Bill takes a set at the table, but asks a question before he tucks in to his meal.
"Cadet Sergeant, what sort of training will we be starting with?"
Bruce listens in for the response to Bills question
He sits down and takes a bite of whatever he's grabbed
"I'm so hungry.. and oddly this tastes pretty good, guess I might get to enjoy the appetite part of being a growing boy."
The food is fresh, not over-cooked, and - despite cooking for something like fifteen hundred at a time - pretty well seasoned. It's not ultra complex, you won't be getting five-star food, but apparently you can still make some pretty good stuff even if you've got only half a dozen ingredients. The pork thing is something called 'balsamic pork tenderloin', with these little potatoes.
"If you mean, like, power-wise, it's mostly personal starting out," Costas says as she chews. "Learning how you move - how fast you can go, maybe finding out what else you can do besides what you Threaded with. I think ... Kreis, Wednesday for the Course?"
"Tuesday," opinions the large-nosed Kreis. "Monday phys-time is the campus tour."
"Nice!" Bas chimes in at the mention of them getting to almost jump right in to powers training.
"What kind of other training can we expect? I doubt they'll let us just work on the important stuff all the time." Bas rams some potatoes in his mouth while he waits for an answer.
Unfortunately Dakota had spent so long dreamily staring at her new PIT to actually have a chance to do anything with it (beyond setting up her thumb and voice-print identification of course.) When the call to assemble went out though, the girl realized how awkwardly she had been acting and hopped up from the bed, skillfully slipping the PIT into a pocket without a second thought.
Eventually they had arrived at the cafeteria and collected food. Dakota had always been a bit of a picky eater before joining up, it was likely one of the reasons for her smaller size even, of course her opinion had changed after boot where they needed all the energy they could get. At least mostly changed there were still some foods she just couldn't stand, such as the pork dish, which was a bit disappointing since meat had always been her second favourite food group (after sweets obviously) before signing up. So she ended up idly spearing the alternative protein dish with one hand while the other slipped her PIT from her pocket under the table so that she could just barely see it.
She only half paid attention to the conversation around her as she thumbed through the menus, and like any decent member of the always on culture tested her boundaries, at least till someone mentioned something that caught her attention. Her eyes flickered up for a moment to confirm that it had been Csgt Costas. "What else we can do? Is it common to manifest other powers this soon? What sort of powers should we be expecting?" By the end she had already been looking down again.
Costas looks across the table at the questioner, then says, "Hey - plenty of time for that later. It's polite - not to mention required in class - to pay attention and look at the person when you ask a question." She waits until Dakota is looking up again, then answers. "Nobody knows. You have the usual baseline Threaded abilities - boosted strength, endurance, agility, manual dexterity, resiliency, that sort of thing. You can all move really well in some manner. That'll probably be it for the next three or five weeks, until someone in your company ... hey, Kreis, what do the specs call it?"
Kreis swallows a chunk of potato and replies, "Lotta things. Erupt, evolve, adapt - I like 'erupt' myself."
"Yeah, me too, I just thought you knew the technical term. Anyhow, someone's genetics will finish talking business with the KS serum still in your bodies, and then bam, new powers - energy beams, force fields, all sorts of crazy stuff. Practically the whole class will erupt within the week or ten days afterwards - they call it a cascade. But there's no knowing until it happens what it's gonna be."
Bill smiles and begins eating. After Costas finishes her explanation, he mutters to those seated near him:
"This is going to be awesome."
"Transmogrification then Zoom! Woo! Ha!" says Bruce with glee
Kreis twitches a smile sideways at the boys' enthusiasm. "Yeah it is, but don't get carried away. Everyone who's here now can still boot your buttocks up between your ears, scan me?" He stabs a potato with his fork, then wags the thing towards Bas. "Well, besides the important things, we get trained in things like firearms, superpowered movement, tactics, demolitions - all that war stuff."
Costas looks up the table to see if he's joking, but Kreis's expression is completely serious.
"Oscar Company, First Platoon, First Squad, on the deck!! Cadet Privates Junior-Grade, get your toes out here and on the line!!"
Mei makes her way out to the hall and 'toe's the line' as ordered. She listens carefully to everything Costas has to say about what comes next, then goes back into the barracks to collect her weapon and head to chow with the other members of her squad.
Mei is quite famished at this point, so she takes all the food that she can feasibly pile onto her tray. She sits down at the table with her squad-mates and digs into the food like it's her job. She would have eaten it greedily no matter what it tasted like, but she was pleased with the selection and flavor.
