 make her wear combat boots._
_16 May 2007, 11:24pm: Discover that Faey girls have the same equipment as human girls._
_16 May 2007, 11:27pm: Have mind-shattering, nearly religious sexual experience._

Despite it all, he blurted out a chuckle after reading those last five lines. This Jyslin certainly did have a sense of humor. He may be pissed off at her for her invasion of his mind, but he could appreciate her humor if nothing else.

And she certainly wasn't intent on hiding her motives, that was for sure. He knew some about Faey, but not much about their culture or their society. He knew how they treated men, but not how they acted in social situations. Was this bold forwardness a simple part of Faey custom, or was she being intentionally dirty to get his attention? As far as things went with this particular Faey, anything was possible, of that he was certain. Jyslin seemed to be a very intelligent woman, much smarter than she seemed, and she was dealing with a human that liked her personally, but objected to what she represented, so that meant that she had to be creative, get his attention, make him think. And those remarks about getting him bed had certainly done that.

Jyslin was going to be a problem, he decided. But it wasn't anything he couldn't handle. So she was a pushy woman. He could deal with that. All he had to do was wait her out until she lost interest, and make her as unwelcome as possible along the way.

Yes, that would work. Feeling much calmer, he killed the terminal window without erasing her little joke. He'd leave that there to remind him. Then he rewound his calculus lesson and started studying in earnest.

                                        * * *

He figured that Jyslin was going to come around every once in a while and tease him, pester him, and then her duties would force her to return to work, more or less leaving him alone.

He could not have been any more wrong.

Jyslin and her partner, the blonde, were standing out on the sidewalk when he came out of the building, standing by one of the Faey's hovercars. They were sleek devices with no sharp edges, and they skimmed above the surface of the street using spatial resistance drives. This one was a military model, armored and with flashers on its top, for use in policing the city.

"Good morning," she said brightly, coming up off the vehicle, her black armored boots clacking on the sidewalk as she walked towards him. "Ready for school?"

"What?" he asked in uncertainty.

"School," she said with a wicked smile. "We don't want you to get lost along the way, so we're going to escort you right into your classroom. And when you're done there, we'll make sure you find your next class, and then your next class, and then your next one. We'll make sure you have no trouble going anywhere you have to go today. We'll be right there behind you every step of the way. Won't we, Maya?"

"Of course," the blonde answered with a clever little smile.

"Don't you have a job?" he asked acidly.

"You're our job today," she said with a nasty smirk. "You see, we told our watch commander about a certain human who just _might_ get into trouble because of a certain fight he had yesterday. You know, we wouldn't want him suffering from harassment from the occupational forces because he beat up a Faey, or gods forbid, retaliation from the Marines because the Faey in question was a Marine. So the watch commander assigned us to the task of making sure nothing happens to you today. Tomorrow, a new pair of Marines is going to escort you around, who will make life as unpleasant for you as possible without actively getting in your way. And another pair the day after that, and another the day after that, and on and on until we report back to her that the threat to you has disappeared."

Jason gave her an unholy glare, which she answered with a light, amused smile. "I told you, Jason. I cheat."

Jason took an aggressive step towards her, then he put his hand in his pocket absently. "You rushed out before I could tell you something last night, Jyslin."

"Oh? What is that?"

"I cheat too," he answered in a cold voice, then he whipped his hand out of his pocket, holding a small cylindrical object. He pointed it at her and unleashed his secret weapon, a small canister of pepper spray, and she took the full brunt of it right in the face. She gasped and gave out a hacking sound, flinching away from the small cloud of irritating mist, putting her gauntleted hands to her face. But the metal of her gloves wouldn't wipe away the agent, leaving her at its mercy.

The blonde, Maya, gave him a startled look, but he just gave her an evil smile, put the canister back in his pocket, and strolled towards school as if nothing untoward had happened.

