d

Aeons flowed through your fingers, and not only did the rock cool to igneous solid, but it began to flake away – to erode, as though millennia were passing through it. The dust picked up the black sand from the surface and began to whisk it away even as you continued working.

Within a few minutes, the lava flow had been reduced to a memory; memories and glittering black dust that could be swept away with ease.

'Hey!'

You turned, seeing a motorist leaning out of the window of their car.

'Yes?'

'Get the fuck out of the road!'

Throwing up a hand, you stepped back, and listened to the crackle as the car drove through the space where the obstruction had been moments earlier.

'You know, you could have told him to go fuck himself, right?'

Undercut seemed genuine in it.

'I know. Instead I'm just hoping some of that dust fucks up his car.'

After they had finished chuckling, Undercut had clapped his hand to your shoulder in camaraderie and the foreman had rushed to instruct his men in clearing up rather than demolition; you and Undercut had checked that Oneironaut's zone of obstruction had vanished and, one you confirmed that it had, you had returned to headquarters and filed your reports. It had gone smoothly, with very little interruption, and you had left feeling as though you had, at least in some part, redeemed the absolute mess that had caused the obstruction in the first place.

That left you without a patrol scheduled for Tuesday, and as a result you had gone in prepared to deal with something else; making sure that such a thing never happened again.

Organising a team tactics session didn't take long. School was out for basically everyone, and so with a day free all it had taken was a quick confirmation with Melder, who used his pull as Ward's Leader to make it a mandatory session. Based on his own humiliation during the conflict, you got the feeling that he was as eager to ensure there was no repetition as you were.

The entire process was much more streamlined than you had anticipated.

As the only area-of-effect master on the team, Scrivener had been largely exempted from participation, something which caused him no small quantity of personal satisfaction; that his power lent him a degree of resistance meant that training to counter it didn't really matter for him so much as it did for others too.

Of course, the same could be said for Regent – who had shrugged off whatever Alienate had attempted during the Octave fight with only the ominous statement that he had 'felt worse', and Rachel, who appeared to have essentially bypassed the mastering by having a brain which simply wasn't so easily diverted as your own and Melder's.

Nevertheless, the two took part in the training well enough, if only to make the numbers work. While your own patrols thus far had taken place in groups of four in most cases, that was due to your team needing to learn the area. Sets of two or three were more common, and with Scrivener sat out that left six Wards who could work either in pairs or trios to emulate common patrol formations.

'So, I'm just putting you under a general compulsion to stop fighting. Or to lose the active motivation to fight. However you want to look at it,' Scrivener said, before he applied the technique. 'The whole point is going to be for you guys to see if you can fight through it enough to keep sparring and for each of you to keep an eye on each other. If you notice someone else flagging, you should check them and prompt them on. If they ever get to a point where you can't get them going, you're to practice getting them into the blue zone.'

He waved a hand over to the corner of the room which had been marked by a blue line of tape on the floor. Representing cover, it served as a backup for those who had been mastered sufficiently as to be no longer useful; it went without saying that in actual practice, the blue corner would be accompanied by hefty volumes of containment foam to ensure the mastered individual didn't suddenly turn around and attack their own teammates.

Previously banished, you felt the tension in your stomach return; containment foam did about as little to you as normal foam did to anyone else, and if someone managed to master you more severely than Alienate had, you weren't sure what kind of damage you were going to do.

Maybe avoiding Octave territory would be prudent, at least until you could figure out something more permanent. It was hard to say.

From then, training was straightforward. Starting in pairs, you worked with two different partners – one with the ability to resist mastering in Alec, which went fairly well, and another with Anchor, who lacked any such resistance, which went slightly less well. Moving into trios saw slightly more success, if only because the larger groups made it pretty difficult to form a trio without at least one of Alec or Rachel in it, either of whom were fully capable of shrugging off Scrivener's low level mastering and perfectly happy to give you a jab with the blunt end of a staff or a finger in the shoulder, curved claw pointed enough to get even your attention, and push you back into motion.