As she She listens to her squad-mates as they quiz the Cadet-Sergeants about what is to come. There are no surprises revealed other than that some of her squad-mates seem to be less serious about this undertaking than others. Bill and Bruce seem more interested in getting a whiz-bang super-power than fighting the Thunder. I wonder if they have forgotten how dangerous this training is going to be?
Mei finishes chewing a bite of food then clears her throat and straightens her back. "Sumimasen, Cadet-Sergeants. Please do not be offended by my question, but I would like to know how many of the members of the squads you started with survived the first year of training." She asks this somewhat meekly, and her voice seems unbearably cute for such a serious matter.
Bill looks over at the Cadet Sergeants, chewing slowly and waiting for an answer.
Costas and Kreis exchange a long look before Costas gives one of those 'you wanna answer that?' look. The boy - he may be fifteen, but after all, he's still a boy - looks down at his plate, poking a broccoli floret with his fork, but nods slightly. The silence of the two extends for several seconds before Kreis starts, closes his mouth, clears his throat, and starts again.
"Foxtrot started out with sixty-six, split into eleven squads, four platoons, six people per squad. First quarter is usually pretty low, would have been zero for us, but my entire squad got floored on the last day of the quarter. The class started to cascade ... six weeks in?" He glances towards Costas, who raises one hand, fingers outspread. "Right, five. First of the Fourth was the last six-pack to cascade, but ... we'd all finished by the end of week six. Typical sorts - everyone had an attack and defense of some sort. Albert threw, I dunno, kind of plasma grenade. Albert was one of those really strapped-down people who'd just suddenly blow out into a no-holds barred rant at some final straw.
"Anyhow. We were doing stick-and-move practice, full-powered for us, in the UCZ's primary instruction zone, the Classroom, when we started to get peppered by stray shots from a combat exercise taking place in what we call the Houses, two blocks away from the Classroom."
He takes a deep breath, then finally looks up; the humor he'd been showing a minute earlier has vanished. "Wasn't anybody's fault; just stray shots that managed to miss anything between them and us. Really put the fear of God in us, everything's under stress but under control, our Chief Petty Officer instructor is calling for a full Zone cease-fire, but then Albert got tagged." Swallowing, he looks back down, and it's clear he's struggling.
Mercifully, Costas picks up the thread of the tale. "Near as the specialists could tell from the sensor records from his suit, CPJG Silva was bruised, but not really hurt. Visual records show him to have started trying to shoot back. Unfortunately, his aim wasn't that good yet; he had a narrow gap to 'shoot' through, but he wasn't hitting the window. What he did hit with four of the seven 'plasma grenades' were two of the five remaining load-bearing columns in the structure they were in. It brought down the structure, immediately killing Chief Reyes, one cadet sergeant from Class 23, a cadet corporal from Class 25, and two of the six members of the First of the Fourth. Another cadet corporal and one more of the six were killed by settling when students responding to the emergency moved the wrong thing and the rubble settled. A third cadet corporal and three more of Kreis's squad died of their wounds before they could be extracted. Kreis is one of two survivors."
"And we're only alive because Colonel Napé" - as an O-9, the highest-ranking Threaded in the North American PDF - "moved heaven and earth to get to Chicago in eighteen hours," adds Kreis quietly. "He was at a conference in Denver, told GHQ to go fvck themselves, he wasn't going to let his men die if he could prevent it, even if we were kids. He can heal," Kreis adds. "They'd moved enough crap by the time he got there he could touch us, Hank and I - just barely, but he could. Kept us alive."
"Officially," says Costas, "two of ours died in Q1, three in Q2. But we really lost five just that day. It was what the Commandant would call a 'salutary experience for the class'. We lost Higson to sheer stupidity a few months later, and only four since, so ... that's it. So the short answer to your question, chippie, is six. We started with sixty-six, down a total of ten to fifty-six."
"Maybe we can explore if they give us some free time later. Don't forget that we have to do everything as a group. I'm not enthused about getting demerits on the first day we get here."
"Of course-" And then came the siren call of the bugle, and she had to shove everything aside...
...