That stroll turned into a sprint when Jyslin's outraged voice reached him. "You're digging your own grave, human!" she boomed. "Now you're going to be wearing a maid's dress along with those high heels!" He glanced back to see that Maya had fished a towel or something out of the hovercar for her, and she was wiping the pepper spray off of her face. Pepper spray wasn't like mace in that once it was cleaned off, it had no lingering effects. It was only to distract and incapacitate a moment, long enough for someone to escape from an attacker.

If she wanted to be an obnoxious little ass, then he'd be happy to meet her on that level, immature stunt for immature stunt.

He managed to get to school before Jyslin got organized enough to follow him, ducking into the Plaid and looking out the large pane windows to either side of the door nervously. It was nothing but a delaying tactic, for he was certain that she had a copy of his class schedule and thus could position herself outside the door and wait for him to come out, but it bought him enough time to try to come up with a strategy for losing her after class.

That wasn't going to be easy. He'd used up his pepper spray, and now that she had an idea how ruthless he could be, he wasn't going to get an easy shot like that on her again. She'd be much more careful next time.

He went to his classroom early and sat down. It was unlocked, as all the classrooms were, mainly because the security system in the classrooms would catch anyone stealing anything. Every tool and piece of equipment in the classroom had an ID chip that broadcast to a central receiver. If anyone tried to steal a tool, it would set off an alarm as soon as he stepped out the door. He pulled out his panel and his notebook and went over yesterday's notes, and Professor Ailan ambled in a little bit after he arrived.

"Ah, Jason," he said amiably. "You're here early."

"I'm avoiding someone, Professor," he replied as he made a few refinements to the sketch he'd done of a plasma power generator's internal working diagram. Jason had a talent for art, and could draw, illustrate, and paint fairly well, almost good enough to be paid for it.

"That Marine, eh?" he said, then he chuckled. "She sent to me to find you yesterday, looking for anyone who came in late. What's she after you for?"

"A date," he answered truthfully.

Ailan gave him a look, then laughed heartily. "My boy, you've done absolutely everything wrong," he told him.

"What do you mean?"

"Faey women like mysterious men, and what's more, they go absolutely wild when mysterious men play hard to get. You have a closed mind, an oddity among humans, and that makes you very mysterious. And since you're obviously trying to get away from her, you're playing hard to get. She's going to come after you ten ways to peel a _goran_, until her curiosity is satisfied. The only way you're going to manage to do that is to just go out with her. She won't stop until you do, because Faey women chase Faey men who say no. It's a cultural trait."

"Then how does a man say no and mean it?" he asked.

"Men don't," he replied honestly, pulling up the chair beside Jason's and taking a seat. "Remember, my boy, the women are the dominant gender, and there are customs that go back thousands of years at work here. Men don't say no because long ago, we weren't _allowed_ to say no. Even though men aren't owned like they were back then, you have to have noticed that the Faey are not nearly as progressive as humans when it comes to gender equality."

Jason nodded, leaning on his hand and listening to Professor Ailan quite attentively.

"When a man wants to assert himself, he has to do it indirectly. Just flat out saying _no_ is actually a form of flirtation. I'm sure the Marine knows you don't know Faey customs and you're not flirting, but she can't help but see it any other way, because I get the feeling she's attracted to you."

"How do you know that?"

"Because when she broadcast to the instructors in the school, she described you as 'a handsome human male with blond hair and wearing a blue shirt.' Faey don't call men _handsome_ unless they're attracted."

Jason frowned. So that's how she found him. Since all the instructors were Faey, it was a simple matter of using telepathy to contact them and track him down.

"Is this the same one you got into a fight with yesterday?" he asked with a grin.

"Does everyone know about that?" he asked tartly.

"It's all over the school, my boy," he laughed. "I wouldn't be surprised that it hasn't gotten all over the city, at least among the Faey. It's news when a human can beat up a Marine. It's _big_ news when he does it in a matter of seconds and never gets touched in return."

He blew out his breath. "I was just trying to make her leave me alone," he said in a resigned tone.

"That's not how you do it," he chuckled.

"Then how do I do it?"

Ailan laughed. "It's not going to be that easy now," he told him. "She's not going to give over on you now, Jason. You'll have to go out with her. You don't have a choice."

