"You should've seen the look on your face," she said.

"What look?" I asked, yanking my wrist away from her.

I looked down to the display on my wrist computer. She'd also somehow managed to disable the strength augmentation in my suit when she disabled the shielding.

"That wasn't funny," I said.

What can I say? I was sort of at a loss for words. You try coming up with something coherent when you've just had a near-death experience at the hands of your girlfriend who you're momentarily convinced is actually working for your archenemy.

It'd already happened to me once, after all.

"I'd say it's almost as funny as letting someone think you're taking them into a hot zone with a giant irradiated lizard, wouldn't you?" she asked.

I rolled my eyes. "That was different."

"Was it?" she asked.

"Sort of," I said. "And I'm going to make sure the computer knows not to let you have access to any more of my toys or schematics, damn it!"

"Are you sure you want to do that?" she asked. "After all. If I could do this much to your systems just by reading the schematics, who knows what I might be able to help you with."

She looked down and frowned. "After all. I probably should get used to using this shit. Especially if my only chance at having something close to what I had before is using your toys."

"It's nice that you're seeing reason finally," I said.

I figured it was better to sidestep the whole issue and focus on the positive. After all, the last time we started discussing her complete lack of powers it'd resulted in her shutting down for nearly a week and destroying a good chunk of my cleaning bots.

She hit me with a look that said she knew what I was doing, but that she was also going to let me get away with it. For now.

Something told me we were going to be revisiting all of this later though.

"Come on," she growled. "If we're going to do this then let's do this.

I sensed something in her tone. The tone of a student who wasn't at all happy at being made to go through lessons she either didn't think she had to do or wasn't looking forward to.

"Not happy with me right now?" I asked.

"You could say something like that," she said.

I wasn't sure how much of that was that she wasn't happy with me and how much of it was her messing around because she figured the longer she delayed me, the longer she wouldn't have to get around to those lessons she didn't want to start.

She was being a surprisingly difficult student. Especially for someone who just all but admitted this was her only path to reclaiming some of her old glory.

It was difficult to tell with her sometimes. Her anger did give me an idea, though.

"Fine. If you're upset with me then hit me."

Selena blinked. "Hit you? What are you…"

"You're not happy with me right now, right?" I asked. "So why don't you go ahead and hit me? It'll make you feel a lot better. I promise!"

"I'm not going to…"

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Are you too chicken to do it? Afraid you're not going to be able to?"

"I'm not going to take out my anger on you that way," she said. "Just because I'm frustrated with you doesn't mean I'm going to resort to…"

"To what?" I asked. "I mean, if anyone deserves it it's me. After all, I'm sort of the reason why you lost your powers. Think about it. If it weren't for me you wouldn't have been out there that day and Dr. Lana wouldn't have been able to do anything to you. If I'd been a little more proactive maybe I would've been able to figure out how to reverse whatever it was she did to you. Instead I've been taunting you and making you go through all this training you obviously hate. If you've ever wanted to hit someone then…"

Stolen story; please report.

The hit came so fast I almost missed it. Almost, but not quite. Again, we're talking about an opponent who was more than a little rusty when it came to the whole fighting thing. It'd been awhile since she'd been in a real fight.

I still didn't count that embarrassing performance at the bank.

Still, the punch was fast. Like it would've been a hell of a haymaker if she still had her powers. Even without her powers it was pretty impressive.

That didn't stop me from easily ducking out of the way even with the strength augments on my suit turned off. As I ducked I grabbed her arm and twisted and used the momentum of her punch to throw her over my shoulder.

She let out a surprised yelp as she flew through the air and landed. At the last moment a cushion of antigravity appeared under her which prevented her from really hurting anything.

"That's an advantage you have over me," I said. "When I was being taught how to do this I didn't have antigrav to make things easy."

Fialux scrambled to her feet. I thought of her as Fialux now that I saw her looking very much like back when we were fighting each other at full power. Back when she'd throw herself at me with everything she had while I did my level best to keep up with her. Even as I knew deep down that my level best was never going to be enough to truly defeat her.