"Okay, here's the skinny. Always be ready to get called to attention, marching orders, the whole ramrod-military thing. Always be ready for it, but we don't usually go marching around the Academy in formation. You'll get pop quizzed, so to speak, pretty frequently for the next couple of years, but you're expected to maintain military discipline without us forcing you to become a brainless robot. You're here to develop your abilities, learn how to control them, and if you can't or won't control them, I guarantee they will kill you - your powers, most likely, far faster than any of the adults here. So keep it together - keep your head in it without us having to shove our arms up your a$$es to turn you into little meat-puppets. Officially, you're dismissed for chow; unofficially, that means y'all can follow me."
Officially. Jacq was grinning a little to herself. Ultimately, she liked Costas's style. But they had to keep the discipline for them in mind. The powers were more likely to kill them than anything else. 'Is that why the training is so dangerous?'
edit: then her question is answered. Her eyes widen as she listens to Kreis fill them in. Damn...
Mei stands up and bows to the Cadet-Sergeants in recognition of their losses they've suffered."Dōmo arigatōgozaimashita. Thank you very much for telling us about that terrible day, Cadet-Sergeant Kreis. I hope we can be wise enough to learn from your experience without having to through it ourselves. Some such events are unavoidable, but if we remain mindful of the fact that anything that can happen, will happen, perhaps we can reduce the odds of such occurrences coming to pass." She then retakes her seat at the table and quietly goes back to consuming her meal, internalizing the emotions brought up by that harrowing story.
Jackie looked to Mei, then over to Costas. "What're the chances we can do some training on 'rescue'n'recovery' on people in collapsed buildings?" Not exactly straight military action training... but might be relevant. Useful some day, even.
She poked at a piece of pork, then decided to eat. Eating was important, even if there was plenty of dinner time. Some days could be worse than this. "It sounds like people and powers don't often mix... but it really does sound like the sky is the limit."
Jackie's next thought made her hesitate. 'Makes me wonder, do the Thunder have something like this?' She looked over at Costas, then Kreis. Maybe some questions were better left unanswered.
Bruce pipes up from where he is sitting
"Jac, howabout as a group, we are mindful to always take stock of our situation even in training and take note of potential hazards and as we get more capable, revise what we can do in a given situation"
"Yep, always." She was looking over at Bruce. "I doubt they want us to be picking up rocks all day. But." She shrugs uncomfortably. "Stuff happens."
Jackie pauses a moment, peering at Bruce. Then she looks over at Costas and Kreis again, speaking a bit lower. "Only reason I wonder about the 'sky being the limit'... do the Thunder have something like this? I think we'd have heard..." But. Keeping an eye out for the worst situation and being prepared. That was a good place to start.
Jodie gulps at the story of deaths during training but, nevertheless, manages to shovel the food on her plate into her mouth. Waiting for a break in the conversation she leans in "Healing? Plasma? What other powers do people get when they,.. erupt? I'd be good to know what to expect!"
Bill swallows hard, wipes his mouth, and drops his napkin atop his half eaten food. He looks over his steepled fingers into the middle distance.
"We can't just be weapons." he thought to himself. "We have to be something more. We have to know more than just combat. An engineer might have saved some of those cadets. Heck, a fireman might have. We can save more lives if we know how to do more than fight!" His jaw clenches as he thinks, but he says nothing.
Dakota flicked her PIT into a pocket with a fluid motion when requested to do so. "Apologies, table etiquette has never been one of my strong suits." She then went back to eating after receiving her answer, at least until Cartwright asked about the death toll. At which she stared thoughtfully at Cartwright.
It wasn't that the question, or answer, really bothered her. It just seemed like sort of a morbid line of questioning this early on in their career. Dakota slowly took another bite of her meat alternative while continuing to stare at the other girl. She seemed a lot more serious than some of the other cadets in her squad, her and the one boy, they were a bit intimidating like that.
"Like I said, usually it starts out with an attack - fire bolts, plasma grenades, disintegration beams, stone shards, even just really impressive strength - and a defense of some sort, usually leaning towards what your attack is like." Costas pokes at her cauliflower, then frowns over at Bill. "Take all you can eat, eat everything you take, Younger. Chow down - you guys haven't had a chance to put anything into the fridges yet. If Candi-Boot didn't teach you, y'all'll learn here to eat until your gut is actually full, even if you don't think you're hungry." Of course, it looks like she's reminding herself of the unwritten, but just as strong as if it were, rule of the chow line, because she pokes at the steamed, buttered, and breaded cauliflower for a moment more before reluctantly putting it into her mouth and chewing.
