Tyler Marius stretched himself out, eyes tracing the curves of Tracy's tall, athletic, dark-skinned body. His latest Earth conquest. Also one of his students.
"If you stay the night, I can promise bacon and eggs in the morning," she purred.
After so long aboard the Angelship, just the thought of meat brought a tinge of nausea with it. Marius had never been keen on a vegetarian diet earlier in his life, but after eating that way for so long due to the resource constraints of an artificial environment he had no desire to switch back to a diet inclusive of animal products. "Come now, Tracy, I can't spend the whole night with every goddess I pleasure."
She play punched him, mouth open in a display of shock. "Tyler Marius, I don't know if I should be happy you called me a goddess or upset you get around so much. Or at least claim to get around."
"The proper response is desire. Men want to be me. Women want to be with me. It's my curse, much as yours is to be beautiful." Marius winked to her as he left bed. Within minutes he stood fully clothed on the front porch of her tiny house, door closing and locking behind him with a deft touch of his corona. After a brief check to make sure he wasn't being directly observed, Marius took to the air. Breaking the first rule of flying he taught beginners, Marius accelerated his entire body, neglecting to leg his legs dangle or exclude his head to retain his sense of balance. Being able to harden every molecule of his body to the point that he could survive having a building dropped on top of him made a lot of the rules other people followed superfluous for him.
The chill night air all around him, Marius reflected on the ladies of this world he had encountered intimately. April from Wheeling had been an employee of a strip club and never knew him as anything more than a man with a lot of cash in his pocket. That had been enough to grant first class treatment for one night. She had been quite lovely, other than the drug habit that left track marks along her arms. Then had come Kendra. Though thicker than he preferred, the knowledge that he had stolen her away from the weakling Greg after a lover's spat added an extra dimension of pleasure. Now there was Tracy, who may be employed as a bartender, but also competed in something called 'cross fit' in her spare time. The intensity of this woman made him hesitate to pursue any sort of relationship. She could quite possibly become one of his real students and he didn't need to complicate their future interactions.
But on the other hand . . . Tracy was hot. Marius smiled into the night as he sailed over the grid of streets below. Buffalo, New York. A nice enough town. Certainly not as unwelcoming to a brown-skinned man like him as other places he had been on this world. He had not enjoyed the slurs directed his way, especially not knowing the context of them. He had been called a hajji, a spic, a raghead, and an illegal. A few towns had lost their chance to be the first to receive talents from him because their residents had insulted him. And one particularly aggressive man had lost the ability to speak when he spontaneously experienced a stroke while yelling at Marius. The hate-filled words had morphed into nonsense phonemes and the man's face had gone white in panic. There had been no stopping the stroke at that point. Marius had not just stopped the blood flow to the brain's language center, he had cauterized arteries with gravitas to ensure brain tissue died.
His flight ended at a yacht club. Marius landed in an empty boat and opened the door to the interior with his talents. Inside, he climbed into the cramped bed and let himself drift into a semblance of sleep.
The vasted portion of his mind remained active as his biological self rested. Real sleep -- consisting of dreams and comforting nothingness -- no longer happened for him. Instead, he felt like a damn computer with most of its input cut off, consigned to hours of tormentful boredom while his physical brain went about its nightly housekeeping duties. This particular night, Marius stewed on the injustices Hafnym had perpetrated against him. First had come the reassignment to one of the outlying ships to serve as the primary kinetic there. That had ended his grand tour through the ranks of grateful single ladies present on the Angelship. Then there had been his deliberate exclusion during the formation of the initial executive board. He and Cassandane had both been screwed over that time. Not that they had ever commisserated together. After she caught him with the scientist girl, they had stopped talking altogether. Though to be fair to both of them, they hadn't exactly been on the road to happily ever after. Two damaged souls didn't combine into a whole one, they just poisoned one another with constant reminders of their shared trauma.
Hafnym and Wilson . . . the mastermind and the muscle. Marius would never have suspected them capable of engineering their ascendancy to control the entire fleet back when they were cowering at the slightest twitch of Nallit. Of the five who survived the training, they had been the most fearful, cloaked in tense silence that they broke only to curry favor with their demonic leader. Wilson had never disobeyed Nallit that Marius was aware. Cassandane . . . she had disobeyed three times that Marius knew of. And each time Nallit had cackled with glee about his rogue female Aoleyen having the biggest balls of his students. He had smacked her around for her insolence, but ultimately he seemed to enjoy having a special student more than he disliked her independent nature.
But none of those politics mattered anymore. Hafnym would never leave the seat of his power on the Angelship. Cassandane would have a hard time catching him with her dappled appearance being so unusual to the locals -- and if she did manage to find him, she would have to ask how he did it before she struck. That left only Wilson for him to worry about. Wilson had been his equal in talent when they trained together. Today . . . who knew. Cassandane had gotten better with obsessive training. He knew that from the awed rumors that percolated throughout the fleet. Hafnym sat in meetings all day, which didn't exactly equate to training hours. Wilson had existed in an undefined role, largely invisible, but on occasion acting as the voice of Hafnym in affairs. Did Wilson practice with his talents or just rely on brute strength to cow the minor talents of the fleet?
Marius himself had only trained after he had slept his way through the women of the small crew and managed to estrange himself from each of them. Playing with the talents had been one of the few escapes available to him. He only achieved full body hardening a year before they reached orbit of this Earth. The other major achievement, with conscious teleotic processes, had been even more recent. He didn't know if Wilson could replicate those feats. He didn't particularly want to find out, either. If he could grow the core of his army to contain numerous strong paragons, he didn't think the fleet would dare send anyone after him. They would simply ignore his existence and eventually leave the planet when the Chekowan got close.
In the war that would follow, only one thing was certain. Tyler Marius would be Savior to another people.
