[u]Codi Bailey [/u]

After having arrived in the training hall and putting on her special gear, Codi had went to the first area that had seemed suitable for her powers. Because of unusual circumstances, and the fact that faculty hadn’t been present to give her a better idea of how to train her powers, she mostly just wound up attacking dummy after dummy. They weren’t always stationary, there were machines to make them simulate moving targets, but Codi still couldn’t help but feel a bit dissatisfied with the whole system. A real moving target wouldn’t have a pattern that she could easily predict, and there were very few cases when Codi didn’t see a predictable pattern in machines. She built robots in her spare time, typically, so she understood how a machine could have repetitive behavior, on a deeper level than most people did. A machine was only as good as the person who had programmed it, and just as smart.

It wasn’t as though the simulation machines weren’t useful, though. Things jumping out from random places, either in front, to the side, or behind, did still catch her off-guard at first, before she got into a sort of rhythm for the whole exercise. She was soon questioning how the school afforded training dummies, when there were students who would completely destroy them in exercises like this. In Codi’s case, they could probably be repaired, but they were still messed up pretty badly, a lot of fabric was going to be rendered useless by Reef’s spikes tearing into them. The real difficulty, though, was that at first, Codi had to figure out how to give a sort of backwards-hug. Such a hug sounded strange, but considering what was present on Codi’s back, it sounded more like getting locked inside of an iron maiden.

In the end, the exercise was actually perhaps a lot more satisfying than Codi first thought, because she knew it wouldn’t be long before the human component of her, at least, started to get tired from the exertion. She knew that any sort of physical training, though, did not have any effect unless you pushed your boundaries beyond what made you exhausted. Until her muscles started to shake and burn with fatigue, she could not afford to stop, or she would not gain anything from what she was doing. She did not know if the same thing could be done to Reef, but if she could increase the power of its grip, she knew that probably nothing would be able to get out of it. Although she knew that the six limbs it possessed were arms, they would be mistaken for tentacles, although generally, she and Atticus both had to make an active effort to be politically correct. Codi additionally attacked dummies that came in front of her or to the side with her own secret weapon—hidden syringe-like claws under the regular nails—which injected bacterial toxins, along with a small live culture to keep it maintained for just a bit longer in the victim. She was so quick in swatting her nails through the fabric pieces of the dummy, though, that nobody would see anything more than a quick tap where the dummies seemed to catch on something.

When Codi had been training for a bit, she didn’t notice that a person had walked into the room, as her back had been turned. Her parasite, Reef, though, noticed, and a few of the spines gravitated to point in his direction, almost threateningly. Not all of them did this, though, as there were still other objects that were more immediate dangers, at least to the simple mind of the insect that the urchin really was. There really wasn’t an intelligent mind, so to speak, but the urchin valued its own survival, and therefore, the survival of its host, as it was fused to her and it relied on her blood supply. Codi felt the urchin tugging one of its arms against her control, which she found unusual, so when she turned to look at what Reef seemed to be noticing, she saw the stranger who had appeared.

Codi then walked out of the simulation area, and turned off the machine, so that power wasn’t being wasted, before looking at the other person who was now in the room. “Hey,” She said, raising one hand up in a greeting. She smiled a bit, but considering that her heart rate was already elevated and still needed to slow down, she couldn’t say a long, detailed sentence introducing herself. She took a deep breath and let it out, so that her heart settled. She couldn’t straighten up, though, because as always, Reef’s incredible weight bearing down on her spine didn’t allow it.