Aberrant: Mutant High - Practice Makes... [FIN]

[GDP_ST]

((Note: This takes place late in the morning after Caught In The Act ))

Alex yawned and took another sip of his steaming mug of coffee, blinking owlishly in the late morning sunlight and pondering the attractions of sloping back off to his bed. The young mutant was sitting in the common room for the dorm building, a sleep-tousled blond Apollo whose own radiance shamed the pale, silvery winter sun beyond the window he sat next to. He shrugged away the urge to bunk off: today was only his second day at LHA and he'd remembered that he was due for an evaluation at some point. Exactly what sort of evaluation, he didn't know, but given that this wasn't a normal school, he was willing to bet that it wouldn't just be on his algebra skills.

And that was why he'd dragged himself out of bed and made himself a huge mug of caffeinated life-support. There was something he wanted to test.

Sitting beside his mug on the table was a packet of cheap candles, one of which was standing up on a plate in front of him. Alex sourly eyeballed the wick, which thus far was spectacularly failing to ignite when he concentrated on it. He didn't understand. He knew that he'd set fire to his parent's letter yesterday. Alex looked out of the window, his sapphire eyes reflective as he worried at the problem like a terrier with a bone. He felt the weak sunlight on his skin like a featherlight kiss, felt his cells take in the radiation thirstily, like a dry sponge sucks up water.

He'd felt something just before it had happened. Under the anger and grief. Something else. The opposite of this lazy soaking-up feeling. Like a... squeezing sensation in his body. He clung to the memory of that feeling, setting up with the facts he already knew.

One: He stored sunlight and catalysed other sources of energy into solar energy within his own body. It was the fundamental core of his mutation. It let him fly. It was possible, therefore, that the energy could find other outlets.

Two: Flying required a similar 'flex' of intangible muscles to the sensation he'd felt in the back of the limo. But it was a whole-body sensation, whereas what he was trying for had been tighter, more focused. And centered around his eyes. He closed those eyes right now, almost meditating on what he had felt physically when the paper had caught fire. He put himself back into that moment, when he had felt a tightening behind his eyes and a sort of... reaching out.

He opened his eyes again, taking another sip of his coffee before setting the mug aside. He locked his gaze on the candle-wick and tightened behind his eyes. It was almost like squinting, but on the inside. He felt it happening, warmth and heat building behind his eyes as he tightened further. Unbeknownst to him, flares of light started to dance around his head in a manner reminiscent of a solar corona. Hey, I'm doing it! I'm actually doing it! He looked at the candle and squeezed the heat out towards it...

Golden light flashed in the common room, startling the handful of other occupants. The candle exploded into liquid wax and vapour. A foot-wide length of tabletop beyond it likewise flared into incandescence and left behind glowing, smoking edges as the searing golden beam of concentrated solar heat emanating from azure eyes cut through it, the chair-back beyond it, and scored a head-sized, glowing round hole in the floor beyond that before a horrified Alex cut the power flow off.

".... Oh CRAP!" Alex stared at what he'd done as a glob of recently superheated wax plopped unheeded into his coffee mug from the ceiling. Guiltily, he looked at the other occupants of the room. "Uh... my bad. Sorry. That didn't quite go as planned..." He trailed off and looked at what he'd wrought, then abruptly laughed, a short bark of surprised disbelief. "Oh wow!"

[Dave ST]

"Amusing yourself?" Came the low, sultry tone from behind him, a British accent laced heavily with displeasure. "Mr. Andrews?"

Professor Jensen, who'd stopped by to deliver some notes to Josh, leaned against the wall that led into the Commons. Every rumor he'd hear about her was true; she every bit the knock-out the other students claimed she was. Her eyes narrowed behind hr expensive tortoise shell frames.

[GDP_ST]

"Ah..." Alex shot to his feet, a crimson blush darkening his tanned face. "Miss... uh... Professor Jensen! I was just-" he looked at the wreckage of the table and floor, then winced as his brain caught up with the situation.

"I didn't realise that it... That is, I'd never done that before. Except by accident, and that just set some paper on fire. I was thinking a candle would be a good exercise. I didn't know..." he paled a little now. "Oh crap. It's a good thing it didn't do THAT when I was in the limo." He pulled himself together, raking back some stray locks of his tumbled golden mane and incidentally looking fantastic as he did so, though he was only aware that he'd made an ass of himself in front of one of the faculty.

"I am truly sorry, Professor. I was preparing for my evaluation and..." he looked at the table again, then sighed and stood up straighter, resigned to his fate. "Sorry."

[GDP_ST]

"It seems you've been having a busy first 24 hours in the Academy, Mr Andrews." Professor Jensen's voice still held a touch of ice, though she was finding it hard in the face of the young Adonis' obvious contrition. "First last night, and now today. Tell me honestly, what grudge do you hold against our furniture?"

"Uh... None whatsoever. I was-" Alex began, but the knockout redhead was already smoothly moving on, her purring tones falling somewhere between amusement and irony.