"Oh, I certainly have a choice," he said with narrowed eyes, speaking in a low, calm, yet ominous manner.

Ailan laughed. "Well, if I can't convince you otherwise, I'll just let you figure it out," he said, patting Jason on the shoulder amiably. "I have to get set up for class. You get your homework done?"

Jason nodded.

"Send it to me and I'll grade it," he said as he moved down towards his table, where his own panel was sitting.

It wasn't long before other students filed in, and Jason's troubles with Jyslin were forgotten as the class began. Jason was rather infatuated with plasma technology, and he was always a very diligent student, making copious notes both on his panel, via the odd holographic keyboard, and on his own notebook, taking vidshots of the diagrams that Professor Ailan wrote on the board and uploading images projected onto the air behind him via a holographic imager from his own panel, a three-dimensional object projected from two emitters mounted into the corners of the wall to either side of the whiteboard. This mixture of human-type technology and Faey holography never ceased to make him curious, but he had to admit that it was effective. Ailan could project up prepared images and graphics to display, using a laser pointer to point to the areas he discussed, and when he didn't have a prepared image, he simply took the marker and drew it on the whiteboard. The images he used could be uploaded into the students' panels so they could refer to them when they studied, or use the video they had their panels recording-if they bothered-when the Professor drew diagrams, flowcharts, or wrote things on the board. Holographs didn't record well in recorded video. They looked distorted and jagged, so it wasn't as easy as recording the holographs. Jason was of a habit to record every class and go back and catch highlights of things he didn't understand, then upload the video of the class onto a stick and keep a copy of it without hogging memory in his panel.

It seemed like only a minute had passed before Ailan clapped his hands in that manner he did when dismissing class. "Alright, people, test tomorrow," he called. "No homework, study for the test!" Jason started packing his things when Ailan came over to him and leaned down. "Oh, and your friend is waiting outside," he said in a low, conspiratorial whisper.

"She is, is she?" Jason asked with a narrow-eyed look at the door. "Professor, can I check out a couple of tools?"

"Certainly," he answered. "What do you want?"

"A cutter," he answered as he zipped up his pack. "One of the good ones."

"No problem," he said, ambling back down to his table as Jason followed him. He went to a cabinet beside the door and removed a small cutting tool, a small device that severed the molecular bonds in the structure of a material to cut it apart. It was cutting at a molecular level, and it left an utterly smooth and clean cut in its wake. He went over to his panel and logged the tool as "checked out" under Jason's student ID number. That would prevent the security system from reacting when Jason took it out of the room.

Jason took the tool in his hand, and saw that it was indeed one of the better ones, able to cut more deeply than the little ones. It was perfect. He put his pack on, then flipped the switch on the tool from _cut_ to _sew_, which allowed it to perform the exact same function as an annealer. Cutting tools differed a little from annealing tools in that they could do more than simply separate annealed matter, and it would take an _annealing_ tool to separate matter annealed by the cutter without physically cutting the two objects apart.

It was perfect.

Jason followed Ailan to the door and waved for him to go first in a grand fashion, then stepped back and put his eyes on the small window in the door as Ailan opened it. The reflection in the glass showed him that Jyslin was leaning against the wall right by the door.

Perfect.

He stepped up to the door, then whipped around it, his arm leading as he zoomed out of the doorway, tool leading. Jyslin barely had time to react before he was on her, and the edge of the cutting tool found its mark, sliding along her shoulder and upper arm where they were in contact with the wall, merging their molecular structures and causing them to become joined as strongly as any weld.

She tried to pull away from the wall, but then she found herself stuck. She put her free hand on the wall behind her, then her foot, and pushed hard, but she was stuck fast. "What the hell did you do?" she demanded hotly as he closed the door to the classroom easily, then started walking away.

He held the cutting tool up over his shoulder so she could see it, but didn't say a word.

She laughed. "You clever bastard!" she shouted after him.

