need.

So now I had taken to carrying two stacks of golden apples (It was a pain to craft that many, since it took a fair bit of focus to make gold ingots that the crafting interface would accept. Still, having over 100 meant if I made a new copy I could give her some), 6 death rays (again, multiples so I could give them to new copies if need be), 6 invisibility cloaks, and of course my phone. 

I also put a chest by the door in and out to fill with golden apples, along with Creating some shelves there to store ready-to-use deathrays and invisibility cloaks. That way any copies leaving the Warehouse could equip themselves similarly. (Though of course there’d be no reason for them to take more than one deathray and invisibility cloak each.)

Crafting golden apples was tedious and annoying, though, so the chest by the door only had two golden apples in it so far. We were tired from making all the ones to keep in my inventory. 

And so the week wore on. It was strange, how everything seemed to just go back to normal. Well, mostly normal. Saavi got into a couple of fights with people who had heard about it. The rumors were everywhere, and it seemed to be pretty common knowledge that there was some kind of connection between canceled Power Control classes and Claye’s absence. And people weren’t exactly nice about it. 

A cryokinetic made some comment about Claye being a danger; that once he graduated he’d have to be locked up for everyone’s safety, and that evening Saavi was shivering in detention with me, the sound of chattering teeth emerging from where she hid under the school nurse’s blanket. That detention was still supervised by that other teacher, the one I didn’t want to learn the name of because Alixer had to be back before I needed it. (That evening, after detention, I asked Saavi to test eating a golden apple. She said it did make her feel better, and seemed to be fully recovered after having it, but she also was basically already recovered, and said she couldn’t tell if it helped at all or it was just a combination of it tasting really good and placebo.) 

And then that Wednesday Alixer was back at detention, like nothing had happened. Well, except for the bandages he still wore. He looked half-dead from exhaustion, but… that was actually pretty normal for him, so the bandages were the only obvious change. 

“Alixer!” Saavi ran up to him as soon as we entered the room (we were walking to detention together that day), but she was prevented from hugging him by a thin, chest-height barrier. “You’re okay!”

“Yes, I’m fine, now go find a seat.” Alixer dismissed us both. He seemed to expect us to just not talk about what happened in Power Control, but I couldn’t let that happen. I at least needed to know if he had any updates on Claye’s situation.

I approached him, to which he gave me an unimpressed glare. Still, he accepted the note I handed him. ‘ I’m glad you’re okay. Do you know how Claye is doing? ’ 

“I’ll speak to you after detention,” he said in a quieter voice, “Now, really, find a seat.” 

Detention was always boring, but that was maybe the longest. Both Savvi and I wound up getting assigned more days of detention for passing notes, since neither of us could just sit quietly white waiting on such an important conversation. 

Still, eventually the hour passed. A couple other students also stayed to ask him where he was, but all he said was recovering from an accident. He did the same with Saavi, but she didn’t leave like the others did when they realized that was all he was going to say on the matter. Soon enough it was just me, Saavi, and Alixer in the room, since I had been waiting to be the last one to say my piece, and Saavi wasn’t leaving without me. 

When I approached Alixer, he glanced at Saavi, and then gave me a measuring look. “Thank you for the help on Thursday. Claye is still recovering; he was more injured than I was.”

I narrowed my eyes, taking a step forward to hand him my note. ‘ And those people are going to let him go after that? ’

His naturally judgemental expression hardened into a warning glare. “He should be back in classes by the end of next week.”

Pocketing my note, he walked towards the door. Saavi tried to stop him, insisting on more answers, but again he stopped her with a thin barrier and continued as if he hadn’t heard. He was always efficient with his barriers, making them as small as possible while still accomplishing what he had made them for, but still I thought his barriers today had even less wasted space. I tried not to worry about it. 

Still, all we could do was wait, and hope Alixer was right. As we waited, Saavi finally explained what was up with the mysterious person they had taken me to first when I got to the world. He was part of a semi-secret semi-governmental organization in charge of the really dangerous powers. The ones that were reality-bending, that could cause massive destruction without any intentional effort on the part of the super with them. It was almost certain the military people were part of the same group.

She hadn’t been meant to tell me about them; I was being kept under observation by them after all, and really she shouldn’t have been clued-in at all, except that she and Claye shared everything and there was almost no chance that Claye would be able to do anything besides work for them after graduation. But she was worried; they had been trying to get Claye’s powers under control for years, and while he had been improving (enough that they thought the big summons like the one I faced were a thing of the past, apparently just two years ago they were on the order of once a month occurrences. He had been on a tighter leash then.), graduation was soon, and his level of freedom from that organization was dependent on his control. 

No wonder she got so mad about people saying Claye would be locked up.

Anyway, she said she was partially telling me in exchange for me being honest with her about what happened. I told her the real story instead of the organization(which she didn’t actually have a name for either)‘s cover story, and she understood how important it was to hear that truth, and returned the favor. 

