The Glass Knight

Florence wasn't far ahead of Vivianne as she took the time to pull her hair up, twisting it up into a loose bun to keep it out of her face for the lesson. He spoke to Canvas for a few moments, the two laughing like old friends before he split off, bee-lining it toward another student. It wasn't odd; he spoke to everyone, though she did find it curious as he sat down across from the boy as if preparing to meditate.

Vivainne made her way over to the waiting professor, but before she could get a greeting out, Canvas spoke.

"You've been asked to head up to the Tower," Canvas said, handing over a small note.

Vivainne turned it over in her hand, thinking Inkwell had gotten lazy for a moment before she made out the familiar, chicken scratch style writing riddled with mistakes. For as smart as Charles was, he wasn't great at spelling.

"Okay," she said, folding the note back up and nodding at the professor. "I hope I'm not missing much."

"I'm not certain how this lesson would work with you and your… situation anyway," Canvas said with a shrug. "Better to play it safe and have a little bit more information before I put you to it."

Vivainne nodded at the hero before turning on her heel, grabbing her bag and throwing it over her shoulder. Since entering the hero program, she hadn't visited the Tower much. In a way, it was odd, because she'd spent every day for months in the hero tower, even if it wasn't the one here.

Aside from Thalia's tour and her arrival at the beginning of the school year, Vivainne hadn't explored the Tower. With very little information on the note, she had no idea where she was supposed to go either.

Was Charles here?

She stepped into the elevator and pulled out her phone as the door shut, typing out a quick message to Charles to ask for more details. She had no idea why he hadn't just messaged or called her in the first place.

With a sigh, she tucked her phone back into her pocket. Odds were he wouldn't reply anytime soon.

The elevator opened up to the bottom floor of the Unity tower, into the back room that was separated from the public entrance and museum. A woman sat behind a desk, manning it like she was a secretary or hostess, not a likely hero.

Vivainne strode toward her, arms swinging loose at her sides. "Uh, I don't know if you can help me, but I was summoned to the Tower?"

"Name?"

"Vivainne Monet?"

The woman paused for a moment, eyes darting up to meet Vivainne's dark gaze before returning to the computer. She typed rapidly, fingers flying across the keyboard before she nodded. "You need to go up to teleportation room three. It'll get you to where you need to go."

"Teleportation room three…?" She trailed off, and the woman took her silence for confusion.

"Take the elevator up to floor twelve," she said with a helpful smile. Vivainne nodded and made her way back to the elevator, though that wasn't what she was confused about. Why was Charles having her go to the teleportation rooms? For that matter, why was she being summoned over to LA? It was the only possible destination she could think of, which meant there had to have been a development with his research. Or, he wanted to scan her.

The elevator climbed rapidly up the tower until it released Vivainne on the twelfth floor, where her options were two sets of stairs, one down and one up. Taking the stairs leading up, she climbed two at a time until a familiar corridor came into view.

Each of the teleportation rooms were numbered with a small plaque on the outside, and she followed them until she found the third. It was closed, and she stared at it for a moment, debating phasing through the door, before remembering her access band. She lifted her wrist to the panel on the front of the door and it beeped before she could even move it away, the door unlocking.

Turning the handle, she stepped inside, cautious as she took the room in. It was empty, as she'd expected, but she had no clue how to signal that she was ready to leave or where she was going. L.A. presumably, but she didn't know for certain and wasn't sure if she needed to tell the teleporter that. She wasn't even sure where the teleport operator was.

Her phone had still yet to go off with Charles' response.

The moment she stepped into the middle of the room, the world around her twisted. She caught herself, legs going tense as the white walls of the room seemed to spin and close in around her. It stopped mere moments later as the familiar nausea of transportation rose up in response, burning along the inside of her throat.

She took a deep breath before glancing toward the door, letting go of the tension in her body as she walked to the door. Swinging it open, she found herself in the familiar corridors of the Los Angeles Tower of Unity. At least she was where she expected to be.

Expanding her awareness, she kept an eye on the area all around her as she left the room and moved into the hallway outside. It was a good thing too, alerting her to movement before she saw it with her eyes.

