You gigantic ass-goblin, I thought towards my, now guaranteed sadistic, mentor. Just throw us at each other right after I had put forth the effort to protect her. I’m just glad there wasn’t a mana bar or something for my techniques.

“Actually there will be in the game, they wanted us to be able to train without that restriction,” came Arya’s voice in my head.

Well that shit had to stop. I couldn’t have her in my head if she was a new opponent. My sensory technique was still going, so I could “see” her rushing at me from behind. As I spun to face her I noticed that a small icon that had been at the corner of my vision was now missing. That was odd, I hadn’t noticed it before. It could wait I would need to ask Savira about it before the game started. For now I had to face off against an opponent that was coming at me with a wolfish grin on her face. I still had my enhancement engaged so I started to throw a quickened punch at her.

My enhancement allowed me to see her shift in stance, and arm motions, as she caught my punch and deftly flipped me onto my ass hard enough to knock my concentration askew. I rolled to the side and up to my feet as a foot stomp came down where my head was. My speed was still going so I tried to rush her again, and once again ended up on the ground but on my face this time.

“This is getting boring,” Arya said, still smirking at me as I rose to my feet.

Son of a bitch, she was reading my motions from my thoughts somehow. Being faster didn’t matter much if she could react before I managed to hit her. Between her reading my thoughts and her superior training I wagered I was in for a world of hurt.

“Yeah pretty much,” she replied to my unspoken thought.

I wracked my brain for any idea on how to counter her thought reading. Luckily there were various options from fiction as to how to manage it. They fell into two categories, empty thought, to blank the mind so no surface thoughts were there, and focused thought, focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else. The problem was I sucked at focusing my mind, let alone emptying it of the swirling miasma of thoughts that bounced around my head at any given moment.

I let the smile grow on my face as I started to move, my mind filling with the various concepts and random ideas that I struggled with on a daily basis. The thought of my missing leg and the annoyance it brought when I got out of my immersion pod. The plans for dinner over the next few nights, my mother’s constant badgering, the little soot covered girl that smiled every time she saw me, and the way the pod felt so real. My thoughts sped onward in a flood..

Arya’s face grew troubled, and I could see her eyes widen as I took the leash off my thoughts. She still managed to deflect half my strikes, her well trained reflexes better than my own half remembered martial arts lessons. Without the advantage of reading my thoughts though she was quickly on the defensive, and then it was my turn to knock her to the ground. Instead of trying for a foot stomp I took the more expedient option, sitting on her legs, and held up one of the ball bearings I would apparently be using for ammunition in the game.

“ADHD is a bitch isn’t it?” I asked.

Her hand slapped the ground twice, signaling her own defeat, and I rose, a hand out to help her up. She took it and answered me, “Yeah that gave me a headache until I turned it off. How do you function with that much going on in your head?”

I shrugged, “I’m used to it. It helps when I’m active, or doing something I don’t need to focus on. Surprisingly books work wonders as a new book is a new changing story. Unfortunately I have a near eidetic memory so I can’t reread books all that often.”

She smiled and asked, “Did you get a technique out of it?”

“No clue, I have to reference the view screen over there. Why, do you see pop-ups or something?” I responded.

“Yeah, I’m kind of surprised you don’t,” was her answer.

Phil answered for us, “It’s a passive effect of your power reading ability. You’re effectively reading your own techniques.”

We both nodded, that made sense. It did mean that I would need to find a way to check my own status while in the field though. I wonder if Jacob would come up with anything, or if it was a standard piece of gear that could be obtained. I was getting side tracked, right now was for training.

“How much time do you have left for training?” I asked Arya.

“About five minutes, what about you?” she responded.

“Around two hours, my incentive to help you with your training was that it used your time and not mine,” I answered.

I paused as an idea came up, and I turned to Phil before asking, “Can I share my training time with her for team training? I want us to get used to how our abilities will work without the training room endless energy.”

