Chapter 36 Why We Go to School

“Ok, I know I stabbed the last guy to death but let’s be honest we all wanted to do that. So now that I’ve done that shouldn’t we be better friends now? Our team name even alliterates now!” - Reginald Cressler, leader of the Slaughterhouse Seven, wondering why literally backstabbing other members of the SS would lead to them betraying him.

Jun waved down Aiden, hands blurring to gesture at the table they were all sitting around, “What took you so long?”

“I stayed back to ask some questions,” Aiden answered.

“Oooh,” Jun said with a sly look, “are these special one on one lessons?”

Aiden rolled his eyes, “Take your mind out of the gutter Jun.”

“She caught a look under her shirt,” Darius explained, “and she’s been talking about it ever since.”

“She is hard down there,” Jun nodded. “Like I can grate cheese on that.”

“Really?” Wren asked, more out of strange curiosity than anything else.

“Really!” Jun exclaimed, swiping her face to quickly put on his Daycore mask, forcing both Wren and Josh to shuffle to the side as Jun suddenly grew in size.

“Like they’re way better than mine,” he said as he lifted his shirt, revealing his own abs.

“Eeee!” Wren hurriedly covered her eyes, though she furtively peeked through her fingers.

‘Was I this thirsty when I was teen?’ Aiden pondered as he sat down, Jun laughing with his deep baritone voice as both Luther and Darius lifted their own shirts to compare abs, showing they were not as impressive as Jun’s.

“Goddamn Physique cheats,” Luther muttered as he pulled down his own shirt.

After a bit of peer pressure, Aiden too gave in and lifted his own shirt, revealing abs that existed only because there was no fat on his slender frame. Incidentally, also revealing several animal tattoos on his skin.

“You have tattoos?” Wren asked.

“Yeah?”

“Didn’t peg you as the type,” Darius said.

“Too quiet and stiff,” Josh continued, “you feel too serious. The silent knight.”

“Can I touch them?” Wren asked, eyeing the still, almost lifelike ink.

His eyes flickered to Jun who was keeping silent.

Jun was letting him decide if he wanted to reveal his power.

Aiden quickly considered everyone around him. They were sitting at a relatively far off table, away from other prying ears.

He was semi aware of at least three of their abilities, Darius, Josh and Wren. Luther remained a mystery, so either he was trying to keep it a secret or it was something that didn’t have an obvious appearance.

The fight they barely avoided with that Dale character, and Trist single handedly defeating the entire class reminded him that keeping the exact capabilities of your ability a secret was a useful tool. One that could only be used once.

“Wren,” Luther began. “You’re being rude, those tattoos might be his ability.”

Wren jumped back, “Oh… I’m sorry… I didn’t know, they just looked…”

“Pretty.”

Darius sighed, “Sorry, I was curious about them as well, I saw you climb a wall and use a crow- Ranpo was it? I’m sorry, since I was prying as well.”

Aiden paused.

He already knew three of their abilities, he knew it through a fight, but it was an inconsequential playground brawl, but all of them happily showed what they could do, losing a first strike advantage just to have some fun.

And now they extended a courtesy.

Aiden clicked his tongue, three times in quick succession, mapping the surrounding area amidst all the distant talking of other students.

There were no other students near them.

He let down his shirt, instead pulling up the sleeve of his one handed arm with his teeth. As he did so, cherry blossoms grew and bloomed across his skin.

“He’s right,” Aiden said, “it’s my power, I can create living tattoos.”

He extended the hand to Wren, glancing at her to touch it.

She carefully did, softly feeling the branches on his skin.

“Woah…” she murmured. “This feels like real bark.”

“But it’s smooth,” Josh observed, he raised a hand, “Can I?”

Aiden shrugged, and nodded at the other two boys as well.

“This is trippy,” Darius said. “Like, it feels like real bark, but the texture is the same as skin.”

“It is,” Aiden acknowledged, “I got used to it.”

