Brook’s the one who decided that C&I should join the National Super Coalition. She’s really against the idea of rogue supers (I don’t blame her—I would be too if I had her experience of the Fireshield Siege!) and even tho Chelsea’s her sister and all, she still didn’t like the idea of the 2 of us running around unregistered. I think it’s the “if everyone else acted that way, the world would explode” idea.
But also, she did make a great point that if C&I ever got caught doing something, we could be in major trouble—like jail forever trouble. And sure, we got our powers from this special legacy instead of stumbling into them like most supers, but at the end of the day we do have special powers, and the NSC’s rules don’t actually specify that their rules don’t apply to the Waking Guard. So, C&I and Brook and the Petrovskis talked it over, and in the end we decided that we should make the plunge.
And then, you and Mom know, I came out to you. And it was a little awkward but worked out fine.
We contacted the NSC and they visited us both right away. They decided it was safe for us to stay in “parental custody” for the next couple days, and they arranged to send us to the Training Centre for a month-long intensive interview/orientation. You know, time to get a sense of who we are and make sure that we’re not going to accidentally blow up the school before June.
C&I flew out to NY with C’s mom, and the NSC advisor picked us up at the airport. He took us in a totally blacked out van to the NSC Training Centre’s “secret location.” (It’s in Susquehanna PA, middle of nowhere, in case you’re curious. Most of it is a creepy complex inside high walls with woods and private property signs for at least a mile in every direction.)
NSC orientation is a lot like boot camp, except instead of push-ups they make you do obnoxious energy-focus-y stuff. C&I had learned a lot already, so we had to pretend that we were just starting to figure it out and to make a lot of mistakes. That made the work a little bit easier, but even more repetitive and dull than it would have been otherwise.
We were meeting with a ton of different people every day, to practice stuff and demonstrate our strength and do psych evals and all that. The only person who stayed with us day after day was our “counselor,” Utah. Don’t know who they think they’re fooling with the camp lingo.
One night about a week into our time there, Utah’s playing with this glowstone. He was talking about the quality of light refracting thru crystals, and then he asked, “You ever seen anything like this?” and he cupped the glowstone in his hand and made light pass thru it so it lit up the wall in front of him, with a symbol in dark relief against the light.
It was in the same language as TDH’s message before, the language that we could understand without knowing how, that was so powerful that you could feel the emotions of the words. This one said, “Friend.” It didn’t quite feel like “friend” tho—the emotion was a little too cautious, sort of standoffish or secretive. After all, Utah didn’t know whether we were in on the WG stuff or not.
It turned out that this was a minor but hugely important test. Every new super in the registration process gets teamed up early on with a WG, who does something like that to see if the new person is WG or not. They almost never are, but the main reason why the founders set up the NSC in the first place was to find all the Waking Guardians who had been scattered over the centuries and to bring them back together into one group.
(You probably didn’t know that was the reason for the NSC, huh? Of course, the mission statement on the website is also true. They do want to keep supers from causing trouble and to set up a safe place for people with powers to work together. Still, their biggest goal is, in Utah’s words, “getting the band back together.”)
So, Utah had this glowstone with a message in the ancient language—a situation that didn’t work too great for us last time, remember—and C&I were too surprised to do anything but stare. Probably with our mouths open a little. Utah looked a little self-conscious about how amazed we were, and he turned off the light and muttered something about it being just this dumb trick he could do.
C&I looked at each other, and I guess we both sort of nodded at each other, and then Chelsea pulled out her stone and asked Utah, “Did you put the word inside yourself? We’ve received messages in ours, but we don’t have any idea how to send anything out.”
Utah must have known how to send messages tho, because just then my hand started to feel warm right where the glowstone was embedded inside, and when C held hers up it had a symbol written inside of it, too. A different symbol. One that meant, “Welcome home.”
(Continue to Brook.)