That was the start of an episode that was rehashed by students for years to come, a cunning war of intrigue and wits between Jason and the Marine who was annoying him, as he sought ways to separate himself from her, but she sought to defeat those attempts. After her partner freed her from the wall with a borrowed annealing tool, the pair of them sought him out and annoyed him through breakfast in the cafeteria, talking loudly and making rude comments, some of them downright embarrassing, some kind of attempt to bait him into doing something which the other students didn't know. He stalked off with the two of them following closely behind, to his next class, and they stood outside the door waiting for it to end.

And they waited long after it was over, and all the other students left. They looked in almost a half an hour later and found him gone, the window open.

Much to the surprise of many on campus, they saw Jason climb out of the third floor window and climb down the wall of the building, then walk away as if he'd done nothing any more out of the ordinary than using the door.

It didn't take them long to find him afterwards. After all, they were telepathic, and the Faey instructors and other military Faey on campus would tell them where they last saw him. They continued to follow him, standing behind him in the library as he read from a few hard paper books-which weren't used much anymore-and then followed him as he went back to his dorm to get a project due for physics, then returned to campus to attend his next class. This time, the redhead stood by the door as the blonde waited outside the building, so she could keep an eye on the windows.

And again, after the class was over, he didn't come out.

Several students saw her rush into the room after the last student came out, but he was nowhere to be found. She grilled the students quite harshly as to where he went, but all of them said he'd been _right there_ not a moment ago, fiddling with his panel, and they were as puzzled about how he managed to disappear as the Faey were. It was later, when a security worker reviewed the records from the cameras in that room that the truth was revealed. Jason had used a hastily jerry-rigged holographic emitter from parts from a project device he'd built for his physics class and powered by a PPG taken from a disassembled cutting tool. He'd taken a shot of the wall of the class, then after class, he rushed up to that wall and activated the hologram, hiding behind a false image of that wall. To keep it from jiggling or frizzing he had had to hold his panel absolutely still, and he'd managed to do it just long enough for the Marine to rush out of the room and try to find him. After the Marine left, he disengaged the hologram, put the cutting tool and his project back together, then waltzed out of class without a care in the world.

The Marine was starting to get just a little bit irritated at that point. Three separate times the human had walked into a class, then he found a way to leave her behind when it was over, making her scour the campus to find him. For the fourth and final class of the day, she called in reinforcements. A squad of ten black armored Marines surrounded the Plaid and lurked on the second floor, where the human was having his physics class, and she stood-nowhere near any wall-right outside the door and looked through the window, making sure he didn't sneak out. He was sitting in the back of the class, beyond the scope of her vision. He seemed utterly indifferent to her presence outside the door, as if he'd already devised his escape from her trap, and many of the students in his class were eager to see the class end. Word had gotten around that the same Marine that Jason had fought the day before was now following him around, and many speculated that she was going to get even with him, following him around and trying to catch him where nobody else could see. They wanted to see what was going to happen.

The class ended, all the students jumped up and rushed towards the door to get out onto the campus green and see what happened when those two came outside, and as soon as the instructor opened the door, the Marine barreled into the room.

And he was nowhere to be found.

That startled the students as much as it did the Marine. They looked all around the room, even in the storage cabinets and closets, but he was gone. There was no other way out of the room, and no other Marine was reporting in that she'd seen him. He'd vanished like smoke.

Growling in frustration, the Marine charged down to the security center for the building and had the human guards replay the video of that room to find out what happened, how he had managed to slip away. They cued up the video for her, and they watched in as much amazement as she as the cunning and resourcefulness of Jason Fox was displayed on that video monitor for them to see.

During the physics class, Jason had unobtrusively annealed his chair's feet to the floor. Since he was in the very back of the classroom, nobody really noticed him doing it, not even the teacher. Nobody was looking back at him. Then it became apparent that Jason was much better with Faey technology than people realized, because he had somehow pumped up the output of his cutting knife beyond its usual capabilities. Further analysis showed that he had swapped the PPG unit of his cutting knife with the PPG in his project, which was a much more powerful unit, then somehow jerry-rigged the cutting tool's circuitry to not melt when it was turned on. When he turned it on, what he got was a cutting tool that could cut nearly four feet deep instead of the maximum of six inches or so that most cutting tools were designed to cut. He'd turned his cutting tool into a sword, and used it to slice a circular angled hole in the floor around his chair, which was annealed to the section he had cut free. The cutting tool cut so cleanly that it didn't make any kind of evidence that it had been used until the cut material was shifted. Since the hole was angled, the circumference of the bottom narrower than the top, the freed circular plug to which his chair was annealed did not fall through the floor.

