Reflections In An Evil Eye

Wednesday, Oct 4^th

It’s one thing to talk about being ‘the Cooler King’ and how we’ll ‘own up to what we did and take what they throw at us without complaining’ when you’re sitting in Sara’s room at Poe. It’s a whole other thing, when, after a long hard day of school, instead of going back to good ol’ Poe and kicking back, you gotta walk down the hill to Hawthorne cottage. Hawthorne, the weirdest cottage at Whateley. At WHATELEY. Think about that for a while. Hawthorne is the cottage where they stick the kids who can’t control their powers enough, and are a danger to others. The hair-trigger energy blasters, the bricks who can’t control their own strength, and the ‘loud’ telepaths who can’t help but broadcast their thoughts.

Well, if nothing else, it will make for an interesting letter home.

I tried to get the gang in the right mood by trying to whistle the ‘Colonel Bogey March’- y’know, what Alec Guiness and the other POWs whistle in ‘Bridge over the river Kwai’?- but nobody was up for it. *humpf!* Try and keep up morale!

Ayla was busy grousing.  “It was a lot easier thinking about the whole ‘Cooler King’ approach when we weren’t so close to the problem.”

“Hey,” Hank reminded her, “if it was easy, no one would be impressed.  So you picked your assignment yet?”

“I have!” Jade chirped. “She’s the one you told me about, Sempai.  Jello, the girl without a body image template.  I was thinking, maybe we’d be good for each other.”

I gave her a smile to buck her up.  “I hope so.”

We were received by Ms. Cantrel, the housemother at Hawthorne.  She’s a large, black woman in a wheelchair, who looks to be about two days younger’n dirt.  But this chair had been jazzed up like you would not believe!  It had no wheels, but glowing golden orbs at each corner, each orb the size of a grapefruit.  It didn’t just hover, it zipped around like a dragonfly. A size 150 dragonfly, XXXXL.

She zoomed up to us as soon as we hit the front door.

“Well, here at last, and about time, too!”

“Are we late?” I asked, not really sure of what to make of this Woman-Mountain.

“Late?  Not yet you aren’t!  But unless we get moving you might be.  And those kids need every minute they can get, so don’t sit there gawking. Let’s get to work!”

She showed me a closet with mops and other cleaning supplies. “Okay, let’s see how those fancy-schmancy powers of yours help you with something simple, like mopping the floors. I want the first two floors not only spic, but span! Well, what are you waiting for? Get to work!”

Grabbing one of the mops, I looked at her retreating back. “Credulous Fool!” I intoned, “Clearly you have no idea that you are dealing with a master of MARTIAL ARTS MOPPING!”

I filled a mop bucket with hot water, added a dollop of cleaning solution, and paused to center myself. *Hiyah!* I attuned the mop to my Ki, and began. “Yi- yi- yi- yi- yi, yi- yi- YI!” I went at the hall with a will, and I was soon at the far end of the hall. I dried out the mop. “Yi- yi- yi- yi- yi, yi- yi- yi- yi- YI!” The hallway was both clean and dry.

“What’s all this noise about?” Mrs. Cantrel came whizzing up. “And why haven’t you started yet?”

“Started?” I emptied the dirty water out into the cleaning closet washbasin. “I’ve already finished!”

“Finished? Then why isn’t that floor wet?”

“I thought that the point of the exercise was for the floor to be clean, not just wet.”

“It IS!”

“Well, then look.”

Cantrel swiveled her chair around so that she could get a good look at the floor. “Well, I’ll be. …” She gave me the gimlet eye, “And where are you going now?”

“Second floor. You DID tell me to take care of that as well, didn’t you?” She nodded. “Oh, by the way, do you want me to take care of those back stairs as well?” She nodded again, and tooled off in her chair.

Four minutes and much yipping later, the second floor and the back stairs were clean and dry as well.

As I cleaned out the mop and bucket, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Mrs. Cantrel again, and she was smiling that shark-looking-at-a-fish smile of hers. “Well, you’re done with that, already. But don’t worry, Hon. I’ll find things for you to do. Come along!” She whirled her chair around.

In quick succession, I proved my mastery of Martial Arts linen-folding, trashcan emptying and shower scrubbing. Yes, the filth of Hawthorne cottage was a formidable opponent, but it fell to the awesome skills of Chaka, super-powered grime fighter!

From the Second Floor down to the Ground Floor, Cantrel showed me to one of the student’s room. There was an official looking nameplate that said ‘Compiler’ next to the door, but there was also a ceramic nameplate ringed with daisies that said ‘Babs’ on the door. It looked like one of those summer camp Arts & Crafts projects. “Okay, Hon,” Cantrel purred, “Your job is to help this poor child get her room clean.”

I looked at Cantrel worriedly. “And exactly WHY does she need help? I mean, I know that Hawthorne is for students who DO need help, but what exactly are the specifics here?”

Cantrel just gave me the shark grin and chuckled as she knocked on the door, “Hon, I think that I’ll let you figure that one out all by yourself.”

The girl who answered was weird. Not in any immediately obvious way, with scales, or antennae, or a nimbus of fire or anything like that, but, how do I put this? She looked like a Barbie™ doll, full-sized and come to life. Her hair was midnight black, but other than that, she could have stepped out of the Dream House©. She had the impossibly cute face with the oversized eyes and the teeny little nose, the ridiculous breasts, the absurdly narrow waist, and long slender legs.

She blinked unlikely iridescent green eyes at us and said, “Yes?”

“Babs, sweetie,” Cantrel said in a completely different voice, “we have someone to help you with your room.”

Why did I get the sinking feeling that I was being set up for a particularly nasty joke? If she’s in Hawthorne, then she must have something seriously wrong with her, and I’m probably gonna find out when it goes off in my face.

‘Babs’ worried her lip, finally said, “Okay”, as if she weren’t sure about it, and let me in.

It turned out that Barbie’s™ Dreamhouse© was a pigsty. No, on second glance, it wasn’t your basic ‘I just don’t care, so I throw it down wherever I am’ mess- I know that style from 14 years of living with Vince. This didn’t have that ‘layered’ effect that you get with a dedicated slob; it was more like she hadn’t had a chance to pick up after an earthquake.

Or maybe the dog had something to do with it.

Lounging on her bed was a large, and I do mean LARGE, white dog wearing something that looked sort of like one of those service dog harnesses, with bulging satchels and a pair of sneakers tied on by their laces. I looked at the dog and said, “I know that we can’t have pets here at Whateley, so that must be a service dog. So, exactly what kind of condition do you have?”

Babs walked slowly into the room and shook her head. “Stella isn’t a service animal. Hey, Stel, this is this week’s Detainee.” The ‘dog’ sat up, and its form began to flow, altering shape. It went through a ‘werewolf’ stage, and wound up as a rather skinny girl with white hair. Now, I’ve seen shapeshifters do their thing before, but this one was really weird- most shapeshifters have to sort of make do with their clothes, but this one’s harness changed into a Whateley school uniform.

“I didn’t know that they made uniforms that did that.” I said.

Stella shook her head. “They don’t. But Babs here does. Though, I still say that I wish you’d make a suit that changes into something other than the uniform.”

“Be grateful.” Babs replied as she pulled out a chair that had been formed from a single piece of very thick metal. “You have no idea of how difficult it was, getting a triggered multiphasic matrix to stabilize.” She looked at me. “So, what did you get busted for?”

“Oh, my team rumbled with those Alphas losers a few days ago, and whupped their butts,” I told her as I started to pick up clothes up off the floor and tossed them into piles.

“Hold on,” Stella said, sitting more at attention. “You guys went up against the Alphas?”

“Yeah, but don’t you worry- next week, the Alphas will be here, so you guys can carve a slice outta their hides, too.”

“What?” Babs got up out of her chair, “But Alphas don’t GET detention!”

“Now they do,” I grinned.

“Why that’s …“ Suddenly, Babs rushed at me in a near blur, taking me totally by surprise. She caught me flat-footed, hitting me with the force of a Mack truck, and sending me crashing into the wall.

I bounced off the wall and kippuped up to a fighting stance. “I didn’t know that they put Alphas in Hawthorne,” I snarled, “but it’ll be worth another week of detention, to send Donny boy the message, DO NOT fuck with Team Kimba!”

Stella got between us. “No! She didn’t mean to do that! It was an accident!”

“It was pretty damn hard for an accident!”

Stella swept a hand around the room. “Why do you think that this room is such a mess?”

“She’s a slob?”

Stella let out a disgusted breath. “NO, she can’t control her strength or her speed! That’s why she’s in Hawthorne to begin with!”

I gave her a hard look. “An Exemplar who can’t control their strength or speed? Isn’t that sort of a contradiction in terms?”

“I’m not an Exemplar.” Babs said hollowly from the chair which she had set well away from me. She didn’t look happy. “But I wanted to be one. And it sorta turned around and bit me on the ass.”

Stella plopped back down on the bed. “Babs is some sort of Nano-tech wizard. She can control and power nanites, just by thinking about it. She can even design ‘em. Don’t ask me how they found out about it. Anyway, when they sent her here to get it all under control, she sorta went nuts in the Workshop. She decided that she wanted to be as good as the Exemplars, so she kludged up a ‘nanotech supergirl’ suite of nanites, and got like that,” Stella waved at Babs.

Babs blushed, and said, “Well, it wasn’t really all that hard- carbonite reinforcing strands through the muscle and tendon tissue, fullerene tube mesh reinforcement of the bones, super-conducting strands through the nerve-”

Stella cut her off, “Short form, she’s so dense that she’s four times as heavy than she ought’a be. And, she can’t control her strength very well. And, she has these sort of bursts of speed that she can’t control either. You were just on the receiving end of one’a those. That’s why they stuck her in here.”

I gave her a skeptical look. “Well, whatever you did, Hon, it screwed up your Ki something fierce.”

“Ki?”

I gave them the ‘Qi Gung for Beginners’ lecture. When I finished, Babs looked at her hand. “And you think that the nanite upgrade that I gave myself is messing with my Ki? And that’s responsible for all the weirdness?”

I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible that you screwed up something else, and that’s reflected in the way that your Ki flows. On the other hand, getting your Ki back on track couldn’t help but improve the situation. But then, it’s possible that this could be the way that your Ki settled afterwards, and you’ll have to tough out the cure the hard way. How long have you been like this?”

“Three weeks.”

“Say WHAT?” I felt my eyebrows try to rise up off of my head. “You’re kidding!” Then I remembered where I was- Whateley Academy, Weirdness Central, and pulled myself together. I waved my spazz-out aside. “Well! Three weeks ain’t nuthin’, Sugar! A little Tai Chi is just what the doctor ordered!”

“Tai Chi?” Babs worried her lower lip. “Gee, I dunno if I’m really up to learning any martial arts.”

