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"I am fucking bored, can you hurry it up?"
"Look, Tommy, I barely know you. I'm doing this for your mental fortitude. If you want to skip out on this, go out and get smashed up by whoever, feel free to walk out now. But the smart thing to do is sit down, shut up, and listen."
Tommy shut up.
"Okay, apparently you're powerful. Phil told me you can manipulate speech?"
"Yeah."
"Right. Show me."
A pause - Tommy eyed the Willow from under set brows, locking on to his mental frequency, and then -
"It's easy. Also, I have never felt the touch of a woman."
He couldn't help but laugh. It never got old. The Willow choked briefly on his words, bent over just slightly, and then straightened himself back out and neutralised his expression.
"Good. Bit gauche at the end there, and your exit wasn't pretty, but you've got a strong foundation. You use that on bullies or what?"
"My exit?" Tommy steamrolled straight past the frankly unwarranted question about his personal life.
"Yeah. You know you’ve got to be careful on your way out, right?”
“No clue what you mean, Willow.”
“Tommy!” He looked almost scandalised. “How old are you, fifteen?”
“Nearly seventeen.”
“Sixteen and nobody ever taught you to be careful on your exit. How many people have you killed? You must have done some brain damage by now. Especially when you were younger.”
“Well,” Tommy muttered, “technically there’s no proof I did that to Freddie. Maybe he was just like that anyway.”
“Tommy, this isn’t a joke. Please listen to me.”
“Okay, what is your wisdom, o great wise one?”
The Willow sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Right. It’s all about the mind. Your mind, your target’s mind, you need to be careful where you put your consciousness. I have a feeling - no, I won’t say that, you’ll just get a big head, and I can already tell you don’t need that.”
“Excuse you, my head is perfectly normal sized.”
“Yeah, for now, maybe. Look, Tommy. I’m gonna test my song on you, and your job is to block it. I don’t expect this to work first try, and neither should you.”
“Hurry it up, then.” He leaned back in the chair and crossed his leg over his knee.
“Okay. Tommy… Tommy, come take this pen off me.”
It was really weird. It almost came in stages - at first, the ability to block the Willow’s instruction came easily; he didn’t feel like getting up, and so he wouldn’t go get the pen. Then, he found his foot twitching, the muscles tensing, and he grabbed his ankle as casually as he could manage with one hand, reminding himself that he didn’t even need the pen. Holding turned to holding back in a few seconds, physically restraining himself to the chair - no, come on, Big T, you’re stronger than this, you have to stay sat down, big man, you’re the master of your own -
And then he stood up and walked across the room to take the pen from the Willow’s hand.
“Pretty good,” the man appraised, looking Tommy up and down as he twirled the pen in annoyance, “fourteen seconds is not bad at all.”
“Wh-” Tommy spluttered, “fourteen seconds?”
“Yeah. Not bad. Especially not since you’re brand new to heroics, no training.”
“Fourteen seconds is fucking rubbish. Let me try again.”
“No - I just sang you, twice in a row is a bad idea, trust me.”
“Come on. Just one more. I’ll smash it.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’d show improvement, but resisting a song is really mentally taxing, and I can’t give you brain damage right after I told you off for doing that to other people. Sit back down and we’ll chat about your powers again.”
Tommy glared at the Willow again, and then -
And then -
And -
“What the fuck?” whispered Tommy.
“Nice try,” the Willow smirked, “but you’ll have to give it another go when I’m not blocking.”
“How do you do that?”
“That’s what you’re here to learn, Tommy. Mental fortitude. Or, shutting the gate on meddling psychics like yourself. What were you even gonna make me say?”
“Dunno. Something about drugs, probably.”
“You’re lucky Phil spotted your power, or I’d probably have had you turn to a child of Prime by now. Sit the fuck down.”
Tommy sat back down.
“Right, mental blocks. As just demonstrated, you can close your mind off to influence altogether. That means my song won’t work on you, anyone trying to read your thoughts can’t get in, all that good stuff. To build one you’re gonna need focus and patience. Do you have those things?”
“I can do. If I like what I’m focusing on.”
“You like not being mentally violated?”
Tommy considered. “S’pose so.”
“Good lad. Sensible. First thing to do is figure out the structure of your mind.”
“Big grey lump, innit?”
