The preceding two weeks had been busy for Matthew. He'd made sure of That. First of all there were the magic classes, which had been a bit of an eye opener. He knew magic would be varied and weird, but that didn't exactly prepare you for the first time you saw a girl grow a pincer. It made him grateful that most of his was apparently the blue kind, at least according to the instructors, and that blue magic worked pretty simply. He just grabbed something, concentrated on it, and it got filled with blue. Then it...uh... It wasn't an explosion, he was sure of that now. That was no boom, no heat, just a scattering effect. Like if you hit a Lego house with a bat, except lethally fast. He came to that conclusion after a couple of hours of private practice, finding small piece of debris that he could toss Kilroy's way and watching them pop in the middle of the secluded shop. Once he started thinking of them as Lego's the other facet of the spell he was using came to him naturally. With an entirely redundant wave of his hand he watched as the broken pieces of a coat hanger danced across the floor tile, making little tinkling sounds as they rolled and tumbled to the middle of the room where the thing re-built itself like a 3d puzzle. Of course he had tried to repeat the process but once he picked up the coat hanger he found it wouldn't accept any more of his magic. It had a pretty good memory for an abandoned hunk of plastic. How good, he wondered? Maybe he could find out. He raced down to the sleeping area and grabbed his bag before returning to what he was thinking of as his training room. Reaching in he pulled out the alarm clock and ran his hand around wall of the room until he found a place behind the counter where he could plug it in. He did, and the red numbers on the front sprang to life. Pulling the thing from the wall he poured his magic into it before carrying it gently, like a bomb, into the center of the room before diving behind the counter and hearing the parts of the thing spray all corners of the shop. Popping his head up, he waved a hand and watched the various parts reassembled themselves into his old familiar alarm clock. He hopped the counter, quickly scooping up the clock and running it back to the outlet. He missed three times in his eagerness, but on the forth try he managed to find the plug and beat the floor with his fists in excitement when the red numbers reappeared. [hr] It wasn't just magic that was keeping him occupied. It was also Mira, and how he hadn't been able to say anything as she'd walked away. Maybe someone smarter or older, or someone that had known her longer than him would have been able to say the right words to pull her out of that mire, but Matt didn't have anything. Anything he could say just sounded like a lie in his head. It had put his ass in gear, though. If things were as bad as she'd made it out to be than these people needed all the help they could get to lighten the load, and even if all he could offer up was his body he was going to do it. So, one day after magic class had ended, he approached the instructor and ask if there was anything he could do. It was amazing how quickly he got back into the swing of deliveries. Goodnight was a small town and there was always someone in need of something. Coffee, aspirin, bedding, laundry, food, water, toiletries, all the things essential to keeping a mall full of strangers on one anothers good sides. It was on foot instead of behind a wheel, of course, but he was amazed at how the same principles applied. Keep the package in good condition, go as fast as you can, and when the customer was a jackass you just smiled and tried to leave as quickly as possible. The second principle in particular was a breeze, as he'd assembled an absurdly thorough mental map of the mall while scouring it of all graffiti and now knew all the shortcuts through the backrooms and maintenance corridors. [hr] Considering his blue magic produced quite a lot of shrapnel Matthew had decided early on to do most of his training of it privately, trying to more precisely control the "fuse" the determined when something scattered and seeing if he could influence the direction of such things when they did, like he felt he had with the centipede. The whole process was surprisingly intuitive. It reminded him of driving, like his body already knew what he should be doing, and so he wasn't very surprised when it seemed like the magic itself helped guide him to doing something new. He charged an old door handle just like he had a hundred times before, but this time it felt different. He wouldn't have been able to tell you what he had done differently if asked. As he held it in his hand it seemed to deform, ripples moving across its surface as he moved it as though it were water forced into the shape of a door handle. Squeamishly he dropped it to the floor, expecting it to splatter like paint across the