He gently shook off the teens’ hands off his own, and reached into pocket to remove a folded rabbit he had spare.

A rabbit tattoo jumped across his skin, leaping from one cherry blossom branch to the other, as it soon reached his hand.

There was a gasp as it slid onto the origami rabbit, animating it.

“That’s the gist of my power,” Aiden said, lowering the rabbit onto the table, letting it jump around. “I can create tattoos of living things and have them animate bodies.”

Luther sucked in a breath, “That’s what the crow-”

“Ranpo,” Darius supplied.

“-Ranpo is, isn’t it?” Luther asked.

“Correct,” Aiden said.

“Where is he?” Wren asked, gently patting the head of the rabbit.

“Off somewhere, he’s rather independent of me.”

That caused Luther to suck in another breath. “Can they survive independently? Or even reproduce by themselves?”

Aiden shrugged, “Former seems to be very likely from my observations, but the latter has yet to be proven.”

Though he highly suspected it was true, since Ranpo now required normal meals, there was no telling what limit there was to his creations becoming more alive.

“Jesus Christ,” Darius muttered. “Even if they can’t, that would at least put you just a few levels beneath a Tiamat level Spawner.”

Trist raised a hand, stopping Aiden from pulling up the sleeve of his cast arm. “Don’t tell me what your power is if you don’t want to.”

She explained, “As a teacher of this school, I am required by Law to log and report every one of my students’ observed capabilities. If you don’t want to reveal it, don’t do it.”

“But I’ll have to get my abilities classified later this month anyways,” he said, remembering the government required declaration of his full capabilities.

“The MCS ratings you’ll have to do are generally pretty shit,” Trist explained. “I would classify as a Physique 1, Regen something and Striker 5, which doesn’t really explain my capabilities other than the fact I’m short range. Some idiots even once came after me thinking I was far weaker than I really am because the ratings mislead them. The ratings are a tool for the bureaucracy to easily classify your power, and only works on a massive scale. A lot of the nuance is lost, so you shouldn’t care much about what you tell them. Just don’t lie.”

“I see,” Aiden asked.

“Though, if you classify as a God Rating, it might be different,” she murmured. “You might have heard it on the news, though I think it's overrated. Like I said, pure power can be broken. And having a God Rating is like getting called a talented child. But some rich families would try to buy you into an arranged marriage.”

“When an ability at its basic form reaches a certain level, it is classified as a God ability. Mover’s get called Hermes, Tinkers get called Daedalus, after the first guy, Spawners get called Tiamat, etc, etc… Again, don’t put too much stock in this, since your power usage matters far more, and you get stronger as you grow older anyway.”

Tiamat, an upper classification of Spawner meta abilities that imply the user is capable of creating entirely self-sufficient, replicating and varied creatures. Less a summoner of minions, and more the genesis of entirely new species.

It sounded exciting, and Bu had previously wished he had one such God ability, and Lu might indeed have one of them.

But he also heard what Trist had said afterwards.

“Don’t rely on classifications, because the height of your first step doesn’t equal the height of your final one.”

For one, as Ranpo had proven, the creatures he spawned had the capability of becoming entirely independent of him. He had no direct control over anything he made, other than the programming he inserted through giving mental concepts.

And those could be overcome.

In the end, his own body was the most reliable tool he had, and it was still a fleshy meat bag with slightly tougher skin.

“Maybe,” he replied to Darius, “I don’t think I’m at that level, and again, I don’t think I want to be classified as a God Rating.”

Personally, he also thought it sounded pretentious as hell.

Darius nodded sympathetically, as did Wren, though for entirely different reasons.

“Yeah, I know my mum would probably try to buy you out for a marriage with my sister.”

Aiden shuddered, shaking his head, “That would be a nightmare.”

Wren sighed as she spoke, “And she’s not even the worst.”