The rainbow colored hero darted around the corner, carrying a heavy pack over one shoulder. They paused, eyes going wide before a smile exploded across their face as if they'd just been handed the world.

"Vivainne! How are you? What are you doing back?" Iris exclaimed. "You don't have a break already, right?"

"No, I'm here for some… training." Vivainne flashed the hero a smile. "You look busy."

"Oh, I am," Iris said, glancing down the corridor. "Actually, I need to get out of here. I'm being called in for something a hop, skip, and a jump away. You look good, though! Good to see the hero thing is suiting you!"

She took off, still lugging her bag around as she disappeared into another transportation room. Shaking her head, Vivainne pulled her gaze away and trailed down through the corridor, making her way down to science level. If Charles was anywhere, he'd be there, or his office. But something in her gut said to check the lab first.

The science level of the Tower was a strange place, so different from the rest of the Tower, from everything down to the lighting. Orange lights burned overhead in large tubes, some strange, rotating energy inside them. There were devices Vivainne couldn't begin to parse against every wall, filling work tables and stacked into boxes along the wall. It was as if the Tower didn't have any storage space, which Vivainne sincerely doubted was the truth.

In addition to that, there were also rooms full of physical blueprints, and then another room kept in the dark, a digital display projecting into the air. Vivainne caught a glimpse of two techs walking through a projection as she walked by.

Aside from tech and development, the science level was also home to the tower's crime lab. She found it after a bit of wandering, observing a half dozen techs working on different things. One peered into a microscope, taking notes in shorthand on the tablet next to them. Another inspected a piece of fabric. One fired a gun into something that looked like a funnel, an action surprisingly mundane for the super lab.

A sharp squeal caught her ear and Vivainne turned, following it out of the crime lab and down a hallway she hadn't noticed before. The voices picked up, the constant babble of a kindergartener reaching her ears, half of the words seemingly nonsense.

A smile tugged on Vivainne's lips as she picked up her pace, taking long strides until she stepped into the shadowed doorway of Charles' blue-lit lab. He leaned over a desk, a pair of glasses she'd never seen before perched on his nose as Vanya stood beside him, talking a mile a minute. It was a stark change from the quiet, terrified girl she'd once been, and Vivainne couldn't be happier. School was good for her, apparently.

Vanya paused for breath between sentences, lifting her head. Her eyes went wide as they landed on Vivainne, and she launched herself across the room. "Viv!"

"Hey, Vanya," Vivainne said, stooping down and managing to catch the girl before she could slam into her legs like she usually did. She wrapped her arms around the girl, lifting her up and onto her hip, though she was much too large to be doing that still. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm helping!" Vanya cheered. "I'm helping Dad do research."

"Oh, you are?" Vivainne turned to Charles with raised eyebrows. There was no way he was researching on her, was he? She'd had enough of that in Vora's care. It was one thing for Vivainne to volunteer herself up to be studied, entirely another for Vanya to be tested.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

And when did she start calling him dad?

Charles glanced over the top of his reading glasses before grabbing one of the papers beside him, holding up the crayon sketch. "She's helping," he said, putting weight behind the words.

The knot of tension building between her shoulder blades relaxed, and she let Vanya slip back to the ground. She raced around the table, climbing into the seat beside Charles and snatching her paper from him. Slapping it back onto the table, she shot him a glare before picking up her crayons once again.

"So, what did you want me here for?" Vivainne asked, sidling up to the table. She peered over his shoulder, nose wrinkling as she looked at the paper. There were a few words she recognized, but for the most part, it appeared to be technological mumbo jumbo. Nonsense. Technobabble.

"For testing," he said, tapping his fingers against the edge of the table. "Shut the door?"

She hesitated for a mere moment before forming a shadow and shutting the door, using the tendril to secure the lock. Charles raised an eyebrow before sitting back, giving her an appreciative nod.

"You're doing a lot better."

She shrugged. "Been putting a lot of work in."

"I heard you had your first practical recently," he said, leaning back in his seat.

