A month and a half had passed since that night. So many things had changed, I didn't even know what was the same anymore.

I was outside a classroom, laughing and talking with my friends. Alyssa, the girl in flannel with incredibly long brown hair, the color and shape of a crinkle-cut french fry. Darris, who was dark and had a big nose and collected music on optical disk because, in his words, that was the 'true' sound. Sebastian, who was too goofy for my tastes, but just the nicest damn guy. And others.

Class had just gotten out. We were lingering, waiting for the last member of our group to join us before we all headed to get food together. It was a nice April day, for California standards, where seasons were often broken into 'summer' and 'really hot summer', a nice breeze was coming in from the west which made it just a little less hot and a little less dry.

The class was a GE course, one of those mashups of history and social awareness that was trying to be hip and progressive. So basically, nobody really paid too much attention because it was an easy A and a GE. The course did have the advantage of a lot of group work -- another symptom of the 'hip progressive' element, and so it had sufficed to get us all meeting each other and winding up friends.

Maybe that was the real goal. Maybe college administrators were secretly geniuses. I kind of doubted it. But given that the quarter had only started a week ago and we already had our feet under us to a degree, that indicated that someone was doing something right.

"Where is that girl? I'm hungry," Darris complained.

"Maybe the TA was hungry too, and ate her!" Sebastian laughed. At least he amused himself.

"Well if he doesn't regurgitate her and she walks out in the next like, five seconds, I'm outta here. I didn't eat breakfast, and I only have an hour until my next class," Darris said.

"Take off if you want, man. No biggie," I shrugged.

"Nah. She's got four seconds still."

"Who does? Until what?" We turned and saw the girl we were waiting for emerge from the room. "Sorry, I had too many questions for the TA and he said come to office hours." She gave an apologetic smile.

I returned the smile and ruffled up her hair with my hand, prompting her to stick out her tongue at me.

"Good timing, Lia. Darris was about ready to eat his own arm, I think."

"Is that why college costs an arm and a leg?" Sebastian laughed. Lia laughed along with him, but I think they were the only ones as we headed towards the dining hall.

As we walked, Alyssa sidled up on my side opposite Lia and began as she often did, with a small smile, like she was embarrassed of it. "Hi, Athan."

"Heya, Alyssa."

"Did ya finish that assignment for EE?"

"Yeah, it was no problem. Though someone made it more difficult than it needed to be by messaging me for hours yesterday," I grinned at her. She made an embarrassed giggle, and I caught sight of Lia making a disgusted face before she abandoned my side to catch up to the others.

"Did I say somethin'?" she asked.

"Nothing I noticed. Probably just wanted to talk to the guys."

"It's so crazy that even though it's yer first quarter here, ya've already got classes in yer major. My first quarter was all fluff."

"Well, that happens when you transfer in the middle of spring quarter apparently. All the preliminary stuff offered in the first two quarters and...here I am just kinda skipping it for now."

"Helps ya've got a major picked out...I'm forever undeclared."

"You seemed pretty interested in electrical engineering last night. Maybe give that a shot? We might even wind up in the same classes."

She gave an embarrassed little laugh as we continued onward, and within a few minutes were walking between salad bars, craning our necks up at holo-menus floating above lines of students who hadn't waited after class got out. I headed for the grill and Alyssa followed, the rest of our crew disappearing into the crowd.

I waited for her with a burger and some fries before we got in line to pay, but on the way there, she stopped dead, looking at the food on the plate on her bright orange tray. I followed her concerned gaze.

"That's a hamburger," I said.

"Hah...yeah it is."

"Aren't you vegetarian? You ordered a veggie burger."

"It's fine," she said with an embarrassed smile. "I'll just...eat around it. Get...some lettuce and tomatoes from the salad bar, maybe."

"That's not what you ordered though. You're gonna pay for it? Seriously?"

"Yeah, it's fine."

It wasn't fine. It was stupid. I took a step towards her which made her stand up straight and freeze, and picked her plate off her tray. She barely got out another small meep before I cut through the line for the grill, ignoring the protests of those in it.

"Hey, excuse me?" I shouted over the counter at another student in a work uniform. "Hi, this was supposed to be a veggie burger, not a regular. Do you think you fix that for me? Thanks."

The guy apologized and took the plate away, and a few minutes later, Alyssa was staring down at a steaming lump of vegetative mash between buns with hearts in her eyes. The second we rang up our school credit chits and headed towards the table where the others were waiting, she veritably pounced on me.

"That was so~oo cool!" she said, bouncing in her stride enough to endanger her hard-won prize. "I can't believe ya did that for me!"

"I mean...it was nothing. It's their job to take our orders, and generally they want to get it right, don't they?"

"But ya didn't wait in line or anythin', ya just walked right up there, cool as anything, didn't even blush to talk to the guy."

