The next few hours passed excruciatingly slowly. I was led blindly around from place to place. No one spoke, I wasn’t sure if I was still with Jude or the black-haired escort in flannel shirt, and was completely and totally disoriented. When the blindfold was finally removed I found myself in a gray room with now windows. Behind me was a chair and in front of me was a man in his mid-thirties, I assumed.

“Sit.” He said; I did as I was told. “Fill this out and sign at the bottom.” He handed me a clipboard with a few papers on it and a pen, then he left the room.

I made sure that I read through the documents thoroughly. My suspicions about the Association had been completely unfounded at that point, and I even stopped for a moment to ponder them. Certainly being here is better than being with Hyperion, I thought. Nonetheless I continued to keep my eyes open for anything incriminating, but there was nothing to be seen. It was simply forms asking me to please remain discreet and quiet about involvement in the Association with outsiders; then there was a application to fill out, which asked very basic questions like my full name, age, date of birth, and social security number.

When I was finished, the same man that had been in the room before came back to take it and then left. I waited for quite a while for someone to come in and tell me where to go and what to do, but after a few hours of doing that with nothing to show for it, I fell asleep in the chair.

I don't know how long I slept, but eventually two uniformed men woke me up and escorted me down the hall to what looked to be a gymnasium full of other people, wandering around and talking to one another. I checked my watch: it was 8:00 AM. Why they left me in that room for the entire night I never quite figured out. I think it was a busy time for the Association; there were a lot of new recruits and they were low on capable people to train them all, not to mention Hyperion had been steadily strengthening their efforts to put them down.

I stretched a little (I was awfully stiff from sleeping in an aluminum, folding chair all night) and sat down on the floor. I looked around; there were no windows; in fact, I hadn't seen a single window since I arrived. I began to think to myself, where in God's name could this place be located? Certainly a building with no windows would be too noticeable for a secret organization to make their headquarters.

I glanced to the left me; there sat a girl with brown hair, draping down to her shoulder blades, wearing a pink skirt and a white, button-up shirt. She was very thin--though not emaciated-looking--and not particularly tall.

"Hello." She said to me smiling; she must have noticed me looking at her.

"Hi." I replied.

"How are you?"

"Tired, sore. You?"

"Oh, about the same."

We were silent for a moment, before she spoke up again. "... So you're a wind-user too?"

"Umm... Yeah... How'd you know?" I asked, puzzled as to how she came to that assumption.

"Well, the rest of us have been here all night. I came in with a really big group of beginners and they divided us up by our element." She explained. "I'm a passive wind-user; how about you?"

I actually wasn't sure if I was a passive or aggressive user. I'd done some research on the Enchanted well before coming to the Association. Passive users were healers; aggressive users were warriors. Some people could do both but that wasn't easy and most people just weren't physically capable of it. I hadn't tried my hand at passive enchantments--I'd barely tried aggressive enchantments--but I got the feeling I was more capable of aggressive enchantments.

"Aggressive, I think." I replied.

"I figured; healers aren't exactly in great supply and usually don't join organizations like these because their abilities are easier to hide." She said. "By the way, I'm Melinda Kimber." She introduced, extending her hand.

I shook it and introduced myself. "I'm Charles Freyer, nice to meet you."

" 'Charles'... so regal. Do you mind if I call you 'Charley' or something?"

You see what I mean?

"... No, that's fine."

"So, Charley, tell me, what brings you to a place like this?" She asked, scooting closer so that we could hear each other better.

"I came with a friend. He thought it would be a good idea for us to be among people 'like us'."

"Something tells me you didn't quite agree."

"Well... I guess. I was fine living amongst people who weren't 'like us'."

"Ah, I understand completely." She replied. "I wasn't exactly thrilled about coming here either."

"Really? Then tell me, Melinda Kimber, what brings you here?" I asked.

"Well, this is kind of like being sent to boot camp for me." She explained. "My parents found out that I was, you know, 'enchanted', and absolutely spazzed. Ya see, my dad's this hotshot, CEO of a fuel-refining business; it's crazy, I'm only eighteen and I've already been all over the Middle East: Baghdad, Mecca, Tehran, you name it. But I'm getting off topic. Anyway, he's a big-wig for this company, lots at stake, and he didn't want anyone to find out that his daughter was a big freak so he sent me here, under the guise that I'm studying in France and that I will probably stay there." She explained very mechanically.

