Chapter 21
I’m not gonna lie. I was kind of jacked for Survival class, specifically the new kid from WT.
I was disappointed when he got off easy.
I had expected Jenks to drop on us like a ton of bricks, but he didn’t.
He went light: a basic PT warm up, a rotation of our stick fighting drills, and then an entire, all four grades, class discussion on levels of alertness and the idea of OODA loops.
“Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act,” Jenks said.
“Emergency decision-making with careful intention and with speed. Always be alert and gather information through observation. Think about what that information means for you and your situation. Notice the changes when they happen. Hunky dory one moment and then suddenly Oh Shit! Stay aware of the Oh Shit. Then don’t fall into analysis paralysis. Decide what to do and then do it. Act.”
“Better to do something than sit frozen,” Mal said.
“Like Blackmore popping Fife in the gut,” Steve threw in.
“Yup. How’d it go down, Craig?” Jenks asked.
“Loudmouth started in on a family. Vesta observed that he was a nasty bully. I oriented on the fact that I don’t like bullies. I then decided to ruin his fun and acted.”
“Which we all saw on the news,” Jenks said.
“You went light on him,” Jacques Armond suddenly spoke up. “Should have beaten him to a pulp. I would have.”
“Ah, a critique,” Jenks noted. “Why? What would that serve?”
“If you have to ask, then you’ll never understand putting lesser men in their place,” Armond said smugly. Oh damn.
“Interesting,” Jenks said. “You’ve observed for a half hour, oriented your posh resort ass into thinking yourself a badass, decided to call out your instructor, and then did it.”
“Ooooh,” Steve said, hand over his mouth and eyes delighted. I was kind of delighted too.
“Pop on up here, wheat sprout,” Jenks said.
Armond bounced to his feet, eyes alight with glee. His intent spoke of trickery and I noticed his left hand touching the waistband of his designer sweatpants. I caught Jenks’s eyes and signed weapon.
“Hmmpf,” Jenks scoffed, frowning at me. “Okay, pup. Take your shot.”
To his credit, Armond didn’t hesitate but went on an all-out attack using some weird spinning kicking dancing style that I wasn’t familiar with.
“Capoeria,” Vesta told me. “Brazilian martial art.”
Jenks ducked and weaved as kicks circled over his head or swept toward his feet, watching and studying his opponent.
Armond dropped to all fours, his head away from Jenks, his body in constant motion.
Jenks suddenly stepped to the opposite side and kicked a short, sharp, snapping kick that caught Armond in the ribs, lifting him bodily off the ground to fly ten feet and crash.
“Oooh, there go some ribs,” Steve said gleefully.
Armond climbed to his feet just in time to meet a bruising flurry of punches from our instructor.
Head, neck, chest, and even a quick pop to the throat.
Armond went down on his ass, his hand reaching for his waistline.
Jenks reached out a hand to his side and his assistant, Mal, tossed a fighting staff into it.
Jenks used it to smash Armond’s hand over and over until a sharpened stick of wood with tape around half of it fell to the ground.
“Well, at least you tried to cheat. Remember, kids,” Jenks said and the whole class answered: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying!!”
“Excellent. Now, Craig, why didn’t you beat Fife to a pulp?”
“It wasn’t necessary. I hurt him worse by embarrassing him in public.
Which turned out to be in front of the whole world.
He’s a professional MMA fighter. He could take a serious beating; probably has before.
But embarrass an ego that large? More devastating.
So minimal use of violence, maximum use of public humiliation.
I’m trying to be less knee-jerk and more deliberative this semester. ”
“As you were at the end of that interview with the Chatterjee woman,” Jenks noted.
“Yes sir,” I said.
“Okay, that’s it. Ponder your young minds on the wonders of the OODA loop and we’ll revisit next time. Class dismissed.”
Jacques was stilled curled up on the mats, arms wrapped around his ribs as his body healed the damage.
Mal scooped up the sharpened stake, looking at it carefully. He sniffed it. “Rowan. Nasty for weres,” he said.
Jenks moved over to Jacques and squatted down.
“Kid, I don’t know what Whiskey Tango is like for weres, but I suspect Earth is different, and this school is very different.
You might want to reexamine your personal goals and outlook.
” Then he stood up and turned to us. Most of the class was still hanging around.
“Could I get a fire witch to burn that stake? I know Rowan is special, but I think that piece is tainted.”
Leila stepped forward before anyone else and TKed the stake right out of Mal’s hand.
It hovered in front of her for a moment, then suddenly burned fast and bright.
The ash started to fall to the floor and Freia made a blowing motion with her lips from twenty feet away.
A soft wind blew the ash across the room to one of the garbage cans.
“Thank you, ladies. Now, why are you all still here?” Jenks asked.
We took the hint and left.
I had a morning economics class—Econ 101 with a Professor C.
Chase. I bundled up in my Vesta-approved down-filled puffy jacket, pulled on a wool cap, and pulled the hood of the parka over everything.
Then I braved the upstate Vermont January weather and trudged to the Econ class building.
