Chapter Twenty-Two
The next morning came and I prepared myself for training the same way that I did every morning. On my way out the door of my quarters I saw a hand written note taped to the inside of my door. In the few months before then I had taken to extending my haven awareness around myself like a protective bubble while I slept. Not that I was worried about the security of my room, or even that of the base's for that matter, but I might not always be sleeping in the base and it was a good skill to have.
That was why the appearance of the note startled me. My awareness in my sleep was far from perfect, but I still should've been able to feel the presence of another person. Upon further investigation of the note I felt relieved.
Eathen;
As I was sitting up last night, contemplating this morning's training, I eventually came to the conclusion that a much simpler man would've come to much sooner. We're going to need a bit more space. The larger room that you and Master Miller have taken to shooting full of holes should be plenty spacious for our needs.
Jason-
I highly doubted that Master Jason took the time to hand deliver the note to my room, break in and tape it to the inside of the door. The piece of paper was small and by itself I could completely understand how I had failed to notice it in my sleep.
As I entered the large empty room I took in all of the damage that Master Jason had pointed out in his note. there weren't any of the the five foot by five foot tiles that were lucky enough to still be in one whole piece.
"It looks like Master Miller's been enjoying himself." Master Jason said nodding towards one of the massive holes that could've only been from Master Miller's rail gun. "I hear he's taken to using cheaper guns when he trains with you after the four of his favorites you cut in half." he said with a smile.
Since he seemed to be in a good mood I figured that this was as good of a time as any to ask the question that had been bothering me since the night before. "Sir, I have a personal question I'd like to ask, if you don't mind." I said.
"Well now, how am I suppose to know if I mind the question if you haven't asked it yet." he said. This was all part of the training. Logic was the father of reason and if I wanted to have an answer to my question I would have to play his word game.
"Well sir, I'm not asking if you mind the question itself, but if you mind the idea of me asking a personal question. If you feel like this may not be the best time, situation, or maybe you just aren't interested in what I have to say, and you would mind the uninvited trespassing into your personal life with my unwanted question then I am simply giving you an opportunity to say so." I said with a grin.
"I suppose I don't mind the idea of a question, and now is as good of a time as any. So, what is it you want to know?" he asked.
"How is it that you're still mortal?" I asked, and he didn't seem to be offended so I continued. "With the wealth of knowledge that you have and the amount of power you wield, how come you've never ascended in purity?"
I knew that the question was highly personal and that it wasn't as simple as he never thought about it. "I haven't always been in the business of training. Throughout my life I have taken many lives and not all of them have been for the best of reasons. I was born naturally gifted and for a great many years I took advantage of that fact. I have done a great many things in my past that I'm not proud of and I haven't always been the man I am today." he said.
Two days ago I would've thought that his was overly cryptic. Being that in the past twenty-four hours I'd ended twenty-four lives, I decided to leave well enough alone. Master Jason was mortal because he couldn't get over the guilt of his horrible past, and that guilt weighed heavily on his spiritual purity. "I understand sir." I said with a nod. At the time I did feel something for ending those lives, but I didn't think it was guilt. They were enemies of the state and had been given multiple opportunities to surrender.
"Good," he said, returning the nod. "So let's begin with the idea of creating matter, shall we?"
I could tell that he was glad that I didn't press further into his dark past. It wasn't that I wasn't curious, but I respected him enough to leave it alone. I hoped that someday he and I might talk about it more but today wasn't that day. "Yes sir." I said knowing that it was going to be quite some time before I would ever get this chance again.
"Somehow immortals can bypass the laws of physics and create matter. As I said before, I have no idea how they are able to do it, but I can imitate it. To do this, I use my haven awareness to find traces of the elements necessary for what I'm trying to create, in the surrounding atmosphere. then I summon that material together into its intended form. In a very literal sense it's creating something out of thin air." he said.
It made sense that his ability to create was based in his advanced haven awareness. I'd never even tried to look that closely at the air, or really anything else for that matter, other than for summoning. Even then I wasn't doing anything more than splitting the plain into the void. This, was telling the difference of the tiny bits of matter hat made up dust particles, and I didn't have the slightest idea as to how I was suppose to tell the difference between things that were beyond microscopic. However I did know that there wasn't enough living, or organic, material in the surrounding air to form wings like the immortals had on my mission. "Sir I think I might be missing something. How do you take the tiny particles from the air and make living, bleeding extensions of your body." I asked, giving voice to my confusion.
"You can't." he said simply with a smile. "I was counting on you asking that very question or else our lesson would've taken a turn away from what you wanted to learn. You can make extensions from what's in your surroundings, but not living ones. What you want to know about is controlled cellular growth, accelerated controlled cellular growth. Using your shockhaven you guide the growth of your own cells into the form that you want. It's the same as healing yourself, and while manipulating cell growth does require a certain level of precision, but it's nothing in comparison to elemental summoning for creation.
