The bus was already about half full, so I made my way to the back of it and found an empty seat across from a girl with wings. I would have sat beside her, but those feathery appendages actually took up a fair bit of room around her and might make it uncomfortable to squeeze in. Being polite, I introduced myself, extending my hand across the aisle as the bus started moving again. “Camila Einsburgh.”

  “Oh, hello! I’m Alexandra. Alexandra Herron, but you can just call me Alex.” She took the offered hand eagerly at first but then seemed to hesitate right before shaking it, her grip and motions kind of weak.

  “Then please, call me Cam.”

  “Sure thing!” Alexandra said with a big grin, turning around for a moment to look around at her surroundings. “Wow, I can still hardly believe that we’re going to Seltron.”

  “It was a bit of a surprise, the announcement of the ‘first’ school for superheroes.” At Alexandra’s curious look, I explained. “Oh, sure, Seltron is the first official school for Empowereds, but there have been other programs to gather people with powers in the past.”

  “Really? Wow, I had never heard about those.”

  “Ehh, they didn’t last that long and weren’t as well publicized as Seltron has been.” The understatement of this half century - Kintash’s Empowered agency was still recovering from the disaster they had almost a decade ago with their program, and they had been one of the more stable eastern powers before then.

  Outside, I noticed the bus taking some odd turns, seeming to enter a construction site. I raised an eyebrow at Alex, who just looked around excitedly, practically bouncing up and down in her seat, causing it to creak from the force. Very odd; the seats are just as reinforced as the rest of the bus. It must be related to the wings in some way as her power - no way Seltron would accept that obvious of a tell otherwise.

  "Something interesting?" I queried.

  “Just watch, it’s so cool,” she said.

  I focused my attention back on where the bus was going and saw the road behind us being closed off by some ‘construction workers’ as we went further in. Once out of sight from anyone else on the nearby roads, the bus stopped. It stayed still for a moment before it started moving again- no, not the bus, but the ground. The road beneath us started sinking down, taking us underground several meters, sheaths of metal covering up the opening above them, leaving the bus in a dimly lit metal chamber under the ground, a few red lights on the walls.

  A quick shift had my eyes and ears enhanced, pushing them to become more sensitive as I noticed the bus driver doing something, saying something. He whispered, “-elta, sockfish, major, 36, sentry,” to something on his console, probably a microphone of some sort. There was a slight shift in the wall in front of the bus, something popping out and sending a blue light through the front window to scan the driver, likely his face or maybe a retinal scanner.

  With those tests passed, the wall in front of us opened up, revealing another chamber, this one slightly brighter and rounder, with curved walls and ceiling making the place almost a cylinder. Hissing quietly at the new sound and light, I shapeshifted my eyes and ears back to normal. That was the major reason why I didn’t just run around with super senses all the time- while I could enhance them (and did usually, at least a little bit), that mostly just made them more sensitive, which meant extra stimuli could be painful and suddenly disorienting. Still, usually not that bad, I must have made them a fair degree too sensitive.

  Blinking my eyes clear of the stinging pain, I could see the place clearer. It was made completely of metal, like the former chamber, but even extending to the floor the bus drove onto. It was a platform of some type, with rings of white light extending around the walls and ceiling with a few prongs and other unknown instruments poking out from around the wall in between the rings. There were a few measurement readers at the sides, and in front of them was a... it was hard to describe, but it seemed like a large lump, maybe some kind of engine attached to a circular device pointed at the bus, taking up most of the space in front of them.

  The walls behind them closed, and looking from this side, I saw a reddish-orange barrier they made up, blocking the way back. My Structural Analysis power could tell me a bit about how fortified the walls behind the machinery were, but I couldn’t get any further details.

  Suddenly, the lights on the sides dimmed, sparks arced between instruments sticking out on the walls beside them, and a blinding light built up in front of the bus before washing over them. A slight, disorienting feeling came over me, and I thought I saw... something, a flicker, but I couldn’t make out what it contained. Then the light faded and the doors behind them opened, the bus backing out onto the lift.

  “What was that?”

  “Just wait, you’ll notice it in a moment when we get outside,” Alex said as the lift started taking them up, the overhead panels sliding away.

  They were in a construction site again, but I immediately spotted the difference. Minute ones, this was still a closed-off construction site, but the buildings were different. The clouds had changed quickly, and the skyline was different. A hologram or illusion- the truth dawned on me quickly. “A teleporter,” I breathed out, shocked.

  “Yup! They got those teleportation rooms to send the bus around to pick all us students up. Isn’t it great? A little wibbly-wobbly feeling at first - and honestly every time after too - but so cool!” She squealed in glee at the thought. “And the machines looked so...” Alexandra gushed about the teleporting rooms, but my mind could only focus on the implications behind this.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  It makes more sense now why they had a bus pick us up instead of a cab to an airport so we could take blimp flights to a central location, but still. I hadn’t thought that the Empire had technology this advanced. Power detectors are still too bulky to be portable after all. Could it be a ruse? Fake gadgets and tech that did nothing other than look pretty and a teleporting Super moved us all here? No, that’s paranoid (which isn’t wrong by itself) and foolish (which is wrong). The government has gone to great lengths to hide and protect those chambers. The disguises outside and the NDAs we all had to sign (that I, for one, actually read!) mean that we can’t tell anyone about even the method used to bring us here, so they really don’t want anyone to know about these.

