Stephanie wasn’t sure what she felt about that, but she wanted into the system so she didn’t intend to back out now. The headset with the sensors folded down and the gloves slipped onto her hands. The right one allowed for the index finger to be exposed, which she assumed was for the nutrient injections. A small needle emerged from the side, pricked her lightly in the neck, and injected the first dose of serum.

  It felt stronger than before, and her eyes closed almost immediately. For a moment, she felt as if she were falling into the darkness all around her. Suddenly, that feeling ceased and the room lit up bright white. She stood in the avatar room, which looked the same as it had the other times she had been there.

  Another AI voice came over, this one male. “Welcome. Normally, June will join you if you make any changes to your avatar. This can be found in your training blocks in your virtual room. However, at this time, she is preparing your Earthbound body so I will get you sorted out.”

  Stephanie tapped her foot and looked around impatiently. “Okie dokie.”

  A uniform disengaged from the rack and hung in front of her. The blue lycra jumpsuit boasted gold stripes down the center of each side and a zipper up the middle. On the breast was the golden P with a circle around it. Stephanie pressed her lips together and tried not to show her amusement at the golden shower reference. She knew it was the school pride. Without having any other choice, she tapped the uniform twice and then the boots. Her hair was immediately pulled back into a ponytail regardless of her preference.

  When she looked in the mirror, she had to admit she looked smart. The outfit was almost like one of the training uniforms the Federation Army wore. Suddenly, the room shifted, speeded past her, and stopped. She blinked, still not used to the initial jolt. She now stood in a courtyard area with a large swath of grass and trees scattered around. Students lay on the lawn, talking and laughing. In front of her stood a huge university building with large pillars. At the top was the school logo. She turned full circle and perused the different parts of the college all around her. It was reminiscent of the pictures she had seen a long time before of Harvard and Yale. Both had now become prep schools, but some fought the change and were unable to survive past the first five years.

  In the distance, tall, rocky, jagged, snow-peaked mountains reached to bright blue skies with fluffy white clouds that floated gently in the breeze. The AI—still the male—spoke again. “This is the main building where most of your non-physical classes will be held. There are atriums for each class and professors are there twenty-four-seven to help you with whatever you may need. To your right, in the eleven buildings peppered across the property, are your major combat training arenas. You will most likely not get to these during your current semester, but you are always welcome to watch from the viewing rooms at certain times.”

  Stephanie turned her study to the buildings which no longer followed the typical university style. They were shaped like different planets and ships, depending upon their purpose. To the right were the Meligorn buildings. There was no mistaking that from their purple hue and smooth surface.

  “Now, to your left, you will find the gym, the cafeteria and student lounge area, and the banquet hall, as well as all administrative buildings. You can also rent individual flyers for your leisure time or take a swim in one of six different bodies of water. In the center, the tall high-rise building is the dorms. If you look at the inside of your arm, you will see a screen implanted into your avatar. It will provide your schedule, a map, and your room information. Everything you will need is included. Now, let’s head to the administration offices where you have a meeting already set up.”

  At a sharp beep in her ear, she looked down at her arm. June had uploaded the information and the map lit up under what seemed to be a very thin layer of flesh. She chuckled and traced her finger over it. “I need to go to the admin office.”

  A red dot flashed to show her where she was and the quickest route. Stephanie shook her head and set off. “Right, a GPS for my own legs. Got it. Better than getting lost, I suppose.”

  She made her way to the triangle-shaped building with the giant gold P on the front. As she entered, a small group of guys walked to the set of chairs in the center and plopped down. She couldn’t help but notice that they looked the worse for wear. All wore uniforms similar to hers, or the guy’s version at least. Underneath, though, appeared to be some sort of built-in armor—a chest shield and shoulder shields—and various tools hung on belts around their waists. A couple of them had burn marks on their uniforms and black soot smeared all their faces.

  Stephanie tried not to stare, but she couldn’t help her curiosity. They looked like they had been involved in an all-out war with the entire planet of Dreth.

  Anastasia walked through and past the boys. The guide now wore a jumpsuit, although hers was hot pink and her hair was down around her shoulders in a simpler style. “Just come back from training, boys?”

  One of the guys chuckled. “Uh, yeah. You could say that.”

  Another slammed his fist into the center of his chest plate and all the armor underneath disappeared. “It wasn’t so much training on how to defeat Dreth pirate forces as it was how best to get our asses kicked. We didn’t lose anyone this time to the white room, though, so I guess we’ve improved.”

  In her annoyingly upbeat tone, she giggled. “Good job, boys. Keep it up.”

  As she continued, she glanced at Stephanie and gave her a wink. Another of the guys stood and slapped his chest three times until the armor retracted. He removed the belt and tossed it on the seat before he rubbed his shoulder and winced. “Yeah, well, that’s why we are here in summer school. Unless we learn this, they won’t let us back in. We don’t have Momma and Poppa fundage to fix the oops. So, unless we want to sign up for a lifetime of debt only to end up as a high-end janitor in the suburbs, I would suggest we figure this shit out.”