Only once did anyone make a move to switch you over to the blue zone, and just the attempt alone had been enough to snap you back into action. Phyton had been surprised when her grasp, strong as it was, had been shrugged off and you had assured her you were going to be okay.

All in all, you were glad that you did the training but entirely uncertain of how well it would work.

While Scrivener's compulsion to stop fighting roughly imitated Alienate's attempt to turn you away from conflict, it didn't have quite the same insidious subtlety and it was far easier to notice; you were briefly tempted to see how things would go if he was overcharged, but you decided not to make the offer. There was a level of danger inherent to using that power that he couldn't normally access, and while you trusted him – especially within the confines of the PRT itself – not to misuse it, the risk of there being an accident when using it on so many people, including some people who normally had mastering resistance of some level, didn't seem like a good idea.

With training wrapping up, you looked at the clock in the corner of the room and saw the time. Still early enough to try something else, and so, with the majority of the team trailing out of the room, you went over to Alec and pulled him aside.

'Hey, can I borrow you for a moment?'

'My dear,' he said, 'I'm a taken man these days. Vista would have my head.'

The abrupt flick you dealt to his forehead put a small crater in his mask, and he reached up to rub at it as if it were his flesh.

'Ow. What do you want?'

'I was wondering if you might be willing to give me a hand with my own Master power. I know it's not the same as yours, since it targets animals, but I thought if anyone might have an idea on getting the hang of one on one mastery without a guide to learn from, it might be you.'

Alec went still, but the moment passed more quickly than you could articulate it.

'Sure. You definitely can't train the way I did, but I guess we both are learning on our own, in a manner of speaking. Come with me.'

He set off moving more abruptly than you were used to from him and you followed him out, thankful for once that your height came with long enough legs to keep up with his pace without having to do an embarrassing half-jog through the hallways or, even worse, summon your Fairy Wings just to match stride with someone who had no physical empowerments.

Luckily the training rooms weren't far from the destination he was taking you to; the back courtyard of the PRT building, which had a few withered plants and a handful of benches around a large central area.

'Animals, right? Here's your best bet. Pick birds. Birds are good because you can get them to go away and that tells you something.'

For the next ten minutes he guided you with more precision than you might have expected through a trial run on your master ability; following his instructions, you approached the trees and selected three birds of roughly the same size and – you thought – the same species. Ornithology was not one of your talents, and unfortunately it wasn't one of Alec's either, since he seemed to regard the birds with the same level of contempt that most people reserved for cockroaches.

'The first bird,' he told you, 'you're going to order to come back here tomorrow with a feather held in its beak around lunch-time. You're going to come back then yourself and check it, and if it's there with the feather, you know it can leave and come back on order. The second bird,' he pointed out to the next, slightly fatter specimen, 'is going to have the same task but it's gonna come back next week. That way you can test if your orders last that long.'

He paused for a second, as though considering what he was going to say deeply.

'The third bird, you're going to tell to take a feather to my apartment window tomorrow morning.'

'Why?'

'Because you don't know where I live exactly, so it'll tell you if the bird can figure out basic information for itself or whether it needs to borrow your own knowledge for stuff. Doesn't really matter in the long run, but it's good to know. Comes in handy.'

You weren't really sure how he would know that, but it made a degree of sense, and one by one you gave the birds the orders that he had outlined; the flow of power in your words felt completely transparent, and if you weren't actively trying to pay attention to it, you weren't sure that you would have noticed it at all. Alec certainly made no mention of it, despite watching it with his own eyes.

'Thanks Alec,' you said. 'I've been thinking for a while about how I could test that power out. It's hard to get practice with a Master power without just going around giving out stupid orders.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'It can be.'

'We should hang out more soon, us both and Rachel. Sound good?'

'Sure. Who knows, maybe if you get the hang of this animal stuff we can all take a trip and watch you master the Planarian. It'll be a hoot.'

The two of you packed back up and went inside, and Alec went off his own way; apparently he had plans for the afternoon, though you didn't really want to question him on them.