Jun nodded, “Yeah, I think my great grand aunt was forced into a marriage after the Jito’s threatened her entire family.”

“That’s what happened to our grandad as well right?” Darius nudged Luther, “He banged our grandma for twenty K and dipped.”

“God you guys have horrible families,” Josh murmured.

All the other Geneline teens stared at him.

“Everyone in my family has married for love so far,” Josh said.

“Oh yeah,” Luther said, “...your family is kinda weird for that.”

“Is it weird to want A FAIRY TALE ENDING!?” Josh yelled, jumping up and swinging an imaginary sword.

“I mean… yeah, but…” Wren shook her head, hands tightening for a moment, “Even if I’m the third daughter, I would probably have to pop out a kid for my mum at some date. It’s a good thing all my other sisters were born with better abilities than I was.”

The fist slammed through the wooden table, scaring the origami rabbit, which jumped into Wren’s hands.

“I can beat up your mum,” Jun offered as he shook off the wooden splinters off his hand.

“Jun!” Wren exclaimed, slapping his shoulder.

“MY BLADE IS YOURS!” Josh yelled.

“I’ll help out if that’s not what you want,” Darius offered. “Though um… I don’t think I can hit your mother, she’s a nice woman.”

Wren shook her head, “Thank you all, but my mum is a good person. She did the same thing, that’s my second step sister, and I still love the both of them.”

“Yeah,” Aiden said, shying away from the hole Jun left in the table. “Violence shouldn’t be your first and every recourse.”

“You could just fall in love with someone with a good ability,” Luther added, playing devil’s advocate.

“Maybe,” she murmured, eyes briefly darting to Darius.

They fell into silence.

“THIS IS TOO DEPRESSING!” Josh declared, moving to slap the table, then pausing a few centimetres from contact, noticing the frightened rabbit.

Josh gently tapped the table, before yelling, “Battle brother Aiden!”

“I don’t remember becoming your brother-”

“My ability is just a basic Physique,” Josh continued. “Like most of my family, it is a simple increase to all my physical abilities, amplified even more when I wear a tuba.”

“I noticed,” Aiden said, remembering the… frankly extremely difficult to ignore members of the Tuba family.

“My goal is to one day inherit the Tuba Knight ability,” Josh said, extending his left hand. “To truly earn its Name and strength.”

“Most abilities deactivate or disappear on the user’s death,” Trist explained. “But there are cases where an ability might persist after death. This generally happens when the ability either has a significant number of rules and conditions, or the metahuman had a significant level of Hume in their body at the time of death. When that occurs, it remains, some are even intelligent to a degree, remaining in the corpse, or moving into an object with a strong connection to the person, frequently something they wielded in life. Some are even inherited by other people. They claim it from whatever vessel the ability inhabited, becoming the new user for the ability.”

“What’s stopping everyone from doing that then?”

She shrugged, “The ability gets… picky, after death. Named abilities like ours especially. I don’t think there’s a single person alive who could inherit Frame of Mind from my corpse, even if I wanted them to. Generally, only close family Genelines, who already inherit a portion of the ability through their blood, can do this. And even then, it’s rather rare. Only the Tuba family is able to get mass inheritance, likely through some sort of secret, but no one has managed to pry it out of them yet.”

“Other than family, your best hope is to ‘trick’ the ability into thinking you are the same person as their former wielder. Having a similar ability, personality, and history helps significantly. Some Geneline families try to mold their children into copies of past ancestors in order to do this. This still has a very low success rate, and the ability might even react violently to an attempt at trickery depending on who the former wielder was. There are abilities that can steal other abilities from people, but they come with a whole slew of their own conditions, and only apply to those with such abilities.”

Aiden gingerly raised his own remaining hand, clasping Josh’s extended hand.

He realised some part of Josh’s boisterous personality was just an act, maybe because he was trying to get the ‘Tuba Knight’ ability his ancestor had, or maybe he truly enjoyed being a more energetic person.