“N-n-n-n-no. Tai Chi Chu’an isn’t a martial art. Well, it can be used as one, but that’s not the point. Tai Chi is a system of learning to focus and move your chi by repeating a system of 108 movements. No punching or kicking involved, just moving your body in a relaxed but controlled manner.”

“Hey, I already know how to move slow.”

I picked up a bit of debris from the floor. “No you don’t. You know that you have to move slow, but you don’t really know how to move- or breathe- at all.”

“BREATHE?” She said outraged, and got up …

… and I just barely managed to get out of her way as another spurt of speed threw her in my direction.

Stella managed to talk her into listening to me. Besides showing her the postures, I helped her ‘feel’ her Ki, which helped her understand a little of what was going on.

I’ll give Babs her due- she’s a smart girl. Not smart enough to keep from mucking with her body with untested nanotech, but she picked up fast.

But when someone’s who that big is a stranger to her own body, she will still have problems. One of her spurts threw both of us against the door and almost knocked me out.

As we were sprawled on the floor, and I was trying to get back the wind that had been knocked out of me, before I got around to pushing a girl who weight over 400 pounds off of me, the door opened. Ayla stuck her head in. “What’s going on here?”

She looked at me with the live action Barbie© on top of me, and tsked, “Toni, aren’t you having enough problems with Rip as it is? If word of this gets around …”

Before she could get around to phrasing her blackmail, Mrs. Cantrel loomed up behind her in her flying chair. “What’s going on here?” She looked at Babs on top of me, shook her head and said, “No, I don’t wanna know. You, Goodchild, get her off your friend. I have another job for her.”

As Babs got to her feet, I told her, “We’ll pick up again, tomorrow.”

Cantrel led me down the corridor. “Okay, what was all that about?”

“I was showing her some moves.”

“Hey, you leave that sicko stuff in Poe! That girl’s got enough problems!”

I explained the Tai Chi Chu’an. “You yankin’ my chain, kid?”

“Hey, ask her yourself, if you doubt my word. So, what’s the new job?”

She led the way down a flight of stairs that were sort of like the ones you see in movie sets of old dungeons. They were cast out of the solid cement. “Well, you asked about ‘Dr. Heavy’, the kid who’s stuck generating a constant 8 G field.”

“I thought that Tennyo was handling that.”

“Yer buddy is handling something else, so you’re the next in the barrel.” She led me to simple door with no locks or anything. "Well, here we are.”

“ ‘Kay, just a sec.”

“Second thoughts?” she smirked.

“There are no problems, only new ways of training. But, I can’t do the job if I can’t move, now can I?” I centered myself, and super-charged my Ki, which makes me that much stronger. It’s a good technique, but tiring as hell. I can keep it up for a few hours; at least, I think that I can keep it up for a few hours. If I start to get tired, I can always call a potty break, and recharge. Hey, this is supposed to be detention, not eternal perdition.

Steeled in body and spirit, I walked through the door and found-

-Okay, I admit it, I was disappointed. I was expecting a huge mess with a hormone-crazed boy bouncing off the walls. Okay, it was a little messy, but nothing like the knee-deep mess that I was expecting. And instead of a cabin-feverish horndog, the kid was sitting on his bed, looking like his dog died.

At first, I was surprised, as I was expecting someone --- taller. But he didn’t look like he was only Eight, there was something about his head---

*Oh, shit, they didn’t tell me that he’s a dwarf! He’s a ‘little person,’ AND he can’t control his mutant powers?  Talk about crapping out in the genetic lottery!*

I stepped into the room, and suddenly the Eight Gs hit me. Yep, suddenly the cliché ‘invisible hand of stone’ makes perfect sense. I steeled myself and walked further in. “Hey!”

“Hey,” he returned dully.

“So, waddya need done?”

“Oh, just … pick this shit up.” He said it like someone whose favorite sport has just gone sour on him.

I carefully picked up a funky pair of drawers that must have weighed four pounds. “So… how cum Billie got yanked from this?”

“Billie?”

“Y’know, the girl they assigned to this room, just before me?”

“You know Billie?”

“Yeah, we’re both in Team Kimba together.”

“Team Kimba?”

“Our training group.”

“Oh …” He sort of sunk in on himself again.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” he said, clearly getting a little peeved. “But it ain’t nothin’ that I ain’t been dealin’ with for months.”

“Okay, you need to get out of yourself a little.” I trudged over- and believe me, at Eight Gs, all you can DO is trudge!- and took him by the hand. I tried to pull him up, and it was like trying to pull an anchor out of a seabed. “C’mon! What you need, is some good old fashioned Tai Chi Chuan to get the ki flowing! C’mon!”

I did the thumbnail explanation of Ki and Tai Chi, and demonstrated for him. He got up off his bed in an ‘Oh, well, if it will shut you up’ way, and started stumbling through the first few movements. Okay, it’s hard to move in Eight Gs, even when you have super-strength, but still! Even someone who’s never done Tai Chi before should have been able to do it better than THAT!

“No, no, no!” I demonstrated again.

He tried again, and didn’t do any better. “There! That’s the best that I can DO!” he snarled up at me.

“Weird. One more time, but this time, do it real slow. I’m gonna watch your Ki, and see what’s wrong.”

He ground gracelessly through the first three movements, before I stopped him. “Got it! I see what the problem is. You got a knot of tangled up Ki, right here.” I poked at a spot just above his belly button. “Now, breathe.”

“Waddya think I’m doing?” He didn’t add ‘bitch’, but it was there.

“I mean, breathe deep. Like, all the way down to your toes. When you can’t breathe in anymore, hold it for like five seconds, and then let it out slow, a little at a time. Try to take as long letting it out as you can.”

I had to get him to slow down a little a couple of times before he got it. And then, as he was doing it right, I poked at the knot. Wow, talk about your Gordian knots! This was one angry snarl! It grabbed onto my finger and wouldn’t let me go! I tried to pull my finger out, but it was stuck.

Sheer brute force wasn’t working, so I sent my Ki through my finger. I felt around the angry tangle of Ki until I found the very core of it. I wriggled it around, got it loose, and then it finally worked its way free on it’s own. The snarl unsnarled and let go of me.

And then, everything started floating.

Yes, floating. As in the junk on the floor gently drifted into the air. ‘Dr. Heavy’ and I didn’t gently waft aloft, though. Hey, we were braced to move around in Eight Gravities, which suddenly punked out on us. We both shot off the ground and bopped our heads on the ceiling.

The Doc let out a whoop like he’d won a date with Pam Anderson and she’d promised to bring the extra LARGE box of condoms. He braced himself against the ceiling and dove down into the cloud of clothes and stuff. Brave boy, going face first into his own untidy less-than-whities. He started bopping around, diving in and out of his own stuff like a dolphin. Or a Null-G gopher, maybe.

I managed to kick myself against the ceiling and kicked out to the door, where gravity came back on the job. I turned back and checked on Heavy-boy. He looked to be having a ball, so I left him to it.

I headed out into the hall and ran into this black guy. And when I say ‘black guy’, I am not talking about a ‘brother’- though, he might have been African-American originally, who knows?- I am talking Black. Slate black. The kind of black that you see on Seals and Sea Lions. Or maybe whales, cause he was BIG, Hippolyte big, and had this kind of thick physique that somehow hid his sharp edges. He was bald, and he had this face that sort of looked like he was trying to stretch a face over a head that was three sizes too large for it. He wasn’t so much ugly as he was, well, ODD looking. “Hey! Are you on the staff here?”

He scowled at me with suspicious little eyes. “What do you think?”

“Hey, this is Whateley! You could be a student, you could be staff, you could be a teacher, you could be the interior decorator, for all I know!”

He chewed this over for a second, and reluctantly saw my point. “My name’s Slab. I’m one of the inmates here in Hawthorne.”

“Inmate? Isn’t that what you call someone they locked up in the booby-hatch?”

“Well, what would you call someone stuck in Hawthorne?”

“Apparently, someone who needs to lighten up a bit, Jack!”

“The name’s Slab.”

“You’re kidding? You picked that out yourself?”

“How could you tell?”

“ ‘Cause, if anyone slapped that tag on you, you’d’a probably ripped his head off, slapped the name in his mouth and crammed his head up his ass.” I waved all that aside. “ANYWAY, I gotta find the staff!”

“What for?”

I opened up the door, where it was all ‘Poltergeist’, and Dr. Heavy was still zipping around. “What do YOU think?”

Slab found Mrs. Cantrell, and Dr. Traherne, who apparently was part of Hawthorne’s in-house research staff. “Okay, WHAT did you DO to him?” Traherne yelled at the top of his lungs.

“What’s the big fuss? I’d think that living in Zero G would be a step up from the way he was before!”

“You got THAT right!” Dr. Heavy grinned as he floated past us.

“That’s NOT the point!” Traherne grated, “These children have very serious problems, and you could have seriously complicated his condition with your reckless poking around.”

“Hey!” Dr. H rose to my defense, “At least she DID something!”

“Oh?” Traherne sneered, “Can you suddenly turn your gravity affecting power OFF?”

“Er … no.” The Doc sort of wilted in mid-air.

“Well then, you’ll have to stay in Hawthorne, won’t you?”

“Oh, hush, Hubert.” Cantrell said from outside the room, still in her chair. “At least the boy can leave his room now without destroying the furniture. Heck, the other kids might enjoy having a Zero-G area to hang out in.”

“Only as long as you have a bucket and mop for the vomit.” Traherne sniped. “And as for YOU-” he poked a finger in my face, “you’re going to tell me what you did to do this, and you’ll leave out the pseudo- mystical mumbo-jumbo if you know what’s good for you!”

“Excuse me?” I returned, feeling the hackles on the back of my neck rising, “Did you just call Qi Gung ‘pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo’?”

Cantrel hit a button on one of the arms of her chair, and I felt an odd force that jerked both Traherne and me out of Dr. Heavy’s room. “Enough of that. Hubert, the kid wasn’t trying anything, she was just tryin’ to get the boy out of his funk, and it bit her. Chaka, for the love of JESUS, the next time that you get the bright idea to go poking around in other people’s lives, THINK, will you?” She gave a massive sigh- but then, there wasn’t a lot about her that wasn’t massive. “Oh, fer the luvva Pete, just go. You’ve done enough damage for t’day.”

I tried to ask a few questions, but she just shushed me and waved me out of the corridor. The rest of Team Kimba had already left, their shifts already done (traitors!), so I headed back to Poe to get cleaned up for dinner.

Well, so much for my first day at the dreaded Hawthorne Cottage.

I got together with the crew. “So, Toni, what kept you?”

“Oh, let’s just say that I helped ‘Doctor Heavy’ lighten up.”

