I woke up in the dimly lit recovery area. Slaith was snoring evenly from somewhere nearby. It was slightly chilly in the ivory-colored recovery room. The faint minty alcohol scent of germicidal cleaners filled my nostrils. Something did not feel right. The tightness behind my eyes kept distracting me. My limbs were unusually heavy. While my breathing was relatively unchanged, but most of my body had a feeling of newness that made no sense. I knew, from my studies, that the regen pods were a biomechanical device that was derived from a giant version of a carnivorous plant. The unmodified plant could keep prey alive for months, feeding slowly on its body through filaments that it used to penetrate the victim while suspending it in a solution that provided anesthetic and nutrients. The modified plant extracted stem cells through the filaments and cultured the cells before reintroducing them to the points of damage. The biggest difficulty was keeping the plant fed enough from a secondary pod. If the plant got hungry, the  patient would start to be consumed by the very thing being used to treat them.

Knowing all of that, considering the extent of my and Slaith’s injuries, I did not expect to be in the regen pods for more than a week or two. Somehow, I was sure it had been longer. Everything had a slight lavender tinge. That odd tint was unsettling.

As I started to move my limbs, I noticed, the natural atrophy of being in the regen pod was more extreme than it should have been. Two weeks of being in a pod should not have done much to make me lose muscle mass. My body acted like it had been in the pod for a week or two.

Just then, I heard Slaith’s snores falter and stop. A few moments later, his voice came from behind a curtain that separated the two beds, “How long have I been asleep?”

“I’m not sure, but it looks like we were both in the tanks longer that we should have been.” I replied.

I was not tied down, so, swinging my legs from the covers, I stood up. Looking down at the skin tight bodysuit that I had been put into before entering the tank, I could see that I was right, my proportions had changed in some way. While weaker that I had been when I went in the tank, my limbs seemed a bit longer and the bones seemed more bulky.

I was panting and feeling strained when I got to the curtain and pulled it aside. Slaith looked more changed than me. His skin was a shade darker than it had been, His bone structure had also become bulkier. At eleven he looked like he was closer to fifteen. Looking at me he  cleared his throat before speaking, “What did they have to do to us? I feel terrible.”

“I don’t know, but it had to be pretty drastic. Two weeks is supposed to heal nearly fatal wounds.” I replied. “We seem to have been here longer than that.”

“You were in the pods for two and a half months Solan.” Came the graveled voice of Standt as he stepped around the curtain. “There were complications. We had to adjust things to keep you both alive.”

“What do you mean ‘adjust’?”

“You know that the tanks are based on a kind of carnivorous plant. Sometimes the plant reverts to its origin and begins to digest the patient. We had to have the medical team manipulate the plant and feed it extra slaves to keep you alive. All told, fifteen slaves had to be fed to each of the plants to save you.”

I was troubled by this. Slaves had been the only people other than my mentor to talk to me and keep me company throughout my childhood. On top of that, the expense of such a waste had to have hurt the family finances.

“Your father was willing to spend anything to save you boys.

“So, why did you stage that fight? Was it to manipulate my son? Is it just so you can have a body guard when you go to school?”

“Yes, why did you do that?” responded Slaith from the side.

“It was because I wanted him to do his best against me. If we try our best in training, we both get stronger. Yes, it would be nice to have someone to watch my back, but it’s always good to have at least one person to talk to. If nothing else, as a sounding board. I need it to be a person who respects me and who I respect in return.”

“If you watch my back, I will watch yours little brother!” stated Slaith weakly but intensely from his bed.

“I’ll try not to get us both killed, Big Brother!” I replied with a wide, self-mocking smile. “That is, once we can both walk across a room without getting exhausted!”

“You both have training tomorrow. The only way to rebuild your strength is to start as soon as you can. From now on, you will train against each other and as a team. If you both plan to protect your new status, you will have to be a perfect pair. When you get to school, your lives will be in danger. You should get as much rest as you can for now.”

The next day was grueling. As promised, we split our time. Some of the time, we would spar and fight each other, the rest of the time was split between enhanced techniques, two-person tactics and our technical lessons.

When we broke for lunch, I had a question for Standt. “Stogar, I hear there are places that our people have conquered that have weapons that use a projectile to do harm to an opponent. Is that true?”

“Yes. Do you know why such projectile weapons are not used here?”

I had to think about it as Slaith quietly observed the interaction from the bench a short distance away from where I was eating. “Does it have to do with those short cones in all of the public areas of the household?”

“Yes. They are a type of plant that we have modified. It monitors the area around it and lashes out with a sticky solvent at any projectile and its origin point. The solvent dissolves most metals, all flesh and bone. Stones are mostly immune to it. There is a weaker version of the plant that is more portable. We use the portable ones at our outposts on other worlds.”

“Is there a way to neutralize the plants? If so, we should learn how to fight with and against projectile weapons.” I said. I was sure the enemies of the house Dothstaire would use any weapon they could get against us. I knew my people were not prone to being overconcerned about fighting fair.