“That’s your brain, cretin. Your mind is a metaphysical thing. You feel it, right, when you pop in other people’s?”
Tommy looked down at his hands. “It’s… like a room, I guess.”
“Really?”
“Little room - but I’m smaller, no problem there - and you just… It’s like a car, actually, it’s like a big car and you hop in through the sunroof and you grab the steering wheel for a bit.”
“Yeah?”
“Like a truck, but the bit at the back’s the body. It’s not really relevant, but wherever you start driving, the rest is coming too. Or when your mate’s playing Run 2 at school on Cool Math Games and you lean over and spam left until he falls off the side.”
“Mhm?”
“Like one of them big robots. Transformers, innit.”
“I think the Transformers already had minds.”
“Voltron, then.”
“I’ll give you that. You feel like you’re climbing inside an existing structure and taking the controls, then?”
“Well, what’s it like for you?”
“For me it’s like the other person is a computer and I’m feeding it lines of code. It’s already doing stuff, and it won’t stop doing that stuff while I’m adding to it, I just drop in a suggestion and it executes. Any time the opponent spends fighting that is just… compile time.”
“I don’t know code. Did my GCSE Computing and then I forgot it all.”
“Well, I don’t code either, it’s just the most suitable analogy. I think I was right, earlier, you know.”
“About what?”
“About that thing that was gonna give you a big head. Still off limits, by the way. So if you treat it like a car, and you’re getting in through the sunroof, how do we block opposing forces?”
Tommy pursed his lips, thinking it over. “Well, obviously you close the sunroof, can’t be that.”
“No, it’s just that easy.”
“Oh, sick.” And then - “wait, how do I close it?”
“That’s what we’re gonna try and do today. Ideally, when it comes down to a fight, you shouldn’t have a sunroof at all. The unprepared are more like convertibles. You wanna be a closed system. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out.”
“What about my speaking?”
“We’ll cover that after. I’ve got to get back to Phil about that.”
Tubbo was, to say the least, really excited to meet Schlatt.
“I’ve heard so much about you! Is it true about the rockslide? Did you really take out the entire conference? You’re so cool, I can’t believe it’s really you, this is amazing!”
“Hey, hey, cool it, okay, kid?”
“Sorry, Mr Schlatt. I just have a lot of history.”
“Yeah, uh, Phil told me you’re a real fanboy type?”
“If you want to call it that. I’ve always been big on computers, you know, makes sense, but being here in the flesh, really seeing you, not just a picture - it’s different, you know? I have so many questions.”
“Well save ‘em, alright? I don’t have time for bullshit. What was your name again?”
“Tubbo, Mr Schlatt.”
“Nice to meetcha, Tubbo. You wanna show me what you can do?”
Tubbo nodded eagerly. He screwed his eyes shut in concentration, and a second later Schlatt’s phone was buzzing in his pocket. He pulled it out, but the thing seemed to be completely un-contacted, beyond the fact that it was still vibrating. Tubbo let out a breath, blinking his eyes back open, and the vibrations stopped.
“Pretty cool. You turned on the motor?”
“Yeah. There’s not much tech in the room, that was the one I latched on to first, sorry if I freaked you out, I’m just still learning, I haven’t been practising for very long and it’s a bit tough to get anything more complicated than that -”
“Kid. Shut your trap. Jesus.”
“Sorry.”
“Look, you seem like you know what you’re getting at for a beginner. You got focus, you got direction, and you got stamina. That’s all you really need to be a good elemental.”
Tubbo pulled back the smile that immediately formed on his lips at Schlatt’s words. “I’m an elemental.”
“Yeah. You gonna get over that any time soon?”
“Probably not. It’s like reverse grief, you know? Mr Watson pulls me out of school and tells me I’m magic and I get to work with Schlatt and the Willow and the Blade, I’m still not gonna really believe it for a couple of days at least. Right now I’m still pretty certain I’m gonna wake up back at home and try and turn my computer on and it won’t work.”
“Well, believe it, ‘cause I don’t need you wasting my time. Let’s do something a little more complicated than that, huh?”
Tubbo nodded eagerly and took a step back. “Are you gonna show me or should I show you?”
“I just wanted to do a little work on the focus side of things. Seems like you’re gonna keep getting distracted if we don’t take you straight down that route.”
“Okay. Yes, sir.”