"I can readily surmise what you were doing, Mr Andrews. 'Playing with fire' is the textbook term." Some of the other sophomores present were snickering, though with a certain sympathy. Most of them at one time or another had been subject to this curious mixture of gentle rebuke and scathing irony. Prof. Jensen eyed Alex speculatively from over the rims of her glasses, either not noticing or choosing to ignore the deep blush she elicited with her frank appraisal. "As a matter of fact, it's just as well I happened by. We need to talk."

"We do?" Alex tried not to look too nervous. What did she have in mind? That smolderingly analytical look didn't help his piece of mind any, either. He'd seen similar looks since his arrival from some of the female students. For a young man educated in an all-boys private school, the heightened female attention was proving highly distracting. Please God, tell me she's not going to drag me into her office to lick caramel off her chest. I won't know where to put my face... Okay, scratch that. I would, but I'd feel reeeeally awkward about it!

Myrna Jensen favored him with a twitch of her lips, which to a fevered adolescent male imagination readily translated to a coy smile. "Oh yes. Come with me, please." she told him before turning to go, her well-shaped rear readily apparent under the tight white jeans that covered it. Alex grabbed his coffee, only to hear her voice from the door. "I believe that has wax in it. We'll get you another. With haste, please? You're a nice young man but I don't want to spend all day waiting on you." Alex flushed again and, abandoning his coffee, headed after the Professor as she walked off.

"I've been checking out your physiology." She told him in a matter-of-fact tone as he fell into step. That was sufficient enough for his pace to falter for a beat or two, and noting his bashful silence the Professor looked over at him with a tilt of an eyebrow. "From the tests and samples Dr Chase took this morning? She asked me to look at them when I had some time, seeing as your biology is fairly odd even for here."

"Oh... Oh!" Alex said, most of his nervousness fleeing in the face of this revelation. It's science stuff! Phew! Wait... odd? "Odd? In what way exactly?" Prof. Jensen smiled at him.

"According to your records you're a reasonable student in the sciences. Decent grades in Chemistry, Biology and Physics. Which is good, because you'll need all three of those to understand your physiological changes. I'd also like to run more tests, if that's alright with you?" Alex blinked at her, and she sighed. "This is a school, Mr Andrews... May I call you Alex? This is a school, Alex. Whilst we don't need your permission to, say, dock your allowance to replace furnishings destroyed in a spirit of youthful enquiry, the Director insists that any poking and prodding done beyond what is needed for a student's health and wellbeing is only undertaken with their express consent and their signing of a waiver to that effect."

Alex mulled that over for a few steps, Prof. Jensen trying not to hold her breath as she watched his beautiful brow knit slightly in thought. When he looked at her and said "I don't have a problem with it, as long as I get to learn everything you do from the studies." Myrna Jensen gave him a much warmer smile than any previously, her eyes shining.

"Excellent! I was hoping you'd agree." she said with almost girlish glee. "There's some fascinating stuff I've uncovered just from what I have already, and-" She checked herself, giving him another smile. "We have a lot of ground to cover, so lets get that coffee and get to the labs. Even walking next to you, outside isn't that pleasant I'd want to linger."

[GDP_ST]

An hour had passed, Alex having spent most of it trying not to let his eyes stray too low as Professor Jensen explained what she had discovered. This was tough going. Prof. Jensen was wearing a knit cashmere top, scooped in the front. Ordinarily a perfectly decent garment, true, but the way the brilliant physicist had of leaning towards Alex when she was making a particularly important point or when she wanted to point out something on the screen practically guaranteed that not all of his attention was going to be on the admittedly interesting data. He wondered with some asperity if she even knew the effect she was having. She had to, right? No way in hell a beautiful, intelligent woman like this had no clue... Or maybe, he thought a little guiltily she doesn't see it as relevant. Maybe she thinks, if she thinks about it at all, that the guy she's talking to should and does have more important things to think about than her boobs. He forced his brain back on track.

"So that's why I collapsed, then. I wasn't able to... photosynthesize?" Myrne Jensen's lips pursed in a smile at that.

"Close enough. Though photosynthesis isn't really what you do. The structure of every cell in your body seems to have fundamentally changed, Alex. Not unusual for a mutant, but in your case interesting. You see, every single one of your cells has become a photovoltaic transformer." she paused and looked at him, ever the teacher, and Alex thought for a few seconds.

"Like a solar cell, then?" he offered, blue eyes studying her face. Prof. Jensen smiled, pleased.

"Yes... and no. That's the simple explanation, as far as it goes. The membrane of the cell wall takes incoming electromagnetic and nuclear energy of all types, not just light but heat, electricity, maybe even microwaves, and catalyses that into bio-sunlight that is stored, very efficiently I might add, in the cell core. You call on this whether flying or, I would assume, when you decide to incinerate inoffensive furniture." She smiled slyly at him, but Alex was prepared this time and wasn't ruffled, instead seeing her smile and raising her a slightly-abashed grin.

