The next day dawned very much the same as the previous one, but this time Alec rose much earlier than he had the morning before. For a few minutes he simply gazed around the dark-walled room, listening to the enormous rumbling snores issuing from the beds around him. He looked across at the alarm clock perched on the bedside table, which currently read 3:42.

Alec rolled around in bed for a few minutes, trying to return to sleep, but he felt too restless to doze off again and after a while simply gave up; instead he found his slippers, stood up, and strode out of the room as quietly as he could. He had rarely seen the Dormitory this peaceful. How different it was to walk through the long corridors, not hearing the usual raucous laughter bursting from every room. He sauntered downstairs, where the green flame in the grate was burning very low, but still casting its light around the room.

His feet took him mechanically towards the front of the Dormitory, where the great white cypress tree gleamed ghostly white beneath the full moon. Alec stood there for a long moment, feeling the cool wind playing across his face, listening to the rush of the sea around the island, something he couldn't usually hear over the bustle and chatter of the day —

“Michaels!”

Alec jumped, his eyes snapping open at the sound of the voice hissing through the darkness. He looked wildly around, then spotted a pair of eyes peering at him from out of the gloom. His observer strode from out of the patch of shadows he was standing in and into a pool of moonlight, throwing his figure into sharp relief. It was Professor Wyatt.

“Oh — hello, Sir,” Alec said nervously.

“What are you doing out here so late?” Professor Wyatt said, watching him suspiciously. “You should be asleep in your dorm room!”

“Oh — well, I — er, couldn't sleep, sir. My roommates’ snoring — it's like a jackhammer. I just needed some peace.” Alec grinned tentatively.

“Well — understandable,” said Wyatt, snorting. “But the common area wasn't a good enough reprieve for you?”

Alec shrugged. “It seemed like a nice night for it. Um — but what are you doing down here so late — sir?” Alec said tremulously, feeling as though he was pressing his luck.

“I? I was on my way back to my office, having just sorted out an issue with a few other restless souls. I'm the head of the Hades Dormitory,” he added, at Alec’s look of incomprehension.

Alec stared at him. “Really?”

“Yes, really. If you had been paying attention at dinnertime yesterday, you likely would have heard.”

A chilly wind whistled through the area, rustling their nightclothes and Professor Wyatt’s golden hair, which looked silver in the pale moonlight. The inspector sighed.

“Well, you should get back inside now,” he said. “No one should be outside this late — or early, that is.” He nodded, waited until Alec had disappeared into the common room once more, and whisked away into the darkness.

Alec, however, did not return to the dorm room. Instead he sank into one of the more comfortable armchairs further away from the fire, staring blankly into the emerald blaze. It was then that the thought of the Tournament returned to him, unbidden, yet not unwelcome. He wasn't yet sure whether or not he would enter, but the fact remained clear that if he did eventually decide to, he would need to become more acquainted with his powers. His powers as an Elemental, which Wildfire had declared him.

Elementals were some of the more common type of heroes, Alec knew, superhumans whose powers revolved around manipulation of a certain elemental force. Wildfire, of course, was a fire Elemental, and though the prospect of manipulating fire would seem limited to merely shooting tongues of flame at enemies, their squad leader had made it perfectly clear that the possibilities with which he might use his powers were quite ranged.

Alec suddenly stood up, gazing at the ornate fireplace, gleaming in the light of the fire nestling in its grate. He strode over to it, then slowly, tentatively, reached out a hand, and touched the stone.

Alec closed his eyes and concentrated, feeling the warm rock beneath his fingers. The effect was immediate: there was a loud rasping noise, Alec’s hands felt suddenly cold and stiff, and he opened his eyes; by the emerald glow of the fire he saw that his skin now mirrored the white marble of the fireplace. He held his hand up to his eyes, flexing his fingers, which now resembled those of a statue. This was what Wildfire had said would happen, but he had also noted that Alec could likely do more with this power. He thought of Maddison, who could create weapons from her bones, and shrugged — what’ve I got to lose?

Again he closed his eyes, and again he concentrated. A funny bubbling sound soon joined the crackling of the grate. Slowly he opened his eyes, and this time they went wide, not with shock as they had the day before, but with awe.

The stone from his palm seemed to be dissolving, dribbles of liquid marble rising into the air to take form in one large, ever-welling clump. At last it stopped, and the lumpy orb of marble simply hovered there, waiting to be molded. Alec frowned for a moment, contemplating, then held both hands above the ball. Though his fingers hung inches away from it, he could feel a sort of pull on them, as though he was tugging at invisible strings. With every wiggle of his hands, the ball contorted in shape; he raised his left, clutching at the ball: it twisted, spun, rippled, and swayed, all in order.