“I can make the plants dormant for four hours at a time. We can practice projectile weapons of different kinds every third day, starting tomorrow. I have a collection. Remember, if you are in a situation where you want to use projectile weapons in an area where these plants are active, destroying one is very difficult.”

Slaith spoke next, “What types of distance weapons are hardest to defend against?”

“Directed energy weapons can be the most dangerous. It is rare to find one that can do much damage in a single attack, but they have a longer range in most cases and do not bounce off of most materials. They also are not subject to things like wind and gravity, so targeting is exact line of sight. They also, frequently, are able to burn through most forms of armor. The physical trauma of a wound can be extensive. Our armor is highly resistant to energy weapons. The coating, made from specially processed drakon blood absorbs and scatters the energy. The heat is largely drained into the environment.

“Arrow and spear type weapons are easiest, as you can catch the missile before it can hit you. They are rarely able to pass through any serious forms of armor. The length of the missile is both the reason for accuracy, and the reason they can be easily kept from impacting.

“Firearms and similar weapons have small and stubby projectiles that cannot be intercepted easily with unenhanced personal strength. While there are some armor types that can limit the damage from those projectiles...”

I will not bore you with the details of the overlong lecture about ballistics. Suffice to say, he covered the subject in enough detail to have our heads swimming.

The following day, we began our survival and infiltration training. This included ways to determine the edibility of flora and fauna in an unfamiliar biome as well as how to learn the local language if deprived of local intelligence. “I was dropped on a world of high, but different technology for my first mission. Three were dropped there with me. I was the only one alive after half of a local year. If the same happens to you, I expect both of you to make it back.”

“Why should we expect that to happen to us?” I asked.

“It doesn’t have to be during your military service,” replied Standt. “It was popular for the more fortunate students to prank the underclassmen at the Cloisters by marooning them on such a world.”

“How could they open a portal? Students are too young to have access to a keystone,” said Slaith, mirroring my own thinking.

“Boys, Do you really think a rich and powerful family would even hesitate to bribe someone if it meant eliminating possible competition?” His wry smile was chilling.

“Is it always that brutal? Would they be able to get away with murder?” asked Slaith.

“Son, they have enough money and influence to kill either of you, provided there are no witnesses they can’t bribe. Most attempts happen when the target is alone and unobserved.

“However, we are getting away from the point. Learn these lessons well. Dumping you on a hostile world makes it deniable as a prank and disposes of the body. It also makes it impossible to have witnesses to your death.”

We spent the next week learning to use tools from a survival pouch that Standt fully expected us to have on our person at all times. There was even a small device (designed by one of the societies we had conquered) that could extract limited linguistic data. The device could pass that data on to us, but it took time. Extracting was accomplished in an hour or two, but absorbing it took at least a week or two. “The more complex and differently structured the language is, the longer it takes. I was once told of a soldier who encountered a language that changed its rules based on the time of day and a complex formula of social standings. It took three hours to extract, and four weeks to absorb. She was exhausted by the effort. That may have had something to do with how many natives she killed subjugating them.”

The less interesting parts of the training involved the details of how not to poison ourselves by eating local food and drinking polluted water.

The kit would fit in a hidden pocket of our school clothing that was being prepared for us. The blue and black tunics with silver trim would show our pride in house Dothstaire.

A few bribes of high quality food that I passed to the slave making the clothes were my simple way of having secret pockets concealed in them. I planned to stash some of my interesting materials in those pockets. Several of the pockets were water proof and airtight.

I also noticed changes that I did not share with Slaith. I had started to notice that I was building up what seemed to be a static electric charge. I had to ground out the charge from time to time. At first the discharges were minor, if alarming. Over the months and years of preparation for the cloisters, the discharges got stronger. Soon, I had to be careful not to discharge where the burn marks could be seen. I inserted a conductive, metal pole into the ground as deeply as I could in a quiet part of one of the gardens. This allowed me to ground them out. Over time, I also had to be more careful with the discharges due to the noise of the discharge. Sometimes I had to sneak out during thunderstorms so that the thunder would mask my growing discharges.

My vision had also began to change. I started having to squint when in open daylight. Standt noticed and had some eye protection made from a dark glass. As the problem became worse and worse, I noticed a change in my eye color. My eyes were green when I fought Slaith. My eyes had become purple. One day, just as I was about to put on the eye protection There was a pressure in the area of my eyes,  and the glaring light became muted. When I examined the area, I saw that there was an almost imperceptible extra, transparent layer that was covering my eyes. The color also seemed to have changed to green again. I asked Standt for a new set of eye protection with no darkening. Once I had the eye protection, it was impossible to see the oddity of my eyes from any reasonable distance. As my tolerance for the light improved, I practiced opening and closing the extra lenses on my eyes. When they were open, I began to notice that I could see much more effectively at night. I also started seeing markings on parts of the house and on objects. It seemed like I was seeing in a spectrum of light that was not usually visible to the naked eye. I discovered, later that I was seeing in the ultraviolet spectrum. Many of the things I was seeing were symbols that did not match any of the languages I had learned.

I spent a portion of many nights looking around the house and examining the markings I found. I wrote them down in a small book I kept with me. I even found some disused portions of the estate that had even more of the strange markings.