First Impressions (Part One)

It took two weeks for something else worthwhile to happen.

After my first day, I mostly kept to myself, kept my head down and tried to get my bearings of just how the school worked. The only person I knew at that point my age was Ruth, but that girl was seriously hard to find! Who'd have thought a blind girl wearing a cloth wrapped around her eyes wouldn't stick out? Anywhere else, she most certainly would have.

In the meantime, I got to learn a bit more about some of my teachers, specifically Miss Pryde. She wasn't terribly strict, but she knew her shit and she expected everyone to perform accordingly in her class. As long as you shut up, paid attention, and proved that you were at least trying to pick up on what she was teaching you during her lectures, she would like you. She'd at least tolerate you.

I'd started from behind the eight-ball to begin with when I'd thrown a profanity-laden temper-tantrum right outside of her class on day one, but no other outbursts since then coupled with my honestly wanting to learn about the guts of computers and other pieces of tech made her soften up on me fairly quickly.

That was good, because from what I'd picked up about her in passing, she was some kind of badass, working with the X-Men since she was my age with a surprisingly versatile power. Who'd have thought phasing through things was so awesome.

…Actually, her power sounded awesome by itself, without knowing that she could completely ruin a person or a machine's insides just by passing through. That was just icing on the cake.

Another plus, I didn't have to go out of my way to find a way to learn how to use my powers. Apparently it was part of the curriculum, and every student was given an instructor suited to showing them how their abilities worked.

I was getting half of that through the classes I'd chosen, and the other half would come in time once I started figuring out what was physically possible or beyond my limits.

My training was annoying. Not the practice itself, but that it never accomplished one of its goals, which was to drain me of most of my day's power supply. By the time training was supposed to happen, I was close to overloaded, just like I was the first day I got my powers back home. Light was everywhere, all the time. The only way I could have gotten away from it would have been to shut myself up in a closet or something.

It would have been easy for a teacher to slack off with my exercises, but Miss Pryde never did. She tried to keep me on my toes, doing her level best to exhaust me while making sure I actually got something out of the things she made me do. It was not an easy task. It was hard to tell if she expected anything in particular out of me as far as my progress went. She never said anything good or bad. Not until I brought it up to her myself.

I came up to her after the end of one of our hardware engineering classes, trying to take advantage of the short time I had between students from my class leaving and students from the next class filing in, "Miss Pryde, why are you working with me on my powers?" I asked her outright, "I mean, I get that it's not really a control thing with me. More like a resource management thing, but you already teach a class with me in it."

She didn't seem offended or defensive about it, instead smiling at me, "I advise one of the student squads, and one of my kids say you have to be on our team. She said it a few days before you even showed up on my class roster," Wow. Weird, "Now, I'm not going to just take her word for it, but I've been observing you for a while in class and when you're training your powers. I don't think it's such a bad idea."

An X-Men training squad? Me? I wanted to call bullshit on the spot. I wanted to yell and cheer about it. That was incredible news.

"I can't fight," I told her, and I wanted myself to shut up. Why was I trying to convince her not to take me on?

"What do you think the squads are for?" She replied, "They're to train potential X-Men. Trust me, I'll teach you how to fight."

She seemed so confident about it. And it was what I'd come to the Institute to learn in the first place, to at the very least learn how to defend myself. That didn't make me any less nervous about the idea, but my nerves were more excitement and disbelief than real fear.