"I want you to take your internal energies and manifest them on your palms in whatever manner you find easiest," István intoned. On his palms, I saw the slow rise of a wispy fog, it started rising up of his hands like a steam - at first a slow plume like a gentle exhale on a cold morning, before morphing into the kind of driven blast you'd see from the stack of one of the industrial plants dotted around the city.

He cut off the flow, looking at me expectantly. I thought back to the first Stream I'd created, the one where Liam thought I was on fire. That should be sufficiently dynamic for a demonstration of my control.

"Do you mind if I modify the position of my hands a bit?" I asked, receiving assent in the form of a nod.

I put them together, fingertips touching as I had before. But this time I left them out in front of me, confident in my ability to circulate the Stream through the Eddies, even in the somewhat awkward position.

Keeping my eyes open this time, I started the circulation. It trudged to life almost begrudgingly, proving that even though I could generally circulate the Streams, my control did still leave a lot to be desired, as I seemed to be suffering from some performance anxiety.

For his part, István watched, looking like a child taken with a fireworks display. He really was every bit the scientist he looked like, and I imagined he'd take as much value from this interaction as I felt I would.

As the Nebula made its way down my arm, I watched a shimmer of its golden-white light appear. It was on the edge of perception just above the surface of my skin, radiating almost like heat from a dark surface on a sunny day - shimmering and ethereal, looking more like a trick of the mind than any part of reality.

Soon the Stream met my hands and crossed the gap, before zipping up my other arm in a surprisingly quick manner. The shimmer on my arms grew thick and began to escape and flow away in undulations, looking very much like the 'Fire!' that Liam was so worried about, only in slow motion.

Before me, I saw a swirl between my palms form, growing two spiral arms and a node similar to an Eddy in the center, before it widened out into a sphere and turned opaque, an almost mirror image of the Core in my soul space.

"That is…" István said, almost making me jump out of my skin as the first sound in a while echoed around the lab. The mirror-Core in my hands wobbled as my concentration faltered. István shot me an apologetic look over my hands, but his attention soon returned to the Nebula I was maintaining in the space.

He spoke again, much quieter this time, and held up a hand before he did so. "Most excellent, Charley," he told me, still very much enraptured by the process. "I must ask. What even is your Alignment? This matches with nothing I have ever seen."

"I, uh, don't know." Which was the truth.

I mean, I did have a sneaking suspicion, considering the colors of Motes I saw and what Celistar had told me, that the answer was either 'none' or 'all of them'. However, knowing what I knew about how different the process seemed to have been for people like Viktor and István against what I had gone through, it didn't seem wise to speak up about it.

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"Well, it should be easy enough to check," he said, finally tearing his eyes away. "You can rest, I cannot imagine that level of complexity and density is easy to maintain."

I slowed the Stream carefully, leery of getting blown back like what had happened before. The rest of the Nebula between my hands drifted apart into a cloud that evaporated into the air slowly.

While I'd been watching this process, István had went and retrieved a variety of Artifacts, which was all the more impressive because he'd been watching the same, meaning he'd more or less grabbed them all without really looking. He wasn't about to miss an ounce of research if he could avoid it, was he?

He sat back down, arraying the artifacts between us. The ones he'd selected all were sticklike in form…

I came to a sudden realization: It's his collection of pointing Artifacts.

Sure enough, he scooped one up off the table and started waving at me with it.

"So, if you have a specific Alignment, the matching Artifact will be stable in your grip. This will be important later."

"So you're saying to take notes, because it'll be on the test, eh, teacher?" I said with my best shit-eating grin.

He retained his serious look, "Exactly." I felt my smile falter a little. Wait, was he actually going to test me?

Then I noticed the tiniest crack in his stoic façade. I'd been had.

"Well, by test, I mean we are going to see which one of these are you are compatible with."

So it was a test, just not one I had to study for. Good, I might actually pass it then.

He held out one of the artifacts, and I took it in my hand.

"Okay, now see if you can manifest some your aura around it," he instructed me. "We shall see if it remains stable."

I did as instructed, only a little distracted by the fact that evidently he didn't know the name of the power, having the same issue I'd just recently overcome. His descriptions were clear enough though, so I let it slide.

A shimmer of Nebula appeared in my hand, wrapping the Artifact. I saw what I was now sure was a Mote inside it come alive, resonating with the Nebula and even absorbing some of it.

István brightened up, just like the Mote. "Ah, there it is," he said, "The stabilization reaction."

I must have looked confused, because he reached out his hand and pushed against the Artifact I was holding with his own power. It broke around it like a wave against rocks.

"In that way," he said, having snatched up another Artifact to point at the one I held, "your power stabilized by the Artifacts of the same Alignment are much more effective than another power which is not."

He swapped out the pointing artifact, sending the one he'd been holding skittering across the table towards me. Turns out it hadn't matched up with his Alignment, which he wanted for the next demonstration.

"But you see, when I have an appropriate Artifact…" he pushed his Nebula outward again, and this time it stacked up against mine. It still wasn't making much headway, if any, but it at least wasn't just harmlessly dissipating. I had the vaguest feeling of it tickling the edges of my perception, but I wasn't quite sure what I could do with it.

"You have quite the strong Ember," he said, momentarily confusing me, before I remember how the process worked usually. "It is impressively resilient against outside influences. You must have quite the concentration to keep it up like that."

Well actually, no. I wasn't doing anything at all after I'd originally commanded my power to envelop the Artifact. It was more or less just chilling there itself. I wasn't about to tell István that though. What if he pulled a Viktor and got all weirdly competitive?

Apparently, he mistook my silence for boredom, "Well, anyway," he said, a hint of embarrassment crossing his refined features, "at least now we know your Alignment and we can move on."

"I'm not so sure about that," I said, stopping him mid motion as he gathered up the Artifacts on the table.

"Oh?" He said, clearly confused.

I held up the Artifact he'd earlier tossed down. I'd enveloped it in Nebula just as the first.

"Ah."

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