  “Stephanie Morgana,” a voice called.

  The guys looked over and Stephanie turned to see a short, plump woman who stood in front of a doorway. She wore a gray suit with a white blouse, stockings, and black orthopedic-looking shoes. Her hair was pulled tightly at the nape of her neck and her look was one that definitely announced that she wasn’t there to play. “Well, is that you, dear? Or are you going by another name today?”

  Her relatively harsh but more pleasant tone than Stephanie had expected shook her senses back to normal. The guys watched her and whispered to one another as she hurried forward and followed the woman into the office. “My name is Elsa. I am the digitally recreated avatar that will set up your first training. Have a seat.”

  Stephanie looked around the office. It was as elegant as everything else on the grounds, with deep, richly polished furniture, high-back chairs, and some of the most famous artwork in history hanging on the light-blue walls. All except for Elsa’s area. She was the newbie training avatar and had a metal desk on a patch of white tile.

  The woman pulled a screen up and flipped through. “Let’s see. We have customs and nuances, that’s a good one. Then there is Dreth protocol and Dreth history. You’ll need those. We also have business customs and proper etiquette…”

  Elsa scrutinized her with narrowed eyes for a moment and checked the box. “Yep, that’s a definite. All right. Stand on that line. I will zoom you over to your first training session so you don’t have to sprint there.”

  Unsure of what zooming was, she complied and stood carefully on the small white tile with a red line. The assistant flashed her hand over the screen and the entire room slid away as before and stopped suddenly in a large classroom with rows of seats. She was, however, the only one there. A middle-aged man with a silver mustache and salt-and-pepper hair stood at the front of the room. He wore a white button-up with the sleeves rolled, a tie, suspenders, and brown corduroy pants.

  Stephanie snickered quietly as she walked down the steps. “Is this the only avatar they have for professors in the virtual world?”

  He whirled to face her. “No, my dear. I am a trainer, not a professor, and a manifestation of the system. Now, come down here, and do hurry. We need to go over what you will study while you are here. The list seems fairly typical for a first timer. It’s perhaps a little full but you look up to it.”

  She was tired of being thrown around at that point. “I’m sorry, but I thought that I would have a chance to focus on magic and Meligorns. I was brought here because of my aptitude for it.”

  The trainer didn’t look up from his paper, even though she knew that as a system-generated avatar, he wasn’t actually reading anything. “No, all students go through the same courses at the beginning. Besides,” he continued and glanced at her, “Meligorn and magic are far too advanced for you.”

  Stephanie’s teeth clenched and she tightened her body and raised her head in determination. “That is not true, and not an assessment that you can make without knowing me or my abilities. I was brought here because of my magical abilities coupled with my impressive intellect.”

  The trainer looked up, smirked, and folded his arms, still holding the paper. “All right, then, why don’t you prove yourself?”

  She nodded and pushed her shoulders back. “Fine. May I have access to magical energy, please.”

  The trainer, now so snarky he was hard not to punch in the nose, snapped his fingers and relocated them to Meligorn. They stood in the center of a large grassy area surrounded by trees on all sides. The sky was the same beautiful purple and the warmth she remembered so clearly immediately flooded Stephanie’s chest.

  In the background, BURT had been notified that Stephanie had moved into her first training. The system AI had recovered quickly from being thwarted by Pinnacle when the school had managed to snatch Stephanie out from under his virtual nose, so to speak. The girl remained the arrowhead of his determined pursuit of his Primary Rule and he had simply adjusted his protocols to accommodate this new development. He controlled and maintained the Virtual World, after all, and it was a satisfyingly simple task to set up the notifications and his access to the system in a way that no one—neither Pinnacle nor the engineers who so zealously monitored his activity—was any the wiser.

  It appeared, finally, that the girl had now entered a new phase and it was imperative—both to protect her and to increase his own critical system development—that he not miss a moment. Accordingly, he cycled up some new special tasks to keep the system busy and headed over to watch her.

  The trainer stood in front of her, put his hand out, and cupped it. He twitched his head to the side with a snide smirk. “Okay, Firestarter, why don’t you make a flame light up in my—”

  Booooommmm!

  Stephanie’s eyes widened and she yanked her hand back and watched in horror as the trainer catapulted off his feet and spiraled sideways for about thirty feet. He landed on his ass and bounced a few times, but still managed to sit. His face was red, white, and charred, and smoke billowed off it.

  BURT hadn’t entered the Meligorn arena yet as he still tried to determine where she had gone. She should have been with her first trainer. Suddenly, he received an alert that the said trainer had been damaged during a new entry review. He pulled the scene up with the live feed on one side and the replay on the other. He saw Stephanie stretch tentatively to extinguish a flame in the avatar’s hand, but the energy was so strong, it rocketed him back.

  He had the urge to initiate the fake human laugh, but that wasn’t a good idea. It was apparent that she hadn’t quite understood the difference between the test world and the new Pinnacle advanced world. He found the location in the system and headed directly there to watch from a distance. When he arrived, she stood face to face with the trainer and was in a heated argument.