“Don’t fuckin’ call me sir, I’m not even thirty. Wilbur’s older than me.”
Tubbo blinked. “Is he?”
“That’s none of your business, actually, kid. Just watch closely.”
He didn’t know what he’d been expecting when Schlatt knelt to the ground and focused his gaze on the earth before them. Destruction, probably. What actually happened was that, with a twitch of his finger vaguely upward, a tiny sprout began to grow out of the ground and into a full-blown weed. Leaves crawled out of the offshooting stem, tiny flowerbuds bloomed, even smaller spiked thorns pronounced themselves along the limbs of the plant. In the space of a minute, Schlatt brought a seedling from nothing to full growth - who knew how deep the roots travelled. The man looked up, rectangular pupils shrinking back to human.
“Focus.”
“How long did that take you to master?” Tubbo asked, excited by the infinite possibilities it posed for himself.
“Years, kid. You don’t need a full minute of focus in a fight, but it’s good to get the hang of it. You never know when your enemy’s gonna be threatening you with a laser and you gotta hold it off until your whole team escapes.”
“Did that happen to you three?”
“Not exactly.” The man looked aside, clearly casting his mind over better-left-forgotten memories. “You gotta be ready to focus.”
“I’m ready. I promise.”
“Alright, wanna show me how long you can keep the phone vibrating for?”
“What, straight?”
“Yeah. Hit it.”
So Tubbo screwed his eyes shut again, and reached out for the phone, and flicked the switch in the back of his mind. Buzzing filled the air - all he had to do was just keep that running, keep it rolling, keep it… spinning? What other words would be appropriate for that gap? Could he spell them? He was never quite sure what the vowels in “rotating” were. Revolving. Orbiting? No, that’s planets. If he could manipulate a phone, could he manipulate a spaceship? Could he bring down the ISS? Could he wake up Opportunity? Could he work a smart car? Would he even need to get driving lessons if he rigged the computer in the car properly? That would be good. He could use the money from lessons on a Ferrari. Or a drone. Every drone’s remote controlled when you have technokinesis.
“Tubbo, are you even listening?”
“What? Yeah, sorry.”
“Fourteen seconds, kid.”
“Wh-” He scrunched his nose in disappointment. “Fourteen seconds?”
“Yep,” Schlatt drawled. “You get distracted?”
“I guess. I was thinking about drones.”
“See, kiddo, that’s your problem - you need focus. What if you’re holdin’ back that laser and you start thinkin’ about cats or some shit?”
“I know. I’m just excited.”
“Here, let me…” He sighed and sat down next to the plant he’d grown, running a hand along one of the leaves. Tubbo sat across from him, legs crossed. “This is the way Phil taught me. What does it feel like to you?”
“What, magic?”
“Magic.”
Tubbo pushed back his hair. “Um… It’s like when they make you do swimming in, like, year four or whenever. When you have to go diving for the rings and the toys and stuff. Like you can’t see what’s going on - well, you were meant to keep your eyes open if you could, but I wasn’t any good - you can’t see and you have to go looking for the ring on the bottom of the pool and it’s not very deep but it’s… heavy? The water pressure. But it’s mind pressure, I suppose. And when you get the ring you can do whatever you want with it, but you have to come up eventually.”
Schlatt raised his eyebrows. “Sure.”
“Oh, you’re American, aren’t you? Did they make you do that?”
“I don’t remember,” the man admitted. “I was never a fan of swimming.”
“What’s it like for you?”
“Uh…” He leaned back, head tilting into the open sky. “Writing in ink. You gotta keep your grip on the pen. You don’t wanna fuck it up, or you got a big splat in the middle of the page. But at the end, you get something kinda beautiful.”
“What about the rockslides?”
He sighed. “That’s makin’ a splat on purpose. I don’t like destruction, you know, kid.”
“Aw, what? But it’s so cool!”
“It kills people. I’m supposed to be a hero. Trust me, kid, you always wanna choose growth.”
Tubbo nodded solemnly. “I was reading about you earlier. Hold on, let me get it back -”
He pulled the phone out, eyes closing, and by the time it landed on the grass before him he’d flipped back through his Safari history to the news article he’d been looking at that morning. When he opened them again, Schlatt was staring at him, wide-eyed.
“What?”
“You gotta tell me you can do these things, kid, I thought it was just motors.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Schlatt sighed. It was going to be a long day.