It was surprisingly easy. He whiled away the rest of the dark hours, with almost no thought paid to the slowly brightening sunlight, morphing the ball.

Eventually his senses reclaimed him, and he became aware of how much time had slipped away by the quality of the sunlight now streaming in through the high windows. The earth skin had faded again, but the shapeless marble blob was still hovering before him.

For a moment he was unsure of what to do with it, but then he decided that he would keep it, to show Wildfire the progress (however little) he had made. Concentrating his hardest yet, he forced the lump into the shape of a small slab, rather like a mini tablet, and hardened it. It solidified in seconds, transitioning from a viscous fluid to a smooth, gleaming mass of stone. It might have been carved out of the fireplace itself.

He snatched it from the air and pocketed it, then hurried up to his room. Jonah, Zachariah, and Javon were just stirring, and none seemed to notice that Alec had not been present until now. Grumbling and yawning, they rose, bleary-eyed, seized their day-clothes, and headed off to the bathrooms, Alec with them.

At last they showered, dressed, and set off for breakfast. Ethan did not take a seat beside them as he had the day before, and Maddison’s figure was lost amid the wave of black-and-bronze around their table, but Alec hardly missed them. Instead, he showed the other three the marble slab, though underneath the table, for it was against the rules to use your powers unless given permission by the teachers.

“You made this?” Zachariah said in an astounded voice, as Jonah turned it over and over in his hands, examining every inch.

“Yep.” Alec grinned. “Check it out.” He took it back from them and held it tightly in his palm. He had never tried to use Earth Mimicry on a lone body part, but as he had never intentionally used it at all until that morning, which had turned out quite well, he attempted it now, concentrating only on the hand clutching the block. The marble slid smoothly over his fingers, up his wrist, and stopped at his elbow. Under their amazed gazes, he performed the same trick as he had that morning, liquidizing the stone and pooling the droplets together to form three marble-like balls, which each of them caught as he solidified them.

“I can't wait to show it to Wildfire,” Alec said excitedly. They finished their breakfast soon afterwards and hurried off to the first class on the schedule. But as it transpired, the first time Alec would demonstrate this ability for a teacher would not be during his evening meeting with their squad leader.

Their first lesson of the second day was Gym, and just like Computer Science, it was far different than Alec had imagined. This class took place, as expected, in the Gymnasium, which, like the assessors’ room, contained a panel and tiles that could be replaced with new environments. The teacher, Professor Elliott, was quite as mad as Professor Sheilds, though vastly more aggressive. With a manic glint in his eyes, he summoned a desert-like terrain littered here and there with old, dried-up trees, and lined with all sorts of traps, from mini geysers that blasted jets of thick, scarlet fluid with force enough to send their unwary victims flying, to hollow sections of earth that were covered so smoothly that if one was not careful enough they would sink into eight-feet tunnels (where they would have to find ways to climb out themselves or remain there until the end of the lesson), and many horrific-sounding others, all proudly proclaimed by Professor Elliott and all surrounding a rather ugly dummy wrapped in a thick straitjacket near the center of the field.

Their objective for the lesson was to try to get around the traps and to the dummy within five minutes, but nearly everyone failed, including the two Zeus students with whom they shared the class. By the time it was Alec’s turn, quite a few of the more brutal-looking traps had already been set off, and the sites of their activation served as quite useful landmarks, so that he managed to pick his way across the field unencumbered and close in on the dummy.

But at that moment several of the cubes which had followed him during his assessment rose suddenly from the ground, as though they too had been covered in patches of sand. Lasers blasted through the air, ripping up the sand and making one girl who had fallen into a pit nearby scream in terror.

At this point, however, the memory of all he had done that morning returned to him, and he seized the slab of marble that he had made that morning, coating himself in the material. He heard many ooohs and aaahs as he strode casually over to the dummy, ignoring the jets of red light issuing from the cubes hovering around him, seized its wrist, and carried it back over to the teacher's side, earning him a round of applause from the watching crowd.

“Not bad, Morrison!” Professor Elliott roared, making some kind of note on a clipboard. “Earth Mimicry, eh? Another Elemental, then? Not bad at all!”