"Lannings, you'll spend lots of time with your PIT. It's dinnertime, movie time, stuff like that that'll really help forge y'all into a group, a squad, instead of just ... seperate people. An' yes, uh ..."
"Marshall," prompts Kreis.
"Thanks. Marshall, yeah, we get trained on rescue an' recovery, but mostly that's a tailored thing - what part of it you get trained in depends on what you can do. Strong ones, earthmovers, and teeks - telekinetics - get trained in the engineering, lookin' at a pile and figurin' out what they can move, what they can't. Thing is, it's only one part of a really big bunch of stuff we need to know. So usually people don't get even halfway decent at it until they're officers."
"I doubt the kids who were the first ones on the spot were thinking too clearly either," Kreis admits around a bite of broccoli, wiping some mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth. "You see kids buried under rubble, well - we're Threaded, you know? I've watched kids run through a reinforced concrete wall with only bruising. But ... that's through, not a hundred tons of the stuff waiting to land on top of you. So yeah, like Walker says, stay alert, stay aware, always be as realistic as you can about what you can do."
Kreis frowns, considering Jackie's latest question. "I don't think so," he says carefully. "It isn't in any of the tactical information they let us see - and like Younger here knows, they let even you guys see some pret-ty serious stuff. But so far as I know, all they have is tech. That acid-plasma sh!t they fire from their guns, the random-walk anti-vehicular explosive rocket walker things they use, the hovercraft gunboats, the sea-mines, their aerial drones, the implants, all that - tech, tech, and more tech. Nothing like Professor Schein came up with." He glances over at Bill again, then frowns. "Hey, Younger, what's chewing your tail?"
He stabs a potato with his fork, then wags the thing towards Bas. "Well, besides the important things, we get trained in things like firearms, superpowered movement, tactics, demolitions - all that war stuff."
Bas frowns.
"That's not what I-" he starts, but the conversation moves forward, and he eventually drops the argument. For now.
"You know, one thing I don't really get, why did Schein decide that Threaded people were the best way to go? There's few of us, so many of us die between Threading and training...why not just try to reverse engineer Thunder tech or something? You could hand a gun to any soldier, and we're still pretty killable. Would we survive being hit by one of those acid guns even when fully Threaded and trained?"
Bas shrugs.
"Just seems like a weird basket to put all your eggs in, y'know?"
Bill's stomach does a flip at Kreis' reference to the video from earlier, but he takes his napkin off his food, wads it up, and dutifully if unenthusiastically begins to eat the rest of his meal.
Kreis: "Hey, Younger, what's chewing your tail?"
Bill swallows hard and looks over at the Cadet Sergeant. "This is no time to complain or doubt. We'll see how this goes."
"It's just a lot to process, Cadet Sergeant."
"You know, one thing I don't really get, why did Schein decide that Threaded people were the best way to go? There's few of us, so many of us die between Threading and training...why not just try to reverse engineer Thunder tech or something? You could hand a gun to any soldier, and we're still pretty killable. Would we survive being hit by one of those acid guns even when fully Threaded and trained?"
Bas shrugs.
"Just seems like a weird basket to put all your eggs in, y'know?"
After filling his plate and taking a seat with the rest of his squad, Corwin takes out his note pad and pen. Taking one bite of his food, he then adds a few new notes to his pad. Then when CSgt Costas called out Dakota for her paying too much attention to her PIT, Corwin put his notepad away and continued eating.
With each question addressed to the Cadet Sargents, Corwin paused briefly in his rapid eating to watch and listen to their responses, looking into their expressions for information deeper than what was being presented.
As the atmosphere turned heavy after Mei's question, and the Cadet Sargents slowly answered it, Corwin again paused in his eating to watch and listen intently.
Once there was a moment of silence, Corwin spoke.
“This is why we learn and practice discipline so that we can become less of a danger to our brothers and sisters and a threat to the Thunder. As the example given by our superiors demonstrates, power without control, without discipline is disaster, chaos and death.”
After swallowing a mouthful of food, he turned to address Bas.
”Why wait until now to question the methods that brought all us here? Don't you think that someone else might have tried that before Professor Schein discovered his breakthrough? Obviously this was found to be the best way for us to finally defeat the Thunder and drive them from our Earth.”
”Why wait until now to question the methods that brought all us here? Don't you think that someone else might have tried that before Professor Schein discovered his breakthrough? Obviously this was found to be the best way for us to finally defeat the Thunder and drive them from our Earth.”
