"The shift in the modern understanding of science became the sole motivator for the current revolution in the education system. As opposed to previous changes in the field, all parties seemed to agree: we don’t know enough."

“Everything alright?” Lisa asked with a cocked brow.

“Uh, yeah. I was just thinking about the next outing I’ll have with my friend,” I said with a mixed expression.

“You guys dating?” Lisa asked with an innocent expression.

“What?” I involuntarily laughed so hard I almost choked on my food. “No. Definitely not. She’s not the kind of people I want to be in a relationship with.”

Was that her trying to determine whether I was single or not, or am I just imagining things? I thought.

When thinking about relationships, my brain cells tended to follow our proudest national tradition: going on strike.

“So, what are you guys going to visit this time?” Lisa asked. She changed the topic as if nothing had happened, to my growing confusion.

“Uh… It’s uh…” I started as I debated whether to go with the truth or a lie. In the end, I decided to go in-between. “An abandoned place we heard about. It’s near Agnolles.”

“That sounds cool! Can I tag along?” Lisa asked eagerly.

“Uh, sorry, I don’t think she’ll accept without meeting you first,” I said in an apologetic voice.

Not even taking into account the fact that your mom’s a cop. I thought.

Even if I ignored Alison’s current beef with the law, I felt like introducing Lisa to her was the worst thing I could do. And that’s coming from the psychotic guy that shot a cop a few days ago.

“Oh, bummer,” she said dejectedly. “I really want to try some urbex one of these days.”

“We’ll do it, but I need to figure out some stuff first, sorry,” I apologized again. “We can do other stuff in the meantime?”

“Is that a date proposition?” Lisa said with a mischievous smile.

My whole face flushed into a shade of scarlet that would make a tomato jealous.

“What? No! Of course not… It’s not like… I mean… If you…” I stammered frantically with the grace of a dead walrus. I was decidedly not the most experienced guy when it came to flirting.

A life of celibacy will do that do you.

“Relax, I’m kidding,” Lisa said with a dismissive gesture. “Oh, by the way, this has been gnawing at me since we met yesterday… Why do you never take off your gloves? I mean, it’s not like it’s cold in here, and there’s no way it’s comfortable wearing them while you eat.”

I froze like a deer in the headlights. It made sense that trying to hide my hands on every possible occasion would eventually attract people’s attention. Thinking about it, I was pretty sure that Dr. Santos had tried looking at them discreetly many times after our last appointment.

Would telling her a bit of the truth be a misstep here, though? Or would lying or avoiding the question do more harm than good?

“I have scars that I don’t really feel comfortable with people seeing,” I decided to go with a half-truth.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry. Believe me, I’m definitely not one to judge,” Lisa said as she pulled up one of her sleeves, revealing a series of parallel lines on the inside of her arm.

I stared in confusion at what I thought was the weirdest scarring pattern I had ever seen until the realization hit me like a sack of bricks. Although I had been diagnosed as being depressed —and even suicidal—for a while, I had never tried hurting myself. Seeing Lisa’s scars was… grounding in a way I hadn’t expected.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t think that… I mean… I didn’t expect that…” I trailed off as I struggled to take my eyes off of the thin white lines on Lisa’s slightly darker skin.

“It’s alright. You wouldn’t expect this upbeat and outgoing girl to have these, would you?” she said with a bittersweet expression.

I cringed hard at her question as the thought had indeed crossed my mind.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all! I mean, shit. I feel like a jerk now. Here, look.”

I took a deep breath and took off my left glove, revealing the twisted ersatz of a digit that was my middle finger, as well as the slightly less conspicuous deformed tip of my pinkie.

“Wow, that’s so gross… But so cool!” she said in fascination as she took my hand into hers. “Sorry, I didn’t mean like that.”

“That’s alright,” I mumbled as my cheek flushed again at the unprompted skin contact.

“How did that happen?” Lisa asked in fascination as she looked at my fingers from every possible angle.

“It’s a long story… And I rather not get into it,” I said truthfully.

“I understand,” she said solemnly. “If I didn’t know better, though, I’d say this is the result of an Impacted power.”

I froze again. I wracked my brain for possible ways out of the sticky situation but only drew a blank. I stared blankly at Lisa like a dear in the headlight.

“I—I’m so sorry, I was saying that as a joke. I didn’t think that…” Lisa said hurriedly.

“It’s… probably not what you think,” I finally managed to say, suppressing a wince.

“I’m sorry, whatever it is, I won’t broach the topic again. Forget I even said anything,” she said with a pleading gesture.

