We
had classes every night from then on; some larger, some smaller –
most smaller, though not from lack of demand. Our first harvest
happened right as we were really getting going, and yielded a pretty
heavy stock of seeds, but there was a limit to our planting space.
Ray found our long-term solution; as people worked their way along,
and became people we could trust, we'd slowly bring them in on
production, as well. It's not like we could keep the actual flowers
a secret from them; only the process, and even that, only for so
long. In the short term, though, we were looking to find backup;
talented people who we could get onboard with our little war, and
quickly.
Finding
talented people was pretty easy, though figuring out what they were
talented at wasn't as easy. I turned out to be good at helping
people find their talents, though, so I did a lot of one-on-ones with
people working on this. Of course, I was cheating; Ulla was right
beside me. She fed me lines, gave me little tests to assign, see
what they could do. We found a few.
Clara
spent her days hammering the place together physically, drafting Ray,
Gina, and I when and how she needed. By the third day of classes, we
a painted sign, an organized back room, and a working coffee supply.
We also had simple shelving islands on wheels that we could roll into
the back, and a trolley for the meditation mats that we could roll
out, which Clara had thrown together. By the fourth day of classes,
Gina gave up and accepted the inevitable, named a salary, told Clara
to hire a couple of part-timers, and flipped the sign on the door
over to OPEN.
In
dreams, Clara was just as much of a handyman, though in a much
smaller way than Gina. She could pull objects out of her pockets
that hadn't been there, without any real focusing time; a trick she
was practicing was pulling out a little tiny box that unfolded into a
larger one, then a larger, and so on, until she had a trunk. When we
tried out "active" exercises – whatever kinds of sporty
combat drill we could think up, that is – she would pull out and
discard tools completely casually. She crossed a 'fast as you can'
obstacle course I had Gina set up in the Zeppelin by pole-vaulting,
whip-swinging Indiana Jones style, and sliding down a set of
hand-over-hand bars on a kid's circular snow glider. Each item was
drawn, used, and tossed aside in a single long movement. Ulla said
that she was most likely an evoker, but it was hard to be sure.
Traditionally, it seemed, evokers made their 'tools' from elemental
forces and natural growth; they slid on ice from frosted blasts,
carried seeds to sprout viny whips and rough-hewn staves, that kind
of thing.
Another
of our students was a fairly hefty older woman named Joy; she gave
the impression of being the kind of lady that dyes her hair purple,
and spends a lot of time with her china collection. In her case,
though, her 'china collection' was mediation crystals, chakric
medicine, and other esoterica. Joy could focus on a person, and
call up a pathway to them, in easy moments. We'd been calling up
half-buried and broken flagstones, and only by focusing on the person
to be connected. She focused on Gina while we were on the other side
of a hill, and the grass parted to reveal a shining walkway in yellow
brick. Of course, the yellow shade of the brick made me ask Ulla
some hard questions later, but she claimed not to have any idea what
I meant. Joy could also, it turned out, get any color bricks she
wanted. Ulla called her a dowser, and had me set Joy to practice
finding people using a imagined compass, pendulum, bird thrown in the
air.
Kimble,
the little red-haired dude with the floating pillar, was a whole
different order of thing. It turned out that taking him any
significant distance from his pillar made him shudder, flicker, and
wake up. On the other side of the equation, he could reshape his
pillar extensively while he was at it, and could actively fly it
around. Ulla told me that she believe he was likely a potential
godling, which set me to spluttering. She then explained that each
of the worlds that lay beyond our current "depth" was
something that had been founded by a single dreamer. A creator.
Kimble could become such a being, she believed. In the meantime, he
was a worldlet in waiting, and could likely act as a mobile base even
more effectively than Gina.
There
were a few more talents, a fair number of talents that seemed pretty
similar to others. We had three conjurers, now, including Gina;
George and Vee. George was, and looked exactly like, a retired
professor of literature, right down to the round specatcles, white
hair, and elbow-patched tweed coat. Vee was a 19-year old east
Indian woman; "Vee" was short for Vasanta; her preference.
I had the distinct impression that this was a sort of teenage
rebellion thing for her, but who was I to judge?
We
had also found another summoner, and a second dowser besides Joy, and
they were fine, but who we tried and failed to build any real rapport
with. There were also people we didn't think we could build a rapport
with quickly, who didn't get invited back past to the rush after
their first class. And there were a couple that we did like whose
talents weren't ones we could sort out, even with Ulla suggesting
things to try.
Clara,
Joy, Kimble, Vee, and George were the ones we picked out to sit down
with. They already knew that it was possible to get bruised up by
being hurt dreamside; we expanded on just how much so. They knew
there were dangerous things down there; we gave them the lowdown on
the nightkind, and on what little we knew about Kether. As we
wrapped up telling them the lowdown, we let them know that we'd be
striking out against Kether and company starting very shortly. It
got quiet, as they absorbed this, until Vee jumped in.
"Horrible
demon-monsters from outside of space and time are invading the town,
and.... And you've been training us as potential recruits to fight
evil? Like, dreamland superheroes. THIS IS THE COOLEST. THING.
EVER. If I fall down, and just flail around in glee, will that be
weird? It'll be weird. Yah."
And
then we were all smiling at each other.