"Maybe your experience was different from mine, but I didn't have time to ask questions during boot."
"And is it obviously the best? They basically put everything in the hands of one guy. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, I dunno. That's why you ask things."
Kreis eyes Bill suspiciously. "Yeah, I suppose." He turns back to Sebastian. "I know I answered you kinda flip before. What the PDF considers to be the most important things for us to learn for the next three years isn't how to control our powers, really - we learn that in order to try to not be stupid, but hey, we ARE teens, and stupidity is, like, hardwired into us. No, what they want is for us to ... to stay human. We got six hours of class time a day, and every quarter we get to examine everything - math, sciences, engineering, politics, history, language, religion, pretty much anything you might want to look at - through reading some piece of culture or another. Granted, that piece usually has something to do with war, but it's still culture, you know? This quarter, Arlie and I are gonna have to get through the Bagdad Gitta --"
Costas, from the other end of the table: "Bhagavad Gita, you philistine."
"I'm a Yid from New York," Kreis rebuts, "so a Palestinian I ain't. Anyhow. It's an old Indian - India-Indian - epic poem about politics and war, from what the notes about it say - all sorts of religious and spiritual stuff. But don't worry, they start you out easy - Shakespeare, Henry the Fifth, Richard the Third, Julius Caesar. And then the Three Musketeers, which is a blast. But you go through the play or book or whatever for the entire quarter - two quarters, when you do parts of the Bible - and the teachers help you tear it apart, break it down, find background info on what really happened as compared to the play or whatever. It's all kinds of interesting, if you let it be. Helps you think about being a real, whole person, not just a soldier. Or, well, a very good soldier; they say all the very best soldiers were also very educated and cultured."
“This is why we learn and practice discipline so that we can become less of a danger to our brothers and sisters and a threat to the Thunder. As the example given by our superiors demonstrates, power without control, without discipline is disaster, chaos and death.”
Costas and Kreis exchange a long look with each other, which ends when Costas gives a quirk of a smile and shakes her head just slightly.
"You know, one thing I don't really get, why did Schein decide that Threaded people were the best way to go? There's few of us, so many of us die between Threading and training...why not just try to reverse engineer Thunder tech or something? You could hand a gun to any soldier, and we're still pretty killable. Would we survive being hit by one of those acid guns even when fully Threaded and trained?"
Bas shrugs.
"Just seems like a weird basket to put all your eggs in, y'know?"
”Why wait until now to question the methods that brought all us here? Don't you think that someone else might have tried that before Professor Schein discovered his breakthrough? Obviously this was found to be the best way for us to finally defeat the Thunder and drive them from our Earth.”
"Maybe your experience was different from mine, but I didn't have time to ask questions during boot."
"And is it obviously the best? They basically put everything in the hands of one guy. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, I dunno. That's why you ask things."
Costas takes this one. "Who says they aren't researching stuff? We're humans, we don't believe in one best way, ever. Too many of us thinking too differently. But don't think that we're all the eggs they got. They HAVE figured out how to do the acid-plasma stuff, they just can't figure out how to get it down to man-portable - hell, Hummer-portable - size. And yeah, from what I hear pretty much all of us can survive a few direct hits from their guns, you know, by the time we get to the ninety-day field op at the end of Fourth Year, but like anything, you hit it enough times and it won't be totally invulnerable in the end, so ..." She shrugs.
"Dr. Schein --" Kreis starts to say, when he is interrupted.
"Wissenschaftler Schein - as you were," states the Commander, 'Fisk, T', from the train, who apparently heard you talking, stopped with a cup of something, and is now waving those of you who start to your feet back to your seats, "don't let me stop you from eating - Doctor Schein, he is a sociopath and a psychopath. This I am sure of from knowing him. And yes, he is a genius, but he is also a scientist of only genetics and biochemistry. So he does not know how to make guns better, only how to make people better. To be fair," Fisk admits, "he did succeed at making people better. He is not only chicken in hen-house, though - just one who thought crazy things and did many experiments and killed many people in order to come up with crazy successful break-through. Which," he points out, "still kills many people. So yes, other things are being tried, all over the world." He glances across the eleven of you (nine chippies, two thugs) then nods courteously and continues onwards.
Kreis looks down-table (or up-table, depending on how you judge these things) with a 'what the hell?!?' look on his face, his thumb indicating the departed commander and says in a hard whisper, "When the hell did he get here?"