SAHAR

Semiramis ‘Sahar’ Vesmarran tried to approach Zenith as she went into the Crystal Hall for dinner, but her nerve failed her at the last minute. It was the most extraordinary thing. She was all set to walk up, plow through all the stickiness, and clear the air. And then, it was like a fog of uncertainty shrouded her mind, and she couldn’t think of anything. And then, the opportunity was gone. Again!

Dammit all, why couldn’t she speak with Zoe? Last year, they’d talked about everything! About anything. About nothing. About too much. Ohhh … truly, the wisdom of God blows like the wind through the ears of a jackass!

Sahar took a deep breath and let her disappointment rush out of her. Well, there was nothing that could be done, she might as well get some dinner. She helped herself to the special, and sat at a table by herself. Again!

Odd, that had never bothered her before. Before, she’d always been setting up one of her marks, or she was studying a mark before the set up. But now?

Semi’s ruminations were interrupted when Tansy ‘Solange’ Walcutt sat down across the table from her. “So, how is the asparagus tonight?”

Semi flinched, taken off guard. “You’re sitting with me?”

“Why not? I share a room with you.”

“You’ve never eaten with me before.”

Tansy made a significant look over at the Alpha table. “Consider it a sort of penance.”

“Oh. The Alphas are still upset over that thing with the ghost girl?”

Tansy pursed her mouth sourly, and then her mouth wreathed itself in a nasty smile. “You know … that ‘ghost girl’ bit of hers would be a great trick. I’d love to know how she does it.”

Semi locked her red-ringed eyes with Tansy’s cornflower blue ones, and gave her a sort of psychic ‘tap between the eyes’, letting Tansy know that she wasn’t being either amusing, or subtle.

Tansy shrugged. “I’m just saying … it would be a really useful thing to know …”

“I’m not a psychokinetic.”

“Oh? How do you know?”

“I have checked, you know.”

“Oh, well, I suppose you’re right. After all, you have a very full schedule. Meditating, brooding, sulking … where DO the hours go?”

Semi bridled at the spoiled little Merikanji snip’s cut, but it did manage to snap her out of her funk a little. Suddenly, she was tired of all the introspection and moping. She had an understanding with the CIA that she would go to work for them when she graduated from Whateley. Being a ‘talented’ agent for the American CIA was what the Americans would call a ‘cushy gig’, but it was also very dangerous work, and you needed every little edge that you could get, just to stay alive. She owed it to both the Company and herself, to make the most of her opportunities here at Whateley!

But, Zoe …

Semi made peace with the two warring urges inside her. Yes, she would continue to learn as many psychic ‘tricks’ as she could. BUT, no more rip-offs. No, there was something precious, something hurt and crying inside her. Another rip-off might kill it. No, this time she’d … what? Just go up and ASK someone ‘will you teach me your special trick, the one that gives you this huge advantage?’ But that was insane!

Some sort of trade, maybe? After all, if she could learn these tricks, maybe she could teach them as well? Now, for almost anyone else, this would have been an obvious conclusion. But to Semiramis Vesmarran, it was an epiphany equal in magnitude to Moses seeing the burning bush, or the prophet Muhammad beholding the Archangel Gabriel, or Bill Gates realizing that a flaw could be marketed as a feature. Suddenly, the hesitations of months of soul searching were behind her.

Yes, she’d start picking up new techniques for her resume again. But this time, she’d offer something in return. It would be an honest, above-board exchange, a value for a value! Then crushing reality brought her back down to Earth, and totally killed her rush. Who would believe her? Anyone who wasn’t a friend of the people that she’d burned, would still get warned off as a matter of course. Which meant, that she’d have to try her luck with the freshmen. Nobody told the froshes anything.

Reflexively, Sahar followed Tansy’s venomous gaze across the caff over to the table where Team Kimba sat. Hmmm … Team Kimba… maybe … if everyone thought that Tansy was using her as a weapon against the troublesome froshes, probably on Don Sebastiano’s orders or some such, then no one would warn them.

Semi immediately mentally slapped her own wrist. *No! I don’t think that way anymore! It only makes things worse! And it cost me …*

Semi mastered herself. Okay, erase the mind game regarding Don Sebastiano. Still, Team Kimba was as good a place to start looking for possible … trade partners? … as anyone.

Very well. First cross off Jade, the little Asian girl with the ghostly sister. Whether the ghost girl that Tansy had kidnapped had been a ghost, or a packet of PK energy, or whatever, it was obviously outside her ability to learn. Of course, the ‘ghost’ might also be the product of one of the girl’s devisor gadgets, and she could learn gadgeteering skills…

No, the girl, Jinn, wouldn’t forget that Sahar had turned her down, when she asked her for help. Sigh* Another wasted opportunity. Was crossing back over burned bridges to be her kismet? She shuddered and waved the evil thought away, before it decided to make a home.

Very well. There was the skinny ‘punker’, who seemed to be egging on every homophobe in Whateley by showing off her ‘package’. Sahar wondered briefly how she’d managed to keep from getting jumped yet. No, no matter what her powers were, getting close to that one would only totally ruin Sahar’s already shabby reputation.

The token boy of the group? No, if she remembered correctly, he was what they called a ‘PK superman’, and she couldn’t learn PK traits  as far as she knew.

The blue-haired Asian? No, she was some sort of energizer, same problem as the last. She wasn’t sure what the new Asian girl, the one with the sword, did. Look into that, it was a possibility.

The red-haired pretty-pretty? No, Semi thought, life is dangerous enough, without getting tangled up with Magic. And that went triple for the Gothling, who had an even worse reputation than Sahar did!

But what about the African? If she remembered correctly- and she had a photographic memory- according to the gossip in the dojos, she was called ‘Chaka’, and she was some sort of prodigy. Something about Ki. She’d heard some of the martial arts types theorizing about it. It wasn’t psychokinesis, but practitioners of Qi Gung were supposed to be able to develop psychic abilities. Which suggested that it was some sort of psi ability. It would definitely improve her ability in hand to hand combat, if that showdown between Chaka and Montana was any sign. While Sahar was of the school of thought that said if it came to violence, you’d already lost, she also agreed that the total pacifist was always at the mercy of the violent.

So, if Chaka’s Ki ability was some sort of specialized Psi trait, then this could work very well for both of them. Sahar would learn a valuable combat technique, and Chaka would break out into the wider range of psi talents. *Yes,* Semi smiled to herself, *definitely a ‘win-win’ scenario.*

Now, all that she had to do was sell Chaka on it.

CHAKA

Well, I managed to survive both my first day of Detention in Hawthorne AND the Alphas at dinner. I must be doing something right. As a matter of fact, I was even able to use that a little, during classes. ‘Yeah, I’m doin’ Dee-ten-shun in big bad Hawthorne, and it don’t bother me at ALL! Uh-HUNH!’ It’s always good to be one up on the competition. Besides, if I didn’t play it as an asset, you know that someone would have been rubbing my face it in it.

Heck, Blitz tried anyway, at dojo. Blitz is this tall strapping ‘All That’ type Brit who thinks that she’s Diana Rigg or Emma Peel or somebody, and seems to have it in for me. This is not good, as she’s very strong, very fast, very good at martial arts, and the first time that I grabbed her to throw her, I got a 100-kilowatt jolt.

And I STILL don’t know why Ito-sensei won’t let me wear rubber gloves and/or slippers on the mat.

As it was, I was spending most of my dojo time ducking little miss cattle prod, so that she wouldn’t call me onto the mat for another session of shock therapy.

But you mark my words- _I will_ find a way around that stupid shock bit, and I _will_ cram that snotty accent of hers, right up her ass!

SAHAR

Semi bided her time. Apparently, Blitz had appointed Chaka as this year’s punching bag, and again, the senseis were taking the ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ point of view. Well, an opening is an opening. There’s nothing wrong with making your sales pitch at an advantageous time…

CHAKA

Ah, Shit, Blitz had pretty much cornered me, and was moving in for the kill. It looked like shock therapy time again. Then, suddenly, this girl that I had seen around the dojo but not talked with before stepped up and said, “Excuse me, but I’ve heard that you’re very good. Care to do a few falls?”

Hey, I can do without losing any more childhood memories! “Sure! I’m Chaka. And you are?”

“She’s stepping aside, little missy.” Blitz stalked up, just oozing that ‘blue-blooded noble deigning to associate with the hoi-polloi’ vibe of hers, “We have an appointment on the mat. NOW!”

“Appointment?” I batted my eyes, “Gee, I’ll have to consult my daily planner. I’m sure that I don’t remember anything about a date with you. And, as I DO have a prior engagement …” I waved the girl towards the mat.

“Oh, no you don’t. On the mat! Now!”

“Yes, indeed. With her, not you.”

“Oh, you don’t get off that easy, little missy.”

The other girl stepped between us. “Excuse me, Blitz, but I’m next on the mat with Chaka.”

“Don’t start with me, Evil Eye! Someone has to show this cheeky little squit …” I didn’t find out what Blitz was going to show me (though I have a pretty good idea). As the girl locked eyes with her, Blitz paused and pulled back. Blitz glared at me. “Later. Believe it.”

I called after her, “I notice that you pull this on the mat- the ONE PLACE that you can win!” I looked at the girl. “So, what was all that about?”

She gave a rueful smile. “I just gave her a psionic tap-” I felt a mental ‘snap’ at my brow chakra, where Taoist theory states that psychic energies enter and leave the mind, “-to remind her that some people don’t have to touch her to hurt her.” She took a deep breath and set that aside. “I’m called ‘Sahar’.”

We had a good session on the mat. Well, neither of us actually laid a hand on each other, but we got a good workout, anyway. I couldn’t touch her because Sahar seemed to have a good idea of what I was about to do, and I used my chi to flow out of her attacks. It was pretty much a rerun of what happened with Cavalier at the ‘Breakfast Brawl’. I could have closed my brow chakra, like I did with Cavalier, but I figured that I owed her something for the save with Blitz.

As class was wrapping up, Sahar said, “I did have an ulterior motive for stepping in with Blitz.” She seemed to be having a problem getting it out.

“Okay, I can respect an ulterior motive. What’s yours?”

She took a deep breath. “Well, besides my own talents, I have- well, not exactly a power, it's more like a knack- for copying the psychic specialties of others.”

“Say what?”

“You know, some psychics and espers have these refined talents- like the gadgeteers, they’re focused on technology. Others can do things like a Psi, mentally paralyzing someone, or an Esper who can intuit how to read any written language. Well, I can learn how to copy that focus, though I’m not as expert with it. Well, ah, I’d like to learn your chi specialization.”