Phil was still on the phone when he ushered Ranboo into the room with the Blade. That was probably why he was currently leaving the two of them alone without so much as a “goodbye” or a “good luck”.
“Possession? Full-on, you think?”
Muffled speech on the other end of the line.
“Fuck off, did he really? And he just uses it to make people say what he wants? He’s always been a little shit, but that’s ridiculous… No, but I believe you, it’s very Tommy… No, don’t tell him, he’ll get a massive head about it, you know him by now. Leave it. I’ll pair him with you again if it went well, though, he’s never been one for trusting. Always in my office for one reason or another. Mostly ‘cause all the other staff would mysteriously let him go without punishment in earshot of everybody else. No, leave it. I’ve still got to talk to Schlatt, don’t worry, I think they’re still getting on with it. Tell me about your…”
And then he was gone.
Ranboo’s first observation was that the Blade was shorter than him.
“Ramboo?”
He was saying it wrong. “Yup.”
“Nice to meetcha.”
“Thanks.”
They stood in silence for a few more seconds.
“You gonna look at me?”
“I am.”
“You’re lookin’ at my shirt.”
“It’s a nice shirt.”
“You gonna look at my face?”
Ranboo forced his eyes up to meet the Blade’s.
“Cool. Let’s get moving.”
“Yes, sir, Mr Blade.”
“Techno’s fine. Tell me about yourself, Ramboo -” still saying it wrong “- you teleport, huh?”
“Yes. Only under stress. For the time being.”
“You seem like the kind of guy that’s under stress a lot of the time, if you don’t mind me sayin’.”
He did mind, a little. “That’s true.”
“Which is good! We can utilize that! You just gotta work with me, here, you gotta let me help you hone those skills, alright?”
Ranboo nodded, swallowing. “It’s, uh, it’s very intimidating. Being alone in a room with the Blade.”
Techno regarded him with a single raised eyebrow. “This scares you?”
“Yes. Very much so.”
“Ramboo, I’m wearin’ my glasses. I’m in a sweater with a collared shirt. I look more like a teacher than Phil. How the hell does this intimidate you?”
“Well, I mean -” he stumbled over his words “- you have a reputation for bloodthirst.”
“That’s overblown. Besides, today the voices don’t want blood.” He coughed. “Most of them. Today we’re teachin’, so they’re mostly sayin’ Teachnoblade.”
“What?”
“Forget it. Can you show me what you’re capable of?”
Ranboo laughed, holding a hand behind his neck. “Funny story. That really, uh… it fluctuates. Depending on my stress. Last time - yesterday I did three miles.”
“Three miles?”
“Three miles,” he confirmed, uselessly. “But I was really freaking out.”
“What can you do when you’re not freakin’ out?”
Ranboo squared his shoulders, tensed his jaw, clenched his stomach muscles. Then the Blade was behind him - they both spun to see the other at roughly the same time. The Blade was… smiling.
“Nice. Is that your limit right now?”
“I don’t… think so. It was just a good place to go.”
“What made it good?”
Out of sight, for one. Safe - hidden - easier to get the hell out. “I don’t know.”
“Okay, that’s fine, that’s not important. What’s important is that we work out how to let you do that without lockin’ your whole jaw down like that. Aren’t you tense?”
“All the time always.”
“Figures. We’re gonna have to totally shift the way you do that. It’s important to relax when you’re mentally strainin’ yourself like that; you’re gonna snap somethin’ in your brain if you keep it up. You need to take a minute?”
He exhaled shakily, tension hesitant to leave his muscles. “Sure.”
“Sit down. We’ll talk me for a second. It helps to hear from people who’ve been in similar situations, you know? At least, it would definitely have helped me. God knows nobody else understood what I was goin’ through, still don’t.”
“... Okay?” He sat.
“Alright, picture this. You’re fifteen. Are you fifteen?”
“Sixteen.”