Now, that reasoning would have been a little more believable if she had told me right after I had told her, instead of waiting several days, but I let it go.

Chapter Text

When Claye came back, Saavi was the first to know, and we both met him in his dorm. It was during class, but I had one of my copies go for me, and Saavi just skipped. This was more important. 

“Come in” He sounded… tired. 

Claye’s dorm was familiar. We had our ttrpg sessions there every week, after all, and it hadn’t changed much in his absence. He didn’t seem to be in the main room though, which made me a bit uneasy. His dorm was made for two people, though he was the only occupant, so it had a common area and two attached bedrooms, though one had been locked and left a mystery for as long as I had known of it. I had a similar level of familiarity with Claye’s bedroom, to be honest. We held sessions in the common area, so while I’d caught glimpses when he left the door open, I’d never been inside. 

“You’re in your room?” Saavi asked, walking up to the door but not touching it.

“Yeah… Y’can come in… D’n wanna get up.” He spoke slowly, like he had to wake himself up between sentences.

Saavi opened the door and went to his bedside. I stood awkwardly in the doorway, not wanting to intrude.

They conversed quietly, but the room was quiet and I was tense, glad to see Claye but very worried about him. He didn’t sound okay. Maybe he was just tired from recovering but…

Saavi took Claye’s hand, holding it up to reveal a tight metal bracelet. “They put the cuff on you again,” she said, sad and bitter.

“Mhm… Can’t risk it… ‘till ‘lixer’s recovered ‘t least.”

Saavi straightened at that. “They said they would take it off?”

“N’... but ‘ey will.” Claye shifted a bit, maybe trying to sit up a little. “Still want me for…” he trailed off, gesturing clumsily with his cuffed(?) hand.

Saavi looked back at me for a moment, and gestured for me to go to them. I did so cautiously.

“I let E in on the deal with the organization. At least in general.”

Claye did manage to sit up at that, his eyes widening. “What? But they-”

“She was there for the incident. And she stayed to help, even when they came and told her to leave. She probably saved both you and Alixer. This is the least of the things they could go after her for.” I didn’t like the implication that they’d go after me for saving Claye and Alixer. Alixer was… he seemed to be at the very least a contact of theirs in the school system; a teacher they’re used to working with. And apparently they wanted Claye for something. 

“Wai’ she… ?” Claye looked over to me at that, brows knotting in confusion. He seemed to be searching my face for something. Saavi was content to wait for him to finish his thought, and I didn’t have a good enough idea of what he was asking to formulate something for a note. If I could speak, maybe I could’ve said something half-formed and gotten him to finish what he was saying. As it was, I shifted awkwardly.

“Did I hurt you?” He settled on eventually, and oh that was an awful way to think about it.

‘ The thing from the rift hurt me. But I’m fine now. ’ I decided not to mention the deaths, or the fuzzy memories from the mes that died, a fuzziness that stood in painful contrast to the clarity of every other memory I had. It was fine. All my memories used to be like this, before I was a Jumper, before A World To Explore, Only One Life To Explore It. They were worse, even, back then. 

Claye’s hand shook when he tried to take the note, and Saavi wound up taking it instead and reading it to him. She added, “It wasn’t your fault.” at the end like it had always been part of the note, but I didn’t correct her. 

And so we sat and talked about it. They explained that the cuff was one of the ways the organization would keep Claye’s powers in check. The problem was that simple methods of disabling powers didn’t exist. It made sure he wouldn’t have the energy to summon a rift, but in doing so it meant he could barely get out of bed. Apparently it was currently on a fairly harsh setting, since he had a tendency of upsetting himself after summoning a rift, thereby summoning another one right after he recovered from the thing from the first one. 

They also explained why the organization wanted him to learn to control his powers, rather than just keeping them dampened this way all the time. The Rift (the big one in space where powers supposedly come from) was one of the biggest scientific mysteries in the universe, and his powers meant he could summon small versions. They wanted him to make them rifts, in controlled sizes and controlled places and times, so they could study them. 

It was maybe the kind of thing I should have been concerned about. Him being their pet science experiment. It was hard to hold it against them, though, when I so desperately wanted to do basically the same thing, had wanted to from the moment I saw him tearing at the seams of reality in Power Control. Still, I had my own control, and I knew that science was beyond me, where I was. Maybe I would Return here, for that, once I had learned and grown as a Spark. 

That wasn’t the part Saavi and Claye were upset about, anyway. Them wanting him for their experiments meant they had to let him learn to control his power himself, which meant loosening their restrictive safety measures, freeing him from the constant drain of the cuff. 