"I'm not going to hear the last of that, am I?" He asked good-naturedly, eyes sparkling. Myrna Jensen shook her head and laughed as he turned back to peer at the information up on the monitor: his smile was too much to take with aplomb, especially this close up. That thought prompted her to stand under the pretext of stretching and move away, picking up her coffee cup and taking a sip with her back to him. That was better, she thought. Gorgeous though he might be, he was a seventeen-year old student and it would not do to ogle him. It would have been easier if he was only a pretty face, but he had a ready wit and a keen mind in addition to his more obvious attractions. She frowned briefly, wondering how on earth Jericho Drumm managed to keep his professionalism with girls like Violet Vincent peering through their lashes at him every time he walked past in the cafeteria. Detachment was important, she told herself. These kids needed friends as well as teachers, but some lines needed to be maintained for authority's sake if for no other reason.

"Professor?" Alex's voice cut through her reverie. She turned around and stepped back over to sit down again. "Sorry, needed to stretch my legs a little. Where were we...? Ah, yes." She leaned towards the screen and tapped at it.

"As you can see here, there's a flaw in your storage system. Without constant stimulation of that photovoltaic membrane, the cell's core begins to leak energy at a higher rate. There is already a steady leak, you see? The inner membrane can't fully contain the energy. That is why you radiate sunlight. And I do mean sunlight, Alex." Myrna Jensen looked at him warningly. "UV rays and all. You need to be careful with that. At the least, delicate dye on fabrics could be ruined. You might have other effects on photosensitive materials such as film. And at the worst, you could cause someone sunburn or even skin cancer." She took a look at his stricken expression and hastily qualified her words. "With prolonged contact, over time, unless they're particularly susceptible."

"I'll bear that in mind." he nodded soberly, lips tightening slightly as he stared at, or rather through the screen. Well, it's not all bad. he thought. It's not like I'm any more dangerous than a hot day at the beach. Professor Jensen cleared her throat to get his attention again, and tapped the screen once more.

"So, as we were discussing, without a constant trickle of energy coming in, you start to lose power. We'll run some tests to see how much is needed, but seeing as you've been a mutant for a week without passing out before being in a blacked-out room, I can't imagine it takes a lot of light to keep you in working order. Now, moving on the further tests I want to run..." She shuffled through a pile of papers and pushed one at him. "That's the waiver. You'll need to sign that before we can continue."

[GDP_ST]

Two days later

"Fascinating."

Alex's eyes swivelled sideways to where Professor Jensen was standing behind a bank of monitors. The physicist was pursing her lips speculatively as she looked from one screen to the next. Finally she looked over them at Alex where he lay on the scanner table.

"The mutation of your cellular structure even carries down to your synaptic and neural pathways. Alongside the electrical impulses, some bundles and fibers are starting to conduct light. Fiberoptic nerves." She smiled like a cat that had found an entire nest of canaries. "This is amazing. Theoretically this could mean much faster thought processes and reaction time, not to mention a more efficient mnemonic function."

"So I'm getting smarter?"

"Not necessarily. We need to monitor the changes to see how far they go. You might notice increased reaction time and reflexes first. The physical side of things tends to manifest first, but not always." Prof. Jensen came around the monitor bank and removed the scanning array from around Alex's glowing body. She didn't look at him as she did so, seeming to be very intent on sliding the trolley with the sensory equipment back over to the wall. "Go ahead and get dressed." she told him without looking around. To look at Alex in his shorts was to gawk, and she had resolved that, as a mature woman in her mid to late twenties, she was NOT going to gawk at this young man. Only the images on the scanner monitors. Which were little more than digitised energy readings against an equally-digitised three-dimensional image of the subject's body.

Alex sat up and slid off the cold table before padding over to the screen in the corner. He pulled on jeans, shirt and sneakers in short order, then came out again running his fingers through his long hair to sweep it back from his face. Professor Jensen smiled at him.

"I think that's enough for now, Alex. We have plenty of data to process through, but we'll keep doing weekly scans in case there are further alterations in your physiology. What's certain is that there's a vast amount of energy contained in your cells, and your mutation seems to be streamlining you for employing that energy. But we have to be careful: the usual cautions given to students about 'pushing' their abilities go double for you, young man." she warned. "At the moment, the changes seem to be controlled and benevolent. It wouldn't take much to push that into the opposite."

Alex nodded somberly, considering the possibilities. What if he continually emitted that solar fire from his eyes? Or started shedding unfiltered solar radiation? He looked at her. "I'll be careful, Professor." he promised. She smiled and nodded, then he turned to go, an expression of brooding worry on his face.

"Alex?" her voice stopped him at the door, and he turned back to see her smiling at him. "I'll see you next week. Don't worry too much, just be careful. And practice your abilities safely. The last thing we want is a dorm building melting."

He smiled back at her. "Okay, Professor Jensen. I'll see you next week if not before." With a wave, he was gone.

Myrna Jensen's smile faded a bit as she turned back to the readouts, her eyes intently flickering over the numbers. I don't want him to panic, but at the same time... I'm feeling a little concerned myself here. I really hope his mutation doesn't run amuck like Mark's did. At least that poor boy isn't dangerous to everyone around him just through existing. Alex would be. Oh lord, would he.