“Thank you, Sir,” Alec said, beaming as the marble vanished once again from his skin. “But it's actually Michaels —”

“Well, Morgan,” said Professor Elliott, who seemed not to have heard a word Alec had said, “you can just stand over there with the rest of the students who've gone already while the others take their turns.”

“Oh, but, Sir,” a Poseidon girl piped up, looking hopeful, “the field seems to have been cleared already, that means the rest of us won't be able to —"

“Oh, don't you worry there, girlie,” Professor Elliott said with a truly disturbing smile. “You're all going to get a turn, there are plenty of traps for everyone. And put the dummy back, will you, Milo, while the next person gets ready.”

------------------------------------------

Following their Gym lesson was Clothing and Textiles. Lined along the classroom walls were designs of old superhero suits created by past students. Some of them looked quite handsome, others quite awful. According to the teacher, Professor Wright, a dark woman with short, curly, black hair, this batch of first-years too would be creating their own costumes, which would be used for special occasions in later years. Images immediately began to stream into Alec’s mind of his own desired uniform, and he found himself actually quite eager to begin, but soon realized, as Professor Wright began to waft around handing out textbooks, that they would not be starting this any time soon.

After lunch, they proceeded to Criminal Justice; Alec, who had only ever really thought about the actual crime-fighting position of other superheroes, only just now began to appreciate how much more there was to heroics than simply finding and fighting them as he left the class with his hand sore from taking an hour and a half’s worth of notes about villain trials and where superheroes stand within the law.

He cheered up slightly as the Hades students made their way down to the track field to meet their squad leaders again, but when they reached the noise and bustle of the pitch, they saw that Wildfire was not there.

Instead they were met by Maddison and Ethan, who relayed the message that he had already gone ahead and was waiting for them in the spot they had fought in the day before. Together they strode towards the clearing, where they found Wildfire waiting for them, seated on the stump of the tree Ethan had hurled at him yesterday. His head was in his hands and there was a crutch leaning beside him, but he looked up as they approached.

“Are you okay?” Javon asked, looking at him with concern.

“Yes, I'm — I'm fine,” he said, though he certainly didn't look it. His skin was paler than yesterday, and his hair seemed to have drained even further of colour, so that it appeared to be approaching silver. “Got a bit too excited yesterday, forgot that I should be taking it easy, but it's no big deal.” He seized the crutch and pushed himself to his feet with a groan. “Oh, don't look at me like that, I told you, I'm fine. So, you all ready?”

“Yes, but, before we start, we were talking about the Tournament,” Maddison said.

“The Interform Tournament?”

“That's the one!” Javon said brightly.

Wildfire raised one of his pale eyebrows. “You seriously want to enter?”

“Well —” Alec began uncertainly, but Maddison threw him a sharp look and he hastily changed tack: “We're thinking about it.”

“And you'll be needing my recommendation?” Wildfire asked slowly.

“I suppose,” Alec said, shrugging.

Wildfire looked at them for several seconds, those icy blue eyes, like oceans of blue surrounding tiny black dots, raking every face. Then he said, “Nope, not a chance. So, about today's lesson —”

“Wait, hold on!” Alec said, taken aback. “What do you mean no?”

“The Interform Tournament was created so that young superhumans-in-training could gain real hero experience — or as close to that as possible. But at its heart, it's about teamwork, since teams of any and all sizes are promoted by the League. I already suffered the biggest shock of my career this week, you think I want to add salt to that wound by being the idiot who recommended the worst team in the whole first year to compete?”

“The worst team —!” Maddison began in tones of outrage.

Wildfire scoffed. “Please. The tension between all of you is so thick I'm surprised you can even stand this close to one another. You spend most of your time glaring at everyone here; you” — he addressed Ethan — “look like you couldn't care less about what happens to them unless it directly affects you. (Ethan shrugged in a he's-got-a-point sort of way.) And you two, you seem good enough, but that's just the surface level. This one's clearly hiding something from the rest of you,” he said, nodding at Javon. “And your insecurities couldn't be more obvious if you actually carried around a neon sign detailing them,” he added to Alec. “Really, as the alum in charge of you, it'd be kinder not to enter you.”

“You — you can't treat us like this!” Maddison said. She looked scandalized. “You're supposed to help us — to lead —”

“You want me to enter you in that Tournament, show me you can act as a team first. Until you can do that, consider it off the table. Now, let's return to —”

But Maddison turned around with a cry of rage and stormed away yet again, vanishing into the trees behind them. Ethan and Javon went as well, and Alec followed, throwing a look of deepest disgust at their squad leader before he was lost to view among the trees.