"Did you hear how it went?" she asked.

"I heard you did all right."

She sighed as she walked around the table, booting Vanya out of her seat. The girl didn't complain as she took her paper and crayons to the floor, continuing her drawing there. "We could have done better."

"Yeah, but that's not really the point of the first test," he said. "It's a lesson as much as it is a calibration test for midterms and finals."

"How did you do on yours?"

He laughed and shook his head. "I had Jason, Artemis, and Athena on my team. We did terribly."

"Really?"

"Really. How's your power development coming? Artemis told me you had your first one on one lesson with Canvas recently."

She shrugged. The lesson, and each one after, had so far levied no results. And not from a lack of effort. She trained her power every day, working with her power core and doing the core awakening exercises Canvas had given her. Her shadow core, for what it was worth, was getting stronger. No less fractured, but she could do more with it, at least for a limited amount of time. But her damn light core?

"I don't even know if it's in there," Vivainne said, picking up where her thoughts left off. When Charles raised an eyebrow, she continued. "My core. I've been doing the exercises and the meditation and the power training and everything I've been told to do, and nothing is happening. I'm not sure it's in there."

"And what of that negator who sensed it?"

"Maybe he was wrong?" She shook her head, hair spilling from her bun. With a sigh, she reached up and pulled it free, letting it cascade down her back. "I don't know. Nothing has been happening."

"I think I may have devised a means of confirming your core," Charles said, tapping the paper. Viv glanced at it and raised an eyebrow.

"Am I supposed to understand what this means?"

"Is the program offering lessons on sass now?"

"I wouldn't be surprised," Vivainne muttered. "What's this for?"

"In addition to the… problem… that I have explained to you regarding research into power cores, there is the other problem that cores aren't actually a physical thing, and there are relatively few known supers with the ability to interact with them. Vora was able to do much of her research because she has an ability to interact with power cores, to perceive them more physically than the rest of us."

"Does that mean you need to find another super with a similar power?"

"No. Well, sort of, but only in the same way we needed teleportation supers to be able to build the teleportation pads we use now. I've been working with several different supers to develop technology to allow us to image power cores, using Vora's research as a sort of guide."

"You're using her research as a guide?"

"This is not my field of expertise," Charles said with an apologetic shrug. "Actually, building this scanner falls more into my realm of expertise than any of the rest. After this, I'm not certain where to go. Trying to replicate the prosthetic cores, I suppose." He ran a hand over his face before looking at her. "This is what I've been building these past few weeks, at the detriment of pretty much all else."

"Does it work?"

"No idea, I haven't tried it. Would you like to be the first?"

Vivainne hesitated for a moment. "Let me see what it looks like first, and then I'll decide."

He stood up, patting Vanya on the head and bidding her to stay put before walking to the back of the room, directly at a wall. She raised an eyebrow as the wall fuzzed and allowed him to walk through it, beckoning her behind him.

She stepped through the illusionary wall to find that they were now facing an actual door. "Nice bit of obfuscation you have there."

He glanced back at her. "You can never be too careful." He emphasized the point as he scanned first his fingerprint and then his eyes before the door unlocked, allowing them through to the hidden lap beyond.

Vivainne's breath caught in her throat, an instinctive reaction she had to shove down. The lab was nothing like her mother's, didn't resemble it in the slightest, but the reaction was still immediate.

Brightly lit, the lab wasn't as clean as Vora's had been, in typical Charles fashion. The only medical equipment in the room was a small IV stand, unplugged beside the wall. Beside it, a computer screen, currently blank. In the middle of the room was a table, not unlike the ones she saw techs using as projectors. In the middle of it, an outline of a human body glowed.

"Does that have a purpose, or is it just for the aesthetic?" she asked, pointing at the body outline.

Charles shrugged. "I repurposed a medical examination table for this," he said. "It's going to work in much the same way, scanning your body, only it's going to be scanning the metaphysical realm your core exists in. That's the idea, at least."

Vivainne nodded as she walked around the table, inspecting it. It wasn't as if she could discern anything from it, she didn't have any of the training or education needed for that, but it made her feel better anyway. "So I'm just supposed to lay here? And then what?"