“Errr … Well, there’s a problem …”

“Now, I’m not asking you to just give up your great edge!” She seemed a little flustered, and she was selling a little harder than is really good salesmanship. “I could teach you one of the specializations that I’ve learned! For instance, I know a psi rote for connecting with another person’s mind, so that you can talk to them, even though you don’t speak the same language! Or-”

“Hold It!” I managed to break in. “I’m not a Psi.” She started to recover, and I headed her off there. “And, I’m not an Esper, either.”

She was totally at sea. “You’re not?”

I tried to give her a reassuring smile. “No. Manipulating Chi isn’t a psi or ESP talent. It’s its own thing, all by itself. Still, I appreciate the offer.”

But by this time, Sahar was obviously embarrassed, so she mumbled something, broke off and hurried away. OH-kaaaayyy… Obviously some issues there. It occurred to me that the worst thing that I could do would be to just shrug my shoulders and say ‘not my problem’. So, I went into the changing room, but she wasn’t there. “’Scuze me,” I asked the girls who were still in the changing room, “but did a girl in a neon blue practice gi just come through here?”

“You mean Sahar?” One of them asked.

“Yeah, I think that was her name.”

“She blew through here without changing.”

*Oh, fuck.* “Was she upset?”

“Hey, it was Sahar.” One of them shot back. I immediately recognized her as one of the ‘Tigers’, the one who calls herself ‘Alakazam’. But then, it’s sort of hard to mistake a black chick who shaves her head bald, except for a long ponytail set high on the knob of the bulb. “Who gives a shit?”

“Aw, fuck, I gotta go find her and …”

“HEY! Hey, hey, hey, fresh-thing, what do you think you’re doing?” the other one, I’m not sure which one she was, said as she grabbed my sleeve.

“I’m going to see that she’s all right. She got sort of upset out on the floor, and-”

“uh-HUNH.” Alakazam nodded knowingly. “Lemme guess- she asked if you could, like help her with somethin’, and she got all upset when you said No, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Smartest thang, y’evver did, Sugar.” Alakazam went into the whole ‘homegirl’ thing. “Sahar is a super-sized order of Bad News, with a side of shit. She’s playin’ you, big-time.”

I looked her straight in the eyes. Ever since I got together with Scott ‘T-Bird’ Emerson (and bitch-slapped their boy ‘Mace’ in the process), the Tigers have been on my back about ‘turning my back on the race’, and that that crap. Don’t you just love having near-total strangers tell you how to run your life? “It didn’t feel that way.”

“Hey, that’s her bag- she’s a psi, she messes with people’s heads. She’s got a different face for every day of the week, just like all them Middle East types. They say one thing to your face, and the exact opposite, the minute they think you can’t hear.”

“Scuze me,” I cut her off, “Y’know, I just hate to cut off a good bigoted rant, but I have to go talk to another human being. You just keep going on about vague socio-cultural abstractions.” I headed for the door Sahar must have gone out.

Suddenly, a wall of smoke formed in front of the door. “And where d’you think you’re going?”

Now this would have worked, if Alakazam hadn’t played this trick on a girl who squishes Nikki’s hobgoblins daily, and copes with Belle’s sense of humor on a regular basis. And Belle’s manifestations are on a whole different level than this. I cut through the smoke with a single Ki-empowered slice of my hand. “I think I’m going to go get some fresh air.”

Frack. Sahar was nowhere in sight, and I had to go back into the changing room, to get into my school uniform for my next class. Whatever had happened with Sahar bugged me, and not just because I hadda take shit from Alakazam, (who comes UP with these names?), either. No, there was something going on there which went a lot deeper than missing a chance to pick up a new trick. I know, as tricks go, Ki is Aces, but it couldn’t have meant that much to her!

It bugged me so much that I couldn’t even pay attention in Intro to Criminology. And Inspector Kwan is my favorite teacher!

Lunch rolled around, and I was at the Kimba table. “Hey, you look out of it.” Nikki observed, “Not looking forward to Round Two at Hawthorne?”

“Nah, somethin’ weird happened at the dojo this morning, and I think I put my foot in it again.”

“Well, that’s a first.”

“What? Me putting my foot in it?”

“No, getting strung out because of it.” Serves me right, going to someone with pointy ears for emotional support. But then, the original series of Star Trek was never really big on my viewing schedule.

“Very funny.” I not-laughed, “A girl came to me with a proposition …”

“Better not let Rip hear about that.” Nikki said with a snarky smirk.

“Not THAT kind of proposition!”

“Well then, what was it, sempai?” Jade asked from the other side of the table.

“Well, see that girl over there?” I pointed at Sahar, who was sitting several tables over, off on the pariah end. “Well, she came over and wanted to learn how I did my Ki schtick. She though that it was some sort of Psi or Esper thing that she could psychically learn from me, and she got sort of strung out when I told her that it didn’t work that way.”

Jade looked over interested. “That’s Sahar,” she said in a tone that kinda suggested that there was more to it.

“Yeah, that’s the name. You know her, Jade?”

“Well ...” she got that cagey look she had when she was trying to
trying to be clever. “Jinn met her, back when I … er … she was stuck
inside Tansy Walcutt.”

“She’s one of the Dickenson girls?”

“More to the point, she’s Tansy’s roommate.”

Suddenly, Ayla, Tennyo and Hank were very interested. “So … Tansy’s playing her next card,” Ayla said, as if she were considering her next chess gambit. “Now I wonder, is Tansy trying to get the Master to her CD back, or is she playing a longer game?”

“Kinda obvious, don’cha think?” Hank wondered. “I mean, Walcutt’s gotta know that Jade will make Sahar.”

“Not necessarily.” Billie corrected him. “Remember, Tansy doesn’t know that the J-team does that info share thing with Jade when they re-integrate. Jade, honey, you say that you met her- what’s your opinion?”

Jade took a deep breath and let it out slowly, to give herself time to think. “We … eelll … I don’t really get the impression that Tansy and Sahar really hung out. It was more like they hadda share a room, and tried not to notice each other as much as possible.”

“So, Sahar wouldn’t feel particularly obligated to help her roomie out.” Ayla said it like a statement, not a question.

“Not unless Walcutt paid her. And Sahar did seem to have a pretty thick mercenary streak to her. Tansy paid her to help her get me under control.” Jade paused and her eyes widened, “Ayah! Tansy paid Sahar more for a few nights’ work, than I’ll make in a year, scraping out the tunnels!”

“Yeah,” Ayla said, “but remember, a big part of that is putting up with Tansy in the first place! Still, with Walcutt money, Tansy can pay for a LOT.”

Ayla regarded Sahar, but turned her gaze when Sahar seemed to notice it. “So, how do we use this?”

Tennyo gave an acid smile. “We let her hang with Chaka, and see what she’s planning. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and all that. I think that Tansy’s dumb enough to fall for a little creative dis-information."

”Ah, GUYS….” I cut in, “as much as I hate to admit it, I think that this is what that Stormwolf doink was yammering about, when he talked about the tactics you use. I mean, I got the impression that Sahar was genuinely upset when I turned her down. I kinda doubt that she’d get that wrung out, just for losing a chance to pick up a couple of grand.”

“Depends how greedy she is.” Ayla said off-handedly. “I remember a couple of the guys who worked for my Dad breaking down and crying, when they lost out on big deals. Besides, the old pity ploy is one of the oldest tricks in the book. If you hold off, mark my words, she’ll find an excuse to make another offer.”

“When she does, take it.” Tennyo offered. “If you don’t, Tansy will just find another way of getting at us. If she thinks that she’s got a ploy that’s working, she’ll keep at it, and leave us alone, otherwise.”

“GUYS, we don’t even know that she’s working for Tansy!” I complained.

“Well, I could meet her, and get an impression.” Nikki offered.

“No good.” Jade shook her head. “She’s a Psi. If she’s into the mind-fuck thing, the first thing that she’d learn would be how to give a phony emotional impression.”

“I’ll make a few calls, ask a few questions.” Ayla offered.

“Shouldn’t be that hard.” Jade said, “From what I heard, one of the reasons that she’s rooming with Tansy, is that she’s got a real bad reputation.”

I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, but may I point out that WE don’t exactly have a spotless reputation ourselves?”

About that time, Bugs and Rip walked up a little late, as both of them had made the mistake of trying to get at the seafood platter before the Alphas. “So, what’s up?”

“Oh, Toni’s trying to decide whether to go out with that cute girl over there,” Sara drawled.

Well, it’s not like I didn’t already know that she was genetically Evil.

We did the ‘brave soldiers marching off to their fates’ bit after classes ended, and headed off to our next day in the salt mines. Mrs. Cantrel divvied out the jobs and left me for last. “Shall I start with mopping, or do I help out Babs first?”

Mrs. Cantrel gave one of those shark-grins. “Oh, neither. Why don’t you go with Fubar here, and see what he needs done?”

An older looking white guy stepped forward, smiled and said, “Hi there, Toni. My name’s Lou, but the kids here call me Fubar.”

As he lead me down into the basement, I asked, “So, Lou, what do you do here?”

“Oh, I just help out whenever I can.”

“Really? I’d’a thought that they were really specific about who does what.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Well, in order to get a job here in the first place, you-”

“Oh, I’m not on the Staff.”

“Then what do you do here?”

“I’m one of the inmates. I live here.”

Oh lord. “Ah, you look kind of …  mature … to be a student. How long you been here?”

“Oh, twenty years exactly, come February.”

Twenty YEARS? “Ah, then how’cum you’re still here?”

“Well, to be honest, this is practically the only place that I can live.” By this time, we’d gotten to the basement, and walked into a short tunnel. He gestured at a set of double-doors set into the very end of the tunnel, which had on it a picture of the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon character ‘Squiddly Diddly’ over the word ‘FUBAR’. I pushed open the door, which lead into what looked like a small indoor swimming pool. That is, if anyone would build a small indoor swimming pool with a bunch of heavy aeration gear and pumps and stuff. But what really caught my attention were the huge heaping globs of gooey crap that was all over one edge of the ‘pool’ and the equipment’s housings.

“eeewww…!” I shuddered. “What happened HERE?”

“Oh, nothing that doesn’t happen four or five times a day.”

“A day?”

“A day. Y’see, I need extremely pure water, or my sinuses get all clogged up.”

I felt my eyes cross in confusion. “Excuse me? What do you DO here?” I saw a snow shovel and a big recycling bin, the type that wheels around, and I was getting a very bad feeling about it.

“Oh, I just hang out.” He could tell that I wasn’t getting it. “Toni,” odd, I didn’t remember telling him my name, “what you’re looking at, right now, isn’t my real body. What you’re seeing is a psychic projection, a manifestation of my Astral body. I, or at least my physical body, is down there in the water.”

I peered down into the water. “Where are you? All that I can see is this big ugly blob.”

“I’m the blob.”

“That’s… you?”