Whatever it was, Josh did it to divert them away from a depressing topic, he was a good person.

“You already know what I do,” Darius said, placing his duffle bag on the table. “I open a can and half-teleport a friend to me, when they drink the can they are fully teleported. It’s also a decent way to explain conditions.”

He took out a can, rolling it around on the table, “My power first fully formed when I was about eight, and all it did was let me teleport a hamster sized creature around a one metre radius around me.”

He passed the can to Aiden, who noted it was the coffee milkis brand he drank before.

“It was pretty shit to be honest,” Darius admitted. “It was fun teleporting Luther’s pet parrot for a while, but I could only do it in the metre around me. So I started adding conditions.”

A limitation in that he needed to previously mark a person, and that it required consent of the other to work.

A limitation and cost in the form of needing a can associated with the person to begin the teleportation, and requiring the teleported to completely finish the can for a full teleportation.

A limitation in that he could only teleport a person to him only once every day.

A limitation in that the teleportation was one way.

A weakness in that there was a brief window where the teleported could be sent back, so long as they didn’t finish the opened drink.

“Conditions and Costs act as multipliers,” Trist explained. “It’s erroneous to say that you are really ‘limiting’ yourself, when the truth is rather different. Tell me, what do you think Vince’s power is?”

“He gets six seconds where he can move perfectly and predict the future?”

“Astute,” the teacher commented. “That is more or less correct, there’s likely a cooldown for it, though I’ll let you figure that out on your own. Vince’s family, the Zenin’s, are mostly Thinker types, and usually aren’t limited to only six seconds of their ability. Which meant Vince limited himself to six seconds as a willing choice.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To make more of a single moment,” she answered. “If his cooldown is one day, then what is happening isn’t that he limited himself to six seconds of power every day, but that he compressed a usage spanning an entire day into a burst of six seconds, drastically multiplying his capabilities for those six seconds. Vince is essentially saving all his strength until he can spend it in a single moment.”

“Costs are another thing, technically a Condition, but some people say it's a thing entirely on its own. Adding Cost lowers the Hume cost of your ability. Most of the strongest Meta abilities already have innate Costs, a Tinker needing materials to work with, a Spawner that requires biomass to shape into new creatures. Some people add certain Costs to their ability in order to lower their Hume expenditure, and thus be able to battle for longer, or to have greater output with lower Hume.”

“If I had to simplify, normally, a person only grows in strength linearly, but a Condition allows you to output strength multiplicatively.”

“And how do you set these things?”

“Two ways,” she answered, raising two fingers. “First, it happens naturally as a result of habit or usage. This one begins with a vow. Say there’s a metahuman who vows to never take lives with their power, over the years as they enforce this vow, it slowly becomes a Condition, and they become unable to break it anymore…”

“I went for the second way,” Darius said, “since the first could take months or even years to take effect, I placed a punishment on myself, allowing the Conditions to take into effect immediately. If I ever used my power outside of those Conditions, I would lose it entirely.”

“Holy shit,” Jun muttered, “Going straight for the hardcore one.”

Darius shrugged, “I was like… twelve at the time, and didn’t think much of it.” He chuckled, “My rents got mad though, until they saw my new range.”

“Before I could only teleport things within a metre of myself at best. Now? I could call a cousin from the northern hemisphere.”

Darius’ teleportation range was multiplied and increased to an extreme due to the number of serious conditions he set on himself. Not to mention, the Hume cost for every activation of his ability was entirely negligible, unlike Aiden and Jun who had to watch their status closely for every usage.

Luther took out a coin and an opened bar of chocolate, “I’m a bit like this idiot as well, though my power was originally just bad luck.”

He took a bite out of the chocolate, then waved it at Aiden, “Want a bite?”

Aiden shook his head, “No thanks, what were you saying about bad luck?”

Luther rolled the coin in his fingers, letting the sun glint on it, “I’ll show you. Heads or tails, and I’ll rig this coin with my ability.”