“It’s alright. As I said, it’s not what you think.” I somehow managed to utter the whole sentence without stuttering, to my silent relief.

Lying about my current situation to yet another person was an additional weight on my mind I could honestly do without. But as it turned out, years of watching hero movies, Impacted documentaries, and Impacted-related news articles had hammered it in pretty hard that a secret identity was usually the best way to go.

I used to find it hilarious that Spider-Man and Superman struggled to maintain a normal civilian life when they could literally lift up cars. I always thought it dumb that they wasted so much energy hiding who they were when literally nobody could stop them—bar supervillains, which Lisa was definitely not. But then I understood. It’s not about ‘not caring’.

Truth be told, it was all about unnecessary stress. I could very well tell everyone I met that I was Impacted, but then I would have to face the consequences. The IHI would want to monitor me, I would have to go to some kind of special counseling, and the dynamic of the relationships I had with most people would change forever.

I didn’t want what little control I had left on my ‘day life’ to slip out of my grasp. The ‘work’ relationship I had with Alison supplied me with enough ups and downs that I wouldn’t want anything more than a plain and boring life on the side.

I was about to try and get the conversation going again, but the buzzing of my phone in my pocket allowed me a convenient way out. I simply picked up and put the device to my ear.

“Yo,” an irritatingly familiar voice came out of the speaker.

“What do you want?” I said, slightly peeved.

Of course, she had to call at that exact moment. Right when I’m having a genuine connection with an actual human being.

“World peace, but on my terms,” Alison shot back with zero hesitation.

I simply waited in silence for her to stop screwing around while wincing apologetically at Lisa.

“I want to relocate our ‘kittens’, fancy a visit to that place we met?” Alison continued. I could perceive a hint of irritation at her joke not being acknowledged, to my delight.

“The p-, I mean, that place with… Tim?” I asked in confusion. Why the hell would she want to go back to the precinct?

“Yeah, that place. I have some ideas for the short term that might solve one of our issues,” she paused. “Or two of them, if you know what I mean.”

Yes, I do, and you don’t need to be so obtuse about it. I thought but refrained from saying it out loud.

“Isn’t that a bit… Risky?” I asked in concern. After all, the place had been a known gang den. Who knew who else could lurk around these parts. Never mind the fact that we killed people in there…

“I had the place vetted and checked out by O. He also has a way to acquire it, although it’ll end up costing me an arm and a leg,” she said in a serious voice, for what was probably the first time since the beginning of this call.

“Wait, you plan on buying it?” I said dumbfoundedly. Lisa, who had been politely silent this whole time, tilted her head at the sudden change in my tone.

“Sorry,” I mouthed at her while covering my phone.

“Well, I’ve been mulling over it for a while. And I do need a functional base of operation, and since our team is officially composed of more than just me, I don’t think my apartment is the best way to go. Plus, obviously, it solves our… other issue.”

She was right, I thought. Although I struggled to understand how the abandoned precinct was the best candidate for a potential base of operation. It was merely more than a creepy abandoned and decrepit building, more fit for gangs and evildoers than… Wait, that’s the point, isn’t it?

I rolled my eyes as I came to the only logical conclusion that Alison’s twisted brain could have come up with. She planned on making it a lair. Presumably, and most logically, a supervillain lair. I had noticed that while she absolutely didn’t give a flying crap about the labels people could put on her, she seemed to put emphasis on everything that could brand her as a ‘supervillain’.

“Aren’t you also doing it for the… how do I call it… Vibe?” I said sarcastically.

She didn’t answer. I had hit the nail right on the head.

I had to admit, Alison’s insistence on following as many Harley Quinn tropes as she could while narrowly avoiding copyright infringement could be seen as a somewhat smart move. I had seen it published in some random article that self-identified ‘supervillains’ were seen as goofier, and thus less harmful, than ‘regular’ criminals, Impacted or not. It didn’t seem to matter whether or not they caused more damage; a random buffoon in a colorful costume was just more marketable to the ordinary citizen than a common low-life thief. I was convinced of that last point as I, for one, was guilty of that exact assumption.

Despite all this, I knew that at least a tiny part of her just wanted to look cool and badass.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she finally said. “Anyway, see you later.”

As per usual, she hung up before I could reply. I rolled my eyes hard enough that my muscles started hurting.

“Family trouble?” Lisa asked with a sympathetic smile.

“Yeah, let’s call it that,” I said with a snort.

“Did the crack-tram ride go ok?” Alison asked in a casual voice while sipping on what I guessed was coffee.