Costas looks confused. "He was on the train with us. What does it --"
His eyes bulge out for a moment, but Kreis manages to say in a strangled voice, "You were on the train with Commander Fisk and you didn't think about telling me?!?"
The confusion of his fellow CSgt only seems to have increased. "What the hell are you talking about, Yakoub?!?" (She pronounces it like 'Jacob', but with 'Yay' instead of 'Jay'.)
Kreis turns to the rest of you. "Tell me one of you guys knows who he is. Please?!?"
"I know he was on the train, and has trouble pronouncing St. Louis. That's about it."
Bruce shrugs as if to suggest he has no idea
"A certain level of education will, help, I'd like to really get into my physics and chemistry, so that I can work out the various compositions of materials, so I can know which ones I can and can't teleport through and various conditions that might affect it as well."
Mei watches and listens to the others with interest, but does not interject in the conversation. She is surprised at the reaction that Cadet-Sergeant Kreis has to the appearance of Commander Fisk and searches her memory to see if she can recall anything about him from her boot training.
Costas asides to Bruce, "Dude, you're in - okay, you'd be entering - eighth grade. You got a long way to go to get to material analysis and composition."
Mei: Nothin'.
Talmadge:
Military: There was a German 'Fisk', an Oberfeldwebel (Staff Sergeant) in the Bundeswehr-Heer (army) during Fourth Berlin (3 years ago) who killed a control ship 'on his own' by getting inside it with a homing beacon and staying alive while artillery fired at the beacon; he was killed in the action, though.
PDF: Another German 'Fisk' is, so far as you can remember, a part of PDF Europe on the intelligence side, but although he's been very successful in field intel ops the past few years, he's a) only a lieutenant, and b) always gets most of his platoon killed. This could be him, but that kind of 'bad luck' would be more likely in the PDF to get him demoted, not bumped up by two grades. (Personal/Character Note: in the PDF's ranking system, your Captain father is no longer the O-3 he originally was, but instead is now an O-6 - equivalent in the old structure to a full colonel.)
"Awwwww... I think I might read up on it anyway a little.. just so I can have some idea why it wouldn't be a good idea to teleport through stuff I don't know about".
Dakota had been quite content to listen to the conversation around her as she slowly munched on her meal. Of course when the Thunder tech, and one of the cadets concerns about Earth's apparent lack of diversity came up it got the girl into thinking about (more fantasizing really) some of the more recent articles she had read on tech forums. Not necessarily articles about military tech, but there were enough new innovations popping up that the other cadet's statement sounded almost heretical to her. Heck, even distributed networking, probably the best known invention in recent history, should have been enough to crush that notion. Sure it was based off an old wireless standard, but humanity had also been genetically modifying crops and using plasma cutters and welders in industry for decades before they figured out KS serum or how to recreate the Thunder's acid plasma.
The point was.. What was the point? The girl felt as if she had gone off on a tangent somewhere. In fact she was distracted enough that when Commander Fisk showed up Dakota was very nearly startled to her feet, although she felt she did a good job playing it off as if she meant to start to stand. Finally a voice of reason.
Once Commander Fisk was gone Dakota went back to half listening to the conversation again, not particularly interested in why Csgt Kreis seemed so keen about the commander. Instead she found her interest drifting towards Walker and Csgt Costas' conversation. "You're going to give up just like that?" She addressed Bruce. "She's probably right about just jumping in the deep end like that, but if you're serious about it you could at least start working on the foundation material you need extracurricularly. If you're clever enough or put enough effort in it might not even be that long till you have a good enough grasp to actually get into it."
She shrugs. "If you want I could even help, I've always had a bit of a soft spot for super light super strong materials."
Studying is one thing; yes, you can study physics and chem at 15 or 16, and you all WILL be studying physics, meteorology, and all sorts of other sciences in only a few days. There is, however, a very long distance between a good understanding of general physics (10-) and a professional level of material composition analysis knowledge, which is roughly a masters-level specialization. (Yes, it's only 3 points in-game, but even somewhat realistically, though you're all very smart indeed, there's a sizeable amount of ground to cover.)
Corwin stops eating and stands at attention, snapping off a sharp salute towards the direction of Commander Fisk's passing.
That would make him... Him... The First...The Best... He really has survived this long. Corwin thought awestruck.
He answering the hanging question in a clear voice with deep respect.
"Cadet Sargent Kreis, that would make him our predecessor, Toliver Fisk of Austria the first successfully Threaded human being."