“Sure,” Aiden said.

Luther extended his left hand, “Let’s shake on it.”

He furrowed his brow slightly, but took the hand and shook it.

Grinning, Luther set the coin on the table, “Heads or tails?”

“Heads,” Aiden said.

Luther flipped the coin, and it landed on tails.

Smiling, he passed the coin to Aiden, “Try it.”

Aiden flipped the coin, and it landed on tails.

“It will land on tails for the next eight flips,” Luther said smugly. “I just fulfilled all of my conditions to activate this ability.”

Aiden’s eyes curiously looked over the black teen as he explained.

Luther needed at least one other person to play a game of chance with him.

This game needed a physical medium, such as a pack of cards, a die, or a coin.

He needed to take a bite out of a chocolate bar, then offer some to his opponents.

He needed to declare he was going to rig the game with his power.

He also needed to know the other’s name or alias, and have touched the person.

Finally, all of that needed to occur within five minutes.

Then the game tools would show the worst possible outcome of what the opponent wanted for the next ten rounds.

“That sounds excessive,” Jun murmured.

“This is just a sub ability I’m experimenting with,” Luther said, “the real thing is what I can do with this coin.”

“You cannot make your ability do something that it could not do before through Conditions,” Trist explained, “A fire manipulator can’t say that if they drink five litres of water everyday, they can manipulate water. It doesn’t work like that, but, if you’ve heard of Priority, you know of another benefit of conditions.”

“You’ve heard it from your Geneline friends, how some of them had abilities that never manifested because their Priority was too low, not enough to even clear the Beatles’ Bar, but that isn’t the only use of Priority.”

She asked, “Tell me, what do you think happens when two metal manipulators try to manipulate the same piece of metal?”

“They fight over it?” Aiden guessed.

Trist shook her head. “The ability with the higher Priority will triumph,” she declared. “If the second metal manipulator can only manipulate iron, then they will always be able to completely wrest iron from the first metal manipulator.”

“When two abilities oppose each other on the same thing, the one with higher Priority will always win. This is why Conditions are so important, because the more you add, the higher your Priority is, and higher Priority abilities completely override lower Priority abilities. It doesn’t matter how strong each ability is, in cases where different abilities intersect, the one with higher Priority will always win.”

“They will only ‘fight’ over it if their Priorities are equal, but that almost never happens. Only occurring in the extremely rare cases when the abilities are somehow exactly the same.”

“There is not a single luck manipulator in this school who can unrig this coin,” Luther proudly declared.

In most cases, the more specialized ability would overcome the more general ability. Luther specialized his luck manipulation so much that even a more ‘powerful’ luck manipulator, one that might be able to affect the luck of entire cities, would not be able to move this coin.

“And I said this is a sub ability,” Luther continued, rolling the rigged coin in his hand, “it’s the prelude for the real thing.”

“This coin stored ten losing flips worth of bad luck from you,” he explained, “now, Aiden you have about ten winning flips worth of good luck inside you. After two flips, this coin now contains eight losing flips worth of bad luck.”

He let the coin catch the light of the sun again, “The rule with luck manipulators is that it's a zero sum game. By taking away bad luck, I leave you with the equivalent amount of good luck.”

“Thank you?”

“You’re welcome cuz,” he chuckled, “that’s what my power theme is. Redistribution of bad luck. I can’t control it outside of these very specific use cases, otherwise it’ll keep absorbing other peoples’ bad luck onto myself in completely random and unpredictable ways. By setting the bad luck onto specifically making you lose this coin game, I can change its course into controllable ways.”

He grinned evilly at Aiden, “but what do you think would happen if someone destroyed this coin before we finished all ten flips?”

“There’s a classification of metahuman, which theoretically anyone can be,” the teacher continued. “That is the Boogeyman.”

“Boogeymen are absolute freaks, who have raised their ability’s Priority to needlessly high levels. They have at least five or more very difficult Conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for their ability to even activate.”