When she looked up she was glaring daggers at me.

Oh how the times changed. There was a time, not too long ago, when her looking at me like that would've been a source of pure terror. When a glare like that would've been enough to turn my bowels to liquid because that glare was usually followed by her doing her best to destroy me.

Or at the very least it was followed by her doing her very best to incapacitate me and disable my tech toys so she could drop me off in front of the cop shop confident I wouldn't give them too much trouble.

I never gave them trouble, as a rule, but my shark of a lawyer was always on call and always more than willing to sink his teeth into the local PD, thank a God I didn't particularly believe in.

But of course we both knew that wasn't happening now. Not when she was already having trouble with the whole super suit thing. Where "trouble" is defined as her being completely unable to do jack shit with that nice suit because she wasn't willing to do the training required to learn how to fight me with what she had now.

Tears trickled down her face, though she was doing her best to try not to actually sob. Her best wasn't all that great.

The practical upshot of all that was she looked just as beautiful as ever, but kind of pathetic. My heart went out to her even as I felt the age old frustration of a teacher with a particularly difficult student. Though admittedly I could get away with doing the kinds of things with my student that would probably get most teachers fired or thrown in jail.

"I don't think I can do this," she said.

I blinked. Not what I was expecting. Fialux was many things, but a defeatist was not one of them. At least it hadn't been. Maybe everything that had happened was finally taking a toll on her.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I asked.

She made a gesture at the flight lab and then down to herself.

"This. All of this. I don't think I can do it. I don't think I have what it takes to train like this. I spent a lot of time learning how to use my powers, but even when they started to manifest it was like I just knew how to use everything. It was intuitive. Not at all like this."

I walked over and got down on my knees in front of her. I put my hands on those knees so they were nice and rested because I might be down here for a little bit bitching her out in the name of slapping her out of this funk.

"Bullshit," I said.

"Excuse me?" she said.

"I'm calling bullshit on all of that," I said. "You didn't just magically learn how to use your powers. That's not how it works for anyone in this business."

"And how does it work?" she asked.

"You know I've spent a lot of time training AI. The stuff I have works better than just about anything out there on the market these days."

"But the last time you had an artificial intelligence assisting you it tried to kill you and take over the world," she said.

"Which is a pretty good argument against the commercialization of artificial intelligence right now," I said. "But that's neither here nor there. The important thing is I've spent a lot of time training computers how to do pretty basic things. It takes time. Baby steps. I imagine it's a lot like what it would feel like to try and raise a kid. Think back to when you were young. Did you walk the first time you tried?"

"I can't remember anything from when I was that young," she said.

"Well I've seen videos of kids. They're terrible at stuff when they're starting out. They spend a few years learning how to do basic shit like moving their arms and hands. Like they roll over and go places without any concern for whether or not where they're going is going to kill them. They're getting used to all the sensory input coming at them. Hell, it's at least a year and a half to two years before they even start forming words to communicate with the world!"

"Is there a point to all of this?" she asked. "Or are you just trying to drive home just how bad I am at this?

I reached down and poked her in the chest. Her balance was so precarious that the poke in her chest was enough to send her toppling over. A small cushion of antigravity kicked up under her. I could tell by the way she didn't hit the ground quite right.

There was something about an antigrav field kicking in that made a fall look unnatural. Like a video game where some of the programming had gone wonky.

"The point I'm trying to make here is you need to take time. You need to do what it takes to get back in the saddle. Because right now all I see is a pity party, and it's not attractive."

That was a lie. The whole sad but angry look she had going, coupled with that skintight bodysuit, was pretty hot. Like I'm not saying sad was necessarily my thing, but the whole vulnerable thing was a pretty cute look if I did say so myself.

I stood. "But you know what? Maybe you're right. Maybe this isn't for you. Maybe this whole training thing was a terrible idea."

Maybe it was, but I was playing a game. Now it was time to see if she took the bait.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.