“Think so,” I answered absentmindedly as I took a sip out of my can of coke.

The bus ride from campus had been pretty banal, but the twenty minutes walk to the precinct made me regret not being able to take a cab or an uber there. Alison had strongly ‘advised’ me not to spend money in any way that could be traced or linked with our operations, so I let the stacking bills pile up at the bottom of my cupboard.

The issue was that Alison somehow managed to pay me in low-denomination bills so that the large amounts of cash she handed me wouldn’t look out of place anywhere in the life of a second-year university student. I understood the matter of not giving me 500€ bills, which would have been bounced back pretty much anywhere, as they had been taken out of circulation to curb international crime. But I couldn’t help and be slightly annoyed at the sheer amount of slightly crumpled 5€ and 10€ bills that took up much more space than they needed to.

“So, what do you think?” Alison asked, shaking me out of my contemplation.

“I’m honestly quite impressed at how efficiently you cleaned out this place,” I said in earnest. “I didn’t picture you as the fast-cleaning type.”

“Yeah, I’m more of the fast-dirtying type,” she said with a proud smirk. “The cleanup was actually done by Mr. O’s goons a few days ago. The only thing I did was bring the furniture and a generator.”

The place looked far from properly furnished—let alone livable—, and I couldn’t help but wonder how and why Alison thought this was the best place to house two runaway teenagers.

“Where are they, by the way? I don’t think I’ve seen them since I came in,” I asked.

“Exploring, I think. That little girl has got no sense of danger whatsoever. It’s impressive,” she noted and paused. “Quite the opposite of you, in a way.”

I simply stared at her in contempt. Those little jabs had lost their bite after spending a few days with Alison. I still felt peeved when she pointed it out, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was a few weeks ago.

“It’s a joke, Alex,” she said in a condescending voice.

“And I’m rolling on the floor,” I deadpanned.

“You need to grow a…” Alison started as I cut her off.

“A thicker skin, I know…”

“Oh, speaking of which, I’ve got news from our bald unbreakable friend,” she said with a smirk.

Was that reference on purpose…?

“He somehow woke up after the cops showed up,” she said calmly. “And managed to escape.”

Although I didn’t show it, I was quite impressed. Alison had told me that exact thing would happen after we knocked him out a second time. It was both comforting and distressing that she managed to be right about so many different things while acting so chaotic.

“Isn’t this bad, though?” I asked with a frown. “Isn’t he going to seek revenge?”

“Goons like him don’t have the power, let alone the motivation to go through with revenge. Plus, if I’m honest, he was quite professional for a man in this line of work.”

I cocked my brow and raised my palm, gesturing for her to expand on that last sentence.

“He knows that it was business, and had the tables been turned, he would have done the same. Actually, he did do the same… Plus, I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t too happy to be working with that piece of shit De Sevin.”

Which meant that this end was tied… for now. Some nagging feeling at the back of my skull told me I should be freaking out at the fact that a loose Rampant had beef with Alison and me, but at the moment, it was quiet enough that I could ignore it.

“Alright, so, what about our plans now? What do we do?” I asked.

“We’re going to have to do something I absolutely hate,” she said dourly.

“And what’s that?” I asked warily.

“We wait and do nothing,” she replied.

“Wait, that’s it? How is this bad?” I asked incredulously.

“It’s when you wait for your opponent to act that you usually get fucked,” she said. “I like to be proactive. But if there’s one bad thing about wiping the board, it’s that you end up lost on what to do.”

I deduced that ‘wiping the board’ referred to killing all of her immediate opponents in the last few weeks and that now she had to wait for her opponents to make a move to know what to do, but I couldn’t quite grasp the reasoning behind the rest of her statement.

“Haven’t you been planning this for years? Shouldn’t you know what comes next?” I asked.

“That’s not how plans work,” she said with a sigh. “First, you gotta have a set of primary objectives. They serve as a ‘guide’ of sorts and help you steer your decisions. Then you got to avoid obstacles and be flexible in the way you go through each step. Think of it as naval exploration. You kinda know where you’re going, but you’re not exactly sure how or when. You just know you will go through storms, windless days, etc.”

She paused to take a long last sip of her coffee and set the mug down on the heap of cinder blocks she was using as a coffee table. Then, with the grace and elegance of a semi-truck, she wiped her mouth with her sleeve and belched.

“If you just planned a straight line,” she continued. “the first unforeseen events you’re going to face will put you off course, and you’re going to have to start over. Conversely, if you don’t have a strong sense of where to go, you’re just going to tumble from one problem to another without advancing towards your goal.”

