"That Marine, eh?" he said, then he chuckled. "She sent to me to find you yesterday, looking for anyone who came in late. What's she after you for?"
"A date," he answered truthfully.
Ailan gave him a look, then laughed heartily. "My boy, you've done absolutely everything wrong," he told him.
"What do you mean?"
"Faey women like mysterious men, and what's more, they go absolutely wild when mysterious men play hard to get. You have a closed mind, an oddity among humans, and that makes you very mysterious. And since you're obviously trying to get away from her, you're playing hard to get. She's going to come after you ten ways to peel a goran, until her curiosity is satisfied. The only way you're going to manage to do that is to just go out with her. She won't stop until you do, because Faey women chase Faey men who say no. It's a cultural trait."
"Then how does a man say no and mean it?" he asked.
"Men don't," he replied honestly, pulling up the chair beside Jason's and taking a seat. "Remember, my boy, the women are the dominant gender, and there are customs that go back thousands of years at work here. Men don't say no because long ago, we weren't allowed to say no. Even though men aren't owned like they were back then, you have to have noticed that the Faey are not nearly as progressive as humans when it comes to gender equality."
Jason nodded, leaning on his hand and listening to Professor Ailan quite attentively.
"When a man wants to assert himself, he has to do it indirectly. Just flat out saying no is actually a form of flirtation. I'm sure the Marine knows you don't know Faey customs and you're not flirting, but she can't help but see it any other way, because I get the feeling she's attracted to you."
"How do you know that?"
"Because when she broadcast to the instructors in the school, she described you as 'a handsome human male with blond hair and wearing a blue shirt.' Faey don't call men handsome unless they're attracted."
Jason frowned. So that's how she found him. Since all the instructors were Faey, it was a simple matter of using telepathy to contact them and track him down.
"Is this the same one you got into a fight with yesterday?" he asked with a grin.
"Does everyone know about that?" he asked tartly.
"It's all over the school, my boy," he laughed. "I wouldn't be surprised that it hasn't gotten all over the city, at least among the Faey. It's news when a human can beat up a Marine. It's big news when he does it in a matter of seconds and never gets touched in return."
He blew out his breath. "I was just trying to make her leave me alone," he said in a resigned tone.
"That's not how you do it," he chuckled.
"Then how do I do it?"
Ailan laughed. "It's not going to be that easy now," he told him. "She's not going to give over on you now, Jason. You'll have to go out with her. You don't have a choice."
"Oh, I certainly have a choice," he said with narrowed eyes, speaking in a low, calm, yet ominous manner.
Ailan laughed. "Well, if I can't convince you otherwise, I'll just let you figure it out," he said, patting Jason on the shoulder amiably. "I have to get set up for class. You get your homework done?"
Jason nodded.
"Send it to me and I'll grade it," he said as he moved down towards his table, where his own panel was sitting.
It wasn't long before other students filed in, and Jason's troubles with Jyslin were forgotten as the class began. Jason was rather infatuated with plasma technology, and he was always a very diligent student, making copious notes both on his panel, via the odd holographic keyboard, and on his own notebook, taking vidshots of the diagrams that Professor Ailan wrote on the board and uploading images projected onto the air behind him via a holographic imager from his own panel, a three-dimensional object projected from two emitters mounted into the corners of the wall to either side of the whiteboard. This mixture of human-type technology and Faey holography never ceased to make him curious, but he had to admit that it was effective. Ailan could project up prepared images and graphics to display, using a laser pointer to point to the areas he discussed, and when he didn't have a prepared image, he simply took the marker and drew it on the whiteboard. The images he used could be uploaded into the students' panels so they could refer to them when they studied, or use the video they had their panels recording-if they bothered-when the Professor drew diagrams, flowcharts, or wrote things on the board. Holographs didn't record well in recorded video. They looked distorted and jagged, so it wasn't as easy as recording the holographs. Jason was of a habit to record every class and go back and catch highlights of things he didn't understand, then upload the video of the class onto a stick and keep a copy of it without hogging memory in his panel.