When the class was over, Jason picked up his pack, pulled his chair up, which pulled the plug out of his hole, and then climbed down into it. He had even set the chair so when he pulled on the edge, the chair and plug fell back into the hole, concealing it and hiding his escape route.

Some people already knew about this, however, but they didn't get out of class for an hour after Jason's class ended. They were all amazed in the classroom under his own, the same classroom where he had Plasma Fundamentals, when Jason seemingly dropped out of the ceiling, fell nearly fifteen feet, and landed with a roll on the floor. He then simply stood up, dusted himself off, picked up his backpack, excused himself politely to the teacher, then walked out of the classroom.

That was only half of his cunning escape. The Marines inside were only on the second floor, which allowed him to have free run of the first floor. He managed to slip by the Marines outside by exiting from the building down through the loading dock, and catching a ride with a human campus groundskeeper who was about to drive off in a school truck, riding in the open bed. They were looking for a blond student _on foot_. Jason had went right by them in the back of the groundskeeper's truck.

The battle that day clearly went to Jason Fox, but Jyslin Shaddale vowed that the war would be hers.


Chapter 2

_Karista, 10 Shiaa, 4392, Orthodox Calendar;_
_Thursday, 15 May 2007, Native regional reckoning_
_New Orleans, Gamia Province, American Sector_

It wasn't easy to study, but he managed it somehow.

All that insanity with Jyslin had completely ruined a day's studying, and again, if it wasn't for his habit of recording his classes, he'd be behind. Getting behind when he had seven classes was _not_ a good thing. He felt lucky that she didn't follow him home, but then again, she was probably still in the Plaid trying to find him. It was only about six, and he knew that when it got dark and curfew kicked in, she'd know where to find him.

He had that test in Advanced Plasma Fundamentals tomorrow, but he felt ready for it. They were studying conduits and PPG's in a little more detail, and anything involving plasma interested him enough to study well ahead. Plasma conduit was made of crystallized silicon, and it was actually rather pretty. It looked like hollow tubes of glass, but surprisingly tough, and the high-energy plasma was carried inside. Silicon conduit could carry any kind of phased plasma, but not plasma in its raw state. That was the clever little trick the Faey had discovered, which was the only reason they could use plasma as a power source. They phased the plasma into different states, and when so phased and set up that the individual phases of it opposed one another, it made it safe. Just like how humans had learned to use three-phase electricity, the Faey used multiple phases of plasma. But it worked much differently, for they phased plasma into alternate states of material existence, spreading out its energy into many different quantum states. That was called _metaphased plasma_, and it was why plasma could flow in a glass tube and not be ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. They had other types of phasing techniques, such as _interphased_, _hyperphased_, and _polarity phased_. Interphased plasma was used to power spatial drives, since metaphased plasma distorted the system. Hyperphased plasma was only mentioned but not explained, because it was a military application, used to make the plasma torpedoes fired from their battleships. Polarity phased plasma was very low-energy and worked very well in microscopic applications, and was what powered virtually all very small devices.