“Why do you think they call me ‘Fubar’? It’s an old Army term. It means ‘fucked up beyond all recognition’.” He pointed at a door. “If you’d like to get a closer look.”

Behind the door was a spiral staircase that went down some twenty feet. At the bottom was a large window that looked into the tank. Fubar was already at the bottom of the stairs, even though I went first, and he never passed me on the stair. “There’s a light switch over there.” The lights brightened the insides of the tank, and I got a better look at Fubar’s real body. He was sort of stretched out on the Barcalounger ™from hell, and he wasn’t moving. He was humanoid- that is, if you’re very loose in your definition of ‘humanoid’. His body was sort of flabby looking- ah, who am I kidding, it was bloated- and there was something about the way that his joints were set that didn’t seem right. His hands were these massive claws, and there these things jutting out from behind his back that might have been wings. But the thing that really jumped out at you was his head. His head alone must have been as big as my entire body, and it was definitely misshapen. Misshapen? Hell, the entire front of his face looked like a freaking squid! There was this mass of tentacles writhing- and believe me, I don’t normally use the word ‘writhe’, but in this case, it FIT!- around in front of his face. The tentacles whipping around were the only sign that he wasn’t dead. Other than that, he didn’t move an inch. “I have the dubious distinction of being the most severe case of Gross Structural Dystrophy on record. At least of those that survived. I can’t move out of water, because my entire skeleton has become cartilaginous. I’ve even developed a set of gills in my lungs. On the other hand, besides being an Exemplar, I’m also a high level ‘Package Deal Psychic’. There are only a handful of Exemplar/PDP combinations that I know about.” He looked out the window at his own deformed real body. “And none of them got anything even like this.”

“What are those tentacles doing?”

“Oh, looking for lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“Yeah, they dumped my lunch in at noon, but you can never tell when one of the little buggers got away, so I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping the old whiskers going at all times.”

“What do you mean, ‘little buggers’?” Hey, keep in mind, I hang out with a girl who eats puppies for breakfast. Literally.

“Brine shrimp. Y’know, like ‘sea monkeys’? There’s sort of a rule, that the bigger something is, the smaller the food that it lives on. The big whales live on plankton, and I live on brine shrimp. Of course, that has its own problems.”

“Such as?”

“Well, like I said before, I need extremely pure water, or my sinuses get all clogged up. And if I don’t get ALL the shrimp that they dump in there for me, they get in my sinuses, and even then, they usually *ahem!* ‘evacuate’ while they are in the water. Just a second….”

Fubar faded from my view. Suddenly, the huge whateveritwas on the barcalounger jerked, sat up partially, and ejected a huge wad of… something… through the water, which at least some of shot out of the water. Then Fubar re-appeared. “Sorry about that. Anyway, like I said, I need clean water. So, part of your job will be to strain out the bigger clumps of that-”

“Y’mean, I gotta shovel snot for the next three hours?”

Fubar shrugged. “Hey, would you want to sit in a pool full of snot? Yeah, your job is to scoop out the bigger globs, clean out the filters, and shovel out the stuff that leaves the water.”

“Do I at least get a raincoat, so’s I don’t get slimed the next time you hock a loogie?”

He smiled. “Look for a closet market ‘Cleaning Supplies’. You’ll find a slicker, rubber boots, and some plastic liners for the garbage bin. Oh, and don’t worry. I don’t let off a big one like that very often, and I just cleaned my sinuses.”

I gave him a ‘yeah, right!’ look. “Rrriiiggghht. And when I’m covered with snot, you’ll just say that the raincoat and stuff is there to be used.”

Then I noticed a movement in the tank. The huge head on the immense figure turned to me, and the eyes opened. The eyes were human. Each one was at least as big as my head, but they were still human. They twinkled, and one winked at me. Then they closed again.

Y’know, that wink creeped me out more than anything else?

It took me the better part of an hour, and I barely managed to dodge getting slimed, but I got the job done, and even managed to use the phlegm dissolver to get the place clean. Fubar nodded approvingly. “Good job, especially for a first timer.”

I gave him a hard look. “Hey, what do you do, when you don’t have someone to clean out your tank?”

“Oh, I just take care of it myself.” He gestured at three of the bags full of snot and lifted them into the disposal hopper.

Oh right. Package Deal Psychic. He’s also a psychokinetic. “Then why don’t you just do that all the time?”

“Then what would naughty Detainees, who go around messing with Thornies without thinking about the consequences, do?”

“Y’mean, this is a punishment detail? The really nasty one, for the Detainees who don’t ‘get with the program’?”

“No, those ones do the toilets.” Fubar shuddered.

“So, this is about Dr. Heavy?”

“Yep, Traherne insisted.”

“But I was only trying to help!”

Fubar gave me one of those exasperated parent looks. “Chaka, Dr. Heavy is a very high level gravitic warper. The effects of his powers put very strange strains on his body. When you were messing around with his Ki, you could have upset the delicate balances in his body that were keeping him alive.”

I felt an icy chill enter my heart. Oh God, I’ve killed him!

Fubar shook his head. “No, he’s doing fine, and driving Traherne up the wall. BUT, that’s pure dumb luck, and the purely accidental matter that you were apparently right about the cause of Lester’s being stuck on ‘generate 8 Gs’ doesn’t change things in the least. Chaka, everyone hits the bull’s-eye at least once in their lives. You hit the bull’s-eye with Lester. But you could have also screwed up his metabolism badly. Unlike Traherne, I’m reasonably familiar with Qi Gung, and I know exactly how badly a system under stress can be fouled up, if you just go poking around willy-nilly, the way that you did.”

“Does the fact that I wasn’t trying to ‘fix’ him mean anything? I was checking out the flow of his ki, and my finger got stuck.”

Fubar seemed to chew on this a bit. “Maybe. But don’t get any weird ideas, Chaka. When the word gets out about what happened, some of the other kids here may ask you if you could ‘poke around or something’.  As a matter of fact, Phlegm, the boy who keeps secreting all that mucus, is already trying to figure out how to ask you, without grossing you out. Just tell him that ‘’Fubar already said No’.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You have that kind of pull?”

“I’m not just an inmate here. I’m also a senior instructor in the Psychic Disciplines. So, yeah, I have that kind of pull.” He paused, and if to prove it, he beat me to my next question. “And, yes, it’s okay if you keep teaching Babs Tai Chi. It’s nothing too drastic, and, hey, it might actually help.” Then he disappeared. “Okay, the pool’s as clean as you’re gonna get it. Mrs. Cantrel says that it’s okay for you to drop in on Babs now.”

I went back up stairs. As I went through the common room, a couple of kids came up to me and started to say something. “Sorry!” I cut them off before they could say anything that they’d regret, “Fubar laid down the Law: I’m not supposed to go poking around in other people’s Ki anymore. If you really think that I can help you, talk it over with that Traherne guy.”

There was a generalized ‘aaawww …’, and they sort of slunk back to watching TV. That big black guy, Slab, was leaning against one of the posts. He scowled at. “You could’a let ‘em ask.”

“I didn’t want to embarrass them, by letting them make fool promises.”

He just scowled some more and let it be. I was halfway down the hallway to Babs’ room, when I was swarmed. And, no, not by more Thornies. Suddenly, a swarm of Tinkerbelle sized Nikkis with little fairy wings surrounded me. They were looking at me and giggling in really annoying high-pitched titters.

It looks like ‘oops’ time again. I paused, focused, took a deep breath. Then I let out with a loud series of yips and furiously poked the little flying copyright infringements, popping them like balloons. The giddy little nuisances were ‘hobgoblins’, little runaway packets of magical energy that Nikki creates when she does her ‘oops’ thing. I get rid of, oh, about five a week, so it’s no biggie.

Babs poked her head out of her door, to see what was the noise. “Oh! Chaka! Fubar said that you’d be dropping by. But what’s all the ruckus?”

“Pest control.” I walked into her room, and yes indeedy, it was a mess- again. I tsked sadly and started picking up. “So, you know Fubar?”

“Oh, sure. Everybody at Hawthorne meets the Foob. He’s all over the place.”

“Well, I guess it’s pretty hard to keep out a guy who can astrally project anywhere he wants.” I paused as a thought hit me. “By the way, how do you keep him from peeping into the girls’ showers?”

“Oh, Fubar would never do anything like THAT.”

I gave her a knowing look. “He’s a guy, and he doesn’t get out that much. Believe me, he peeps.”

“I’ve never heard of him trying anything.”

“That just means that he’s a very good peeper.”

Babs crossed her eyes as she tried to wrap her head around the idea. She glanced around nervously, and decided to think about something else, … anything else. “So, ah, wanna show me that Tai Chi thing again?”

Babs hadn’t come very far with her Tai Chi, but hey! Give her a break! She’s only been doing it for a freaking DAY! I mean, it takes months, if not years, for any real improvements to develop.

I was guiding Babs through her third set of motions, when there was a knocking at the door. I opened it, and Mrs. Cantrel was there. “Are you through in there?”

I looked back in. “You cool, Babs?”

“Yeah, I think that I’m getting it. You go on, I’m okay.”

As Mrs. Cantrel led me up one of the stairs, I asked her to look into a Tai Chi instructor for Babs. “I mean, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to be here every day, and Tai Chi isn’t really any good, unless you do it every day, regular as clockwork.”

Mrs. Cantrel stopped her chair, and spun it around to look at me. “And what’s it to you?”

I looked right back her, straight in the eye. “We share a common experience. I know what it’s like to have your body suddenly turn on you and leave you flat. So, she did something stupid, and it bit her in the ass. God knows, I know what that’s like. And besides, why wouldn’t I want someone to get better?”

Cantrel grumped and spun her chair around. “Well, if you’re all that eager to be helpful, then you’ll just love this’n.”

She led me to a room with an unusually wide door with really thick, heavy-duty doors. She buzzed a couple of times, and didn’t get any response, so she keyed something, and the doors rolled open, letting the latest bubble-gum rock anthem come tumbling through the door. She sighed, “Oh, of course. What else would it be?”

She whizzed inside, and I followed. Inside I saw a dark-haired girl in jeans and a pink Tee-shirt,  bopping around to the sound of the music. She looked to be about ten, maybe eleven years old. But, if Jade has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t always tell a mutant’s age.

Cantrel let her boogie for a little bit, and I took advantage to check out the room. It looked as if someone had tried to girly up a heavy machine shop. Everything in the place was made of really heavy-duty metal or high-impact plastics, yet also as if it had been designed to be replaced on a regular basis. Sort of like Dr. Heavy’s room, but not as plain. The place had been ‘prettied up’ with pink paint and flowers and stuff. Stuff that a little girl would like. Or, at least what an engineer who didn’t have kids of his own might think a little girl would like. There were a bunch of large, palm-press buttons all over the place, including what looked like an oversized game controller set near a TV screen. There were shelves with girly stuff, like dolls, stuffed animals and horses, but most of it looked … off, somehow.

