Julia woke from her state of pseudo ‘sleep’ with a start, a harsh noise blaring from a set of speakers in the roof of her room. It was a noise that she’d become well acquainted with over the past months during training, the alarm signifying the beginning of a day of hard training, usually combat focused training.

One of the major upsides to her vastly altered form was the ability to almost instantly wake from the state of light sleep that she only had to maintain for a few hours a day. Instead of their being any real grogginess, she was working at full capacity right from the word go.

If only it didn’t come at the cost of any recognisably human features.

Julia pulled herself from the bed that she used, mostly out of an ingrained comfort than any tangible difference than just sleeping on a concrete floor. She let her flattened and puddle like form drip to the floor, pooling of the flat and hard surface before she counted to three and did the equivalent to an overweight man sucking in their gut.

In a mere moment she recreated the skin that covered over the rest of her semi-liquid body, inbuilding much of what she used for the day. She’d created the method of doing this after a lot of experimentation in the months after she’d Awakened and become this monstrous thing.

After that… she’d laid off on experimenting with her biology, much to the frustration of those around her. It was probably capable of being her biggest asset, and yet she just stuck to something she understood, as if ignoring the capabilities of her biology would make the reality of it less real.

She looked around her room, disappointed that she’d have to leave its comfort so soon in the morning, but such was training at the AASAU. Her room was sparse, lacking much in the way of personalisation other than the bedsheets and pillows which had all been hers since before her Awakening.

The walls remained their unblemished off white, most of the parts of her room going completely untouched, sticking instead to the bed that she spent much her time in outside of training. The need to personalise wasn’t very strong in Julia, in comparison to Jamie’s room which was practically a whole now room to when they first moved in, all dark tones and album art from the latest and greatest covering the walls.

Julia resigned herself to the day and rolled herself out the door like you’d roll a heavy stone, a tendril quickly whipping out of her body to open the door easily. She entered into the main living area of the team dorm room, easily the first of her team members to have arrived even when she dawdled. In the centre of the room, however, was a figure that she wasn’t expecting.

Instead of their regular training instructor Maryanne, a middle aged Linked who has a low-level strength Link, stood an average, if a little bookish looking man. Julia had seen him and listened to him talk on a few occasions, though she’d barely ever done so, even on an impersonal basis.

But she knew, with the small knack she’d picked up for recognising stronger Linked through her combat training, that this man was strong. He wasn’t short, but he wasn’t tall either. He looked physically able, but nothing like the developed muscle that a man Like Ajax, or even the sleek muscle like Ren had. But he felt large, as if he were easily five time the size that his physical body took up.

The man, dressed in a general blue-green trainer’s outfit, pushed a pair of rounded glasses up his nose as he looked up from the tablet that he’d been intently working on. He peered neutrally through the lenses, ever so slightly amplifying the size and clarity of his brown irises.

“Julia Parson, I assume?” He said calmly, his voice a little more nasally than she remembered from the induction speech he’d given to all the new Linked as they were put into floor three’s bootcamp. It’d been about six teams in total that had begun training that day, all assigned a training instructor to guide them.

But he was the step higher than that, he was the head instructor, the man that calls all the shots in the bootcamp floors, even the lower, cheaper floors were run by him in some fashion. He was Osmium, or David Braker as he’d introduced himself on her first day. She gaped for a second or two longer, before realising that the man was still waiting for a response, face perfectly clear of any discernible emotion.

“Uh, yes! I’m Julia, sir.” She spluttered out, and the man nodded sharply, tapping a few times on his tablet in quick succession before simply staring at the tablet, leaving the room in silence. Julia, however, wasn’t quite cognizant of that silence. She wasn’t sure that there were many that could be when Osmium was standing in your dorm, not a few metres away from you.

Osmium was a legend in Melbourne and Brisbane, probably even Sydney too. Despite his pretty neutral and young looks, Osmium was old guard, having become a Linked right before things really went to shit in Australia at large. In fact, he was a step away from being a bona fide member of the Australian branch of the Enforcers, or the Sentinels, or whatever they’d tried to unsuccessfully rebrand themselves to after Suicide.

He’d been the real deal, a policeman turned ‘superhero’, keeping the other Linked in check on both sides of the law. As a kid, Julia and a whole generation, had at least a little hope as they’d watched the endless nostalgia content. Shows that television stations seemed to produce at astounding rates with content from when the Enforcers and Osmium’s small group of Linked police were still active.

Though, that hope always died as soon as you watched the news and saw just how terrifying the world really was.

In the span of her musing, Julia watched Ren emerge from his room next, quickly assuming the same shocked double-take that Julia had experienced when she’d first witnessed the man that used to stand on top of Australia’s Linked crime division of the Australian Federal Police.

“Ren Ikari?” Osmium said, his voice a gentle but flat tone.

“Yes, sir?” The Japanese immigrant said as he flipped the grass-like, green hair out of his face, having naturally grown at least eight inches since the night before. Osmium looked to Ren, nodded sharply, and then did a similar sequence of quick taps, again letting the room fall into silence.

Ren inched as close to Julia as he could with her only standing four feet and a few inches in her standard form, whispering in a hushed tone.

“Holy shit, we have Osmium standing in our room, Julia!” The bewilderment in his voice was clear, almost shellshocked by the turn of events so early in the day. In his shock, Julia could hear his almost flawlessly neutral accent slip into a more poignant Japanese one, something that Ren lovingly called ‘engrish mode’.

