“Both of you have above average IQ’s, so I am not going to stand here and lecture you. You are welcome to consider this class a study hall, but playing it like a traditional class would waste both your time and mine. You have a lot of reading, though, and a full class schedule, which is why it’s scheduled in three hour blocks.”
The teacher was a normie, although I knew better than to use the term around, well, normies. It was considered kind of offensive, although in my opinion just about any term used to describe a group of people was, sooner or later, deemed offensive. Like changing the language would paper over the fact that one group could bench-press a bus and the other couldn't. The current socially approved term was ‘non-alpha,’ a bland, bureaucratic label that would inevitably be declared problematic by the council of the perpetually aggrieved in a year or two. I gave it five-to-one odds the next term would be something utterly ridiculous, like ‘baseline appreciators’ or ‘empowerment-adjacent citizens.’
I’d gotten a surprisingly good night’s sleep, a minor miracle considering my mattress seemed to have been stuffed with recycled textbooks and regret. The school mess provided a delicious breakfast, a perk I intended to exploit to its caloric limit. It was quite a bit more crowded in the mornings, so I figured Mindy’s guess about where the students were the night before seemed pretty accurate. A few people had been interested in me, their eyes gliding over the rare male Alpha specimen like I was a poorly taxidermied exhibit, but a stern glare honed by two years of people feeling sorry for me had kept them mostly at bay until Mindy had shown up. I wasn’t here to make friends; I was here to secure a future that didn’t involve eating ramen in a condemned building. I was more than capable of ignoring the occasional ‘what the fuck is HIS problem?’ I caught, mostly because I’d already asked myself that question and come up with a list of compelling answers.
“To be honest, I don’t even care if you show up except on Fridays for the next four weeks. That’s when I throw a test to make sure you have read what I assigned you. I usually teach early American History, So I plan to use this time as a way to catch up on my work. I’ll be here even if you aren’t, so if you have questions about what you have read, or about American History, I will be happy to help you. I get paid to be here, you don’t, so use it as you will.”
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Doctor Menendez was a young guy, maybe in his thirties, which in the ancient, tenured world of academia probably meant he was still paying off his student loans and dreaming of a classroom that didn’t double as a storage closet for remedial outcasts. I didn’t really know how academies or universities worked, and I also didn’t really care. My higher education had mostly consisted of learning which alleys were best for avoiding heroes and which convenience stores had the best post-energy-debt junk food deals.
“The only real rules I have are that when you are here, you treat this like a public space even though there’s only the two of you. That means no eating, sleeping, or other acts that are best held in private… I don’t want to watch that. If you are Alphas, and no, I don’t need to know, try to avoid using any powers in this class, at least spectacular ones. I don’t really care if you can use your abilities to sharpen your pencils or memorize the dictionary, I just don’t want superpowers flying around my head, or you burning down the classroom.”
“Do we need to raise our hands?”
He shook his head. “Nope. And you are perfectly welcome to talk about whatever you think you need to. Just don’t try and talk over top of me if we decide I need to go into full-on teacher mode for something. Also, keep quiet during quizzes. This class is remedial, but it DOES help determine class placement when the regular semester starts. If you screw up the reading, you’ll be dumped into remedial Alpha history, and that class DOES get graded, and it’s boring and time-consuming. They will figure you need the lecture time to learn. Some folks do.”
The books and websites he gave us to read were not exactly basic, but they were not too bad, written from the standpoint of both alphas and normies. They didn’t really delve into powers, but rather on the social and strategic effects of alphas before and after the Kaiju started becoming a real problem.