tiles. Instead there was a sound like crushing stone as it landed. He stared at it for a few moments, then reached down and tried to pick it up. It wouldn't budge. [hr] It wasn't long before Matthew developed a bit of a reputation as a gopher. It was a common sight to see him popping out of an unused door, hauling a heavy box up one of the powered down escalators, or navigating a trolley through a packed hallway. It was as though every moment he didn't spend sleeping, training, or eating was in transit from one person to another and sometimes he ate on the run. It kept him in shape at the very least. You could't pay for this sort of cardio, and between it and the magic he slept like a dreamless log every night. Of course, it wasn't long before people started asking him for things. He'd just got done delivering a package of aspirin to a little old lady who couldn't have been a day younger than 60 when she'd asked whether he could do he a little favor while he was up and about. He'd barely said yes when she'd shoved a big clear plastic bag full of what looked like multicolored rags into his arms and asked him to stock some of the derelict claw machines around the mall with her "sock monsters." It turned out that a "sock monster" was less terrifying than what he'd first though upon the lady's hasty clarifications. She had sewn up a bunch of socks she'd been donated into, well, various plush animals that she'd embroidered with fanciful little designs and decorated with googly eyes that she'd somehow gotten ahold of. She'd apparently done something similar for the local children after "the hurricane," though Matthew didn't know which one she was referring too, and thought that maybe giving people something to do would help calm some of the tempers that were flaring up around the place. Matthew didn't know if that would work, but he gone out of way to stock the machines anyway. Most of them didn't even have glass, but as he left the last one he saw a small curious group gather to try and get the things anyway. [hr] Matthew stood, back to the wall, beads of sweat forming on his brow as he watched a group of people practicing black magic while being overseen by one of the impromptu instructors. One of them, a big buzzcut guy in his late 30s, seemed like he was in deep concentration while his partners held his hands. One of them, a tall blond woman that was still half his size, suddenly squealed in delight and said something like "Now, roasted marshmallows" to him. Buzzcut opened his eyes halfway, grinned, and then shut them again. Matthew tried to will himself forward, but found himself affixed to the wall as though by magic. He shook his head, managed to take a step forward, then found himself right back where he started only a moment later. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to be near [i]them[/i]. There was a pitch black terror nestled in the pit of his stomach that kept him away from that group. He wondered if the fear came from a memory he had, or maybe it was something he'd started developing along with his recovery. It didn't really matter though, did it? No matter what he was still afraid. No matter what he still had to go over there and talk to them. No matter what they had the same type of power he had. He could feel it there, in that pit. The same kind of power that could tear apart a human mind and leave someone with nothing. Powerful. Horrible. His. "C'mon, c'mon, get it together." He muttered to himself. "Useful. Make yourself useful." "Hey, you okay buddy?" Came a booming voice that jerked his eyes upward. Buzzcut waved at him like you wave at an old friend you met sudenly on the street. "Uhhhh, yeah. Yeahyeahyeah." Matthew said, pushing himself off the wall. "Just, y'know, taking a rest. Gotta get on now, though. Lots to do. Lot of things that need doing..." Matthem called the last line over his shoulder as he shakily made his way down the hallway, leaving Buzz and his two friends confused. Baby steps. That was what Matthew thought to himself. Just like getting your life back together, you needed to take baby steps. Maybe he'd try a little black magic tomorrow. Just a little bit. Just a little. [hr] When Matthew was roused bright and earl on the 20th and was sent to a room that he had never actually been in before he assumed at first that he was being sent to pick up a delivery. So when he entered amid what seemed to him to be some kind of important business he sluck, kind of embarrassed, to the back to await his turn. It was only when Simon mentioned fighting living street art that his head perked up and he realized that he was a part of the important business. He stepped forward and listened intently as the man laid out basically everything Mira had told him two whole weeks ago. The VU was on the ropes. They had taken heavy losses. They needed help. Time to get up off his ass. "Absolutely." Matthew said. "Anything to lighten the load."