Holy sh@t! Mei thinks, her cheeks reddening that she didn't make the connection herself. I wonder what brings him here? From Kreis' reaction, he must not come around here often.
Mei has had a sense of impending doom ever since her train entered the Chicago ruins. Not doom in the negative sense necessarily; just a sense that momentous events were beginning to unfold around her. That sense that you should remember where you are so that in the future you can remember where you were. These are not feelings that she would reveal to the others, but she feels a strong urge to write a letter to her mother tonight. Haha would understand what I'm feeling.
Addressing Dakota.. Brce looks at her with a kind of lightbulb awakening as if he's been kinda searching for something to latch onto
"Sounds great lets do it! I'd like to really get my teeth into something that's my own and not regulated"
"Thanks. Marshall, yeah, we get trained on rescue an' recovery, but mostly that's a tailored thing - what part of it you get trained in depends on what you can do."
"I doubt the kids who were the first ones on the spot were thinking too clearly either," Kreis admits around a bite of broccoli, wiping some mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth. "You see kids buried under rubble, well - we're Threaded, you know?
Kreis frowns, considering Jackie's latest question. "I don't think so," he says carefully. "It isn't in any of the tactical information they let us see - and like Younger here knows, they let even you guys see some pret-ty serious stuff. But so far as I know, all they have is tech. That acid-plasma sh!t they fire from their guns, the random-walk anti-vehicular explosive rocket walker things they use, the hovercraft gunboats, the sea-mines, their aerial drones, the implants, all that - tech, tech, and more tech. Nothing like Professor Schein came up with."
"'bout the rubble, and the training... yeah, it's about what I thought. I mean, sometimes I hear about all the training, just for general soldiers, before even the Thunder showed up..." Jac bobbed her head up and down. "Good that the thought is there..."
He glances over at Bill again, then frowns. "Hey, Younger, what's chewing your tail?"
Bas shrugs.
"Just seems like a weird basket to put all your eggs in, y'know?"
Kreis eyes Bill suspiciously. "Yeah, I suppose." He turns back to Sebastian. "I know I answered you kinda flip before. What the PDF considers to be the most important things for us to learn for the next three years isn't how to control our powers, really - we learn that in order to try to not be stupid, but hey, we ARE teens, and stupidity is, like, hardwired into us. No, what they want is for us to ... to stay human. We got six hours of class time a day, and every quarter we get to examine everything - math, sciences, engineering, politics, history, language, religion, pretty much anything you might want to look at - through reading some piece of culture or another. Granted, that piece usually has something to do with war, but it's still culture, you know? This quarter, Arlie and I are gonna have to get through the Bagdad Gitta --"
Jackie mouths the word, even when Fisk interrupted them. Her brow furrows. "Wait, cultural studies?" She fought the incredulity out of her voice. It took a bit of work. But still. "Hell... Didn't even expect that..." She mutters the last under her breath, pondering.
That one, 'bastian?' was asking some reasonable questions. 'Younger' seemed to be off... but her attention was drawn off her other new squadmates--
“This is why we learn and practice discipline so that we can become less of a danger to our brothers and sisters and a threat to the Thunder. As the example given by our superiors demonstrates, power without control, without discipline is disaster, chaos and death.”
After swallowing a mouthful of food, he turned to address Bas.
”Why wait until now to question the methods that brought all us here? Don't you think that someone else might have tried that before Professor Schein discovered his breakthrough? Obviously this was found to be the best way for us to finally defeat the Thunder and drive them from our Earth.”
Jacq's mouth falls open in dismay, her attention drawn to Corwin again. She closes her mouth for a moment, looking as much to Costas and Kreis as Corwin. Enough maybe to catch the look between them. She looks back to Corwin again, mildly stunned. Well.
"Cadet Sargent Kreis, that would make him our predecessor, Toliver Fisk of Austria the first successfully Threaded human being."
Holy sh@t! Mei thinks, her cheeks reddening that she didn't make the connection herself. I wonder what brings him here? From Kreis' reaction, he must not come around here often.
Jacq was still stunned when she looked at Corwin and Mei. She looked back at them, then at Kreis. "Huh." Yep. Huh. It was the only word that would truly do. 'What the damn?' Jacq thought, wondering if she was turning red as Mei. Wow.
"Bingo," says Kreis, pointing a fork at Corwin. "From what I can tell, he always goes where there's a problem." And like a switch getting flipped, the presence of Fisk and 'goes where there's a problem' gets connected in his brain, and he looks suddenly towards where Fisk went, an expression of wary alarm on his face.