Cantrel hit a switch on her armrest, and the music cut out. The girl stopped dancing and spun around. She saw the two of us, and immediately went beet-red in the face. “Sorry t’interrupt, Diz honey.” Cantrel said, “Meet our latest detainee, Chaka. Try not to break her.” With that, Cantrel zipped out of the room.

I looked at her. ‘Diz’ looked like she weighed maybe seventy pounds, if that. “Break me?”

She gave me a ‘sorry about that, Chief’ grin. “Ah, yeah. I break stuff a lot. Y’see, I got this thing, psychokinesis, but instead of makin’ stuff float, I’m like really strong.”

“Oh? Hank- I mean, Lancer- on my team’s like that. He can lift about five tons, or so he says.”

She made a face. “Can he turn it off?”

“Turn it off?” It took me a second to figure what she was talking about. “Oh, you mean, can he NOT be super-strong? I guess so, we’ve never had any real problems with it.”

Her face got worse. “Well, I can’t. I’m always super-strong, and I can’t control how hard I push. I always give it eight tons.” She waved around the room. “All this stuff is made to take a lot of punishment. They got buttons for all the stuff that I gotta move around, that I don’t wanna throw like a missile. And if I wanna leave this room, I gotta wear that.” She gestured at something that looked like a leg brace, only for the entire body. “It’s rigged so that it takes all my PK strength to move it, so I don’t tear nothin’ apart. But it’s real slow, and every so often, it jams. That’s why they call me Diz.”

“Diz?”

“Short for ‘Diz Aster’.”

I immediately had a thought. “You ever hang out with ‘Dr. Heavy’, down in the basement?”

She nodded. “Yeah, but not a lot. I mean, it’s nice, not havin’ t’worry about tearin’ his stuff up, but he’s like 15, and he’s all into boy stuff.” She made a face. “And, his room is, like, a PIT! It’s disgusting!”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “Maybe now that he’s floating around in zero gravity, he’ll be a little better about putting his funky drawers in a hamper!”

She got very interested. “I heard about that! You know anything about how that happened?”

I gave a ‘sorry about that, Chief’ grin of my own and raised my hand.

“You?” Suddenly, she was all interested and came up close real fast. Not wanting to get plowed over by an eight ton St. Bernard, I jumped back. “How?” I gave her the ‘Qi Gung for Beginners’ version. She was all amped, but she got mega-bummed when I told her that Fubar had nixed any more off-the-cuff Qi Gung.

“So, what do you need to have done?”

It turned out that all she really needed was a Scrabble© pigeon. I spent the next hour at the mercy of a Scrabble© shark. And what the hell is a Kolhozy, anyway?

While I was furiously looking up ‘Muzhik’ (which turns out to be a kind of Russian peasant, same as Kolhozy- apparently they got lots of different kinds of peasants in Russia), Diz took one of those ‘hair styling’ heads and started brushing that looked sort of like vermicelli. “Couldn’t they find something that looks better’n that?” I asked.

“Eight tons of force, remember? That new girl, Babs, made this for me. It’s some sort of ultra-strong nano-thingie. Babs-”

“Not to worry, I’ve already met Babs, and got the down-low. Okay, here it is- Muzhik.”

“Seventy-seven points!” Diz squealed, “On a Double Score!”

“Shark!” I shot back. “Hey,” I said, looking at what she was trying on the dummy head, “not bad. Let’s see how it looks on you!”

I picked up a comb, but I couldn’t get it anywhere near the back of Diz’s head. “What’s with the force field?”

Diz looked up at me. “I can’t turn that off, either.”

“How do you EAT?”

“Through a straw. Another nano-construct. I haven’t eaten anything solid in almost a year.” She paused, and a look of real hunger crept over her face. “Y’know, I’d KILL for a Big Mac?”

“What’s the matter, Toni-hon?” Rip asked as we mass-migrated to dinner, “You still brooding over the one that got away?” She’d been teasing me about Sahar ever since Sara spilled the beans. She’s more or less gotten used to the fact that I’m also dating T-Bird, but that doesn’t mean that she’s happy about it, so she gets in her digs when she can.

“Nah, I’m just a little bummed out.” As we ate, I described Diz’s lousy situation. “I mean, GAWD, she hasn’t even been able to TOUCH anyone in, like, a YEAR!”

“Toni, NONE of the kids in there are exactly sitting pretty.” Ayla pointed out, “That’s why they’re in Hawthorne.”

“You don’t get it, Ayles! She’s only Eleven!”

Jade shrugged, “Well, I did hear that the earlier a mutant trait manifests itself, the more powerful and more uncontrollable it is.”

“Yeah, I know. But, God, she can’t even eat solid food! She had to force a straw through her force field and drink through that!”

“The straw is probably attuned to her force field.” Hank said with the calm certainty of a professional.

“And what’s THAT supposed to mean?” I shot back

“Well, it would take too much energy to create a solid PK field that would be on all the time;” he explained. “Besides, if it were a solid field, it would repel the air we breathe as well, and we PK supermen would suffocate."

“So, it has, like, air holes?”

“No, Chaka-sempai,” Jade told me, “It’s more like a really complex lace pattern that shifts when something touches it. Only, instead of the force moving away from what’s touching it, it moves toward it, increasing the power of the field.”

“Oh- kaaayyy … That makes sense … I guess.” I gave her a look. “But howcum you know all about it?” 

“Hank let me charge Jann into his field.” Jade paused, “Had a real hard time getting’ free of it, tho. Don’t really wanna try that one again.”

I tried to wrap my head around what they were trying to say. “Sooo … it’s like the force field learns what it should and shouldn’t push away? Do push away Zergatronic Death Rays, don’t push away oxygen and chocolate fudge? Only in Poor Diz’s case, it even pushes away the fudge, unless she can get it through the magic straw Babs made for her.”

Hank nodded. “Somethin’ like that. Takes a bit to get used to new clothes, and like that.”

An idea was forming somewhere in the back of my brain, but it was derailed when a pair of long muscular black arms, overloaded with bling-bling, draped themselves over my shoulder. “Hey, Sunshine! Why don’t you brighten up these li’l sparklers fo’ me, hunh?”

“Hello, Dredz.” I said in as deadpan a way as I could. ‘Dredz’ was part of Lily’s team, ‘STAR League Jr’. STAR League Jr. Oooggg. … It must suck, being thought of as a kiddie knock-off of somebody else.

“Sooo … Baaayyy-bay ... when are you an’ me gonna get together for a little you an’ me?” Don’t ask me where he got the idea, but Dredz seems to think that we’re an item or something. I keep telling him that I’m already connected up, but he seems to think that I’m playing hard to get or something. It wouldn’t be half so bad, but Dredz is on the whole suburban gangsta trip. Getting hit on by him is like being drooled over by my brother Vince.

I was searching for a nice way of prying him off of me, when suddenly Dredz slipped with a thud, and a slick patch on the floor carried him out of the dinner hall. I patted Rip on the hand. “Thanks. I needed that.” Hey, having a jealous girlfriend can come in handy some times! Rip’s managed to accept that I’m dating Scott. At least, I think she has- it’s hard to tell with that girl. … Anyway, she puts up with me seeing Scott, but there’s no way that she’s gonna put up with anyone else come nosing around me.

Y’know, it’s kinda frightening, when you see it in print, like that.

During study time, I was looking for something to think about besides diagramming sentences. I kept coming back to Diz and that stupid force field. Okay, having super-strength that you can’t control has got to suck big time, all by itself. But not being able to touch anyone … Suckimus Maximus! It all came down to that stupid force field. Okay, maybe they can’t find a way to bring it down … but maybe there’s a way to, like, get through it somehow?

I looked over at Hank, who was sitting there, grinding through his homework. Lucky dork, he didn’t seem to have any problems turning his force field off and on. Come to think of it, how often did he have the fool thing on? I reached over and gave him a poke. “Hunh? What is it, Toni?”

“Do you have that force field of yours up and running?”

“Uhm, sort of. Why do you want to know?”

“Just curious.” I gave him another poke. “Crank it up, will you?” A slick feeling came between his skin and me. It wasn’t like there was this hard wall between us, more like I was trying to pin down a bead of mercury with my fingers, only instead of the mercury slipping out from under my finger, my finger kept slipping off the mercury. The harder I poked, the more my finger went scooting off in the wrong direction.

Okay, this is a lot more interesting than tenses, any day! I felt around with my Ki, and I got a sense of what Jade was talking about; It’s like there are these tiny whirls of energy twisting around just over Hank’s skin, laying in wait for something to disrupt the pattern. As soon as something pushes in, like my finger, or a bullet, or packet of photons or something, it overloads a sort of ‘surface tension’, and all the PK energy sort of swarms into that spot instantly, forming a bigger and better barrier.

Okay, so the problem isn’t really so much getting past the PK field, it’s a matter of not triggering the swarming reaction. All right, let’s assume that Diz’s force field works like Hanks, only 24-7 at full blast. Still, she can eat- if it passes through that stupid straw- and she can take showers. No, more likely she has to take baths, and she sits there, dry as a bone, until her force field gets used to the water, and lets it past. Come to think of it, how does she wipe, after she takes a dump? Does she just do it before she takes a bath? Jeez, just when you think that somebody’s life can’t suck any more than it already does … !

Okay, Diz doesn’t stink, so that means that she can stay clean. So, she does wash somehow, probably like I just figured. That means that once the force field gets used to something, like that straw, or her clothes, it lets them past. Diz just doesn’t know how to tell her force field to shut down.

Maybe I can use my Ki to ‘slip past’ the PK. If I can feel the PK, maybe I can match it somehow, and make it think that my Ki is just more PK. Let the PK balance itself out a little, and sneak past that way. I laid my the tips of my fingers on Hank’s cheek, closed my eyes, and focused on feeling his Ki. It took a bit, and I could tell that people were saying things, but I wasn’t hearing them. I could feel his PK whirling around, and I finally got a sense of the ‘tone’ that it was operating on. I tried to match the tone, and I could feel Hank jerk.

“What did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You did something… to my skin… it felt… weird…”

“Don’t worry, Studmuffin,” I grinned at him. “I think that I just got your number. Turn your force field up, full blast.”

Hank shrugged and focused for a second. I reached out and touched the very tip of his nose. The ‘tone’ was a little different and I couldn’t actually touch his nose, but I easily matched it, and slipped past his PK.

Hank looked cross-eyed at my finger. “Hey--- I can feel that…”

I pulled my finger away, and on a sudden impulse, poked him again. “Hey!” Hank said, “Why’d... hey, how’d you do that?”

