The diner Lucas picked out is situated on the eighteenth floor of a business building in the opposite direction from the center as the other diner he's taken me to. It looks just as cozy, though.

There's high-traffic carpeting on the floor here, with wooden panels on the walls and bar, and wooden seats and booths. The booths and stools are all cushioned with dark green covers, and the lighting is a bit dim, which is to be expected considering the location. There are only a few strip bulbs.

"You're ordering for me," I remind him Lucas as he slides into one of the booth seats, and I slide in across from him.

"Sure," he grabs a menu and starts looking through it.

"Are you two ready to order?" A woman in her late twenties asks after approaching us a minute after we sit down. "Or do you still need a few minutes?"

"Do you have lemonade available?" Lucas asks.

"Sure do," she answers. "We just got a few bottles of lemon juice in a few hours ago."

"We'll have a couple of lemonades, then," he tells her. "And can we get a couple of orders of mozza sticks to snack on while we wait for the rest of our food? We'll probably be ready to order the rest in a few minutes."

"Sure thing," she says. "Anything else before I go back?"

"No, thank you," he tells her.

"Alright," she says. "I'll got tell them to drop the sticks, then I'll mix up your lemonade."

He turns his attention back to the menu as she steps away, and I tap his leg with a foot, causing him to look at me.

"Lemon juice in bottles?" I ask. "Not squeezed?"

"Lemonade isn't just lemon juice," he says. "There's a little sugar to reduce the sourness and just make it tart, and some water mixed in as well. It's cheaper to just buy the juice than the actual lemons for most places."

"Even though they have to squeeze it to make the bottles?"

"You aren't paying for the peel, which can be used, or the guts, which can be used," he explains. "The amount of lemons used to make the bottle of lemonade, when all is said and done, nets them more than if they simply sold the lemons. The guts can be used for certain recipes, while the rind can be used in recipes or to extract the oil from for use in things."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

Our waitress returns with our lemonades, and Lucas orders for us. For lunch, we're both getting thick double-cheeseburgers with lettuce, onion, pickles, and ketchup, a side of fries, a side of onion rings, and a salad. It turns out pretty nice, and I wish I could eat stuff like this more often.

Then I remember the recipes that Lucas has given me, and how they've turned out so far.

"I've screwed up almost everything that isn't just measuring and dumping into the slow-cooker."

"Oh, jeez," Lucas groans. "You are following the directions, right?"

"Pretty sure."

"It's only been a few meals," he mutters to himself. "It's not that bad. He's just new and needs the experience."

I decide not to let him know I heard that.

"Just… try to pay attention to the recipes," he tells me. "Read them all the way through before starting, make sure the heat is right, and that's about it. Don't forget the help section at the start of it."

I've been doing all of that. I'm still screwing things up.

"Y-yeah," I answer. "I'll do that."

Neither of us talk for the rest of lunch, Lucas seeming pretty happy to indulge in eating over conversing. I guess he's still partially in his cranky morning mood.

"I'm going to head to the center and get some exercise in before my shift starts," he says after we leave the diner. "What are you doing until you come in for the martial arts session?"

"It's what, almost one?" I ask, and he checks his watch.

"Quarter 'till."

"Probably wander around town to keep my blood flowing."

"Why don't you come to the center?" He asks. "You aren't restricted to only coming during the scheduled training, you know."

"I don't really know what else I could do," I tell him.

"Just wait at the desk," he tells me. "If Sophie's there, I can have her show you a few things."

"Sophie?" I ask.

"One of our employees," he begins walking, so I follow. "Not a family member. She began training there when her power manifested thirteen years ago, shortly after her sixth birthday. Her family didn't really know how to help her train her powers We offered her a job three years ago. Most of our non-family staff are people who had come for years that we offered the positions to. The rest are temp workers hired through an agency for a shift or three."

"Ah," I say. "How good is she? At training, I mean?"

"Better at the stuff that's not powers," he tells me. "Though if it's something related to her power, she's decent. She hasn't worked with a variety of powers much, though, so she's lacking the experience that someone like from my family has. If you'd attempted to work with her, she probably wouldn't have had the first clue of what to do for your ability."

"What's hers?" I ask. "Or, uh, is that, uh, wrong to ask?"