Phil rubbed his chin as he thought, “I like the idea as your mentor, but I would need to check with Savira. Give me an hour and come back in, if we can do it we will. At the very least I should be able to convince her to offer a little time for everyone to test it out.”

Arya spoke up, “You can hang out at my HOME while we wait. I’ve already changed it around a bit to make it more than a gym.”

“Sounds good, I haven’t bothered yet. Interior design isn’t really something I put much thought into, well not much by my standards,” I responded.

She let loose a peal of laughter as she replied, “Considering I have seen how many thoughts you actually have I am pretty sure you will come up with something. Come on, let’s go.”

As we stepped out of the training hall the world turned black for a few minutes. I began to panic at the emptiness before a new door appeared and moved toward me depositing me into a new area.

I took a deep breath, blinking my eyes, and generally trying to reorient myself from the nothingness. “Okay, maybe coming to your HOME was a bad idea,” I said, my voice a little shaky.

Arya looked a little chagrined and said, “Sorry, I should have given you permission before hand. My mentor was still here and told me that you would be stuck in transition until it auto dumped you to your HOME or I authorized you to be here.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just something to remember for next time,” I said as I looked around.

Her HOME was, dare I say it, quaint. Two walls were filled with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Another wall, the one with the door, held a fireplace with a pair of comfy looking recliners positioned in front of it and an end table between the chairs with a small lamp. The last wall was actually a window that looked out onto a lake with tall trees and mountains, a classic beautiful cabin view. The corner of the window wall and the fireplace wall was interrupted slightly by a small room with an open door I could see the costume locker in. A quick mental calculation told me that the square footage of the room was the same as mine, just filled differently.

I asked the first question that came to mind, “Why bookshelves? I can make an educated guess on the view, but that has me a bit stumped.”

“There are a large number of books in Braille or in audio format, but most of the indie publishers and web serials don’t get converted. I have loved stories ever since I was a little girl and my father would read to me. He always told me that I could make the worlds in my own head, and then it wouldn’t matter what other people saw. I know it was more to comfort me, but it did help,” she answered.

I couldn’t argue the reasoning, and as we sat down in the chairs I asked another question before thinking about it, “So what is all do you have on the shelves?”

She pointed at sections as she answered, “Those are non-fiction: Geography, Law, Psychology, and Arts and Crafts for the most part. The fiction is a bit of a custom piece. I was able to link some online book subscriptions and web serials to the shelves, so I can pull a book off and it will be the stories I want.”

Okay, that was just cool. It wasn’t far off of having an e-book reader. My musings were interrupted by her asking a question, “So I asked my dad about the terrorist incident at the school. He told me that the police had managed to disable most of the bombs around the school, but didn’t know about the vest the leader was wearing. Apparently there was one fatality, the terrorist, and a casualty; a young man who was visiting a former teacher but got caught in the blast. Was that you?”

I nodded and replied, “Yes it was. I spent about three months between the hospital and recovery before the immersion pod was fully set up.”

She smiled and said, “You forget, I saw inside your head when you were blocking me from reading your intent in our fight. One of the first things you thought of was that day. Your thoughts were hard to piece together, but I get the impression you had the opportunity to get away before the explosion.”

I sighed; something told me she wouldn’t let it rest. I explained, “I could have gotten behind some cover, but there was a little girl fairly close. In the movies there are explosions that just knock people down, but shrapnel and concussive force are what generally kill people. I knew that the only way the kid wouldn’t get seriously crippled or dead was if someone or something else blunted the force that hit her. Since the only thing big enough that could get in front of her was me I did so. The movies don’t do the damage justice.”

She smiled, “And now, for a game where you get to be a superhero, you choose techniques that allow you to stop bullets and shrapnel from hitting other people.”

“You’ve already been digging into those psychology books haven’t you?” I replied.

She let out another bell like laugh as she answered, “Maybe a little, it was actually something I overheard Savira say to Mr. O’Brian after you left. She was discussing you and Jacob’s power choices.”

