Chp 11: Bond with the fam

"Ugh, I wish my roommate was a nice as yours." Silvers whined.

Basalin chuckled. "Roman isn't kind. He's reasonable." He corrected, the girl furrowing her brows as she slowly unpacked the meaning behind the sentence. She's only thirteen after all.

"What is your roommate like?" He asked.

"Bossy. Rude. Annoying. She brings boys and her friends over and they leave trash everywhere on my bed. She's also the one who spread those rumors..." She teetered off, hugging herself. Basalin meanwhile stared with surprised and wide eyes.

"Uh, well shit." He thought for a bit, before saying, "We got a couch," punctuated with a shrug. The action and 'out' made her giggle, before laughing. A comfortable silence hung, and they arrived. It was empty when they opened the door.

Bas started to unpack the food, pick out skillets and other cookware stocked in each room. He taught Silvers how to cut and dice, how to clean tools when they've cut meat, how to turn on a stove, how to saute meat, and how to know when food is cooked. Attention to detail and patients is the golden key and rule to a good meal.

Silvers then plated the chicken alfredo. Both new friends were enjoying their food when Reggie, Silvers' roommate entered the room.

The girl entered with a pissed off face, stopped dead in her warpath at the sight of Basalin and Silvers eating food together, before giving out a snarl and bolting out of the room.

"Well... someones not having a nice day." He muttered, making Silvers laugh.

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Roman plated a thick cut of the T-Bone Steak in front of Basalin, making the now fourteen year-old boy hum in satisfaction. He then plated another one for himself, and then the last for Silvers. The girl smiled at Roman who grinned back, proud of his work. Both seated people waited for Roman to join them, and then they dug in.

It was currently summer and all three students of the 'Strongest Trio' as they were called by most cliques and student bodies were holed up in both Basalin and Roman's apartments. The AC was blasting, and the three now second year students were enjoying an A grade dinner. Roman was a talented cook and had recently surpassed his teacher in the art. Although, Basalin knew how to fry concrete and make it somehow edible, while Roman wasn't nearly as knowledgeable about survival foods.

Silvers only improved and grew under her new friendship with Basalin. The boy teaching both her and Roman his Aura techniques and using her as a baseline after Roman admitted to thinking her as extremely weak due to the first match of the year. That was quickly corrected with a beating, and Roman now looked up to Silvers as an obtainable and realistic goal of ability, and not Basalin with his freakish standards.

One might think that will all this work and teaching, Basalin wasn't growing. One would be incorrect. With an Olympic swimming pool on campus, Basalin threw himself in the swimming and aerobic grind. Unlike many Self Insert Original Characters, he actually had to work for his ever over used 'swimmers' body. His combat skills never stalled as Basalin made it a fun game to randomly 'disappear' and have his students try and find him whenever he wanted to kill something in the ID. The only thing to suffer was his Alchemy game.

Without a field to grow his ingredients, he was limited to those gained in the ID and those were limited by time and ability to gather them. There was a 2:1 time dilation, but he still needed to sleep and the like. He balanced this by devoting himself to his studies, unwilling to be merely a blade designed to kill, and instead wanted to be one that was as knowledgeable as possible.

What dangers lied in the far Norths of Solitus, what foods could one find in the desert wastes of Vacou, what were the names of all 367 documented Grimm species. What were the vulnerabilities on all of these species, what were their weaknesses, their strengths, how do we limit them, what about terrain, what about scenario and so on.

Basalin had a black book that he called his 'Hunter's Guide To Killing All Things Grimm' and listed every coherent thought and idea about killing a specific Grimm type in certain reasonable situations. In the most desperate of scenarios such as sacrificing teammates and soldiers to allow civilian escapes, to his future escapades as a frenzied bloodthirsty berserker.

His most blank page on the book were ideas on how to kill a Geist without Dust or magic, making him always have a source of emergency dust or magic reserve.

The other page was on the weakest and cutest of all Grimm, the Jackolope Grimm that swarmed the foe to rip them to pieces with tooth and antler. The page simply held a small anecdote.

"Just keep swinging and hope you kill them before they kill you."

And.

"Run and die, fly and live, swim and possibly survive."

Weak and cute, yes. But in sheer numbers? The prairie planes of Sanus were hellholes.

Basalin yawned as he finished his plate and took it to the sink. There he clean and stored it away along with his drink glass and silverware.

"Who wants to go to the beach tomorrow?" He asked, getting surprised reactions from his two friends.