"No, it's fine," he says. "Some communities, it's rude to ask someone their abilities, but those are the elitist ones. Sophie doesn't hide her ability, and doesn't mind if we tell others, especially if they're a client she might be working with. Her ability is called 'needles'. She can generate needles and project them towards a target. Her ability isn't all that powerful, though. As soon as they generate, they fly forward. Straight forward. She can't control that. She can, however, control how many of them that she has out at a time, but she does have to actively sustain them. As soon as she stops, the needles disappear."

"I thought you said every ability had a 'strongest' part?" I ask. "And that people have other spells?"

"Some abilities are weaker than others," he tells me. "Especially if the blood's diluted. I've not met someone with only one part, though. With training, she's become able to create bludgeon needles. Rather than piercing you, they slam into you and break your bones."

"Ouch."

"Yep," he says. "Her best ability, though, is controlling the speed at which they fly forward. When she started off, we didn't know she could do that, and they flew at about only ten miles an hour. However, after about five years, we realized that they'd been moving faster, and guessed that she might be able to adjust the speed, too, and so she began working on that. Now, she can project them at about sixty miles an hour."

"That doesn't seem like a ten-percent gain per month," I say.

"It's not," he nods. "The gain is actually something like five to ten percent, and we normally say five percent because that's closer to normal for someone with simpler abilities, like hers. Since you can shadow-walk, though, I kind of assumed you'd be a shadow-shaper, which is a more powerful class of power user, and so would have the higher gains."

"Ah."

"Yeah," he says. "She's still pretty decent at helping power users train their bodies to help with their abilities regardless of what it is, though. All she has to know is how your body moves during the use of your power, and she can formulate a training to go help with that."

"I tend to be standing still," I point out.

"Apart from that one time on Saturday," he nods. "Yeah. But as you proved that time, you can move while doing it. It's just harder for you at the moment. If you tell her about the agility training that we're working in as part of the training, she can probably figure out a few things for you."

"That you could just tell me?"

"Yep," he says. "But she can work with you on getting started with them while I work on other things. Like my pre-work exercise."

I'm going to take a guess and say this pre-work exercise is necessary for him to not be a total grump while at work.

"Alright," I say. "I'll chat with her and see what she says, though I still need to head home and grab my bag first. I'd planned on going home after our hangout today, so I didn't bring it."

"If you don't mind me popping into your apartment, I can be there and back in a few minutes."

"Just another reason to wish my parents had helped me start training this when I discovered it," I mutter.

Lucas and I stop talking there and finish the walk back to the center in silence, and there are a man and a woman I don't recognize at the desk. The man looks to be in his fifties, while the woman looks to be maybe thirty.

"Tabitha and Amy come in at four," Lucas tells me. "These are my parents. As you can see, I got my youthful genes from my mom. Judging on her nice aging ability and my grandpa's, I'll probably be a twink for another decade. I'll be back with your stuff."

He disappears in a flash of light, and I suddenly feel very exposed with the gazes of his parents upon me.

"So you're Kieran Wolfe?" Mr. Lusvaris asks.

"Uh, yeah?" I answer.

"You are as adorable as my sister says," Mrs. Lusvaris tells me. "You've been working with Lucas for a week, right?"

"Yeah," I answer.

"How do you like it?" She asks. "I assume a lot, since you were hanging out with him this morning."

"It's nice," I answer. "I wouldn't have thought up the training schedule he gave me, and he's helped me learn a fair bit about abilities in general."

"Yeah," she says. "He mentioned you'd only used it once, when you were five? And that your parents apparently didn't seem to know how to help you train it?"

"Yeah," I say. "I guess they didn't have abilities? He's mentioned that most people manifest by the time they're ten, and everyone has by adulthood, due to the hormones of puberty and stuff."

"Nonsense," she says. "One of them had to have had an ability. However, it's possible it was minor, something they wouldn't have even thought of as an ability."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"How good's your night vision?" I ask.

"A little good, I guess," I shrug. "Nothing supernatural though."

"Are you sure?" She asks.

"I mean, I've never had something to compare it to," I say. "But I'm pretty sure. Why?"

"People with powers rooted in light," she says. "Have benefits to their eyesight. A power to not be blinded by brighter lights and to pick out light in darker times. Tell me, how easy is it for you to pick out the items in your room when it's dark in there? When there's virtually no light at all?"

"I can see the outlines of things," I shrug. "But that's really it. Nothing supernatural."