“Okay, I was fifteen. You’re a schoolkid. You’re just doin’ your work, keepin’ your head down, keepin’ your grades up. Somethin’ changes. Suddenly ya got powers you don’t even understand - you feel like you’re goin’ crazy, maybe your grades start slippin’, and ya can’t let that happen, so you push through. Ten times as hard. Somethin’ snaps, whatever, whatever, Phil swoops in, Angel of Death, lets ya know you’re not alone, takes you with him, and you’re safe. Apparently. Still scary, right? You’re worried all the other recruits are gonna find out about you, so ya keep your head down again. Ramboo, listen - it does not work like that. You’re gonna snap again eventually if ya keep treatin’ it like somethin’s wrong with you. You gotta get over it. I wanna help you get over it. Nobody helped me get over it, and…” He paused. “It was a bad idea. There’s nothin’ wrong with you. Trust me.”
Ranboo nodded slowly. “Thanks for… for telling me, I guess.”
“Don’t get used to it. It’s called strategic breach of comfort for alliance purposes. You wanna try again, or…?”
“I don’t mind. You’re meant to be the teacher.”
“Alright, we’ll see if you can get the same results without breakin’ your jaw.”
Ranboo must have visibly doubted that, because Techno raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“What, you don’t think you can do that?”
“I don’t know, it’s just… It kinda feels like it comes with the territory. Don’t you have to strain it?”
“I never had to strain it. What’s it - sorry if this is weird, but - what’s it like for you?”
“It’s like…” He put a hand to his face, trying to summon the words. “I don’t know. Just another muscle, I guess. Like when you gotta open a jar, you push until it moves, right? But it’s easier if I’m already stressed, so I guess it’s more like opening a fire door. Slams into the other side of the building and you’re outta there.”
“Interestin’.”
“Why? What about you?”
“My powers have always come in hand with the voices. More like a bomb, really - grenade with the pin pulled out. I’m just the one holdin’ down the button with my finger. And when the finger slips… well, you’ll know.”
“I don’t actually follow you guys that much. I just know about you from what I heard from other kids. And my parents.”
“That’s probably for the best. If you were scared without ever seein’ me in action, I’m pretty sure we never would have got this far if you had.”
Ranboo just nodded. Another thing he’d noticed about the Blade was that, even though he was the shorter of the two of them, he filled the room way more than Ranboo ever could. Not in a necessarily threatening way (despite the way he’d compared himself to a live grenade and all) - just in an… imposing way. Commanding. He was clearly the leader of any group.
“Okay. Workin’ on relaxin’. I don’t know how much I can help, considerin’ how my powers activate on release, but I can try. Let’s start with the basics - do some stretchin’, work out the tension. You ever do that thing where you massage your face?”
“No?”
“You’re gonna see the face of God, I swear, it’s beautiful.”
Phil hung up the phone on Wilbur and slumped against the nearest wall. His wings itched to be let out - they’d have to wait another hour or two before he got back out to the middle of nowhere where he lived and flew. In the meantime, he’d accept reports from the other two and see how the young generation were getting on.
In all honesty, Tommy and Tubbo weren’t ready yet. Neither was Ranboo - he’d been forced to take the kid and his peers straight past the shallow end stage when he’d heard reports of a kid disappearing right before his bullies’ eyes and reappearing three miles away in a Tesco car park. No time for gentle hinting and encouragement; his only option was to put Tommy in detention over the phone for later that day, send Ranboo straight to the facility while texting Kristin instructions to be there waiting for him at the bus stop, and pull Tubbo out of class as soon as he got back on school premises. That was yesterday. One day couldn’t make as much difference as it honestly needed to if these kids were going to remain on track.
The trouble with the young ones right now was, to put it bluntly, that they were all too selfish. Tubbo, with the power to manipulate technology however he wanted, used it to browse the internet hands-free and distract his teachers when they were trying to assign homework with fake phone vibrations and power outages. Tommy, with the power to possess another human being, hadn’t even paused to think about the full capabilities of his powers, limited to assuming his ability lay in making others say funny things and nothing more. Ranboo, with the power to teleport any distance depending on his emotional state, from the little Phil knew? Well, he was still at the point of treating it like a stress response, a way to get away from his problems.
And sure, it had taken a while to teach Wilbur to use his song for mature purposes rather than defenestrating Techno, and it had taken a while to teach Schlatt to use his growth slowly and patiently instead of letting it burst forth with unforeseen and unwanted side effects, and it had taken a while to teach Techno to use his voices and their often violent desires to his benefit instead of working against them and fighting them at every turn…
Yeah. It had taken a while. This generation would be no different.
Phil wasn’t stressed about the long term, though. Hell if he didn’t have time.