Jack’s first lesson veered far from his original plans.

Most unexpectedly, he found himself seated in the furthest row behind twenty of his students while Thea lectured. She now wore a more suitable outfit, crafted hastily by Jack from some of the finest materials he’d collected through his portals. Instead of the scantily and poorly protective battle-bra and thong, Jack had smithed a suit of skin-tight, lightweight chainmail and fashioned a set of dragon-leather top and skirt that he’d dyed silver to match her request. A cloudy fog still hazed around her body; Thea explained that the fog was a manifestation of her mana, a sort of training all Altarians required through adolescence. It trained the mind to constantly shield oneself while also working to make controlling mana feel as natural as breathing.

Jack had leapt on Thea’s offer to teach the fledglings how to sense mana and awaken as Players, or Thiaxes, as they were called in her tongue. She’d expressed a slight hesitation over the potential differences in Earth’s mana, but so far, her lecture had been enlightening. Not even Jack had bothered to ask some of the most basic questions about mana. Was it an energy? A particle? A wave? A liquid? Was mana a clumping of mana-molecules, or was it the grouping of something else that made mana? While Thea did not know most of the technical answers around mana, she knew more than any human and she also knew which questions were the important ones to ask.

She assured the students, however, that to her best knowledge, all living beings could awaken, gather, and manipulate mana.

The class was more focused than they had ever been. Each student hung on every one of Professor Althea’s words. They jotted notes, slammed fingers on keys, and muttered to themselves as they worked to capture and internalize every word. At the end of her lecture, Thea smiled and then called Jack to the front of the room.

“My turn,” Jack cracked a joke as he walked to the front.

The students turned and looked at Jack’s powerful figure as he walked by. Some lowered their gaze while others stared, again, trying to capture every second of his presence. A few whispers rose from among them.

Jack turned as he reached Thea’s side. “Now,” Jack started. “We’re going to call you into the office one at time. Professor Althea is going to be explaining, teaching me a few things. If you don’t understand what we are saying, or have questions, just hold them and Althea will answer whatever she can afterwards.” Jack turned and looked at the first person starting from the front left. “Lisa,” Jack beckoned.

Lisa stood and approached.

“The rest of you all can talk amongst yourselves. This shouldn’t take too long.”

The class stood and rearranged their desks, conversations sparking immediately about the things they had just learned.

“Sit,” Althea instructed, leading Lisa to a mat in the center of the connected office.

Lisa looked to Jack for reassurance.

Jack nodded and smiled. “It’s perfectly safe,” Jack assured her.

Althea picked up a mana-stone from the desk and carried it to Lisa who accepted it with open hands.

“It’s light,” Lisa commented. “I didn’t expect it to be nearly weightless.”

“If you really want to be confused, drop it,” Jack instructed.

“Really?” Lisa questioned. “Here?”

“Go ahead,” Jack assured it. “It won’t break.”

Lisa tilted her hand and let the stone slide off. It tumbled but didn’t fall, instead, it wafted into the air like a leaf in the breeze. “Wow,” Lisa muttered; her mind raced through all of the concepts, the laws of the universe that she’d learned through dozens of years in the field of theoretical physics.

“I’m going to go over the most basic of mana breathing techniques,” Thea began, calling the floating stone to her with a flick of her wrist and then handing it again to Lisa. She glanced toward Jack and let the smallest smile flash on her face as her eyes met his. “Now sit,” Thea commanded, turning away from Jack to hide her blushing cheeks. “Legs crossed. Arms together like this,” Thea motioned with her arms, hugging herself around her own waist.

“The stone?” Lisa asked, mimicking Thea’s design.

“Ah, yes.” She looked to Jack again, unable to hide her redness. “Our children’s breath is enough to levitate the stone just outside their mouth. I didn’t take into account the difference in a human’s lungs. You cannot simultaneously inhale and exhale.”

“Does it just need to stay there?” Jack asked.

Thea nodded.

Jack shifted himself and sent a stream of mana into the floor causing a small sapling to sprout from the wood in the center of Lisa’s lap and grow upward, stopping just a few inches from her mouth. “Go ahead,” Jack motioned.

Lisa raised the stone to the sapling.

Again, Jack sent a string of mana and the sapling reached out and extended green threads around the stone, locking it firmly in place.

“Now, breathe as you normal would,” Thea started. “Feel the air flowing into your lungs. You can close your eyes if it helps, but I want you to focus only on your breath. Feel the coolness entering you. The warmth exiting. Feel the touch of it on your teeth. The pressure as it enters and exits your lungs. Feel the air. Focus only on the air.”

Lisa breathed. She didn’t understand what she was doing, but she pushed away any thoughts that entered her mind. She breathed. And, when she found her mind wandering, she listened again to Thea’s instructions, focusing only on her breath.

“Fascinating,” Jack mumbled. “She’s already drawing so much energy in.”

Lisa’s eyes snapped open, her breath suddenly erratic. “I felt it,” she rasped. “Was that mana? It just exploded within me. It was everything. It felt like a cold bath.”

“Now this,” Jack instructed Lisa in the basics of his nature mana breathing techniques. Even with the pool of mana beneath her, she had no such realization. No connection with the energy. No major awakening.

“I wonder why it’s different,” Thea commented. “The quantity of mana is the same. So there must be something with mana-stones?”

Jack pulled a mana-stone from his pouch and crushed it in his hand.

Thea looked, confused, but held her tongue.

Jack crushed another stone and then another and another and another. He crushed nearly two hundred stones before his crazed expression softened to his maniacal smile. Jack lifted his hand, gathering a small ball of mana in the space. He directed the energy, relying on the skills he’d just generated to guide him. And then, to everyone’s surprise, a mana stone condensed right in the palm of Jack’s hand. It was darker, cloudier than the others, and swirled with the emerald grace of nature-tinted mana.

“Try this,” Jack motioned to Lisa, sprouting a thick tree trunk in the room. He placed the stone in the trunk at Lisa’s abdomen and then instructed her in a new set of breathings that involved resting her head and hands on the tree.

Lisa followed his instructions without question, although a part of her felt as if she was being pranked and the cameras would be revealed any minute. And then, a rush of life burst through it. It felt different than the wind energy. It was warmer, earthier.

“I did it,” Lisa said, staggering away from the tree.

“That’s unbelievable,” Thea commented finally, still flabbergasted by Jack’s power. “Yesterday, you’d never heard of a mana stone. And now, you can make them? Is that even possible? You can make a mana stone? We have to mine them from the rifts. From the mana vein. But you can just make them?”

Jack turned to Lisa who had begun sweating through her shirt. “Thank you, Lisa,” Jack said. “Can you send the next person in?”

“Uh huh,” Lisa said, exiting without another word.