Chương 39: First Class

Morning, Monday. June 10th. That's what my phone said. First day of college. That's what my schedule said. I was told yesterday I'd be getting a ride to Piedmont, then a ride to UVA in the afternoon. I had until 8: 45 to do whatever I wanted. The back of the schedule featured some room numbers at least, so fifteen minutes might have been a good enough window for finding my first class. Didn't really feel ready. The actual time was six in the morning. Far too early to get ready for school.

So my priority was on just using the loose time I had. The first thing I did was sneak up to the cafeteria, trying not to make any noise, and acquire some breakfast. Skeleton crew there was able to give me a pretty basic supply of bacon and waffles and this yellow clay-like substance they claimed was egg. Taste didn't really matter, I was used to the fact real food wasn't exciting me like I had hoped. That was thirty minutes burnt. Then it was training time. My room was, thankfully, pretty tall. About thirty feet.

I needed that for what I wanted to test. During that attack at the demo, I figured I could push myself to move faster. Big jumps. Needed to get better at those. Best spot to do it was here, didn't draw any attention. Just couldn't jump too hard or I'd put a hole in the ceiling. I drilled myself on it, just trying to find the right sweet spot to hurl myself. What I found was that there was no moving fast without also moving far by doing this.

That was honestly common sense, and I shouldn't have to be surprised by that, but it was the case. My focus was on more intermediary jumps from there. If I could get fifteen feet vertically, I'd be fine. I didn't have an exact measure of what that was, so I had to use myself as reference. I was about six feet, three of me is about eighteen feet. So if I got around there, it was the sweet spot. How could I get reference for that, though? Posters. I could use posters as markers.

I hadn't taken them out of their cases yet. I had five out of the eight we got that weren't already put up, each about two feet tall, maybe a little taller. Stacking them up in their cases against the wall fit about what I thought ten-ish feet would be. There was my first goal. Unfortunately, it was an annoying one. It took me an hour to get higher than what seemed like ten feet. I was going too soft out of fear of breaking something. Had to put more into it.

The next lunge sent me far higher than I anticipated, and I had to spread my body out just to not put a hole in my ceiling. I had my upper limit now, at least. Still useful. The next twenty minutes was dedicated to trying to go a bit weaker than that one. Incrementally, I managed to stop touching the ceiling, and I could start consistently reaching what felt like maybe the right height. I was a bit over the poster stack, so it seemed correct. That was vertical. Now for horizontal.

The room's longest distance was from the bathroom door to the aquarium. Maybe fifty feet? Should've gotten a tape measure. Didn't want to risk breaking the glass, so that was my starting point. I'd lunge from there to the bathroom. This wasn't as tricky as the vertical leaps, at least. A half hour of nonstop lunges and I managed to hone it down to a pretty basic motion. The matter then was timing. I found the stopwatch in the same section as my alarm, and I just set that while lunging. First lunge: 6.

8s That was maybe about four hundred feet in a minute? Wasn't sure. Didn't feel fast. Could I do it faster? Push harder? Second lunge: 6. 1s That's like five hundred feet in a minute. Tenth of a mile, wasn't it? Not bad. Could I go even faster, though? Third lunge: 6. 3s Regressing. What I could tell was I was very upright. Maybe tilt lower? How low can I go? Fourth lunge: 3. 5s Landed face-first doing that. That's gotta be nearly a thousand feet in a minute, though.

Doesn't seem feasible until I know how to stick my landings. Needed to figure out how to stop myself. Fifth lunge: 5. 3s Late stop because of another fall. Maybe same time. Sixth lunge: 5. 5s Okay, I could orient in mid-air a little bit. Needed to get my legs out. If I could stop on my feet, I wouldn't be handing villains my head. Seventh lunge: 5. 8s Eighth lunge: 5. 1s Ninth lunge: 5s Tenth lunge: 5. 6s Eleventh lunge: 4. 8s Twelfth lunge: 4. 4s Did it. Two foot-shaped gouges in the bathroom floor, but I did it.

I got the motion down. Barely over six hundred feet in a minute if my guess was right. But that didn't matter yet, I had motions down. I could work on expanding tha- Phone ringing. Answered.

"Leo Holt?" A woman's voice. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Yes," I said.

"Hi, I'm your ride. Waiting outside the base." Looking at the time, it was 8: 40. That didn't make sense. It was 7: 50 when I started the lunges. Looking over the times, in total they took a bit over a minute. If the walk back from each one took two minutes, that was twenty-five minutes. Where'd the other twenty-five minutes go? I'm losing time and I couldn't figure out why. This wasn't normal.

"You there?" the voice said on the other line.

"Yeah, sorry. Was getting my shoes on," I lied. I was already fully dressed. Rushing my way out of my room, I clambered the fucking funhouse that was the stairs and hallways out of the building. Parked in a black car was a woman in maybe her twenties, sitting on the hood of the car.

"Leo! You can sit in passenger, just make sure to move your bag out of the way."

"Bag?" I parroted.

"Yeah, you guys all were supplied with your own backpacks with basic materials. Notebooks, pens, and a little mini-laptop for anything you wanna have digital, but that's optional." Never used a computer in my life, so that thing was a paperweight. Getting into the car, I hefted up a black backpack and just sat it on my lap. The ride was much quieter than I expected given the woman seemed peppy, but I wasn't going to complain. Was too shaken up over all that time loss situation. There was a correlation.