“I know right? I knew he was the head instructor, with his speeches and all,” Julia mused back after putting a tendril up to Ren’s ear, speaking directly into it with a small node “but having him in our room is… different.” Ren nodded excitedly, trying desperately to keep himself from letting the excitement reach his face too harshly.

Funnily enough, even though Ren was an immigrant from Japan, he was possibly the person most interested in Australian Linked and the power dynamics. He’d be able to talk your ear off for hours about how the Enforcers fell in America and how that effected the Australian branch, that would be rebranded a few times under different governance, until it eventually died almost a decade later. If you considered Osmium’s department in the police an extension of that, of course.

Was Julia surprised when she’d found out that Osmium worked as a trainer in the AASAU nowadays? Immensely, especially with the reputation that the AASAU had for bending over backwards for ‘those in power’.

The next to appear out of their room was Jamie, bleary eyed and sporting a dishevelled mop of bed hair. Julia and Ren, both having gotten over the momentary blast of starstruck-ness, watched on gleefully as Jamie’s eyes went wide after she noticed the legend standing in their living room, her mouth gaping open wide enough that you could just see the strange scales covering her jaw from behind her high collared hoodie.

“June Nkala?” He asked, glancing up at Jamie’s face and frowning slightly, “My apologies. Jamie King?” The correction came quick enough that Jamie didn’t even have time to disagree with the initial query. The reason for his quick change became clear as June Nkala herself stepped out of the room from the doorframe that was clearly too small for her.

Ajax might be a massive man, but June was something else, well and truly augmented by her Link into being the tallest person in the training facilities at the moment, though there were definitely taller Linked. The black-skinned woman stood at a mind boggling seven foot tall, dwarfing Julia’s crush by over half a foot, but instead of the built muscle that Ajax possessed, June was the counter opposite.

In fact, it had been the entire reason she’d fled Zimbabwe with her family, because she was almost entirely skeletal, her body somehow defying gravity and remaining standing despite being able to see her bones laying just beneath her skin on most places of her body. If she didn’t wear thick clothing most of the time, and use her ludicrously thick hair to her advantage, she’d be downright disturbing to look at. Not that Julia could talk, glass houses and all.

“Ah, June Nkala?” Osmium asked again, recounting hie earlier mistake. The massive woman, just as all the rest of them had, gaped with a stunned expression. She was surprised that June even knew who Osmium was, with her having come to live in Australia in her early teens after her early Awakening, rather than Ren’s pre-teen.

“Yeah?” She said, stunned, her voice higher than you’d expect for someone her size, though she quickly amended with, “Sir?”

Osmium gestured to Julia and Ren, who had already begun a little line up, and Jamie and June quickly made their way into the sloppy line up, trying to hold down their astonishment.

“Good.” David Braker said calmly, “I imagine it’d be a bit of a shock to see me here at morning line up instead of Maryanne?” He didn’t smile, but Julia could sense at least a little bit of amusement in the man’s eyes. They all nodded dumbly, though Jamie was the one to speak up, something unusual for her around people she didn’t know or wasn’t comfortable with.

“Did something happen to Maryanne?” There wasn’t much worry in the voice, with the woman being at least strong enough to crush someone and tank a head on collision with a car, but it was a probing question nonetheless.

“No, nothing significant. I have simply asked for a favour to take over her team for a few days this week from now on.” Julia and the rest of the team reeled in confusion, but Osmium didn’t stop for a moment, “From now on, I will sporadically appear in your weekly schedule, though I will warn you that it is unlikely you will get much in the way of notice, other than my appearance on said day.” The clear explanation just left the team even more confused, with Ren raising a hand tentatively, unsure if he was allowed to just talk normally.

“Ren?” Osmium nodded towards the green haired man, prompting him to speak.

“This sounds great, sir. It’d be an honour to work with you, and I think that all of us feel the same,” Ren paused for a little bit, allowing his words to sink in, “but I’m not sure that I understand why we are being given specialised training from you personally. I was under the assumption that you didn’t do personalised training because of the reduced impact that it has. Sir.”

The confused sentence, coupled with the strangely tacked on ‘sir’ at the end made the others in the group silently cringe, hoping beyond hope that the legendary Linked didn’t take any offense and just leave. Though, Julia found herself more curious as the moments ticked by without a forthcoming answer, with Ren even citing one of Osmium’s own lectures as to why he acts as a head trainer instead of a personal trainer for the rich kids in the floors above them, not unlike Domain and Baxter’s mini–Rightful Order team.

“A good question,” Osmium replied finally, pressing the bridge of his glasses up his nose firmly then brushing back his short brown hair, greying slightly at the sides, “I am doing it as a favour to an old friend. It seems that for me to help, I’ll have to do it directly. However, I do sometimes miss the experience of directly training a team.” The vaunted ex-police officer scrunched his thin eyebrows together for a moment before unfurrowing them.

“I may not be able to provide the more comprehensive training that Maryanne would be able to, and most of your time with me as a trainer will involve combat directly with another team, but I will do my best to give your team as much knowledge as I can in the time I have you. Is this acceptable?” He asked, as forward and clearly spoken as he’d seemed in every interview he’d ever done.

As the team gave their clear and honest response in the positive, not ones to turn down training from the Osmium, something that was sure to aide them on any path they decided to take later in life, Julia began to let her mind wander into obscurity as they filed out of the room, following the powerful Linked to the Underground.

‘I wonder if he still gets paid royalties on those TV appearances he did…’