“Then why do people do it?”

“Because it keeps raising their Priority,” Trist answered. “At a certain, massive Priority difference, even abilities that don’t directly oppose the higher Priority ability will start getting cancelled out and weakened. So some madmen raise their Priority so much that when it actually activates, it is impossible to defend against, usually, resulting in the instant death of the target, no matter what defensive abilities they might have had.”

“Lesser Boogeymen have fewer conditions, but they use their massive increased Priority to constantly unleash undefendable attacks against their targets. Sterling could count as a lesser Boogeyman, but since his ability is so large-scale and repeatable, it loses out on individual danger.”

“If I break this coin before all the flips are finished, all remaining bad luck in it will be sent back to you at once,” Luther said. “Of course, since you still have ten flips worth of good luck in you, and this coin only has eight flips worth of bad luck left, it would actually leave you with about two flips worth of good luck.”

“But my good luck can run out,” Aiden said, eyeing the coin.

Luther flipped the coin, letting it fall on tails again. “Yeah, if I waited a day for the good luck to be spent, then the bad luck in this coin won’t be cancelled out.”

“I can do this with any game of chance,” Luther said, “coin flips are the easiest, since the required object is easy to store and hide, but if I do this with, say, dice, and the lose condition was to roll a one, then I would create a die that has ten one in six bad luck rolls, compared to a coin’s ten one in two bad flips.”

“So a dice game with those rules would store more bad luck in the dice?” Aiden asked.

Luther flashed a grin, “Exactly. The more in favour it is to the opponent, the more bad luck it would be to cause a losing outcome, but the generated good luck for the other person is always equal.”

Luther gave Aiden the coin, “Alternatively, if you flip this coin seven more times, you would have spent all the bad luck in it, and gotten good luck for free.”

Aiden raised the coin, looking at it.

And he flipped it again, watching it fall on tails.

In this group, Luther was the wildcard.

“Now that I’ve revealed my own hand,” Luther continued. “How did you manage to run on the wall before?”

Aiden flipped the coin again, before he reached out his hand, and created the octopus suction cups he had used.

He gestured at his ear, “These tattoos have all the abilities of their original, I use the ears and eyes of different creatures to enhance my own senses, and when I create these…” he paused, not remembering what exactly they were due to his power, “... these cups, I can stick to a wall much like the original animal.”

“Like an octopus?” Wren asked.

He reabsorbed the tattoos, now swapping them over with octopuses in their entirety, “Yeah.”

“Then… can’t you regenerate your arm?” Jun asked, glancing at his cast. “There are animals that regrow limbs right?”

Aiden sighed, “If I understand my power right, I cannot.”

“My power doesn’t ‘give’ me the abilities of animals, it creates a tattoo which I can use,” he said. Creating an eye tattoo on his palm, he showed it to all of them. “I can’t see out of this eye, but if I maneuver it…”

He moved the tattoo quickly over his skin, past his shoulder and onto his eye. “Here, on my eye, I can see through it, almost as if it were a pair of glasses. In this case, along with my ears and nose, I’m not actually enhancing my own senses, just putting on something that can filter them better, and registering that.”

“The capabilities of the tattoo is still limited to the creature,” he continued. “If I damage this…”

On his arm, he generated an axolotl and paused as he forgot it.

“... amphibian…” he hesitantly supplied by analyzing the characteristics of the pink creature. “Say, cut off the tail, it wouldn’t regenerate me a new hand, it would regenerate a new amphibian tail.”

“I can use tattoos to enhance my strength by a bit, but my own flesh and blood doesn’t have the structural or biological capacity to fully mimic the swipes of a bear or a tiger,” he finished. “If I do that, it’ll rattle my own bones and hurt my muscles,” he said, remembering the only fist attack he attempted on Johnjohnjohnjohn.