It also meant them staying, at least to some extent, on his good side, giving him rewards for progress and good behavior like going to the Academy rather than lonely personalized tutoring, or letting Saavi in on all the secrets he was privy to. Or, eventually, once he graduated, living outside of the organization’s facilities, being able to go home at the end of the day to somewhere he wasn’t watched constantly, where he was able to interact with normal society.

That was their goal. That was what they were worried this incident had ruined. (Well, that and they were worried about everyone who got hurt, of course.)

We had one month left before graduation when I told Claye and Saavi I would be leaving. 

‘ I don’t know when exactly, but I’m moving away after graduation. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, or if I’ll be back, but I won’t be able to talk to you after I leave. ’ I handed the note to Saavi while I packed up my game master things for the week. 

“Oh. But- you can still text, right?” She asked as she handed Claye the note.

‘ No. Where I’m going is too far away for any communication to be possible, as far as I know ’ I saw no point in explaining Jumping to them. I did care about them, but I would probably never see them again. So we weren’t close enough for me to tell them. We couldn’t be that close, because then I would miss them. And I already missed Agatha and Tarvek and Gil and Zeetha and Violetta and Theo and Sleipnir and even Nick, even though I hadn’t seen him at all after that first year in Girl Genius. I didn’t want to have someone I missed in every world I went to. Once I bought the Return power, I’d still only be able to use it once in each time between jumps; not often enough to keep up with people from a lot of different worlds. Plus… I was going home eventually, and then I would never be able to see anyone from other worlds again. But I had to go home eventually. I couldn’t go without seeing my parents or best friends ever again.

So I didn’t tell Claye and Saavi where I was going. Because I didn’t want to miss them. I almost didn’t tell Alixer or Kayne that I was going, but I did eventually decide it would be unfair not to tell Kayne, since I thought he might still be hoping I could come and help him with his stalker problem after I graduated. And Saavi wound up telling Alixer. 

The weekend before graduation we held a small party. I told them I didn’t know how long after graduation I’d be able to stay, so we had a final long ttrpg session, which was basically an epilogue to the campaign, which I had managed to rush an ending for in the weeks prior. 

I had learned to do different fonts on my notes, and each NPC in the campaign had a different font for their ‘voice’. I gave Claye and Saavi in-character goodbye letters from each of the important NPCs of the campaign, since I had rather sappily made the campaign ending be their characters finally returning to the sea, with their rescued friend in tow. Almost all the important NPCs lived on land, since most of the campaign took place there, so… yeah the metaphors were pretty obvious. Still, Claye and Saavi seemed to appreciate it. 

Along with the letters, I gave them drawings of their characters. 

They both knew it was pointless to give trinkets to someone with the power of Creation, but Saavi said they couldn’t just let me disappear without anything, so she gave me a flash drive with a bunch of her favorite media, from shows to comics to Eyequarium videos to fanfic, especially focusing on things she figured I wouldn’t have seen yet. It was smart of her to figure out that being out of communication range meant no access to the internet.

Claye’s gift I almost didn’t want to accept. It was letting me try to take apart his power suppression cuff. (Now at a lower level of suppression than it was when I first learned of its existence, but still enough that he stayed seated through the entirety of our party.) The problem was it was an extremely expensive piece of technology, and he would be taking the blame both for taking it off without permission and for if I damaged it. 

But they both insisted. And I did really want to know how it worked. So I just had to make sure I didn’t damage it! 

I did, however, manage the self-control to say I wanted to do it in my lab, where the lighting was better and I had all my tools at my disposal. The rest of the party was short, and I was a little distracted the whole time thinking about the upcoming experiment, but Saavi was smart enough to save their gifts for the end, and soon enough I was spiriting away the suppression cuff, with the promise to return it (undamaged!) first thing the next morning, before class. 

Taking apart the cuff was so much fun . It was also slow, painstaking work to do so without risking damaging it. It was the kind of sleek, apple-style futuristic high tech that hid all it’s seams and had screws that needed to be handled with tweezers, or with little magnetic wands that made them much easier to pick up, but I had to be careful not to get too close to the electronics since I wasn’t sure how magnet-proof they were. Really, this level of tech was outside my wheelhouse, since most of my background knowledge was of steampunk stuff. Still, I had been working with this universe’s tech for almost six months by then, and while none of what I was working with was as advanced as this, they still followed the same kinds of principals.

Surprisingly enough, the mechanism of suppressing his power didn’t involve breaking the skin. Instead, it involved keeping his skin in constant contact with eight pads, which conducted several different things. There was a substance that I had to assume he was meant to absorb through osmosis, electricity (of course), but there were circuits that seemed to imply the cuff was getting something else there, too. An energy that was transmitted through a substance I didn’t recognize, and converted to electricity in the cuff, used to charge the batteries. It also was apparently a strong power source, since there were several sinks for extra energy, and more batteries than I’d expect for the meager amount of power it should take to function.