"I'll scan you and see if it can actually detect your cores, and hopefully we'll be able to determine if your original core is still there," Charles said. "Whenever you're ready, we can begin."

Vivainne nodded and took a deep breath, steadying herself before climbing onto the table. She laid out flat, shifting on the cold glass beneath her, then adjusted her hair. Charles walked over to the computer as she lay there, mentally going over the breathing exercises she'd learned to keep herself steady.

"I know I shouldn't be nervous," she said with a nervous chuckle.

"It's perfectly normal," Charles said. "How would you feel if I said I was nervous as well."

Vivainne chuckled. "I remember you told me that before," she said. "It's fine. If you can figure this out, it'll help a lot of people. Not just me."

"I'm hoping to at least help you," Charles said. "I'm not sure how far I'll be able to go with this research, or what I'll be allowed to do."

"I don't understand that," she admitted, closing her eyes at Charles' instruction. Something hummed beneath her, and a faint pressure washed over her. Her breath caught for a moment before she forced herself to pick the rhythm back up. "You told me messing with power cores is dangerous, because of some threat, but you also said it's been dealt with before. How can we just sit back and let so many people just go through the world without helping them when we have the means?"

Charles didn't answer right away. "You have to weigh the cost of helping a few versus putting more in danger by touching matters we shouldn't. Your mother could have brought down untold harm upon the world by messing with power cores. We don't want to do the same."

"But we have the benefit of information on our side," Vivainne argued. "And I want to help people. Isn't that why I'm becoming a hero? Isn't that why you became a hero?"

He sighed. "It is."

"I know I can't be anything except for a guinea pig in this whole process, but I feel like we should at least try and help people. If we can learn how to safely make prosthetic cores, shouldn't we? There are so many supers with shattered cores who can't live normal lives. I could be one of them."

"You aren't."

"But I could be," she protested, eyes flying open. "My core could shatter, and that'd be the last of it. I want to find a way to prevent that. To stop it from happening."

"Sounds like you should be the one doing the research then," Charles commented. "You're good to get up now."

Vivainne scoffed. "You're the one with the super genius brain."

Charles chuckled. "That's more of a hindrance, in this area, where the primary route of the research has nothing to do with what my power actually relates to. And it's not as though you need to be a super genius to understand. Your mother wasn't a super genius."

"No, but she studied it all through college."

"And? It's not as though you couldn't go to college. Or get an equivalent education somewhere, if you want."

Vivainne went silent, considering the idea. She'd never imagined going to college, or going into the family trade like Vora wanted. The very idea of being forced to work for Monet Industries had been enough to make her try and fail half her classes in high school, not that her mother had allowed it, even if she'd given Vivainne the gap year she begged for. But Vora was out of the picture, and Monet Industries was hers now. She could let it go to waste, or she could put it to use, helping people. Helping people her mother had hurt.

"Maybe," she said, swinging her legs over the side of the table. "Let's find out if that worked first."

Charles tapped rapidly on a keyboard as Vivainne walked up behind him, grabbing the back of his chair. He didn't stop typing, inputting some incomprehensible code before pressing enter and grabbing the mouse. He tapped an icon on the side of the computer, and her scans appeared.

Vivainne had never been in the hospital, never had any sort of scans or X-rays or anything of the sort done, and peered at them curiously as a series appeared across the screen. "Why'd you scan all of me when power cores are in the stomach?"

He sighed. "Because they're not actually in the stomach, that's just the general impression."

She lifted a finger, pointing at the screen as a hesitant smile crossed her face. "Mine are in my stomach," she said, voice wavering. The scans were odd, the outline of her body more like that of a ghost with odd tendrils of color circling through her body like a combination of veins and nerves. In the center of her stomach, the lines connected with a small, black organ, not quite round, wedged beneath where her lungs would be. Beside it, and the thing that made it difficult to breathe, was another one. Dim, seemingly disconnected, but there. "Those are my cores, right? Both of them?"

Charles turned back to her with a smile. "I do believe they are."