9 A calm before the Tempest.

I spent the rest of my weekend in a very happy mood and completely skipped out on my training. As a matter of Fact, I didn't even exert myself enough to know the aftereffects of what had happened due to that kiss. I did though look for any martial art training nearby and found a few Taekwondo places including one which used to be affiliated with our school. But it seemed if I wanted to use it in actual combat other martial arts styles like Krav maga, jiu-jitsu, or Muay Thai might actually be more useful but watching videos wasn't going to help with these. What ended up with was a simpler solution to just learn Taekwondo and try to use the basic skills developed from it to try and learn Wing Chun. The idea behind it was that it relied heavily on extremely fast reaction time and reflexes which I could still train and improve and I hadn't seen an actual physical limit on it.

The next few months were the best of my life, both timelines included. I went out on small dates with Nebula almost every weekend. We went for a long walk to the park and visited a few older buildings around the area. She was very interested in architecture and explained the significance of these buildings and their styles. We then had some milkshakes at a local cafe and spent time alone talking about our lives, friends and even the most inane of things. We went to a romcom movie another weekend which I guess watching with her was more fun than I had expected. Another weekend I took her to a local gaming arcade, It was a pretty big place but wasn't usually that busy in the early afternoon on Saturdays. She wasn't really into it much early on, after half an hour of trying to play two player games with her I decided to give in and show her the real reason for going there. I showed her an entire section which was dedicated to photo booths. You could go into small rooms with backdrops and a lot of nice props to take photos with. After a dozen or so pics we just settled down on the Victorian era carriage with the backdrop of London on it. A little privacy was difficult to get as teenagers, this was most definitely a nice place to be alone with each other. Kissing was no longer a new thing to us and the comfortable carriage was a really nice place to get comfortable in each others' arms. Most of my other date ideas didn't really live up to that one, except the carnival that we went to in November. In December our school had a Christmas carnival when it was announced, I asked her to officially go to the carnival with me as my date. Everyone would know about us being together if we did go together. Apart from Anna who kept it to herself, very few people knew for certain what was going on between us since neither of acted any differently in school. She agreed and we decided that since both of us working on the coordinating committees, we would meet in front of our class after the preparations for the day were done.

I didn't just spend my time during these months going on dates and lazying around. I went and talked to the Taekwondo teacher that was earlier affiliated with our school. I lied to him about having done Taekwondo since I was in 5th grade till 7th grade via my school but when we moved here most of my stuff was thrown out since the move happened when I was in boarding school and it wasn't taught there. I asked him if he could let me attend a few beginner and intermediate level classes and determine during which he could determine at what level my skills were and I could join that class full time. That week I attended 2 beginner level classes on Monday and Wednesday, then the intermediate level classes on Thursday and Saturday. After the Saturday class, as I had expected, he decided that I was good with my basics with my physique being good enough that I should be able to keep up in the advanced class he took every Sunday and Wednesday early morning. Those classes were a god sent, There were 2 students who competed at the State-level tournaments and one who was training to compete for a spot on the National team. Above all that I found out that the teacher when he was in Highschool was actually in the National team and had participated in International matches. My forced enhanced mode helped me improve myself a great deal and helped pick up the appropriate skills in a few weeks. I hid my level of improvement well while sparring in the classes, by the first week of November I could tell I was better than everyone else in the Class, both in terms of my skills as well as physical capabilities. The combination of learning the skills of multiple people allowed my ability to be better than any single person. The physical capabilities were still far from the person I had inadvertently scanned in the fight against the gangsters and so had quite a lot of scope for improvement.

I had quit the class as November began giving an excuse that my studies were getting too difficult to keep up. Instead of this class, I had started practising Wing Chun using videos. There are two important points to be considered here 1st, I had become incredibly spoilt being able to learn everything just by being close to someone and watching their skills once or twice. Secondly, no matter how much I wanted enhanced senses, reaction time and reflexes weren't really enough to learn even the basics in an entire week of practising 3 hours every day. This brought about the realization that I was absolute rubbish in terms of actual talent in learning these martial arts.

This easy time I had been having had made me complacent. I had forgotten that what was helping me do all this was a supernatural ability that I had somehow awakened. The realization that someone else also might have either supernatural abilities or some sort of technology to detect other people with supernatural abilities hadn't struck yet. But that was going to happen soon, life had been giving rewards left, right and centre after a very small test. The bigger tests and true lessons that needed to be learnt were going to arrive very soon, only I didn't know it yet. But life was going to throw a wrench.