Of course in addition to its main function it also seemed to be constantly sending out data. (Which, of course, wasn’t getting to it’s intended destination from my Warehouse.) This was things like the cuff’s location (whoops, they’re definitely going to figure out what happened), basic vitals for the wearer (heart rate, skin temperature, that kind of thing), and something that I assumed was tracking how much magical energy it was absorbing. (That had to be the third thing the pads were meant to transmit.)

Now, going into more detail on how exactly the device both absorbed magical energy (or something similar to it, I couldn’t actually tell what exactly it was absorbing. Putting it on activated the sensors for being worn by a person; the heart rate monitoring and everything, but the data I assumed was magic absorption didn’t change. Of course that could have been Out Of Context preventing my powers from being suppressed, but it made me less confident in my assumptions. I could have tried to break into the system converting the energy, but it was much more tightly sealed and I was trying not to damage it. Similarly, I did all the tests I could on the material used to transfer the magical energy, but without taking a sample they were inconclusive. 

Still… it shone oddly under the different wavelengths of light I exposed it to. It must have some kind of energy still in there, because sometimes it seemed to reflect a higher energy light than I shone on it. And it… When I looked at it with my bare eyes, without using my goggles or a magnifying glass (which was needed to make out most of the circuits), it… warped. There was an almost chromatic aberration-y effect to it, that none of the sensors I made seemed to be able to pick up. I almost thought I was just seeing things, but… it was almost rainbow. It reminded me of the rift. It could just be leftover energy in the material, but… I remembered the military people cleaning up from the battle with the thing from the rift. They collected all the strange not-stuff it left behind. They could have been just making sure no one would notice, but. I had a suspicion.

So I did end up taking a sample of the material used as wire for magical(?) energy. It was eh… I managed to do it without (as far as I could tell) affecting the function of the cuff. It was still pretty obvious though. But I learned so much . And more than that, I knew there would be more I could learn from it for… Well probably for a while! It didn’t work under conventional laws of physics, and learning the laws it did work under would be a long-term project. One I was so excited about . 

I had to rush to put the thing back together before Claye told me he would be ready to take it back. This did result in me breaking or losing track of a few of the infuriatingly tiny screws, but Creation saved the day and I made replacements easily enough. They were probably not exactly the same material, but that wasn’t super noticeable and shouldn’t have any effect on function. 

When Claye put the cuff back on, it made a soft crackling noise, and he glared at me. Whoops! Still, after a few minutes of testing, neither of us could find anything actually wrong with it. My theory was that my taking a sample of the magic wire let a little bit of magic energy out into the air, but the crackle stopped fairly quickly, and neither of us noticed any unintended ill-effects. (The intended ill-effect of making him very tired was just as strong and aggravating as it was supposed to be.) 

We ended up both getting in trouble for that one. The whole ‘the life signs stop, the gps moves to my dorm and then all signals stop, then randomly start in the morning and it goes back to Claye, slightly damaged’? Yeah that was not very subtle for the people looking at the data. They figured it out before the end of the day. 

But there was only so much they could do. Holding us back from graduating would be official, and the organization was still a layer of secrecy below the Academy itself. (Which was still secret, just less so.) Not all the teachers were clued into their existence, and almost none of the students were, and they wanted to keep it that way.

So we wound up in detention, of course. I was used to it, but Claye was new there. They also said after graduation we’d be both be in their custody for a while; we could earn privileges like leaving. That was close to the deal Claye was already getting, just starting with less ‘privileges’. Claye and Saavi worried about it meaning I missed when I had to leave, but obviously I wasn’t. Whatever method they used to contain me wouldn’t stop Astra . 

Graduation was… Fine. It was the classic standing and walking and hearing names be read. My perfect memory meant I recognized a lot more names than usual, but other than that… Well, I’d done this song and dance before and it was just as boring this time. And just like highschool, it had kind of been a forgone conclusion for me from the start, so I didn’t even really feel I had anything to be proud of. 

I did have that feeling of a chapter of my life ending, though. Astra hadn’t told me anything yet, but I had already packed up everything I had been keeping in my dorm into my Warehouse, and disconnected the wardrobe door from the Warehouse. I found I could actually strand copies inside that way, and left a few there to see what happened. 

I knew fairly soon I’d be leaving this world behind, possibly never to return. And as much as I hated it, I knew I was going to miss Claye and Saavi. And even Alixer and Kayne. I was going to miss running our ttrpg sessions, I was going to wonder if Claye got out from under the organization’s thumb, if Saavi learned not to pick fights she couldn’t win,  if Kayne managed to evade his stalker, if Alixer managed to get any sleep. I wouldn’t be able to forget them, not with my perfect memory. I wasn’t sure if I would want to.

Once I got back to my dorm after the ceremony, Astra stopped time and asked if I was ready to go. I said yes, and my vision filled with stars once again.