I grinned at him, and said, “Like I said, Studmuffin- I got your number.” Then I ruthlessly tickled him into a giggle fit, while other Poe kids walked by with that ‘Team Kimba, go figure’ look that I know all too well.

Once the homework was wrapped up, I dropped by Rip and Bunny’s room. All things being equal, Rip’s being more than a good sport about Scott and all, and I wanted to let her know that I do appreciate her. Take a good fully clothed massage, amplify with a liberal application of Ki, and I left Rip a gently cooing puddle of flesh, and Bunny, round eyed.

You’re supposed to dread going to do Detention, but I could barely wait for it. Fubar had a big heaping mess of goo waiting for me. “Hey! Squiddly Diddly!”

Suddenly, ‘he’ was right beside me. “What is it, Toni?”

“Am I scheduled to be with Diz again today?”

He flickered out and back in again. “Nope, but I can put in a good word, if you really want to. Did you learn some new words that you wanna spring on Diz?”

I shook my head. “No, I had an idea, and there’s something that I wanna try out on her.”

Foob shook his head, “Toni, I know that you mean well, but Diz’s condition is very …”

“I’m not gonna mess with her powers! I just had an idea that might make her life a little more livable.”

He looked at me funny. I briefly had one of those ‘is he messing around in my head, and what do I do about it if he is?’ moments. “Okay, but Cantrel wants to have someone there, in case something goes wrong.”

I shrugged. “Okay.” I briefly thought about asking him if he’d been messing around inside my head, but what would I do if he said ‘Yes’?

“Oh, and would you get that lump there? It’s starting to get crusty. I hate it when they get crusty.”

Some people are so picky about their mucus!

My ‘chaperone’ was Slab. I guess they figured that if anything went wrong, they wanted someone who could soak up a lot of damage there to get things back under control. “So, what’s this big idea you got planned?” He didn’t add ‘you stupid little twink’, but it was there, you could just tell.

“Nothing major, Dude. Just a little something to make Diz’ life a little brighter.”

Slab started to say something, when a stream of loud cussing came down the corridor. Following the sound of the swearing, we looked down the hall, and Nikki ducked around the corner, buck-nekkid and giggling. I quickly covered over Slab’s eyes and started to say something as Nikki flounced toward us. Then Nikki came around the corner- again- this time fully clothed, waving a broom and cussing up a storm. “Come %*&^ing BACK here, you ^&##!*$ &>~#!”

Oh. Hobgoblin time again, only full-sized this time.

As the hobgoblin-Nikki scampered past me, I poked it and ‘popped’ it. But instead of dissolving into ethereal vapors, like hobgoblins usually do, it sort of ‘shattered’ into a few dozen buck-nekkid Nikki- pixies. The Nikki-pixies (Nixies? Nik-sies?) giggled and flew off in a swarm. The real Nikki paused, scowled at me and said, “Oh, thank you ever-so $#@&- ing MUCH!” Then she chased after them, swatting at them with all her might.

Slab scowled at me. “If that’s the sort of help you are, I’m not letting you anywhere NEAR Diz.”

I pointed at Nikki as she rounded a corner, swearing like a sailor who just missed the last boat for shore leave. “That shouldn’t have happened. Normally, Nikki’s hobgoblins just go *pop!* and turn into vapors when I pop them.”

“It’s probably because she’s not the one creating them.”

I looked aside at him. “You got a guy who creates hobgoblins here?”

“What makes you think that it’s a guy?”

“A girl wouldn’t think up Nikki running around naked.” Or, if she did, she’d be in Poe.

Slab shrugged. “Okay, you got me there. I think that Spoof has a crush on her.”

“I take it that ‘Spoof’ is the kid responsible for this?”

“Yeah, t’be honest, it’s nice to have a change from Autobots and Pokemon and Ninja Turtles.”

“Sounds to me like this kid watches too much TV.”

“Yeah, but what he dreams up on his own can be worse. At least the TV stuff acts like he thinks they’d act.”

“So, in other words, it could be worse.”

Slab nodded. “Believe me, you do NOT want to be here when he’s having nightmares.”

I shuddered, and knocked on Diz’s door. Diz looked up from the book that she was reading. “What? You back for more punishment?” She hit some controls, and a waldo setup started fishing around her shelf.

“Don’t bother with the board. Just sit down and stick out one of your feet.”

Diz shrugged, sat down and stuck out one of her shod feet. Well, I was thinking of doing this with a bare foot, but if I’m right it shouldn’t make any difference.

I knelt down by her and ran a finger over the slick surface of her shoe. Come to think of it, how did she stand up, if her force field was repulsing everything, including the floor? “Let me know when you feel anything.”

She gave me an ‘man, you are SO dense’ look. “I can’t feel anything, remember?”

“Shush.” It took a while longer- her vibes were a lot different from Hanks- but I finally got the ‘tone’.

Diz jerked. “Hey. I felt that!”

“Good. Then I think it’s working.”

“Exactly what are you up to?” Slab asked from behind me.

“Watch and learn, pipsqueak!” I ran a finger down the length of Diz’s shoe, and felt leather. Okay, so far, so good. I untied her laces and pulled the shoe off.

“How’d you do that?” Diz asked, flabbergasted.

“Why *I* am the Wise and Powerful CHAKA!” I intoned in my most over-awesome voice, “Mistress of Ki and all it’s myriad applications! There is NOTHING that I cannot do, when I put my mind to it!”

“Or, in other words,” Slab said in a flat, unimpressed voice, “she got lucky on a wild-ass guess.”

“HUMPH!” I said loudly. “Pay no attention to the little man in the big skin, Diz! Just lean back, and enjoy.” I proceeded to give her the most luxuriantly relaxing ki-powered massage that she’d ever had. Like she has a lot for comparison. She lay there, digging on being able to feel someone touching her. She turned around to give me a hug but I stopped her. “Ah-ah! I’m not immune to your PK, I just managed to slip past it. If you hugged me, they’d have their hands full squeezing me back into the tube of toothpaste.” Diz wilted a little. “BUT, there’s nothing that says I can’t give YOU a big hug.” Getting the rest of me past her PK shield was… interesting, but I managed.

We sat there, just listening to the beating of each other’s heart for a while. Then, I remembered Slab. “Well! Enough of that. Don’t want you getting jaded or anything. Up for a game of Scrabble?”

As Diz smiled and punched the buttons to retrieve the set from her shelf,. I looked at Slab. “Well? How about you? Maybe Diz could spot you a few points?”

Slab shook his head. “Naw. I’ve already been taken through the wringer.” He turned to leave, but we cackled him out the door with ‘chicken-clucks’.

Even Traherne had a hard time finding fault with what I’d done, when he heard about it. Not that that stopped him from bitching about not being able figure out HOW I’d done it. I think that he just doesn’t get the whole concept of Ki. But Cantrel had a very different take on it. “Y’did good, Kid.”

Okay, it wasn’t a rousing tribute with a medal or anything, but Cantrel looked at me differently now. She didn’t look at me as if I was tracking mud on her clean floors anymore. She looked at me with warmth, and like she knew that I could be counted on to do the right thing. From someone like Cantrel, that means a lot.

But the kicker was at the very end of the shift. Diz looked at me with that tragic ‘you’re going away?’ look. “Will I see you again?”

I shrugged. “I think that it’s a good bet that they’ll arrange for me to be assigned to you, when I get detention.”

Big Puppy-dog Eyes. “And what if you don’t GET detention?”

I gave Diz my best reassuring smile. “Oh, if I understand Karma correctly, I can almost promise you that I’m gonna get detention. More often than is really good for me, I’ll bet.”

“Why?” Diz suddenly seemed to be worried about what sort of person she was counting on for her hugs.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m no troublemaker. But I just don’t sit still and take it when people try to push me around.” Though, come to think of it, that pretty much IS what most people call a ‘troublemaker’. “Still, not just laying there and letting people wipe their feet on you is usually enough to get you in trouble, one way or another. I wouldn’t worry, Hon. I’ll drop in every so often, even when I don’t have detention.” I turned and glared at Slab. “You got a problem with that?”

He looked back at me innocently. “Why would I have a problem with it?”

“I dunno. You just seem to have a problem with the fact that I exist.” He just maintained a dignified silence.

Well, three days into my week of Detention, and I think that I can honestly say that I’ve done more good at Hawthorne cottage than most of the losers that they send there do in their entire time at Whateley. What? You were expecting modesty?

Well, if there was a downside to detention, it’s that it cut badly into the time that I could spend with Scott. I barely had enough time to change for dinner, yet when I got to the big fish bowl, Scotty was so busy with his buds that all I got was a wave. A Wave! *Humph!* No wonder, women are always bitching about men!

Still, it took more than that to harsh my good vibe. First Babs, then Dr. Heavy, and now Diz. Maybe I’m going at this ‘Ki Prodigy’ thing wrong, by focusing on the martial arts. After all, there’s all sorts of things that you can do with Ki! Maybe I was given this incredible gift, to be a great Ki healer.

I was riffing on the high of what Cantrel had said when I spotted Sahar, sitting all by herself again. No, wait a minute, that bitch Tansy was with her. Now, I’m not psychic, but even I could tell from several tables away that Tansy was working Sahar for something. Probably trying to get the girl to do something stupid, that’s Tansy’s bag. Maybe she’s trying to get her roommate to mess with Team Kimba, to get that DVD of her that Jade burned.

Okay, maybe I’m just tripping on the whole ‘do-good’ thing, but it really struck me that Sahar needed a friend. And Tansy Walcutt ain’t nobody’s friend. And, whathehell, I sorta owe Sahar for keeping Blitz at arms’ length.

I picked up my tray and said, “Cover me, guys- I’m goin’ in.”

Before the gang could talk me out of it, I was over at Sahar’s table. “Why, TANSY! I didn’t recognize you-” I dropped to sotto voce, “-fully dressed.”

Tansy went beet-red, and I could sense her gather and focus power. But there are rules against going around psychically bitch-slapping people. At least, in public. Or where there are several other psychics around. And given Tansy’s personality, I’ll lay odds that most of ‘em were already fishing around for dimes to drop on her. Tansy sniffed, made a nasty remark about the quality of the neighborhood, and left. She went over a few tables, and sat with two other blondes, who all started buzzing at each other.

Sahar looked at me with large confused (and red-ringed) eyes. “What is it?” she asked, with a note of fear.

“Well, you made me an offer, and you left before we finished talking it out.”

She made a surprised noise. “But … you said that your Ki gift wasn’t psychic …”

“So? That doesn’t mean that I can’t teach you.”

She blinked in confusion, “But I can’t learn psychokinetic gifts-”

“Honey, Ki isn’t psychokinetic. And Everyone’s got Ki, whether they know it or not. Now, if you can learn psychic ‘knacks’ from other Psis, then you should be able to learn how to use your Ki from me.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Can you use your psi to learn normal stuff, like Math or Gymnastics?”