I didn't think it was a big deal at all. Nothing that would make me hesitate for a moment, but it seemed like a very big deal to her. When we sat down, Sebastian asked her what she was talking about, and so the whole table got a recitation of the events, a lot more dramatically than I remembered them. Lia spent the whole time twirling pasta on a fork and looking at me like I was scum, which I didn't think I deserved.

Finally, we were due to split up. Time on campus moved in discrete hour chunks as classes started and ended, and we were reaching the end of that hour. Alyssa and Darris had class, Sebastian had homework, and that left Lia and me sitting alone with our trays and the demolished remains of the relatively crap food which had once inhabited them.

Almost as soon as the others were gone, she turned on me. "The heck, dude," she said, her eyes boring a hole in me with half-lidded disgust.

"You've been giving me this glare all day. What did I do? Did I made a joke that offended you or something?"

"No, you're breaking hearts again, while AEGIS is waiting for you at home."

"I am? What?" I threw my mind around looking for what she was talking about. "Alyssa? Because of the burger?"

"No, dummy. You guys were messaging all night? She asked you all sorts of questions about yourself and your major? And your homework? No girl cares about your homework, Bro. Get a freaking clue."

"She's picking a major. She's interested in EE."

"She's interested in you, dumbnut. How is it possible for you to be this dense? How is it possible for you to attract girls like some kind of honey stud? I don't get it."

I shook my head. "You're wrong, Lia. She's just a friendly girl."

The silverware jumped as Lia's forehead made contact with the table. She made a frustrated noise that caused a few onlookers to gawk momentarily.

I looked at her with sympathy. Maybe she was right. She had an unerring streak with this kind of thing, and I certainly didn't. But at the same time, I really didn't see it at all. Rather than just argue that she was wrong, I tried to suss out maybe why we disagreed.

"Lia, she's never like, asked me out, or followed me back to our place, or told me she likes me or anything. We talk, yeah, about mundane stuff like school, and what we want to do after we graduate, and what our families were like."

She turned her head and looked at me sideways. "Bro, you're so messed up."

"What? I'm serious."

"That stuff might be mundane to us, but that's regular people's lives. That is serious stuff. Those are things people would talk about on dates and junk. And you're using AEGIS and Saga and Karu as a social calibration mechanism, and that's just way outta whack."

I blinked at her and repeated myself. "What? I'm serious."

She sighed. "Normal girls don't express an interest in a guy by...jeez, should I make a list? AEGIS cut you open and then performed surgery to put you back together. Karu did strafing runs on AEGIS' compound to liberate you. Saga turned you into some kind of sex puppet that one time...you can't seriously expect normal people to act like they do."

I realized, if anyone was listening to our conversation, they had to be assuming we were talking about a TV show or something at this point. Ours truly was not a normal life.

"Well, yeah, obviously. But normal girls do drop hints and tell you they like you and ask you on dates and stuff. It's not all bombings and lobotomies."

"Bro, that girl was dropping so many hints I'm surprised you can still breathe under their weight. Tell me, what constitutes a hint to you?" She leaned back and waited smugly.

"Like...well...like, I learned that Moon likes me, and then I noticed that she always comes over all the time for no reason. That's a hint. Or...or how Karu would change in the same room as me. That's a hint too!"

"Again. A girl literally living in your house, and a girl literally stripping for you. Want to throw AEGIS watching you sleep in there? Just accept the fact you're kinda broken here, bro. You're way busted when it comes to normal female interaction."

"I have you," I muttered. "You're normal."

She laughed, stood up, and patted me on the shoulder with the hand not gripping her tray. "Nice try, dude. But not really." And so saying, she walked off and left me alone.

As much as I'd been arguing with her, I couldn't say I really cared that much who was right or not. If I were...somewhat off-kilter, did that matter? It's not like I was the one chasing down girls and subjecting them to my whims. If a girl was giving me the signs or not, if I caught them or not, it wasn't going to change anything.

It just seemed easier to not worry about things now. The dread, the self-loathing, the stress of everything was just...so much lighter now. It wasn't gone, Dragon was still out there, biding his time, the XPCA was still kind of a pile of shit, though they'd shored up the rest of the mess with New Eden, and I hadn't heard much else out of there recently, except that it was still miserable. The P-Force was still active, though there hadn't been an event which required an Exhuman's touch in a bit. It felt almost certain that good run of luck was soon to expire.

But even with that, my life personally just felt better. There really was only one new obsession which had rolled in to replace all the old. One I was going to indulge now, as I did whenever I had a free moment, it felt.

I unzipped my backpack with little effort and pulled out three heavy books, spreading them on the able in front of me. Two were textbooks for my major, the third was just some light reading I'd picked up on the same subject after speaking with one of my professors. I broke out a pad of paper I'd been scribbling on, and marveled for a minute at just how well it passed as the insane scratchings of a madman.