“That last possibility sounds eerily familiar,” I said mockingly.

She rolled her eyes and ignored the jab.

“Anyway, as I’ve told you, I’ve talked with O. He’s in agreement that we should lay low to see who makes moves next. In the meantime, we could start training you.”

“Training me?” I asked skeptically. “Training me to do what?”

“Fight, be sneaky, be more useful in our operations.”

“And what would that entail, exactly? Self-defense lessons?” I asked with a raised brow.

“Among other things, yes. But probably not the kind you’re thinking of,” Alison said as she leaned forward. “We’ll train you to be effective in fights, and that means playing dirty. Not playing fair.”

“Let me guess, more kicks to the balls and fewer punches to the nose?” I asked in a mock tone.

“Precisely,” she grinned a wicked smile.

“Fuck!” I swore, doubling over as I struggled to catch my breath. “I don’t feel like this is fair… or helping,”

No matter the usefulness of my healing abilities against severed limbs, a punch to the stomach seemed to have the exact same effect as they did on anybody else. Alison’s first lesson in ‘street fighting’, as she called it, mainly had been comprised of just her hitting me in all the most painful places. Granted, I had to get a little more resilient to pain if I was to be of any use in a fight in the future, but I didn’t think that being repeatedly punched in the stomach and in the nose was the best way to go.

At least she agreed not to go for the nuts… yet. I thought sourly.

“Think of it as desensitization, like for an allergy,” she said as she jumped up and down in a kickboxing stance.

Yes, I’m allergic to punching and kicking, and the best way to treat it is to deck me as much as possible until I faint. I thought sarcastically but refrained from saying it out loud. Mostly because I couldn’t utter the whole sentence at the moment.

“Alright, but can we—” I got interrupted as Alison kicked me straight in the nose, eliciting a yelp followed by a drawn-out scream from me.

“FUUUUUUUUCK,” I yelled as I tried stopping the bleeding before it exited my nose.

It was a good thing that the back of the precinct was walled off from the other places in the vicinity. I couldn’t help but cast a quick worried glance at our surroundings to make sure no one had been alerted by the noise. But as was becoming more and more apparent, no one seemed to come across the vicinity, even during the day.

Although the grounds were perfect for the current ‘spar’ we were having, doing so during the day felt weird.

“That fucking hurts!” I said as I spat a glob of snot and blood on the dirty ground.

“Then fucking dodge it,” Alison said with a snarl. “Or block it. Or do anything other than complaining. We’re training you to withstand those kinds of things, not to be a little bitch.”

I grunted out of frustration and tried punching at her, but, as I was well-informed by now, she nimbly avoided and dodged each blow. Out of the two hours we had been training for, I had landed precisely two blows on her.

“How did you even get knocked out by the bald guy?” I asked in frustration. “You have dodged pretty much all my blows.”

“He’s like a fucking golem, in case you forgot. Though I will admit, I was cocky and underestimated his strength… but I know exactly what yours is. It’s zero,” Alison taunted.

“Still knocked him out in the end!”

As I finished the sentence, I lunged forward in an attempt to tackle Alison, but she simply raised her knee and hit me square in the jaw.

I got knocked back and fell on my head. I think I might have fainted for a few seconds as the next thing I remembered was Alison slapping my cheeks.

“Wha—what?” I asked eloquently as my surroundings tried their hardest to stabilize themselves.

“Easy there, tiger,” she said with a hint of concern in her voice. “I think we’re done for the day.”

“Yes, please,” I murmured as my senses started coming back to me, along with the beginning of what would no doubt be an unpleasant headache.

The next few days were some of the worst in my life—physically speaking. I hadn’t killed or helped to kill anybody, so there was that, but my repeated sparring sessions with Alison left me sore and bruised all over. I found out, quite surprisingly, that most of the injuries didn’t heal at an accelerated rate, but some of them did. The bleeding, especially, seemed to trigger my healing ability faster than anything else.

Regular bruises and sore muscles didn’t seem to be fully covered by my auto-healthcare package, for some reason. I also found out that I could indeed regrow teeth after Alison had knocked one out of my mouth yesterday. On the flip side, I managed to land a solid blow on her yesterday. Though Alison complained that a punch to the boob wasn’t going to be effective against most of our opponents, I was still satisfied with that small victory.