There had to be. But nothing made sense. Sometimes I was just sitting around in thought. Sometimes it was mid-conversation. When I lost my senses in the fight with Technofiend, was that another instance of losing time? No, because I knew that was about thirty seconds. Was it? Thirty seconds is a long time to be slugging it out with someone. So maybe that didn't line up- Brick buildings. They pulled me back to Earth. Good, I probably nearly lost more time getting caught up in those thoughts if that was the source.

This was Piedmont. But the brick on it made me think of foster care.

"You need any directions, Leo? My sister goes here and I visit her constantly." Flipping through my schedule, I pointed out the room number for ENG 090.

"Oh, uh... when you go in the front door, under the arch. You're gonna see a big set of blue stairs. Go right when you see those, follow the hall down. Third door to your right. Or fourth. I know the hall it's in, just not the exact door. You'll see the room number, they're printed on the doors." I nodded.

"Thank you." Slipping out of the car with my bag, I trudged off under that arch and in through the front door. Very abstract-looking interior. A second floor that jutted out above the first in random bulges and cubes. A central blue staircase. Windows everywhere. About as many people where there were windows as well. Taking a right at the staircase, I found a hallway. Looking at each door, I found that room number. It was the fifth door down. She tried, at least. Looking at my phone, time was about 8: 57.

I was on time. The door was easily pushed open, and the room showed me its life. It was small. Maybe a quarter the size of my room. Four sets of four seats, plus two extra sticking off to the side. About half were occupied. There were no windows, like the interrogation room. The fluorescent lights were the same as the hospital's. The entire room was white. Most of it seemed to be white concrete except for one wall, which was a shinier material. Whiteboard. A clock sat above the whiteboard. Convenient.

One large desk, by the whiteboard, where a middle-aged woman with short, curly hair sat, going through a large notebook of some kind. She dressed in an outfit that reminded me of a tablecloth. The life of this room was a clinical, dead one. It didn't belong to anyone, so it couldn't really become alive. It had an existence to just be used. I found a seat closest to the door. Not to escape, just to keep an ear on the actual hall.

A ringing noise came from her, before she pulled out her cellphone and tapped something.

"That's class start," she muttered before standing up, taking a moment to park herself in front of the whiteboard.

"Good morning, everyone, my name is Professor Ciobanu," she wrote out her name on the board.

"And I'll be the one handling your Basic Writing Skills class. Just to talk about myself, I've been working as a professor for ten years, my favorite band is the Beach Boys, and my husband is a vampire!" Gasps.

"Oh relax. He's a Knight and works as a night shift teller at a bank. Little Gregor wouldn't hurt a fly, we've been married for twenty years and I've known him since we were teenagers." Very dismissive about that.

"What's a Knight?" One student asked.

"Bottom rank. He can't make any vampires himself." Another student spoke up.

"Was he always...?" The professor shook her head.

"Turned when he was twenty, was part of his homeland return trip to Wallachia."

"The thing in Chicago!?" the first student asked. The professor rolled her eyes.

"God, no! I hate that stupid thing taking that name. Wallachia's also the name of the country vampires come from, it was founded by Dracula. World War 2. Did none of you pay attention in history class?" Was it that common knowledge? Also seemed as though she really opened herself up to this conversation.

"Anyways, big tangent. I just drop that little detail because then I can tell you guys to not mess with me. Not that Little Gregor would do anything. I love him, but he's a big chubby goofball, I don't think he even knows how to hurt people. We're moving on from that now. Right, let me go over what we'll be covering." She explained the class.

Breaking down parts of sentences, grammar, structuring paragraphs, and that we'll be reading things like news articles and other students' essays, to prepare us for the next level of English course. Seemed simple enough to me, at least.

"So for starters, let's introduce ourselves. Down each row, right to left, you're going to stand up, say your name, what you want to study, and just a random little interesting detail about yourself. Just make sure it's not as crazy as mine, okay?" They all followed the sequence. No one really stood out to me. Most everyone just seemed uninterested, a few had enthusiasm but it was a minority. Given this was a class for people who weren't any good at reading or writing, that didn't surprise me. Then I came.

Last domino in the row. I stood, feeling like I was putting myself in front of a crosshair as I spoke.

"Leo Holt. Don't know. I don't really read much." Immediately, I slung myself back into my seat. There was some snickers, maybe three total. They were distant, separate. Probably amusement, wasn't really my problem. The professor pursed her lips for a moment, before nodding. She then acquired a stack of index cards, placing one on the nearest student's desk as she spoke.

"Alright, so now I just want to do a little writing diagnostic for you all, okay? Just need you to write a paragraph, three to five sentences, describing a time you had to make a difficult decision. This isn't graded or anything. I just want you to see where you're currently at, and I also want to see so that I know what might need to be adjusted." The cards were distributed. The stack ended up in my hands, and I put the cards off to the side while I slipped one out for myself.

Pulling a pen from my bag, I stared at the card. Difficult decisions. Accepting the door being closed in my face. Telling Darrel's mother the news. Shaking Tancred's hand. I had a lot of those. Not a single one of them fit in just a paragraph. I just went with something that was still honest, but didn't give away anything. That I was homeless for half a year.

That I had difficulty finding places to sleep, and had to at one point choose between a decommissioned phone booth and a mechanic's garage, in the seediest part of Richmond. That this was deep in the core of Winter, and that if I didn't find four walls and a roof in time, I was probably going to die. I tried to end it on a positive note so I didn't traumatize the poor woman. That I clearly made the right choice if I was here to write about it. I don't think that was really for her.

But that's what I was gonna convince myself.