Costas watches the other CSgt do the whole fanboy routine, then shakes her head. "He's always been up about Fisk," she asides to the others, finally cleaning her plate and moving on to her dessert, an apple crumble. (The other option was a peach compote. You pays your money and you takes your choice ...) "Yeah, cultural studies," she says about Jackie's surprise. "Like Kreis said, they want us to be people first, soldiers second. Well-educated people, too - accepting of others, knowledgeable, that sort of stuff. The more you know, the better you can make up your mind."
Considering the conversation between Dakota and Bruce, she smiles slightly. "Don't go thinking it isn't regulated," she advises. "What we look up on our PITs, and what gets looked up on the desktop ones in our rooms, is tracked. You spend a lot of time looking into something, and they'll start getting into it in class. From what the cadet officers say, there's nothing you can study that doesn't have a military application. I'd guess that if you really start looking into materials, you'll get combat engineering training tacked on. And demolitions, but from what I've heard, demolitions is a sub-set of ComEng."
Considering the conversation between Dakota and Bruce, she smiles slightly. "Don't go thinking it isn't regulated," she advises. "What we look up on our PITs, and what gets looked up on the desktop ones in our rooms, is tracked. You spend a lot of time looking into something, and they'll start getting into it in class. From what the cadet officers say, there's nothing you can study that doesn't have a military application. I'd guess that if you really start looking into materials, you'll get combat engineering training tacked on. And demolitions, but from what I've heard, demolitions is a sub-set of ComEng."
That's interesting. I hadn't given much though the using the PIT outside of my assigned studies, but if what I look up on there can impact how my studies progress, I will need to come up with a strategy to direct my course of learning through it.
"Cadet-Sergeant, are there student activities clubs, or something of that nature here?" Mei asks. "I'm a practitioner of Kendo, and was wondering if there was any way to continue my work on that here with other students."
Bill finishes his meal and follows the conversation between the two cadet sergeants.
"Cadet-Sergeant, are there student activities clubs, or something of that nature here?" Mei asks. "I'm a practitioner of Kendo, and was wondering if there was any way to continue my work on that here with other students."
"I'd like to know too. Haven't had much time to keep up on my boxing lately, I'm getting rusty."
"My Fiore could use alot of improvement as well."
Corwin retakes his seat and quickly resumes eating. After listening to Mei, Bas, and Bruce he comments wryly "Well it seems that a third of my squad mates clearly have some kind of combat training."
Her mouth fell open slowly as she looked between Kreis and Costas. This wasn't what she had expected, not even a bit. "I can only imagine. I mean, if they are putting this much effort into this, when things are they way they are..."
Crap, bad thought. Jackie cut it off, not wanting to dwell too much on that. "Have you heard something, Kreis? Maybe something Fisk smells?" But Jacq was grinning as she said it. "Maybe he thinks we oughta be putting more of a leg up in this..."
Her eyes trail over to Sebastian and Mei. Clubs? Wow, this could really be a school. Riding... But it was only a wistful thought. She should focus. "C-cendo? And boxing?"
Kreis looks sideways at Bruce with a narrowing of his eyebrows, not sure if he understands what the kid is getting at - or what, exactly, his attitude is.
Costas, however, has already blithely trundled on. "Oh, sure," she tells Mei, though you probably won't get to really do any serious study on it until spring - two quarters. That's when the 'always as a team' restriction usually gets lifted. But if you all can get agreement on free-time at the gym, usually you can find someone to work out with in the same area as each other. Obviously," she gestures to Bas, "that's easier for something like boxing, but we have a good six or eight martial arts represented here, and a couple of them include sword-fighting, so you should be in luck, Cartwright."
Once she's said that, and looking over the plates of the group, she glances at the inside of her left wrist again - left forearm, actually, and those to her right can see that there's a small readout stuck there, a microPIT or something, that displays the time for her. "Well, we got an hour and fifteen minutes before we have to be all-hands at Assembly. Not often you get to be a democracy, but now's your chance. Whadda y'all want to do?
Yes, she's asking your real opinion. This is YOUR free time, and right now she and Crais are detailed off as your campus guides, so if you want to take the campus tour now instead of on Monday, they can get you oriented. Or go unpack your stuff for another hour, or interact with each other, or whatever. The Choice Is Yours!! ;)