The wind was fierce off Lake Champlain, gathering force as it raced up the hill to scour the hilltop campus.
It would have been nice to have more ability with Air, but I had enough to create a wind-free space over my face. The bitter wind was a good excuse to walk head down, face hidden till I got to my building.
Inside, I sat near the back of the room, taking off my parka but leaving the watch cap on. Then I sketched in my notebook, head down, while I waited for the professor to show. Kids filtered in, pairs, singles, and triples, most chatting about inconsequential things.
The first person to focus on me registered sudden intense surprise and excitement. Word spread fast.
I see Intent inside my head, first as a kind of flood of attention.
Picture a circle with a triangle of focus spinning around as the person focuses on their surroundings.
The color of that triangle tells me if it has been flavored with anger or fear (red), envy and jealousy (green), happiness and love (yellow), calm acceptance (blue), or thoughts of violence (black).
Vesta asked me about lust once and that, oddly enough is orange.
The color coding helps me triage which intent to focus on first. Once I begin to drill down, I get flashes of potential actions the individual is picturing.
In my mind, I saw all twenty-three circles spin my way, the triangles of intent focusing on me. The colors were very light, bright flashes of red, yellow, orange, and some green. The lightness indicates curiosity, the spectrum the emotion behind that curiosity.
Peripheral vision flashed as a last person entered the room and closed the door.
A quick glance showed a late-thirty-something female with a messenger bag, which she set on the desk.
Then she turned toward the class and I lowered my eyes to my sketch.
Her intent flared (which indicates surprise) with very light red—most likely fear.
I kept sketching. The person at the front of the room froze for a moment, then took a step back to lean against the desk.
I focused on her without looking. Worry, alarm, and curiosity. The worry was strongest.
“Young man,” a clear feminine voice said.
I looked up with a sigh. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Ah, I…” She looked around at the rest of the class. “We know who you are,” she said.
“Well, then you all have the advantage of me, although I might guess that you are Professor Chase,” I said.
“I should have looked at my class roster sooner,” she said with regret.
“Yes, you could have had me thrown out,” I said. “You still can. It’s a simple spell I can teach you. Goes like this… ready? Craig, get out of my class.”
She froze again, her surprise even greater.
“That’s harsh,” she said defensively. “I wonder if you have given thought to the kind of circus this will become.”
“Oh, yes. We have. Three ring circus and I’m the main monkey,” I said, keeping my voice light. “You know, if I had realized that Vesta would be outed by my actions… well, I still would have punched Fife in the stomach. Can’t stand bullies.”
“The media will be three deep, and the student body will flood the halls,” Professor Chase said. She was tall, thin in a runner type way, with a long face, brown hair, brown eyes and very white teeth. Likely a nice smile when she wasn’t worried to death.
“Valid,” I said. “But it depends mostly on my fellow classmates. Spread the word, and it’ll get nuts. I can still get here unnoticed, but it’s up to all of you if we have paparazzi busting down the doors.”
“They should have warned me,” she said.
“I agree. We had a number of talks about this with the college president, vice provost, and head of campus security. They thought it would be okay on account of when the Demidova-Gordon twins first came to college,” I said.
“That was nuts,” she said. “I didn’t have them in any classes, but I saw the first few weeks of craziness.”
“But now it seems like it isn’t much of a thing for them,” I noted.
“People had known about them their whole lives. The Steward’s daughter has never been so much as glimpsed, let alone photographed.”
“Actually, she has been—both glimpsed and photographed. Omega squashed the photos.”
“And the Steward squashed the witnesses’?” she asked, worried.
I laughed. “He’s nowhere near that ruthless. He’s actually very nice. Mostly he just had a chat with people, explained the problem, and up until Lake Placid, none had spoken of it. Now, of course, because of me, all bets are off.”
“Well, the first videos and that interview have blown interest in the two of you to crazy proportions,” she said.
“She’s the interesting one. I just get attention by association.”
“That’s not true at all,” a girl in the front row said, then blushed red when she realized we had all heard her words.
“Well thanks, but I’m just a low-powered male witch from a frontier planet. She’s the Heir to Earth’s Stewardship, so I get it. You should have seen me when I figured out who she was.”
“You didn’t know?” Professor Chase asked.
“No. It was a big secret in Arcane last semester, but I figured it out when the axeheads got released on Church Street.”
“You killed them?” front row girl asked.
“Reflex. You see axeheads running for you and you better act fast,” I said. “So, Professor Chase, you want to say that spell?”
She was torn, her intent fully conflicted. Worry mixed with super intense curiosity, and she was thinking of another woman.
“Everyone want me to leave?” I asked the class.
They were silent and then chorused with a wave of nos, and no ways.
“Okay, tell you what. You’re all curious now.
Understandable. I was super curious about her when we met although I didn’t realize the enormity of my situation until much later.
But let’s do this. Ask me questions now until Professor Chase is sick of it and then I can take off and call the Registrar’s office.
Maybe online is the way, which is okay, because that’s how most of us learn on Greenacres. ”