“That’s why I still need glasses,” he said, “because under my eye tattoos, my sight is still shit.”

Reabsorbing the axolotl, he finished, “I can certainly create an animal that can regenerate limbs, but I myself can’t.”

“Then why don’t you make a massive army of animals?” Luther asked.

Aiden sighed, “Materials, no idea where to procure them, not to mention I need a place for them to stay, and I need to feed them. I can’t magic materials out of-”

“Wait!” Jun yelled, the Nightcore mask suddenly on her face. “Wren!”

“Huh?” the girl jumped, having previously ignored them, and instead focused on petting the tiny origami rabbit.

Everyone turned to her.

One could practically hear the light bulbs turn on in each of the teen’s heads.

“MAKE A BEAR!”

After a brief, very frantic moment, mostly them dragging Jun off of Wren as she excitedly listed off things to make, they explained their idea.

Wren’s ability could transmute the pages of her notebook into real objects by writing the name of the desired object. Her size limit was about an A0 piece of paper, however, she could generate all the pieces of an object and assemble them separately. Once made, the object becomes permanent.

She needed to fully understand how an object functioned to create it, so she currently couldn’t make anything more advanced than a clockwork watch. Additionally, she couldn’t create an object that had a metahuman ability in it, because those were unique.

She couldn’t generate living things, but she could generate food, however, she couldn’t generate any animal products such as leather, fur, meat, milk or eggs, since the Awakened ancestor who originally Manifested this ability was a staunch vegan and it was reflected in the ability that was passed on in the family.

When she ran out of pages, she needed to get a new notebook through certain methods she refused to disclose, but otherwise?

It was possible.

“I want to ask,” Aiden began, “what is the difference between you and me?”

Trist tilted her head, “The difference?”

“The spars earlier showed me the difference between me and a student who graduates here and enters into the military,” he said. “I want to know the difference between me and you.”

She looked at him, really stared for a while.

Before she exploded into laughter.

“Alright then, there are about four things which separate us, Meta Techniques, Extended Techniques, experience, and exploits. I’ve already explained the first two to you, the third is self explanatory, which leaves the last one.”

“Exploits?”

From her pocket, she pulled out a… fidget spinner? One that looked like it was made of pure gold.

“See, abilities really shine when you find something to synergise with, a way to utterly break and exploit the hell out of it.”

She spun the fidget spinner and let it go. Aiden watched as it floated and unfold in midair, becoming a massive carnival wheel. One that had a cartoonish face and pointed nose that acted as its arrow.

“SPIN SPIN THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE!” the strange thing yelled.

And Trist did, grabbing the side of the wheel and spun.

“SPIN SPIN! WHAT WILL YOU WIN?!” it yelled as the wheel spun.

And slowed, Aiden watched some of the choices pass, until it finally settled on something.

“YOU HAVE WON [5 kilograms of Osmium]! CONGRATULATIONS!” the wheel yelled as a lump of shiny metal fell onto the ground.

Trist grabbed the wheel again.

“WAIT WAIT! YOU NEED TO WAIT [23 hours, 59 minutes and 54 seconds] TO SPIN ME-”

The wheel was frozen in a frame as Trist rewinded it.

“SPIN SPIN THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE!” the wheel yelled again, and Trist grinned at Aiden as she spun it again.

The next spin gave a golden ring.

At Luther’s suggestion, they made it into one of the private training rooms, Wren writing down different things in her notebook as they went.

She ripped one page out.

After much insistence from Aiden, mostly to Jun, explaining that while he could make a massive bear heavier than all of them combined and able to break their spines with a single swipe, there was a chance it could go out of control and he did not want to deal with a rampaging grizzly.

For some reason that made both her and Josh more excited, but intelligence prevailed as the page Wren ripped out became a massive tortoise plushie. One big enough it reached Aiden’s knees.

And he touched it.

The tortoise tattoo slipped onto it with no resistance, and the plushie came alive.