In the meantime, Yvan and Marie-Anne had started cleaning out the precinct and making it their own. The transformation wasn’t quite there, but it looked a bit more habitable in the few rooms they had started decorating than from the outside. Each of them had made themselves a ‘room’ after a few days, both furnished with a TV, a computer, and a bed. Yvan had even taken it upon himself to make a guest room that Alison ended up using while she was still working on the place.

Speaking of which, Alison had somehow managed to get the electricity working and the water running in the whole building. If I understood correctly, she now owned the precinct and the area surrounding it through a shell company called ‘RodentExpress’. Yvan, Marianne, and I had tried asking her what that name was about, but she refused to expand on it.

I wasn’t particularly good at math—nor bills— but I knew that this must have cost a lot, especially since I looked at the price of real estate in town. Most towns this close to the Swiss border shared the common flaw of having real-estate prices comparable to those in Geneva, without the corresponding wages. I knew that Alison had to have some manner of wealth, seeing how much I was paid, but to think she could buy such a massive building on a whim really went to show how much more she made than me.

Maybe I won’t have to do this for too long until retirement. I thought half-heartedly, but I knew full well that this kind of wishful thinking would probably lead me to some sort of massive disappointment down the road.

Since Tuesday, I had also started hanging out more and more with Lisa at and outside of class and even talking to her through text messages. I still didn’t quite know if that could be considered flirting, but I felt that we were growing closer than I had been with anybody aside from my family and my psychiatrist.

The issue was that, in an unexpected text message, Lisa had asked me if I wanted to come to a party at one of her friends’ flat on Saturday night. I had never been to a party before, as I lacked the one thing that made them possible: a stable group of friends. I was pretty anxious at the prospect of looking too ‘out of place’ there but also excited at the opportunity to meet new people.

As usual, I had acted impulsively and accepted before fully thinking things through, not that it mattered much anyway.

I literally killed a crooked cop after storming his human-trafficking hideout. I don’t get to play coy about going to a party. I thought resolutely.

Maybe having a social life would help me deal with having more serious existential issues to deal with. Perhaps it would make it all worse. But no matter what, I reasoned that the best way to proceed was to do the same thing I did with Alison. I would try to see where it got me.

My phone buzzed with Lisa’s reply to my own.

“Awesome, see you there 😊” the message simply read.

I felt the unfamiliar feeling of a slight buzz deep in my stomach. Is this what they call the butterflies?

The sound was LOUD, and the music was—at least according to my tastes—absolutely awful. The whole place reeked of cigarette and joint smoke, and I was pretty sure that I was currently standing in a puddle of spilled beer.

“So, Alex, right?” a blond girl with long straight hair asked, almost yelling above the sound of the music. “What do you do in life?”

“I study Digital Arts with Lisa,” I yelled back, pointing at Lisa, who was currently right next to me.

“Wow, so, another Leonardo Da Picasso,” the girl said with an exaggerated giggle.

I looked at Lisa in what I hoped passed for a neutral expression, though the alcohol might have dulled my ability to master my facial mannerisms.

She winced and mouthed the word ‘sorry’ at me and then turned back to the loud girl.

“He actually draws way better than me, but that’s not even the coolest part. Do you know he does Urbex?” Lisa shouted.

Although she hides it well, I think she’s actually a lot drunker than me. I thought with a chuckle.

Withstanding her stupidly drunk friends was a strain on the mind, but Lisa’s presence here soothed me.

“What’s that?” the Da Picasso girl asked as she took a large sip out of her glass, vodka presumably.

“Urban exploration? That’s swag, dude!” a guy with more pimples than hairs on the face said.

Swag? Who the fuck uses ‘swag’ in this day and age?

“Oh, is that the thing where you look for abandoned places to visit them and take videos and stuff?” A short, stocky girl with glasses and brown hair asked.

“Uh, yeah,” I replied eloquently.

“My cousin does that. That’s, like, weird but cool,” the girl continued. “Have you been with him, Lis’?”

“He hasn’t invited me yet,” Lisa said with a faint smirk while looking at me.

“Wow, not cool, you should, like, totally invite her!” the blond girl said in an exaggerated voice.

“Well, I guess I could…” I started.

“No, you gotta promise, now, or you won’t do it,” the girl cut me off loudly.

“… Sure,” I finally said with a wince.

“Awesome, please take me someplace that’s cool and creepy!” Lisa said, beaming at me.

Why did I do that? I thought as I ground my teeth. If that stupid idiot hadn’t intervened, I could have changed topics. Now I gotta commit to that ridiculous lie I made in the first place.

“Oh, and you could introduce me to your friend you were talking about!” Lisa said excitedly.

Oh, no.