Curiosity compelled me to ask, “Did he have anything to say to that?”

“He said he had wished you had the ability to use those powers then, and that it was a shame that people with your sense of ethics couldn’t do more,” she answered.

We continued talking about different subjects as the time passed. It was actually a pleasant way to spend time, her mind jumped to different topics often enough to keep my own engaged. I could tell she was amused by how quickly I came up with theories and answers to the questions she asked. Eventually she asked, “How do you come up with answers so quickly? I can’t read your mind right now, but I don’t get the sense that you’re just blowing smoke out your ass either.”

I shrugged, “One of my old teachers, the one I was at the school to visit actually, was having difficulty getting me to show my work in class. Math is boring to me, all those methods just to get an answer. I got snarky with her one time when she gave me a poor score on a quiz because I didn’t show my work and ended up with detention. Instead of the typical clean the classroom or write on the board time waster she actually sat me down with her and her husband. Her husband was a guidance councilor for the local university.”

She nodded at me to continue and I did, “Anyway, we talked and I explained how I went from question to answer without considering the method actively. He asked a few questions, and then explained that I likely had the rarer combined type of ADHD, he couldn’t diagnosis of course because he wasn’t a shrink. He did give me some advice on how to deal with it though so I could continue to learn. I started doing mental exercises for processing information quickly, but it had a side effect: I would constantly analyze everything and my mind would form conclusions. It doesn’t help me stay focused long enough to learn boring material, but it helped a great deal with general aptitude in many subjects.”

“So you learned to be a jack of all trades, but couldn’t focus enough to go through an advanced degree course?” she asked.

I shook my head and clarified, “Yes and no, I am pretty good with hands on tasks. I taught myself woodworking as I could shift to different projects as the mood struck me. Anything like that where variety in skills was a sign of ability rather than a focused skill set I was good at. In general though no, spending time studying for higher education was difficult. It’s why I was looking for a physically active career, or something with a regimented lifestyle that could help curb my own issues.”

“But due to an explosive change in circumstances you have to be idle, except for when you get into the game and can run around saving people again,” she said with a grin.

I laughed and said, “Exactly.”

There was the sound of a doorbell, and as we looked to the door Savira walked in wearing the business suit we had seen at the café. She smiled at us and said, “Good, you’re still here. William has a counter-offer for your training.”

Arya spoke up before I could and asked, “What’s the counter offer?”

“Between the five of you there is a total of three hours of training time remaining. You may trade it all in to either give everybody thirty minutes of training time with the full game system engaged, or you may trade it in to do a scenario we were finalizing,” she answered.

It took me about two seconds to decide which one I wanted to do, another second to see a potential fly in the ointment, and three to form the words properly, “I am interested in the scenario, but I would like to know some of the details on it.”

Arya looked at me with a lifted eyebrow and I shrugged while saying, “Training rooms are great, but you can’t test yourself without proper opposition.

Savira however just nodded and said, “The scenario was what we intend to use as the tutorial and power acquiring stage of the open release of both Call and Creed. The content was designed for a party after the powers acquisition phase. That is where you would be starting, and you will earn in game rewards from this, as those were already calculated.”

“Are we casting votes for this? I’m interested, but I don’t feel like inviting a crowd here to get everyone’s answer,” Arya interjected.

Savira shook her head and replied, “Since over sixty percent of the remaining training time is Mr. Cayne’s we thought it best to let him decide how he wants it used.”

I was shaking my head before she even finished speaking, “Nope, we decided to go into this as a team. I won’t overrule a group vote on this.”

“It seems I have lost my bet; William said you would choose to go that route,” Savira began.

I chuckled as she continued, “Since he has managed to predict your choices fairly accurately so far, I took the liberty of asking the rest of your team. They indicated they would like to try the scenario.”

I looked to the red head next to me and asked, “Thoughts?”

She nodded, “I like the idea of an actual trial, especially one where we can start out earning rewards.”

Turning back to Savira I said, “Let’s do it.”