All this plasma was generated by the PPG, the Plasma Power Generator, and it itself was an amazing creation of ingenuity. He'd read the history of the device, and it showed the boundary from where the Faey were limited to their own star system, the Draconis system on earth charts, and when they were released to conquer and rule other planets. The PPG was, literally, a miniature sun. That's exactly what it was. The Faey had technology that affected space itself, allowing them to stretch it, pull it, even tear holes in it, and that was the technology that allowed them to build the PPG. Inside the device was a "bubble" of stretched space, and inside that bubble of stretched space, isolated from the rest of space by the boundaries of its bubble, was a hot nuclear fusion reaction. Just like the nuclear fusion that took place in stars, that's what was going on inside a PPG. Within the bubble were temperatures approaching fifteen thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but because it was in that isolated bubble of manipulated space, the heat and radiation could not escape it. The bubble was breached in two places so plasma could be drawn out of it, then be fed back into it after it completed its circuit. A PPG's size and power rating varied, and that affected its shelf life. The PPG in the cutter he'd borrowed had a shelf life of about a year. After a year, the material in the PPG's bubble would fuse into an iron core, and then the PPG would exhaust itself and stop working. It had a battery of sorts that kept the bubble intact until the PPG could be serviced, for the iron core of a spent PPG was larger than the PPG itself. If the bubble broke down, that volume would return to normal space, and make the PPG literally explode as something larger than itself suddenly occupied its fusion chamber. The device had a couple of very serious cascading safeguards to prevent a bubble breach when the device was fusing, because a breach would cause a cataclysmic fusion-induced explosion that would be about as powerful as five hundred Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs. The bubble, or _core_ as it was called, could be ejected from the PPG, sent through a micro-wormhole and out into deep space, and the PPG had protocols for doing that if it detected a disastrous breakdown in progress. It had several other conditional protocols that would lead to a core ejection, such as readings that went over certain limits or a disruption in the bubble integrity. The PPG could eject the core before a tear in the bubble led to a fusion explosion, but the backlash fed back through the tear and tended to destroy everything within ten feet of a damaged PPG.

Because of the danger a breached PPG could pose, they were heavily protected in the devices in which they were installed. They were always surrounded by a metal called _vandirium_, a Faey alloy that was about a hundred times stronger than titanium, armor to protect against some kind of catastrophic breach. Faey armor was made out of a variation of vandirium alloy that was even stronger, but was more expensive to produce.

It was funny that cost should even matter, but it did. The Faey had a good grasp on molecular-level physics, and that had led to the construction of matter replicators. But the problem with them was that they could only produce materials in base elements, and they couldn't replicate any element heavier than the metal Palladium. Silver, the next element on the table, could not be replicated, nor could gold or many of the metals that the Faey used to construct armor and vessels. It was even funnier that the human table of the elements was similar to the Faey version. They had many, many more elements on their table than the human table, different variations of known elements because of the number of neutrons in the nucleus, but it was still organizationally similar.

That was why they Faey needed Earth for farming, because they couldn't replicate food. It was also why silver and gold were valuable to the Faey. It was also why they didn't give their occupational forces the _real_ armor that they equipped their soldiers with. He'd seen some on CivNet somewhere, powered armor with flight packs, integrated weapons in the arms instead of external weapons they had to carry. That armor was much more expensive, its materials couldn't be replicated, so they'd equipped their occupational forces with only the weapons and armor they needed to keep the technologically backwards humans in check. Their weapons, well, those were the real deal. Faey used tiny bursts of high-energy metaphased plasma as their primary weapon, which exploded on contact with solid matter and also tended to burn through as it penetrated. The result was like an explosive bullet, which punched into a target then detonated. Living things shot by a metaphased plasma weapon tended to explode from the inside out when blood vaporized from the heat and that steam applied pressure to the flesh, aggravating the explosive contact the plasma had with a much cooler material. The result was a charge of metaphased plasma only two millimeters thick could leave a hole nearly a foot across. It was quite gruesome; even a graze could blow a limb off the body. What made them very nasty was that the fact that because they existed in multiple quantum states, it allowed most of the energy of the blast to pass through coherent energy shields. Any plasma state that matched the state of the shield would be stopped, but the remaining energy of the weapon would pass through and hit what it protected. The Faey employed shields on their warships, but the shields on ships they attacked would be useless.

CivNet was like the human internet... someone with enough patience could find just about anything. It was all in Faey, and he didn't speak or read the language, but his panel could translate everything into English, so it made it legible. He'd found the technical specs for plasma pistols and rifles on CivNet, as well as the