So he was depending on me to change the direction and I had. Was I that predictable or was he prepared to teach me either technique? Why else would he give me the information about elemental summoning first? Regardless of his reasoning, or my growing number of questions, I was glad that we were starting with the seemingly easier task of controlled cell growth.
"Pay attention, because I don't enjoy doing this." he said, extending his left arm out and rolling up his sleeve. A razor thin red line, maybe eight inches long appeared out of no where, along the top of his forearm and blood began to trickle out. To his credit, he didn't flinch in the slightest from the cut that had to be at least half an inch deep. Instead he tilted his arm down so that I could see the cut better and spread the cut open with two fingers from his other hand. Fully open, his blood flowed like water from a tap. Then the blood stopped all together. The vanes and arteries began netting themselves back together as the flesh began regrowing underneath. In the span of maybe five seconds the cut was completely healed. From nowhere a wet cloth appeared in his right hand and he wiped the blood off his arm. Then he dropped the cloth to the floor wiped the blood that had fallen with his foot and sent the cloth away.
"As enjoyable as that was, do you feel confident enough to try it yourself?" Master Jason asked.
There hadn't been a skill yet that Master Jason, or any of the other Masters for that matter, had tried to teach me that I'd failed to learn. However, watching Master Jason bleed everywhere didn't help my confidence. I'd been cut in training before, but I'd never bled like that before. "I'm ready sir, but if you don't mind I'll do the cutting myself." I said. I don't know why I thought that cutting myself sounded like a better idea, but it did.
"That's fine by me." Master Jason said, truly seeming not to care, not that I figured he would. He wasn't the type to take any pleasure cutting someone who wasn't fighting back.
I raised my left arm and wit
h my right index finger I drew a line the length of my forearm. I felt like it was on fire but I held back any sign of the pain as best I could. Then when I looked down I was shocked. I could see the cut but it was just a thin red line. With as hard as I clenched my jaw, I couldn't believe that a small cut was all I had to show for my bravery and toughness. Not to mention that I was trying to go at least an inch or so deep. I reached up and pried open the cut with my right hand. In an almost sick way I was relieved to see that I'd made it an easy inch deep at least. When I flexed my forearm, the cut finally split open and showed a nice smooth V-shaped groove easily an inch deep into the muscle tissue underneath. The part that left me stumbling as to what I should do next was that there was no blood. None what so ever. I could look into the groove and see the muscles and the cut vanes and arteries. At that point, since there was no real risk that I was going to bleed out, I decided to give Master Jason a look at it and get his opinion on the whole not bleeding thing.
"Sir," I began as I angled my arm for him to have a better look. "I understand that this isn't normal, but do you have any ideas, recommendations, or information as to why I'm not bleeding?" I asked. Oddly enough I wasn't even worried about it at the time, just confused.
He took my arm in his hand for closer observation and then started trying to get a pulse. "You have a ridiculously low heart rate and that's part of the issue." he said.
"It's normally around twenty or thirty beats per minute sir." I said.
"Well I'd tell you that immortals tend to bleed less than normal mortals, but I can assume that you've seen enough immortal bloodshed to argue that. Also that cut was so precise that you had to pry it open so that may have something to do with it, as well as your normally low heart rate. Then again you might be just lucky and all of the things add up to make it so that you don't bleed." he said, letting go of my arm.
That felt like a pretty poor explanation and I could tell that Master Jason wasn't telling me everything that he thought might cause something so abnormal, but the burning pain in my arm was enough that I didn't push the issue.
"Are you ready to try healing that, or do you want to wait and see if it starts to bleed?" he asked, and I could tell that our conversation over why I wasn't bleeding was over.
I nodded and focused my haven awareness on the cut and watched as the the cells started to heal the cut on their own. In a few seconds I got down the pattern, and all I had to do was replicate what my body was doing naturally and speed it up. Within seconds my arm was back to normal. I flexed my fingers and clenched my fists a few times to make sure that everything was working as it should, and it was.
"Good work. It seems like you have grasp on cuts." Master Jason began. "Do you feel confident enough to try the next phase of healing, or do you want to try cuts some more?" he asked with a smile.
I was confident enough after healing that cut that I didn't want to have to do it again if I didn't have to. "Sure let's move on." I said, and dropped my arms to my side waiting for another demonstration. Then I heard something hit the floor and I felt the strongest itching sensation on my left wrist. When I looked down I realized with an almost grim horror that I wasn't getting another demonstration. My left hand was on the floor and in my shock I grabbed a hold of the stump at the end of my left arm and felt the wet drops of blood slip through my fingers and drop to the floor.
