章節 19: Training
Emile sat alone in a large room. The room was filled with life from bright yellow flower petals to bunches of vibrant green moss. After seeing the complete details of his soul Emile set out to learn the specifics of his gift. The cadets were technically all enrolled in a gift training course, but since every gift was incredibly different this allotted time was mostly for the cadets to experiment on their own.
For Emile, that usually meant visiting Jazz in the lab since she had access to all the seeds. The room Emile was sitting in now was the storage room of the laboratory. Beneath the onslaught of flora that crowded the room were the multiple chests that housed all of Jazz's ingredients, seeds included.
For the past few days Emile had been solely focused on mapping out how his gift interacted with life. First, he tried to organize similar plants together. That meant anything with flower petals was packed together, mosses were together, plants that produced fruit were together and so on. This system, however, quickly fell apart.
Practically every plant that produced fruits also had flowers. And many of the plants with flowers were also poisonous. But there were also poisonous mosses, should those be paired with the poisonous flowers? Emile didn't know. All he had managed to figure out during the past few days was that poisonous plants required more essence to fully mature versus non-poisonous plants.
That has been the only significant pattern. Some non-fruit flowers required more essence than fruit flowers which made no sense to Emile. At the start of this experiment of his, Emile assumed it would be relatively easy. Now on day four and page twenty-two of his notebook, and only a select handful of plants had used the same amount of essence and those plants had nothing in common from Emile's perspective.
Emile picked up another seed and injected it with his essence. The seed cracked and vigorous tendrils sprawled around Emile's palm. Within a second, the bulb of a flower grew then hatched and magenta petals sprung to life along with a strong sour scent. The smell stung Emile's nose and his eyes started to water.
He tossed the flower to the side and picked up his notebook.
'Sulking Scite - three essence - magenta petals - sour smell - made me cry'
After that Emile stood up and began collecting all of the plants into one corner of the room and then left.
"I don't get it Jazz." Emile complained as he shut the door behind him. "I can't find anything that connects the amount of essence needed to the type of plant."
"But they're all low cost right?" Jazz asked.
"Every non-poisonous plant has been less than ten, the poisonous ones are all over the place. Some require eleven while others require thirty."
"Yeah but that's based on the effectiveness of the poison right?"
"Actually no–" Emile answered, "I think it's because a poison's effectiveness is relative. Something extremely dangerous to us might be perfectly fine for another species. I can't figure out how that works either."
"I see. That makes sense." Jazz paused for a few seconds as she thought of a new question. "Does it really matter?"
"Why wouldn't it matter?" Emile responded, taking a seat on one of the stools.
"Well it's not like you're going to be using every plant in existence right? The vast majority of them don't do anything. You just have to know the numbers for the plants you're actually going to use."
"What if I'm lost and moments away from death and I place all my bets on a random seed bursting to life, but I was wrong about the amount of essence it needs."
"Emile we can come up with a thousand narratives where not knowing all of these arbitrary numbers becomes a problem, but you're being trained specifically to manage unknown situations. Not everything has to be perfect." Jazz reminded him.
"And besides, if anything I feel like you should be prioritizing how much essence it takes to heal real, breathing people. You need to move on from the flowers." Jazz spoke again.
Emile looked down at his rugged notebook filled with stained pages of notes detailing the colors, names, and effects of every plant Jazz had.
"I just want to do more than wait for people to get hurt. The best form of healing is preventing them from needing treatment to begin with, you know." Emile said.
"Well I think you're trying to do too much, but hey I sit in a lab all day so don't take my word for it."
Emile left the lab after that. He had considered trying to test how much essence healing people used, but he needed hurt people for that. He could hurt himself, but Emile didn't consider that an option.
After his gift training period, Emile went to the cafeteria where he sat with Emma, Roman, Brie, and Violet.
"Oh Mr. Forerunner wants to eat with the cool kids today. Guys bow your heads, it's only polite." Roman mocked Emile as he sat down.
"I still can't believe you didn't tell anyone." Brie chirped in.
"I was scared. I think that's reasonable." Emile commented.
"Oh no! I'm joining the most respected military force our kingdom has to offer! I'm literally better than everyone! Wa–" Roman was quickly shut up by Emma who pulled his ear lobe across their table.
"It's respected out of infamy, Roman." Brie interjected. "The Forerunners have the highest fatality rates every year. Getting assigned to them is a death sentence."
The table went quiet after that. Roman awkwardly played with his brick of mystery meat and vegetable slaw.
"Hey Emile–if you happen to see my dad can you tell him about me?" Brie asked while keeping her head down.
"Sure, what's his name?" Emile responded in between bites.
"Andreas. Andreas Sterling."
Another round of awkward silence commenced.
"So lets say, hypothetically, that someone here sleeps during all the class training and didn't really know what the Forerunners were. How would you inform said fake person?" Violet suddenly said something.
"The Forerunners are the Fallen Sky's elite mobile force. They're given pretty much all of the foreign land operations which are typically exploring an uncharted area. Their overarching purpose is to find a suitable place above ground to migrate our kingdom to." Roman quickly answered.
"Roman's technically right, but there's more to it than that. The Forerunners are independent. The kingdom puts out this message that they're our elite troops, but really all that means is they're a group of powerhouses. The leader of the Forerunners is said to be stronger than our King and because of that they're rarely given missions by the actual crown. Most of the time they accept bounties to slay beasts who are used in important potions. They'll do anything for the right price that doesn't contest with the kingdom." Brie answered afterwards.
"So they're glorified bounty hunters with a badge?" Emma stared daggers at Emile.
"It sounds like I might get paid a lot…." Emile trailed off as he tried to ignore Emma.
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