He had touched on an interesting idea, though. Could you master the Planarian? You doubted it, if it was that easy they probably would have just had Scrivener do it by now, or else some group like Octave would have taken the thing in to use as an attack dog; you shuddered at the thought of that. While you had no real intimate knowledge of the Planarian, the fact that it hadn't died despite Cinereal actively trying to make it dead told you all that you needed to know. Anyone who could actively take a prolonged assassination attempt from a Protectorate head and keep walking around was something that didn't sound like a fun enemy.

Chances I could master the Planarian if I tried?

0%

You'd expected about as much. Either you just didn't have something powerful enough to do it, which was a possibility, or – more likely – the creature was just the kind of thing that you couldn't master at all, regardless of how strong you were. They could drag Heartbreaker down from Canada and point him at the thing, and it would have no effect.

Wondering, you couldn't help but ask yourself the question.

Chances that we could just negotiate something with the Planarian? Chances that it could be reasoned with?

0%, 27%

Now that was a surprise. No chance of a negotiation, but some chance of there being a way to reason with it? You wondered what that could even mean in the case of something like that. Somehow you didn't think that Cinereal would be too hot on the idea of giving it monthly sacrifices to keep it satiated, and the idea of actually trying to talk to it seemed bizarre.

Chances that I could actually talk to the Planarian?

9%

Chances that anyone else is better equipped to talk to the Planarian?

0%

Huh. Even stranger. You couldn't deny that from time to time you'd shown some skill as a negotiator but the idea that nobody but you had a chance at all seemed risible. Still, the fact that there was a possibility in even some abstract world meant that it was worth thinking about.

In the case of a negotiation gone wrong though, there was another obvious question you wanted to ask yourself.

Chances that overcharging Cinereal would give her the juice she needed to just kill the Planarian outright?

0%

Right. That would just be too easy.

As you asked questions, you could feel the void in your head pulse. It did that sometimes, though you couldn't really work out what prompted it other than those moments that you were gaining powers. This didn't feel like one of those times though, and you reached out towards it.

Sometimes it felt that there was something at once immeasurably thin and infinitely vast between you and it. Close enough to touch, and yet far enough that you could fly forever in its direction and never even begin to get close. It was something that you would find impossible to describe to someone, and any attempt would invariably make you seem mad at the least, and absolutely certifiable at the most.

On a rare occasion, you could feel something from it. You remembered back all the times you'd perceived something you would even categorise as an emotion. Was that simply something you were feeling for yourself, filtered through the lens of abstract detachment; your own feelings, compartmentalised in the face of danger? You did typically feel it during intense moments, so maybe it was just your brain's way of protecting you from moments where things were getting too much.

It was as good a theory as you could imagine, but it didn't feel right. There was something distant about it, and distant in the mundane way rather than the way that approached the paradoxical closeness of the void.

Chances that I'm feeling something other than just my own feelings in those moments?

Inconclusive.

You weren't sure how to take that.

When you flew home, it was with the weight of discontent in your stomach rather than the shame and regret that you had felt over the conflict with Octave.

At least you might get a feather delivered the next day. That might cheer you up.

Actions Remaining:

- Try out the following hobbies: reading, cooking, woodworking, swimming, puzzles

- Work on designing some kind of restraint method with your tinkertech

- Work on your tinkertech in this order: scans, bots, suits (1, 3, 10)

- Follow up on crisis management (Wednesday 11th May)

- Test Shadow Snare in non-combat situations

- Hold a Q&A with the Atlanta community, preventing Regent and Scrivener from 'helping'

- Ask Percentile the chances that Tritium dislikes the PRT for a particular reason

- Find time to hang out with Rachel and Alec

Relatively short chapter but a very quick turnaround given the last minute change of the voting time! In this update, we patrolled with Undercut, did some public goodwill, trained with the other Wards in tactics that might help us avoid repeating the Mastering failure, and got a start on Disney Princess by taking Regent's advice. We even had enough time at the end to ask some questions about the Planarian and turn introspective, attempting to reach out to the void - with mixed results.

Lot of goals remaining: how do we achieve them? Leave your suggestions for goal-orientated actions, or just things you'd like to see, in the following format: