Morning class on day two was… unusual. Because of the number of alphas and their training, the school had adopted an almost Maxwell Smart approach to keeping their ‘uniformed selves’ separated from their student identities. It was security theater, but I had to admit, it was charmingly elaborate theater.

  First, you were expected to go in uniform. I didn’t have a ‘uniform’ for Blueprint, so I simply wore a light blue World Gym tank top and gi pants I used to train in, with my lifting trainers. A black domino with a holographic feature alteration to make me look like I had lower cheekbones was more than enough of a disguise. It screamed ‘low-rent vigilante’ or ‘eccentric support Alpha,’ which was exactly the brand I was going for.

  Second, apparently, the rooms had a secondary transit elevator in each closet, which would deposit us into a subsurface assembly room with a private code to return us to our room. It wasn’t great identity protection—anyone with a decent olfactory power or pattern recognition could probably figure it out—but most alpha students were expected to change their super-handle when they joined a team to protect either their identity or to suit a theme. I mean, come on, can you imagine Mindy calling herself ‘Glacier Girl’ into her forties? I certainly couldn’t. It had a certain expiration date, like milk or my optimism.

  I would probably hang onto Blueprint for as long as possible, simply because ‘Paradox’ was taken. Trademarks were very real, which was why I was actually glad I was able to grab ‘Blueprint’ as a legal ID. My supervillain personas, though, were not registered because, you know, supervillains. They were not often sticklers for trademark law. I’m pretty sure ‘Diabolus Firetrap’ would have been contested by several pyromaniacs and at least one heavy metal band.

  And teams like the Olympians, of course, wanted their teammates to use a handle based on Greco/Roman mythology. THOSE trademarks were often registered property of the team itself, sort of like in professional wrestling. As I recall, there’s been at least three Vulcans, and only one of them was a widgeteer. The other two were just guys who really liked anvils and hammers.

  Once the small, well-lit transport cab brought me to the underground hub, Glacier Girl was already waiting for me, only instead of the revealing outfit she’d fought me in, she was dressed in a well-supporting sports leotard and tee combination in blue, surprisingly close to the color of my gi. It was practical, professional, and did absolutely nothing to hide the fact that her awakening had sculpted her into a vision of perfection. Great.

  She had a mask similar to mine, but only idiots wouldn’t recognize each other. I just hope she didn’t recognize Diabolus, except he’d been wearing a full helmet with voice modification and much heavier military-surplus armor. Same height, but that was about it. I made a mental note to add a slight hunch to Diabolus’s posture if I used him again.

  “Nice look, GG,” I said.

  She shook her head, “I am burying that until I graduate. Right now, I am registered as Frostweaver instead, to get a little distance. It’s funny that we match, though.”

  I smiled, “Not a bad handle at all. I am just Blueprint, but I don’t have a real uniform, so I just dug this out of my gear for right now. Once I graduate, I figured my uniform would be whatever the team chooses, or nothing at all.” I meant tactical gear or a company polo shirt. I realized my mistake a second too late.

  She giggled, giving me the up-and-down. “Can I vote for nothing at all? You look amazing.”

  I gulped, my brain short-circuiting between flattered and horrified. “Uhh… you look good too, but I meant just civvies or whatever I need to wear to support a team.” Smooth, Jake. Real smooth.

  She laughed, “I know what you meant, I was just… I mean, I knew you were well-built, but damn.” She held out her hand towards my shoulder, “Can I touch?”

  I growled a little internally. This was exactly the kind of attention I’d spent years avoiding. I was a project, a utility, a means to an end. Not a piece of meat to be appraised. But then I looked at her face. It wasn’t leering; it was curious, almost academically interested. And if we were going to train together, physical contact was absolutely going to be necessary, so she might as well get it out of her system now. Maybe I should have picked a sweatshirt, but have you ever tried lifting in a sweatshirt? It’s like doing cardio in a sauna suit designed by a masochist. I had no idea what this ‘Eastern Studies’ was supposed to be, but since it was in uniform, it was a good assumption that it wasn’t just Chinese history.

  “Fine,” I said, tilting my head a little as she ran her fingers down the muscles of my arm. Her touch was cool, which was… interesting.

  “Your muscles are incredibly hard,” she said curiously, “I thought you were a widgeteer or something. Physical strengthening?”

  I nodded, falling back on the cover story. “Materials specialist. But apparently enhanced physique comes with the package, because materials include my own body. Most people with any kind of healing gifts have pretty good bodies, because they can just think themselves improved, just like kinetics. It’s not like a mass manipulator or internal elemental, I mean, I am not bulletproof, but I do intend to be the best I can be.” The best liar, the best faker, the best at pretending I wasn’t one wrong word away from financial and metabolic collapse.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “So you just… thought yourself into looking like that?” she asked skeptically, brushing my bicep again.

  I shook my head, a bitter laugh escaping. “No, I broke my ass on the weights for years, and trained in Sambo, boxing, Lethwei, and wrestling. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being a superhero, and then my dad died, my lucky superpower turned out to be a dud, and I went broke.” The abridged, cynical version of my tragedy. Now available in paperback.

  She sighed, “I am sorry about your father. My father was… He disappeared when my sister and I were babies, so I don’t know much about him. But uh… I got a pretty good Alpha gift, so I have been focusing on training that. Still, they graded you as a class six, I doubt very much your power is a dud, even if it’s support.”

  I chuckled, the sound hollow. “I still don’t understand why. I mean, yeah, it has a lot of potential, and I have been trying to train and expand it for two years. Mostly, I think it’s because it has a healing component that is…” I tried to think of a good term to explain it.

  “Weak but Consistent?”

  I nodded, “Right. Utterly consistent in its applicability. If the injury is small enough, I can heal it no matter what it is. Poison, radiation, burns, severed, whatever. That’s why my body is enhanced, because I can fix any workout damage instantly, including temporary improvements, and I keep the strength and durability without having to deal with the scarring or loss of flexibility.” I left out the part where that process felt like a cellular-level train wreck every single time.

  “That, and I can make widgets work.”

  “What?”

  I smiled a little and decided to offer a hint of trust, a tiny piece of the truth to sell the bigger lie. “If a widget is small enough, within my field, I can power it even if the widgeteer has disconnected it. Not for very long, I have massive energy problems, but a few seconds is usually long enough to at least figure out what it does, or to trick it into doing what I need it to do. That’s one of the reasons I like the name Blueprint. I am not a widgeteer, but I can play one on TV.” For a pricey hourly rate, of course.

  She laughed, “Now I know why he registered you as a tier six. That’s sick. I mean, you could use ANYTHING, even the most powerful widgeteer gear.”

  I laughed, “Sure, like I said, for a few seconds.” Followed by a week-long coma of metabolic despair.

  “Can you heal yourself?”

  “Well, yeah. That’s how I learned.”

  “How much? I mean, you said you can heal anything that’s small enough to fit inside your field, or whatever. But your whole body is part of you. Can you heal yourself?”

  I nodded slowly, “Yeah, but again, energy problems. Not to mention, if it's enough damage quickly enough, I am just dead like anyone else. Do you know what burnout is?” My statement wasn't exactly false or true... if my brain was gone, I was too, but short of that, if I didn't mind horrifying energy debt, I could recover from just about anything. That's why my helmet had serious armoring.

  She nodded as we started walking towards the G wing. “That’s when you run so far out of energy that you pass out, and if you overdo it, you can kill yourself.”

  I nodded, “Well, I have a very small energy pool. I won’t kill myself, but if I try something that’s too big for me, I can run into something I call energy debt.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I go into the negative. I can actually run into the negative as deeply as my maximum energy, but when I run into the negative, I feel like complete crap, all of my food and rest are just spent trying to recover, and I walk around like a zombie for days or weeks until I can get a positive balance again. It’s like a really nasty Flu, and I can even get sick because it depresses everything, including my immune system.” I described it clinically, omitting the soul-crushing fatigue, the headaches that felt like my brain was trying to escape my skull, and the deep, existential hunger that no amount of food could ever truly satisfy.

  She looked at me shyly, “Can you tell me how you awakened? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  I ignored the innuendo, which was probably accidental. “It was stupid. I was trying to build real claws like Wolfling when I was seventeen, out of some beat-up steel knives and some of those chain-mail gloves that you use to keep from lopping off a thumb when you are cutting meat. I didn’t secure the vice well enough, and the grinder slipped, and a piece of the knife went flying at my face. Of course, as a seventeen-year-old old I never even considered something like safety goggles. Because why would I? Invulnerability was just around the corner.”

  “I tried to dodge out of the way, and apparently, my ability turned its path just enough so that it hit me in the ear instead of the eye. And then I managed to heal the ear while my dad called the ambulance, and went into massive energy debt. They kept me in the hospital for a week, not because of the ear, but because my entire system was acting like it was trying to shut itself down. After I recovered, the doctor submitted a report to the assessment center about a boy who was covered in blood with no apparent injuries, and two weeks later, I was a class 2 microkinetic that could barely influence a coin flip.” My origin story: a cautionary tale about poor workshop safety.

  She smiled a little, “That was more exciting than mine. A boy at the resort where I was working thought it would be funny to jam up a ski-lift while I was in the maintenance bay. I almost froze to death when he took off for the night without telling anyone, because he forgot I was closing. After a while, I got comfortable again, and then I froze and broke the lock. Boom, superpowers.”

  I nodded, “Boom. Still, cryokinesis is an incredibly useful power. Control, attack, defense, it’s super popular with teams.”

  She nodded, “Yeah, exactly. It’s both the most common elemental and the most popular. Most teams have at least one already, which is why I felt like I had to do what I did. Although technically, it’s a bit different from normal cryokinesis.”

  I nodded slowly, “Hire a PR team.” My one piece of genuine, free advice.

  She nodded and looked at the G annex. “Well, I thought we had the same class, but it looks like I am in room G305 and you are in G306. Catch you at lunch?”

  I nodded, smiling in what I hoped was a friendly way instead of a rictus grin. “Sure thing,” I said, before turning to face my fate. Whatever fresh hell ‘Eastern Studies’ was, it probably involved getting hit. A lot. Just another day in paradise.