“Well … yes …”

“Okay, the mistake that most people make, is that Qi Gung is some paranormal, kinda-magic thing. It’s not. Like I said, everyone’s got ki. Everyone uses ki. They just don’t use it very well. Everyone can learn to use their ki. It just … takes most people a while. Like, say, twenty or thirty years of dedicated effort. Now, as you’ve probably heard, I’m like the Mozart of Qi Gung; doing this stuff is like breathing to me. Okay, technically, it’s all breathing, but you know what I mean. So, I should be able to teach you a few things.”

Sahar’s red-ringed eyes narrowed in suspicion. “And what will you be getting out of this?”

I shrugged. “Okay. I’ve never actually trained anyone in Ki before. And, before you can really use ki, you’ve got to, well, sort of wake it up, wrap your head around the fact that it’s there, and get it to listen to you. Now, this is a lot harder than it sounds. Now, for me, it was easy as pie. But, by definition, I’m hardly what you’d call normal. Waking up your ki is major. But, I think that I can walk you through it. ‘Course, we’ll have to do this in the dojo, so Ito-sensei has the final say-so.”

“I still don’t see what you’re getting.” 

“Hey, messing around with Ki is dangerous. People have died, trying to get their Ki to do too much. If you agree, you’ll be my first student. Every mistake that I make, I’ll make with you.”

Sahar shook her head. “But you’ll be taking every risk that I will. There must be some form of payment.” 

Woof. Dunno why she’s so hot on the whole repayment gig, but if it’s so important to her. “Well … I guess that I could always stand to learn Arabic.” I looked at her. “You could use that psi of yours to teach me Arabic, right?”

She nodded. “I have to warn you- the link that we’ll have to form will be very … intimate. You should know that. Some might feel that … closeness … would be … uncomfortable. Or manipulative. Even invasive. If you let me in, there’s no way that you could know that what you’re thinking or feeling is you or what I want you to think or feel.”

I shrugged. “So, we’re both taking a risk.”

She looked at me strangely. “Why are you doing this?”

“Hey, teaching Qi Gung is part of learning Qi Gung. I gotta start with someone. I think that you’re tough enough to survive any screw-ups that I might make.”

Sahar took a deep breath, like she was gonna jump into cold water. “Okay. … I’m in.”

NEX

There are people who do push-ups as handstands. There are people who do push-ups and clap their hands at each crest. Cyril ‘Nex’ Huntley did both. He could have used PK to help him do it, but he didn’t. Nex was angry. He’d accepted a commission, and he’d failed. The elf-bitch and her iron-plated boyfriend had made a fool of him. But he wasn’t angry at them. No, you don’t blame a target for not rolling over and dying, or for someone for coming to the rescue. No, Nex was furious with himself.

“I don’t believe it!” *clap!* “I gloated!” *clap!* “Ninjas don’t gloat!” *clap!* “The Evil Emperor Zerg gloats!” *clap!* “Stupid-ass PUNKS gloat!” *clap!* “But Professionals don’t gloat!” *clap!* “They get in, do the job, get it over with, and get OUT!” *clap!*  “They don’t have bloody conversations with their targets!” *clap!*

But what really pissed Nex off, was that he’d made the mistake that he’d always told himself that he’d never make. He’d promised himself that, when he’d seen the old James Bond movie, From Russia, With Love. Grant, the SPECTRE assassin, had screwed up the entire plan.  Kronstien’s entire elaborate plot had been working like a Swiss watch, right up to the point where Grant should have simply pulled the trigger and sent 007 to Hell. Admittedly, Bond was suspicious, but, if he’d just kept to the plan, and acted like a professional, Grant still would have killed Bond. But NO, right at the last moment, when he SHOULD have just kept his mouth shut, and blown Bond’s brains out, Grant had to go and get chatty. He had to go and gloat, and shake Bond down for money, despite the fact that it would have completely destroyed the cover story that Kronstien had planned, and tell Bond to kiss his foot. Nex remembered being outraged when he saw that scene. Up to then, Grant had been a perfect assassin. But, no, just when it mattered the most, Grant had punked out. At that moment, Grant deserved to get shanked by a knife that came almost out of nowhere. And Cyril had promised himself that he’d never make that sort of stupid mistake.

Then, why had he made it?

Nex let himself down onto the floor. Yes, why HAD he done it? When a professional makes an inexcusable blunder like that, he doesn’t beat himself up over it. He figures out why it happened, so that it never happens again.

He’d had her, but when she fought, he more or less played with her. When she bit him, he decided to hurt her, rather than just mark her up. Yes, that was definitely where he went wrong. A quick sandbag along the back of her head, maybe a sedative soaked rag over the mouth, and it all would have been over before the git in the armor could have reacted. Indeed, his entire plan had been flawed. A quick splash of acid would have done the job, and the redhead never would have seen him. If anything, the King Arthur poser who had been stalking her would probably have been a prime suspect. So, why had he done it that way?

Because, he’d wanted to hurt the redhead.

Another classic blunder! Never let yourself get emotional on a job! But WHY had he wanted to hurt the redhead? She’d never done anything to him. Indeed, it was the first and last time they’d ever met. Not that he wouldn’t enjoy peeling her arrogant face like an apple. But why did he resent her so much?

He remembered feeling attracted to her when he first saw her. But his research suggested that every straight male who saw her got that reaction. Some sort of psychic projection, he’d heard. But why would he want to hurt a girl that he was attracted to?

A face came unbidden to his mind’s eye. Sahar. He still longed for Sahar; maybe he also wanted to hurt her? Maybe Reilly’s psychic projection had slipped past his mental defenses, and itched that anger at Semi, unconsciously making him want to take out his anger at Semi on Reilly?

This was even more annoying than the gloating. He still had it bad for Sahar. God, how cliché! He was still infatuated with the girl that had played him for a sucker.

But then, he’d known that she was playing him, even as she was doing it. Indeed, it was part of what made her so irresistible to him. They were two of a kind, both of them dedicated to the careers that they were training for. She, a ‘talented’ operative for the American CIA, and he, a killer for hire. He’d never seen anyone with an instinct for the jugular that Sahar had. She was perfect in her ruthlessness and cold-blooded cunning. She enflamed him just by his thinking about her.

He was blessed- he was only 17 years old, and he’d already found his woman. He was accursed- she’d left him. No matter what it took, Cyril Huntely knew that he had to get Sahar back.

CHAKA

Call me crazy- God knows, you won’t be the first- but there is just something essentially wrong with doing Detention on Saturday.  I mean, Detention is being kept after School, right? And there’s no school on weekends, right? Sometimes boarding school can be such a drag. They made me miss my ‘toons!

Well, at least we got our hours over in the morning, so we had the afternoons to look forward to.

Cantrel had me clean up a hall in a section where a boy called Phlegm roomed. Phlegm was the kid who secreted a thick, slimy mucus all over his body. Constantly. Well, it was a formidable foe, but none can stand before the awesome mopping technique of CHAKA!

I’d rinsed out the mop and was emptying the bucket into the special ‘Biohazard’ chute- Hawthorne has special ‘Biohazard’ chutes on every floor (and people say that POE is weird!)- when Ayla walked up to me. “Hey, Tone, I need a hand.”  Never one to miss a cue, I started clapping my hands.  “Very funny. I need help with the room.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s frozen.”

“Then get Cantrel to unlock it for you.”

“No, I mean FROZEN. As in sealed shut with ice.”

I paused for a moment. “Oh, right. Whateley.” I followed her to a room on the third floor, where a girl bundled up in a snowsuit and a guy dressed in what I took for a technicians uniform were standing beside a door.

“Hey, Frostbite, this is Chaka. Chaka, this is Frostbite.”

“Lemme take a wild guess- Ice powers?”

Frostbite gave a ‘oh, this again’ grimace. “Well, to be accurate, I have a psychokinetic talent that’s attuned to water molecules.”

“Oh! Do you know Riptide?” She nodded.

“Rip? Oh, right, she’s in Poe, isn’t she? Yeah, but part of my talent is that I use the heat energy in water to propel it. When I move the water, I translate the heat energy into movement, and the water loses heat. Problem is, once the ice sets, I can’t move the water anymore. I can shape the water into a form, but once it freezes, that’s it.”

I gave a half-smile. “AND, you can’t turn off your ‘freeze’, right?”

She nodded. “Yep. And I’m not immune to the cold that I create, either. It’s not as bad as it was last year, but every so often, it still goes out of control, especially when I’m dreaming. Then, I wake up in a Winter Wonderland.”

“Yeah. The snow on the floor was sort of a giveaway. So, what do you need me for?”

Frostbite glowered, “I’m frozen out! That idiot Olympia came into my room and started dricking out over something. Not only did she short-circuit the heaters and the dehumidifiers in my room, but she set off the freaking sprinklers! Everything in my room is covered in ice a foot thick! I barely got out with my snowsuit!” She clutched together and shivered. “Gawd! I’m freezing!”

I looked at Ayla. “Okay, and why do you need me? Can’t you phase through it, or get heavy and just force the door open?” The door had one of those latches, like a large kitchen freezer.

Ayla shook her head. “What? And pass through freezing cold ice? Not hardly. Besides, what would I do, once I was inside? I can’t get Ernie there inside to fix the heater, and I don’t know how to do it myself! And the latch is filled with ice; if I tried to force it open, I’d probably break the mechanism. We were thinking that you could do your kung fu mojo on the ice, like breaking a board or something, but not break the metal.”

I leaned over and tapped the ice. “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, Ayles, but I think that I can help you.” I got a sense of the resonance of the ice as opposed to the metal, and focused my Ki. “”Hi-YAH!” I gave the door a palm strike in the center of its main panel, and the ice around the edge shattered. Ayla checked the latch; it worked, and the door swung open.

The room was designed like a freezer- for obvious reasons- and it was as cold as one. Yes indeedy, there was a thick coating of ice over everything. Frostbite hurried in, and gave out a loud scream of anguish. “My Bed! My electric blanket! It’s ruined! Omigawd, my homework! My books! Oh, no… MISTER MEW-MEW!” She clutched an ice-encrusted furry cat plushy to her chest. “Dammit, WHY did they put a sprinkler system in a freezer in the first place?”

“Safety regs.” Ernie the tech said evenly as he was looking at one of the very large heater panels that was positioned over Frostbite’s bed. “We wanted CO2 sprayers instead, but those are more expensive, and the budget’s always tight.” He tsked and shook his head. “Sorry, Frosty, but this thing burned itself out when the condensation hit the heating element. I’m gonna havta replace it.”

“Ahhh, NUTS!” Frosty snapped. “Well, what about the dehumidifier? It won’t be that bad, if there’s