"Well now, see that." Master Jason said pointing to the few drops on the floor. "You can bleed, it's just extremely slow." he said, getting my attention and trying to keep me talking so that I wouldn't go into shock.
I looked back at Master Jason and fought off the shock. At the same time I fought off the pain, the anger, and the almost overwhelming urge to lash out at him with the full extent of my power. "You could've at least given me a warning!" I said, still furious.
He shrugged, which didn't help my anger at all. "I could've, but then your haven shielding would've gone up and made it far more difficult. But regardless of what I could've done that's all in the past and you're still missing a hand." he said, so casually that if it was even possible I wanted to hit him even more. "I'd like you o try regrowing it, but if you can't, or if you have any abnormalities with it then you can cut it off and reattach your old one." he said, still perfectly calm as though we weren't talking about the possibility that I might become an amputee.
I couldn't even bring myself to speak without shouting, so I simply nodded and focused on the stump that was the end of my left arm. I knew a little about human anatomy, but not enough to try and grow a new hand and part of a wrist from nothing. Speeding up the natural healing process that my body would do on its own would just give me a nice new flap of skin to go over the end of my stump, which wasn't an option. So I extended my haven awareness to my 'old' hand on the floor and used it as the blueprints for my work. I started from the base of my wrist and worked outward, creating everything from bone to skin before moving down to my palm and eventually down to my fingers. After about two minutes I had a fully functioning left hand. I flexed and checked each finger by its self, then together. Other than the skin being softer than before there was no noticeable difference.
"Good. It looks like you've got a grasp on regrowing, no pun intended." Master Jason said, and I couldn't help but crack a smile. "So do you feel confident enough to move forward?" he asked.
With as quick as I was to jump to anger, be it justified anger, I almost felt foolish. Other than the pain, which was already gone, he hadn't done anything that had a lasting affect. Still he did just cut my hand off without any warning and then made a bad joke about it, so I wasn't going to apologize for shouting. "You know, normally I would just say yes and move on, but the last time I just said yes wound up loosing a hand. So I guess it depends on what we're moving forward to." I said.
With a sense of humor that was dark and bordered on insanity he summoned my old hand into his, as though he was giving me a hand shake. "To be technical you didn't actually lose anything." he said, waving my hand at me. "Regardless, I figured you were ready to move forward to growing additions, such as the wings you were interested. Unless you'd like to keep working on healing." Then he held out my hand and with a smile added, "A souvenir, unless you want to try to reattach it that is."
"No I think I'm ready to move forward." I said, and looked down at my old hand. I was a little unsure if he was being serious about me taking it or not. I mean he and I both knew that I was somewhat sentimental and had kept the blindfold from our first training session, but keeping my old hand seemed sick. "I think I'll hold off on the hand though." I said.
Master Jason chuckled. "You never know when you might need a hand." he said squeezing the last bit of hand humor before sending off the lifeless appendage. "I'm sure the medical department will enjoy their gift." he said, hinting as to where he was sending my hand. "They've been dying to experiment on you for years, so at least they'll get part of their wish." I could only imagine why the medical department would want to experiment on me, or what those experiments would entail, but I didn't give it much thought at the time. Just another small hint that I wasn't being told the whole truth.
"So growing wings?" I said, trying to get as far away from the bad hand jokes and healing as much as possible.
"Yes. It'll be easier with an example, so I'll go first." he said, getting some space. instead of just taking his shirt off by hand like normal, he sent it off to some unknown location. "It's best to take off your shirt before you try to grow your wings. Otherwise it can get a little cramped and complicated." he said.
I could only imagine the difficulty of trying to grow around the fabric, so I said nothing, nodded, and followed suit. At first I was just going to take the shirt off normally, but then I figured that it was good practice. So I sent the shirt back to my room and considered it practice instead of laziness. Then I opened my haven awareness and waited for Master Jason to begin his demonstration. I didn't have to wait long at all. Once my haven awareness was active Master Jason gave me a
nod, turned his back to me, and began. it was a fairly quick process and in reality I didn't need to see the process at all. Just the final product would be enough to let me replicate it myself. All I needed was an example of functioning wings, to see how the bone and muscle structures tied into the body itself. However, it was becoming more and more apparent that Master Jason was holding back information, not about training or techniques, but about me, so I didn't tell him the extent to which I already understood creating.
Even though I'd seen more than twenty immortals sprout wings of their own, watching Master Jason do it in slow motion was strangely beautiful. When he was finished he had two giant wings covered in gray feathers. He turned around and stretched each giant wing as far out as they would reach. "Your turn." he said, with a smile.