It seemed like only a minute had passed before Ailan clapped his hands in that manner he did when dismissing class. "Alright, people, test tomorrow," he called. "No homework, study for the test!" Jason started packing his things when Ailan came over to him and leaned down. "Oh, and your friend is waiting outside," he said in a low, conspiratorial whisper.
"She is, is she?" Jason asked with a narrow-eyed look at the door. "Professor, can I check out a couple of tools?"
"Certainly," he answered. "What do you want?"
"A cutter," he answered as he zipped up his pack. "One of the good ones."
"No problem," he said, ambling back down to his table as Jason followed him. He went to a cabinet beside the door and removed a small cutting tool, a small device that severed the molecular bonds in the structure of a material to cut it apart. It was cutting at a molecular level, and it left an utterly smooth and clean cut in its wake. He went over to his panel and logged the tool as "checked out" under Jason's student ID number. That would prevent the security system from reacting when Jason took it out of the room.
Jason took the tool in his hand, and saw that it was indeed one of the better ones, able to cut more deeply than the little ones. It was perfect. He put his pack on, then flipped the switch on the tool from cut to sew, which allowed it to perform the exact same function as an annealer. Cutting tools differed a little from annealing tools in that they could do more than simply separate annealed matter, and it would take an annealing tool to separate matter annealed by the cutter without physically cutting the two objects apart.
It was perfect.
Jason followed Ailan to the door and waved for him to go first in a grand fashion, then stepped back and put his eyes on the small window in the door as Ailan opened it. The reflection in the glass showed him that Jyslin was leaning against the wall right by the door.
Perfect.
He stepped up to the door, then whipped around it, his arm leading as he zoomed out of the doorway, tool leading. Jyslin barely had time to react before he was on her, and the edge of the cutting tool found its mark, sliding along her shoulder and upper arm where they were in contact with the wall, merging their molecular structures and causing them to become joined as strongly as any weld.
She tried to pull away from the wall, but then she found herself stuck. She put her free hand on the wall behind her, then her foot, and pushed hard, but she was stuck fast. "What the hell did you do?" she demanded hotly as he closed the door to the classroom easily, then started walking away.
He held the cutting tool up over his shoulder so she could see it, but didn't say a word.
She laughed. "You clever bastard!" she shouted after him.
That was the start of an episode that was rehashed by students for years to come, a cunning war of intrigue and wits between Jason and the Marine who was annoying him, as he sought ways to separate himself from her, but she sought to defeat those attempts. After her partner freed her from the wall with a borrowed annealing tool, the pair of them sought him out and annoyed him through breakfast in the cafeteria, talking loudly and making rude comments, some of them downright embarrassing, some kind of attempt to bait him into doing something which the other students didn't know. He stalked off with the two of them following closely behind, to his next class, and they stood outside the door waiting for it to end.
And they waited long after it was over, and all the other students left. They looked in almost a half an hour later and found him gone, the window open.
Much to the surprise of many on campus, they saw Jason climb out of the third floor window and climb down the wall of the building, then walk away as if he'd done nothing any more out of the ordinary than using the door.
It didn't take them long to find him afterwards. After all, they were telepathic, and the Faey instructors and other military Faey on campus would tell them where they last saw him. They continued to follow him, standing behind him in the library as he read from a few hard paper books-which weren't used much anymore-and then followed him as he went back to his dorm to get a project due for physics, then returned to campus to attend his next class. This time, the redhead stood by the door as the blonde waited outside the building, so she could keep an eye on the windows.
And again, after the class was over, he didn't come out.
Several students saw her rush into the room after the last student came out, but he was nowhere to be found. She grilled the students quite harshly as to where he went, but all of them said he'd been right there not a moment ago, fiddling with his panel, and they were as puzzled about how he managed to disappear as the Faey were. It was later, when a security worker reviewed the records from the cameras in that room that the truth was revealed. Jason had used a hastily jerry-rigged holographic emitter from parts from a project device he'd built for his physics class and powered by a PPG taken from a disassembled cutting tool. He'd taken a shot of the wall of the class, then after class, he rushed up to that wall and activated the hologram, hiding behind a false image of that wall. To keep it from jiggling or frizzing he had had to hold his panel absolutely still, and he'd managed to do it just long enough for the Marine to rush out of the room and try to find him. After the Marine left, he disengaged the hologram, put the cutting tool and his project back together, then waltzed out of class without a care in the world.