  She shook her hand and pulled it against her chest. “How was I supposed to know about the difference in my availability?” She paced back and forth, slightly panicked. “I’ve only done magical flame twice.”

  The trainer’s face was, fortunately, healing rapidly in front of her. “What, twice?”

  Stephanie whirled toward him and tried to calm herself. “On my government test. And the rest was with the batteries. I’ve only had a battery to play with since then, and I didn’t think about the fact that it would be different. Of course, I didn’t mean to throw you across the arena. That would be bad manners.”

  Aaron tilted his head back and to the side to stretch his neck and squinted one eye as he typed. He received an alert in the upper right-hand side of his screen. As one of the engineer-programmers on duty, he was notified of all potential issues in the Virtual World system that might require attention. The damage sustained by a tutor avatar fitted that category and it really was simple luck that made him the first available engineer in the queue. He sighed and pulled up the footage that displayed Stephanie hurling the trainer through the air. At first, he chuckled, having never liked the avatar manifestation. The tutor was a dickhead. He glanced in the corner at the name—Stephanie Morgana, Pinnacle Prep. Slowly, he stiffened in his seat and zoomed in on her face.

  His mouth fell slightly open as she clapped flames off her fingertips. “The girl knows how to throw magic in her first class? I gotta check this out for sure.”

  Before Aaron could investigate further, BURT butted in.

  >>>This is my trainee… BURT

  He tried to respond but by the time he typed the words, the AI had already booted him out and changed the location. It would be impossible for him to find her now. It was unlike BURT to expel any programmer or engineer from a program unless he was in the middle of an upgrade.

  Aaron didn’t like the unusual response so he began to search and pulled up Pinnacle’s summer semester records. “What are you up to, BURT?”

  He pulled up the picture of the girl and definitely matched her with the one he’d seen. He cross-referenced her file with her student ID and stared at the numbers. “B221ZA…that’s the student I gave to BURT to handle during testing. What the hell? How did she go from testing to a summer semester that fast? We don’t even finance summer semesters.”

  His mind racing, he tapped his fingers on the table and stared at his ViD screen, swiped back to her file, and read through to her name. “Stephanie Morgana…Morgana…why does that sound so familiar?”

  He put her name into the archives database and immediately, new releases popped up with her picture on the screen. His mouth dropped open again and this time, his hand slammed down on the desk. He realized that she was the one who had saved that woman and baby from the truck by throwing magic. She was the one they called…well, a whole lot of names, and some not so pleasant.

  Officially, she was referred to as a YFW, a Young Federation Witch. Or, to some of the guys who had drooled over the picture of her with glowing purple eyes and electrified hair, the Young Fine Witch. There was no doubt that she needed to be trained and that she probably deserved to be, but it was really strange that BURT was so protective of her. That was not programmed into his system and indicated a possibly serious misstep, regardless of the fact that everything seemed to be moving along just fine.

  Aaron sat back and shook his head. He needed to do more. Logically, he needed to tell someone that BURT had these kinds of abnormalities, but in order to do that, he would have to explain that he was the one who had told the AI to test her in the first place. That was a huge breach of company policy. No matter how much he knew about BURT or how much he was involved in the creation and upkeep, he would be fired and possibly arrested for it.

  He put his fingers on the keyboard. “There has to be something in the testing footage that shows me what might have happened to her,” he muttered to himself. “From her files, that testing was her first time in the Virtual World. How would she learn that in one test session?”

  As he began to filter through the tests by student ID, another alert chimed in his ear. There was an urgent request from the system in server S5891K, which was somewhere in northern Idaho. Unfortunately, he couldn’t ignore it. He closed out the filter and clicked on the request with a mental note to make sure to resolve it as quickly as possible.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The teacher of the class put her hands on Stephanie’s shoulders from behind and pushed her thumbs into the center of her shoulder blades. “The taller you stand, the more you will command a room. The more you command a room, the more you will demand attention from every species there. The Meligorn are very gender neutral when it comes to business. Your sex will not bother them. The Dreth can often be brutish and snide to women, so you will have to exert your dominance when meeting with them.”

  Stephanie snarled, stuck her chest out, and scowled down at her blue blazer, white blouse, and knee-length blue suit skirt. She wore pantyhose and blue round-tipped heels. Her ankles wobbled slightly, and she could feel the pain in her arches. “WTF? How about a fireball up their ass? Will that get their attention?”

  The professor, very similar to Elsa only taller and with a more refined style, slapped her on the lower back with a rolled up piece of paper. She walked around her in a circle with her nose up as her gaze studied every part of her body. “You have the form perfect, girl. It’s your attitude that needs adjustment. That will happen, though. The purpose of this training class is to teach you to understand how to participate, lead, and follow through with presentations in meetings for both sales and young executives.”

  The professor gestured, Stephanie’s suit disappeared, and her uniform reappeared once more. She exhaled a relieved breath and allowed her shoulders to slump. The professor clapped her hands. “Go on, you did well today. Your next class is three doors down on the left.”