The full stack of hand pointers Artifacts that István had brought laid on the table in front of me. I'd went through every one, and they'd all been a match.

"Well," the man himself said, "That does make the next part easier." He picked up one of the Artifacts and looked off to his side at it while the other elbow was propped on the table, a lost little science puppy who'd just had his theories upended. "I have so many questions… For later."

The one he was holding was the Water Aligned and he held it out in front of him again, but sideways this time. Enveloping it in his Nebula, he floated it away from the palm of his hand, where he was able to make a decent-sized ball of steam form in midair. Of course, when it was only about arms length, all balls of steam are 'decent-sized' and I could make arguments for all of them also being far too big to feel comfortable with, along with being far too steamy. Even the 'ball' part seemed a little suspect, since steam wasn't supposed to be ball-shaped.

"Used in this way," István was telling me as I mentally sussed out my comfort level with spheres of burning-hot water, "the Artifact acts as sort of an anchor for you to work with the potency of your powers."

He wiggled his fingers a little, and the ball changed shape to a flat half-moon shape, like a blade, and then into a spike. "You can modify it, as I just did, but the more self reinforcing shape you use, the easier it will be to maintain. Something like the sphere will be much easier to maintain, although the others are very useful and worth the effort to master. Allow me to demonstrate."

He took the point of the spike, grabbed it as if it was the nib of a pen, and then wrote directly on the surface of the table in wet streaks. Which is to say he made the same perfect letters he always did, just in water.

While he might of said demonstrate, this was clearly just 'showing off' with extra clothes. Not that I'd begrudge him that. It was obvious his control was absolutely through the roof, to go along with that nuts penmanship. I couldn't help but think that they were related, cause duh.

"You can also project these shapes, but they will fall apart, more quickly the more complex they are. You'll also lose the Artifact. Well, quicker than you would otherwise." He retracted his Nebula and held the Artifact out to me. Looking at it, I realized there were some fine cracks around the edges, and it looked worse for the wear in general.

"Ah, so they are consumable."

"Yes," he confirmed, "They are. Which is why I said that the 'next part would be easier'. Because we can just feed you any old Artifact, we don't have to match the type at all." The way he said 'feed me' the Artifacts made it sound a little like shoveling feed to a cow. I wasn't sure how I felt about the mental imagery on that one. At least they'd have to fatten me up a bunch before they could take me off to market.

István took out another Artifact, clearly hesitant to use his stock of pointing devices for my training past what he already had. He'd come up with one that looked like someone had taken three round pebbles and threaded them onto a hoop.

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Well wait, it was just three rocks on a hoop. Weird. Like some kind of children's toy. Given how much I knew about the providence of these Artifacts, it could very well be a form of toy. Or maybe a teether for a very scary toddler.

Handing it to me, he had me hold it on top of my hand and push Nebula into it. Once I had it suspended, he directed me to try to shape a cloud of Nebula into something specific. The first one was a sphere, which was easy enough, it was the shape I was used to making.

After that he had me attempt to straighten the sides out to make a cube. This turned out to be much harder than I'd have expected. Every time I'd stop paying attention to one edge, it'd smooth back out again. Eventually, out of frustration, I leaned into the process too hard and one of the three pebbles detonated with a bang, the whole structure being blown away by the mini-explosion.

István stared wide eyed at the Artifact. At first I was worried that he was concerned about the loss.

"Well. I've never seen that before." He muttered, staring at each little bit of debris like it was made out of solid gold.

Ah, of course, I thought.

Science Puppy.

Sure enough, he had another Artifact out in record time, this one a different Alignment, which I'm sure wasn't accidental. Even if I vaporized this one in an identical manner, he'd probably be perfectly happy burning through every Alignment he had just to check if they made his eyebrows smoke similarly when I cooked them off.

The new Artifact met a similar end on a different shape. I'd gotten the square in order, and was struggling with shape number four, the spike he'd shown me. It'd gotten a bit easier when he'd trained me to try to envision the whole shape in one go, rather than to create parts of it from another shape. To be fair to me, it was partially his fault for starting me on one and then migrating it to another, since I thought this meant modifying the existing shape, something that looked like what he'd done.

Turns out it was much easier for me to just 'let go of' the current shape and reform the new one a moment later, something that had a fundamentally similar appearance to 'creating from', but I found far less work to actually accomplish in fact.

"We will not get a chance to work on it today, but you should know that you can compress more power into the shape once you are accomplished at maintaining it."

I looked up at him over the pair of spheres I'd created, yet another shape he'd instructed me to create. At this point I was positive it was no longer training and just him using me as another experiment, but it was kinda fun, if challenging work.

"It has a name, you know." I said.

I saw the doggy ears perk up on the Science Puppy. I could almost see the metaphorical tail wagging. "What does?"

"The 'power'." I figured at this point he'd helped me more than enough for this little secret. "It's Nebula."

"Nebula…" he said, turning the word over inside his mouth slowly. "Where did you learn that?"

"It told me," I said.

"It told you?" He asked, more than a little incredulous. I'd expect that, I definitely didn't come across as the most serious of interlocutors. "How did the power… Nebula, that is - tell you that?"

I got a big smile on my face. "Vibes, man. It harmonized with me!"

If it were possible to charge admission for the look István gave me, I'm sure I could have made good money.

"How did it go?" Viktor asked, when István and I met him around noon. We'd gotten decently far on the shapes, but there just wasn't a ton of time to work on it. István had given me a selection of Artifacts, which I'd distributed into a series of pouches he also gave me.

Apparently he wore a similar set like a bandolier across his chest, but I could't tell underneath all the science hippy stuff we normally wore.

"It went well," István said, "She is a quick study."

"That's good," Viktor replied, his normally deep voice so low it was effectively just a rumble. "I get the feeling we're going to need that, today."

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