The Marine was starting to get just a little bit irritated at that point. Three separate times the human had walked into a class, then he found a way to leave her behind when it was over, making her scour the campus to find him. For the fourth and final class of the day, she called in reinforcements. A squad of ten black armored Marines surrounded the Plaid and lurked on the second floor, where the human was having his physics class, and she stood-nowhere near any wall-right outside the door and looked through the window, making sure he didn't sneak out. He was sitting in the back of the class, beyond the scope of her vision. He seemed utterly indifferent to her presence outside the door, as if he'd already devised his escape from her trap, and many of the students in his class were eager to see the class end. Word had gotten around that the same Marine that Jason had fought the day before was now following him around, and many speculated that she was going to get even with him, following him around and trying to catch him where nobody else could see. They wanted to see what was going to happen.
The class ended, all the students jumped up and rushed towards the door to get out onto the campus green and see what happened when those two came outside, and as soon as the instructor opened the door, the Marine barreled into the room.
And he was nowhere to be found.
That startled the students as much as it did the Marine. They looked all around the room, even in the storage cabinets and closets, but he was gone. There was no other way out of the room, and no other Marine was reporting in that she'd seen him. He'd vanished like smoke.
Growling in frustration, the Marine charged down to the security center for the building and had the human guards replay the video of that room to find out what happened, how he had managed to slip away. They cued up the video for her, and they watched in as much amazement as she as the cunning and resourcefulness of Jason Fox was displayed on that video monitor for them to see.
During the physics class, Jason had unobtrusively annealed his chair's feet to the floor. Since he was in the very back of the classroom, nobody really noticed him doing it, not even the teacher. Nobody was looking back at him. Then it became apparent that Jason was much better with Faey technology than people realized, because he had somehow pumped up the output of his cutting knife beyond its usual capabilities. Further analysis showed that he had swapped the PPG unit of his cutting knife with the PPG in his project, which was a much more powerful unit, then somehow jerry-rigged the cutting tool's circuitry to not melt when it was turned on. When he turned it on, what he got was a cutting tool that could cut nearly four feet deep instead of the maximum of six inches or so that most cutting tools were designed to cut. He'd turned his cutting tool into a sword, and used it to slice a circular angled hole in the floor around his chair, which was annealed to the section he had cut free. The cutting tool cut so cleanly that it didn't make any kind of evidence that it had been used until the cut material was shifted. Since the hole was angled, the circumference of the bottom narrower than the top, the freed circular plug to which his chair was annealed did not fall through the floor.
When the class was over, Jason picked up his pack, pulled his chair up, which pulled the plug out of his hole, and then climbed down into it. He had even set the chair so when he pulled on the edge, the chair and plug fell back into the hole, concealing it and hiding his escape route.
Some people already knew about this, however, but they didn't get out of class for an hour after Jason's class ended. They were all amazed in the classroom under his own, the same classroom where he had Plasma Fundamentals, when Jason seemingly dropped out of the ceiling, fell nearly fifteen feet, and landed with a roll on the floor. He then simply stood up, dusted himself off, picked up his backpack, excused himself politely to the teacher, then walked out of the classroom.
That was only half of his cunning escape. The Marines inside were only on the second floor, which allowed him to have free run of the first floor. He managed to slip by the Marines outside by exiting from the building down through the loading dock, and catching a ride with a human campus groundskeeper who was about to drive off in a school truck, riding in the open bed. They were looking for a blond student on foot. Jason had went right by them in the back of the groundskeeper's truck.
The battle that day clearly went to Jason Fox, but Jyslin Shaddale vowed that the war would be hers.