  A non-disclosure agreement could be fairly punishing, but these ones had been enforced by a Super under their control. Not even sure if she had a ‘hero’ name, but her power made written agreements literally binding; we couldn’t tell anyone about this no matter what... Not that I had actually signed it with my true name, but I doubted these kids were as informed or properly cautious as I was.

  I glared mildly at the kids up front talking about how they ‘couldn’t wait to tell their friends about how cool the school was.’ If it was all just a show for school kids, they’d be unlikely to go to such lengths. Also, teleporting powers are rare. The only one I have is pretty situational even before it got weakened. Plenty of those powers, even at their full potential, wouldn’t be able to do this, or at least not as subtly.

  I cast my mind to the currently most popular teleporting hero, Starshift. A somewhat overblown name, but he came with a decently strong power, even if he’ll never make the Miracle Squad or quite match up with any of the other top ten heroes. He could create ‘gates,’ circular disks in space that connected two points together. Strong enough for such a teleport, but everyone on the bus would have noticed it.

  My first thought still isn’t impossible, mind. With multiple heroes working together, they could do it, but I’m starting to think it’s likely that the government really just made those chambers... and placed them all over the country... This is for way more than just moving us school kids around. This is huge. It gives the Empire great control and reach, the kind that, though they still wave the patriotic flag about, hasn’t really been seen since its heyday two centuries ago. Especially if they have access to other countries. I shivered at the thought, immediately calculating rival nations and how likely this would be to ratchet up tensions between them...

  “Cam?”

  “Ah, sorry, Alex, I just got a little lost in my own thoughts,” I said with a bit of a chuckle, affecting a suitably embarrassed grin and scratching the back of my head. “Let’s see if we can figure out where we are now.”

  It was the River Province, though which of its two major cities I couldn’t tell. The bus didn’t stay there long, picking up a new student and carrying on. We chatted a bit as the bus moved around, picking up new students before it would go back to the site and teleport them to a new city, the bus filling up as the bus toured all around the country.

  The bus had over forty students in it when the driver declared that we were heading to the school, and the bus descended into excited chattering from the students. Entering the teleportation chamber, there was the same flash and weird feeling. When the bus drove out, this time it came out not to a construction site but to a parking lot. Or something like it, while there were a few cars, there were ATVs, some bikes, and other vehicles more than there were cars here, as well as a sign for a blimp landing platform on the roof.

  “Alright kids, this is your stop,” the driver gruffly said (clearly not picked for his people skills). All of us got off, and standing in front of us was an older man with a short military cut, faded yellow hair. He had stern green eyes and bulging biceps crossed in front of him as he looked down at the class with his imposing 6’6 height.

  Everyone else looked nervously at him while I resisted the urge to shake my head, not surprised by his appearance but still annoyed. I take it back; if this is what they were working with, maybe the driver was picked out for his personality.

  “Welcome to Seltron Academy. I am Derrick Beachwood, one of your teachers, but you will call me Mr. Beachwood or Sir, am I understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said clearly, trying my best to keep the boredom and contempt out of my voice. Derrick had been a real pain the last time we met, though he seems to be a bit more laid back than then. Less angry too, but that’s probably just speculation on my part; the circumstances are quite different here.

  Beachwood’s eyes flickered over to me as the first student to speak up, the others chiming in quickly after me as they realized the older man wanted them to respond in the affirmative. He only seemed to look at me with faint approval, not a hint of recognition on his face. First test passed. He looked at our group, seeming to think something over for a moment before muttering (or just speaking in a low tone, as it really wasn’t that hard for us to hear him), “We’ll work on it.”

  He spoke up louder to us students and said, “Follow me; I’ll show you around the campus.” Walking out of the covered parking lot, the students followed in a vague line behind him. I was near the front and the first to step outside and see Seltron in all its glory.

  Lush fields of grass extended on either side of a well-tended, fresh dirt road leading out from the parking lot and to the school itself, with cliffs and beaches past them on either side. There were trees scattered about, a few clusters farther from small groves to mini forests. The sky overhead was a bright blue with a few clouds and... a shimmer?

  Turning around as I stepped further out, I saw that the shimmering appeared in all directions of the horizon, up or around out to the ocean all around us. We were on an island, with some kind of field generated around the outside to protect it. Or trap us in, the wary part of my mind, that part that had let me survive this long, warned.

  A few buildings, small metal hut-like things, dotted the sides of the path as we walked to the center. There lay the jewel of this mystery island: Seltron Academy, shining in all its glory, the sun’s light reflecting off of the domed top of the large building.

  I couldn’t make out its full size from here at the bottom of the hill, but judging from the peak of the dome, it must have spread out over several kilometers. All in shining glass and steel, glittering brightly in the sun. At the front of it was the Seltron Academy ‘SA’ logo in red and blue, standing out brightly even this far away from the school.

  Alex, basically summing up all our thoughts, let out a “Whoa.”