I didn't bother to turn my back to him to begin. I began by starting in between my shoulder blades. The bone structure was simple and remind me of another set of arms with shoulders for each, but unlike normal arms they tapered off to a point, and in all they were much thinner, longer and opened up to a thin membrane Feathers were an after addition and were kind of like making fingernails and hair. That was the real difficult part of the whole thing, filling in the membranes and the rest of the wings with feathers and getting the right spacing between them.
It took me slightly longer than it had Master Jason, but when it was done I was truly proud. My wings shown with a beautiful snow white glow. I flexed each wing and stretched them this way and that. I spent a good five minutes shifting all of the different parts and getting familiar with how they moved and responded. I was feeling pretty confident when Master Jason spoke up.
"So, are you gonna try and fly, or was all of this just so that you could look pretty?" he asked, still smiling.
It looked like I wasn't going to get an example for how to fly. That was fine by me, I could already practically fly with my shockhaven control alone. I was happy to take the lead. I stepped back a bit more to give Master Jason some more space so that he wouldn't get hit by any of the dust that I was sure to kick up. I spread both my wings as far out to my side and then I jumped up and forward so that I was gliding over Master Jason. I could glide, but gliding's not flying so once I was behind Master Jason I beat my wings once and felt the jolt as I shot up a few feet. With about five more beats I'd ascended to a respectable height of maybe thirty feet. Each beat pulled harder then expected, and that first flight was anything but smooth. Within moments Master Jason flew up next to me, giving me plenty of space.
"You're not striving to maintain flight with continuous powerful beats. Your wings are large enough that you should be able to glide fairly level without losing height, and only have to gently beat you wings every so often to regain the altitude that you've lost." he said, as he leveled out smoothly at my side. I followed his instructions and began to smooth out myself. "Unlike a bird, you don't have tail feathers, which means that the only form of control you have comes from either your wings or shockhaven influence." Then he turned gracefully to the left until he was flying in the direction we'd come from. "Change the angles and twist your body to turn." he called over his shoulder.
Following his instruction over the next few hours I became a lot closer to competent He was right and really all it amounted to was a twist here and there of my body and wings to change the air flow around me to change directions. When I started to look closer at the whole process in my haven awareness I began to see the patterns of air flow and everything else as mathematical equations and numbers and I stopped needing to ask questions. It was no wonder that Master Jason was so skilled at flying.
Eventually, after doing several different maneuvers from simple turns and flips, to more complicated dives, aerial flips and rapid direction changes, we landed. After he landed Master Jason's wings broke apart into tiny particles of shockhaven energy and dissipated into the air around him. "I don't believe we have the time to work on creating today before your lesson with Master Sam this afternoon." he said, casually.
He had to have known that we would only have time for either creating or healing and body modification, but not both. Was that why he had left the choice up to my determination to learn one or the other? He was always planning, always manipulating thoughts, and I had to wonder how one man, one mortal man, control so much with just his mind.
I couldn't say any of this to him, or any of the other Master for that matter, but I had to say something. "I can only imagine that after so many calculations over such a long time they all must seem to run together and look familiar" I said. I tried to make it vague enough that it could seem like I was talking about flying or just haven awareness in general. Still I knew that he could see through it and into my suspicion I was beginning to simply know that Master Jason was older, much older, than he looked instead of just suspecting it. He hadn't aged a day since before we'd even begun training. In the years that followed that day I had changed dramatically like all children do as they grow up, but I could see the change in not only myself, but also Master Miller, Master Chen, and even in the base staff, whom I didn't know but still saw regularly enough. There was something unnatural about him and although it wasn't dark and apparent, like how Master Samantha was forever young and beautiful, that didn't make it any less fear inspiring.
He turned with the same smile of confidence that was warm and friendly. "A fair point, and there are three truths that you should know that support that theory First: Absolutely everything in the natural world can be represented by numbers. Second: If you were to graph these numbers through sound equations patterns emerge Third: therefor patterns exist everywhere in nature." he said, with the up most seriousness. Then in his normal lighthearted way he said. "You should probably make your way to Master Sam's. I would hate for you to be late listening to philosophy and words to live by."
"Of course sir." I said, with a respectful bow. I turned to leave already deep in thought. Was there something deeper hidden in what he said? Or was it just another mystery to keep my thoughts on safe topics? Regardless of the purpose or hidden motives behind him telling me these truths one thing was certain. They were truths, of this I had no doubt. Whatever truths Master Jason had chosen to omit in the past he had never openly told me a lie. And as much as I thought he was hiding a great deal of things from me, I did have a great deal of respect for the man. So weather or not he intended for it to happen to the degree that I took it would remain in question. From that day forward I took greater notice in the patterns that arose in all things, and the meaning of those patterns.