"Really?" She raises an eyebrow. "That's not normal, Kieran. Not unless there's enough light cast in there, anyway. And if there's almost none at all, then it would take the eyes of a light-wielder or shadow-wielder to pick things out with little light to see by. And I'm willing to bet one of your parents could as well."

I'm about to protest again when I realize she's right. Not just one of my parents, though. Both of them. They went out at night because 'we both inherited good night sight', and they never tripped over things in our apartment while navigating it after coming back in. Even in what most would consider total darkness. That's from a power? I'd never thought it was something special, but I guess when it was for my household, it's natural to think that way.

"You see I'm right," she smiles. "There are many people who have abilities that are slight that they never realize are abilities. They may have even trained them without realizing. I knew one boy when I was growing up who had a tendency to turn invisible whenever he felt anxious and wanted to be left alone. Didn't even know he was doing it, he'd just assumed people were leaving him alone. His ability was to disappear from the perceptions of others, so not even his clothes were noticed, as it would mean perceiving him."

"Unlike with an actual invisibility power," Mr. Lusvaris says. "Where only the body would turn invisible, so people would still see the clothes until the person learned to turn them invisible as well."

"It wasn't until he was almost twenty," Mrs. Lusvaris tells me. "That he realized he had a power. If your parents' powers were as subtle – to them – as that, then it makes sense they might not have known."

And if they both had shadow-based powers, it would explain why I came out stronger. Lucas did the same thing, coming out more powerful than either parent because he had two bloodlines with light-based powers rather than one with and one without.

"I guess that makes sense," I say. "So it may have just been seeing in the dark?"

That doesn't line up with what Lucas told me, though. How could that be a power by itself, then?

"Not just that," she says. "It could be something as concealing themselves in shadows, a subconscious activation that they weren't aware of. Or enhanced spatial awareness and mobility in shadows."

"My dad," Mrs. Lusvaris tells me. "Gained increased strength, agility, and toughness when in light. The brighter the light and the more of it there, the greater the enhancement. If your ability with that is weak, you might not even notice the increases enough to realize you have a power there."

"Once the power in the bloodline dilutes enough," Mrs. Lusvaris says. "It's pretty common for the abilities to end up as more subtle things, unnoticed for a few generations until they either fade away or get strengthened by coincidence."

"I guess that makes sense, too," I say. "So a lineage can lose an ability if it doesn't merge with another with something similar frequently enough?"

"No," Lucas speaks up, startling me as he apparently showed up while we were talking, holding my bag. "Lack of training in each generation weakens the power as well. If too many generations pass without the power being trained, it can disappear. That can be slowed or stopped by either starting to train your abilities regularly or by having a child with someone else with a magical bloodline, though one with a similar base as yours is best for that."

"And two weak bloodlines can result in someone more powerful than either parent?" I ask.

"Correct," he answers. "However, two powerful parents won't result in a child more powerful than them unless it's a case of a prodigy. The thought is that the bloodline is still there in full until it actually fades away, and that two of them mixing together results in an awakening of it. If the parents are already powerful, then the bloodline's awakened to its fuller potential. Your case – where one or two weak parents have a child, and the child seems to be strangely powerful in comparison – isn't uncommon among power users."

"It's not an extremely common thing," Mrs. Lusvaris tells me. "But it's not a rare thing, either."

"Oh, okay," I say.

"I'm going to go train," Lucas says. "I'll send Sophie down to talk with you."

Lucas then disappears from sight, and I look at his parents.

"Don't take it personally," Mr. Lusvaris tells me. "If he's not getting some, then he tends to be a grump after waking up, up until he flexes his powers a bit more than traveling to and from an apartment."

If he's not-oh. Ah, right, he told me about a certain issue power users face that I haven't really dealt with. Only slightly, but it's not bad. I guess some people are cranky if it's not dealt with well enough.

"It doesn't bother me," I tell him. "He hasn't really turned the cranky on me. Is it really okay for me to be here for, uh, seven hours? He said that it's not a problem to do stuff here until my scheduled sessions with him starts, but-"

"It's not a problem," Mrs. Lusvaris interrupts. "We have some power users who train for twelve or more hours a day in an attempt to increase their skill with it. As long as you aren't causing problems or trying to actually live here, it's fine."

I take it they've had some try to live here because it's cheaper than an apartment?

"Okay," I say. "I'll wait over there for her."