Free Star Force: Sav (SF51) by Aer-ki Jyr Page A

hand to the bigger man. “Welcome onboard.”
    Wilson took it with a fairly firm grip.
    “But don’t expect us to go easy on you,” Paul warned.
    “It’d defeat the purpose if you did.”
    “Alright then,” Bo said, feeling like getting back to
their workouts. “Let’s get at it.”

 
 
    7

 
 
    July 15, 2546
    Solar System
    Earth

 
    Bo sat in one of the sparring chambers, legs crossed,
eyes closed with hundreds of tiny thuds orbiting around his body in a pattern
too intricate to easily pick up on…except that the trailblazer was hardly
concentrating on them. Archons often found pure meditation not to work, and
that in order for them to really disconnect from their environment and let
their minds wander they had to be at least partially involved in the
environment, as if no action whatsoever put them on guard for something to come
and low level activity allowed them to relax.
    Some of the Archons used handstands, others more active
drills that required little effort that they would repeat over and over again.
Ever since his Sav ascension Bo had turned Jedi, levitating and orbiting
objects around him not so much to free his mind but to work out some of the
lingering pain that seemed to be grudgingly diminishing with each day that
passed. It was 1 pm and he’d just finished up an hour run, with the slight
fatigue that brought warming his legs as his mind worked through the
telekinetic manipulation necessary to keep his little star system of thuds in
order.
    Two hours from now he would get back to harder
workouts, but for now he wanted to get some meditation time in before catching
a shower and a quick nap…the latter of which was helping his head. Straight
rest and he’d lock up, but action/rest cycling helped to loosen him up…an old
Archon training trick they’d learned back in their first 100 years.
    As Bo’s mind wandered he gently nudged it into the
parts of his mental capabilities that were untapped, probing the limits of his
thoughts almost randomly as if he was bouncing around. That was another old
trick, that when one didn’t know what they were looking for they had to ‘shoot
around’ randomly. That little tidbit had come from Taryn, who often went crazy
in drills trying to shake more speed out of herself . A
crude, jerky, almost completely random action sometimes had the ability to
access a part of yourself that your normal control didn’t allow you to touch,
so in order to find new mental territory Bo was flailing around inside his
head, making him feel kind of like a Human pinball machine.
    It was something he had done many times in the past,
but now that he had new brain tissue and a whole new mental structure he had
plenty of room to bounce around in, and exploring those new capabilities was
something he was going to chew on in every way possible…though at night he
tried to do the opposite and not think, needing smooth sleep. That didn’t
always work, but he found that if he let his mind go in meditation then sleep
time would often not be invaded by as many random thoughts.
    Which was another reason to take a nap afterwards and
suck up some good minutes while his mind was satiated from the meditation
randomness.
    But that wasn’t going to happen today, for somewhere
in his ramblings he hit on something. He didn’t know what, but almost
immediately he felt instability swelling inside his head.
    “What the…” he said, dropping his orbiting thuds as
his mind suddenly lost its cohesion. He focused on the ascension prompt, not
understanding how this would happen outside of training. Every single time it
had occurred previously, in all the Archons, it had been during some type of
physical stress. He was under none now, nor mental stress
given how easy holding the thud grid was . What was going on he didn’t
know, but he wasn’t going to squander the opportunity for another upgrade.
    With the little semi-bouncy balls dropping and rolling
everywhere Bo concentrated, channeling