That night, that inexplicable night over a month ago, it felt like half of me had left myself, and in its place, this yearning. I felt like the protagonist of an H.P. Lovecraft story, suddenly stricken with forbidden knowledge while I slept, except my knowledge wasn't forbidden or madness-inducing, it was freely out there, they made coursework to study it. It'd even chosen a variation of it as my major.

It blew my mind that just a short while ago, I was struggling with all these different directions I was being pulled in, and that I'd managed to for the first time...in my whole life really, be able to choose my own path...and had no idea what path to pursue.

I mean, the choice was obvious, wasn't it? Go the way I wanted to originally. Go to college. Play sports. Study electronics, electricity, computers. Make friends again, live a normal life. If that was within my grasp, why wouldn't I head that way?

AEGIS had been ecstatic, and within a few days, a few drones in a couple datacenters, and a few taps on her floating keyboard, and my transfer in for spring quarter was accepted. It seemed...too easy. I expected...I don't know, an Exhuman to blow up the school or something before I got there.

But here I was. A week in, making friends, winning hearts if Lia was to be believed, studying electrical engineering...and tryouts were beginning next week. I couldn't help but to smile as I pored over my textbook, several chapters ahead of where we were in class already.

Maybe she was right. Maybe my normalcy calibrators were completely broken. Everything here felt so easy, so free. I'd needed to arrange transportation to get to and from our off-campus housing, and instead of paying half a million credits to some Exhuman who could only work when your back was turned, I'd waited two minutes in line to get a bus sticker put on my school ID. A literal, physical, paper sticker. Not digital or anything. It was amazing.

Amazing how easy everything was, when you were doing things you were actually intended to do. Everything here was made simple, from eating, to getting to and from class, to looking up assignments and schedules...college was an introduction course to independent living, and so things like that were designed to be easy. I'd learned it all the hard way already, while juggling being an Exhuman and all that entailed...and it was just...glorious, revelling in how little was expected of me, for once.

I wound up spending most of two hours there without noticing. Like AEGIS when she worked, I guess, and didn't seem to acknowledge the passing of time. My mobile buzzed and let me know that my next class was beginning. Math, which was of course, everyone's favorite, and engineering-level math, so none of the others would be in there, either.

I closed up my books and gave my notes a final, contented once-over before packing it all away and heading out the glass doors.

The campus was laid out as though by two people; one who loved tall buildings and was trying to recreate the LA skyline, and one who loved walkways and broad venues, with sparse trees and concrete paths dissecting grassy patches. The two did not agree, and so the school was positively schizophrenic in whether you were out in a park, or walking in a claustrophobic alley between skyscrapers, unified only by their mutual love of concrete in all things.

I preferred the darker paths. Maybe if I'd never been an Exhuman, I might have stayed out and enjoyed the sun, but my paranoia always went off when I was in the open now...the nagging voice in my mind saying things were too good, and life was too simple, and wouldn't it be absolutely apropos if that were all to come to a violent end with a single sniper round, or some kid IDing me from the news.

Which had, admittedly, happened once before. Saga was handy to have around. Really didn't help with the paranoia though.

I was almost to my class, still a few minutes early, when my mobile buzzed inaudibly again, and I stopped to take a glance. Again, a little paranoia, I wasn't going to walk around with my face buried in my mobile and risk bumbling into something.

But I didn't need to bump into anything to find trouble. Not when it could dial me whenever it wanted.

> Event out of Chicago, meet at 11th and State in 35 minutes

From Cosette. Terse and impersonal, as our relationship had been now. I really had myself to blame for that, but now wasn't the time. Instead, I began contacting people, letting them know what was up. Rito, for transportation, Lia and AEGIS to cover my tracks, and Whitney.

Messages back and forth began coming in as I managed the five-way conversation as best I could. Organizing and coordinating weren't exactly my thing, but as the one point of contact between everyone, it just kind of fell to me. AEGIS expressed worry, as she always did, Lia was confident in us, in the P-Force, sure that we'd make the world safer and bring back another win.

I didn't have the mind for predicting outcomes. I just wanted to get everyone moving and on the same page and meshing. But even as I did, I felt that calling, couldn't help but to think about the insane sprawl of circuitry in my hands as I typed and responded, think of my friends' time as discharging voltages, being combined and stepped up together so that more joules of work could be managed than by one source alone. Circuit diagrams rose unbidden in my mind, which both amused and scared me.

And then, with a snap of my mobile closing, it was over. I took a few deep breaths, checked the time again, and found the whole ordeal had taken only four minutes. Funny, it felt much longer. Maybe we were all getting better at our jobs.

That left thirty-one minutes left before I needed to disappear, since Rito made the math on transport time easy, and so I hefted my backpack further up my shoulder and continued on my way to class.