It was around that point that a bell sounded and the lights dimmed a little bit. Men in uniforms shooed people sitting in the middle of the floor and sat up a wooden crate surrounded by a rope, held up at four corners by columns. Then the doors of the main entrance opened and in stepped a slender fellow with dark brown hair, escorted by two uniformed men. I immediately recognized him as the infamous founder and leader of the Association: Zadok Oberon. He was in his early fifties, though it was hard to believe; he looked no older than thirty-five. His hair was very short and he sported a goatee; and he walked with a kind of good posture that I'd never seen before. He stepped into inside the barrier created by the ropes and up onto the crate. One of the uniformed men handed him a megaphone, which he turned on and spoke into.

"May I have your attention, please?" He said, more as an order than a request. "I have a brief introductory announcement for all of you. You are all new recruits into the Association of Exceptional Minds. All I ask is that you remain discrete and keep the whereabouts of our headquarters a secret. Within the next few weeks you will receive a brief training in using your element, as well as training in hand-to-hand combat. Be prepared. In a few moments you will be ushered to your quarters. That is all.” And without another word or glance to anyone, he was gone, out the same door he came in.

“Hmm… ‘Hand-to-hand combat’… Sounds like fun.” I said sarcastically.

Melinda chuckled. “You sound about as thrilled to be here as I am.” She commented. “If you didn’t want to come you shouldn’t have let your friend talk you into it.”

“Well, we didn’t do a whole lot of talking about it, actually. He just mentioned it one night and I told him to ask me about it in the morning; and he did… and here I am.”

“So… Why didn’t you just stay behind, and let him come here by himself, if he wanted to come so badly?” She asked.

“Ehh… it’s kind of complicated… Either both of us were going to go, or neither of us were going to go… I mean, we didn’t say that, it’s just sort of implied.”

“… Oh…” She said, confused. “Oh! So… you’re good friends… so to speak?”

“Uhh… yeah.” It really wasn’t often that I had to answer that question; I don’t think many people assumed that Jude and I were a couple, and if they did, no one said anything about it. I think it was because the two of us lived in a small town, where everyone knew everyone else, basically, and where the concept of two men being romantically involved was lost on simple people.

It wasn’t long after that Melinda Kimber and I were separated and taken to our respective quarters. The dorms were long rooms with cots set up in two rows on either side of it, and with a white curtain that could be pulled around each bed for privacy. The dorms were not coed, though it didn’t seam as if the Association was all that worried about fraternization, as the women’s dorm was just down the hall and neither kept their doors locked; not to mention, security was rather lax in that part of the headquarters. Not a night went by that I didn’t hear quiet moans and sighs coming from one part of the dorm or another.

It wouldn’t be long before Melinda and I met up again, but before that would happen, I was reunited with Jude in the dormitory. He was standing the middle of the room, wearing the same red shirt and gray sweatpants he had been wearing the day before. He looked very disoriented, amongst the throngs of mostly young men, darting around the room and creating chaos, while trying to pick their cots out. I moved towards him, dragging my luggage the whole way, I was still exhausted from having slept in a folding chair all night.

“Man, you look like hell!” He exclaimed as soon as he saw me, which, of course, did wonders for my self-esteem.

“Yeah… I feel like hell.” I replied.

“Did they like… rough you up or something?” He asked.

“No, they just made me sleep in that room where I had to fill out my application on the folding chair.” I explained. “Did they do that to you too or am I just lucky?”

“No, all of the new-recruits were in the gymnasium last night. I wondered where the hell you were! I thought there might have been a problem or something and they kicked you out.”

“Nope; still here.”

The two of us weren’t able to find cots next to each other, like we would have preferred; we waited too long to do it and by the time we decided it would probably be a good idea if we got that taken care of, there weren’t too many open cots left. So I ended up relatively close to the door, on the left side of the dorm, and Jude was three cots from the very back, on the right side; not that he ever slept there. Jude slept with in my cot the entire time we were in that dormitory, and I slept on top of him. Granted, it wasn’t comfortable, but we’d been sleeping together for so long that unless we were in the same bed, neither of us would sleep well. This ceased to be a problem later on, for as we moved up in ranks, we became better accommodated. In fact, at the height of his success in the Association, right before he left and all hell broke loose, Jude was living in a suite in the Hilton in the ritziest part of Pointe Dume, nowhere near the Association’s H.Q.; but that’s a story for much later.

The nearest exit was pointed out to us down the hall, where a ladder went up the wall for a long way. We were only allowed to leave a few at a time, and only at certain hours of the day (usually late at night or very early in the morning). However there was a “main entrance” that was miles away that surfaced in a mach janitor’s closet in a subway station at the center of the city, which was always busy, not matter what the time of day, and random folks randomly popping out of janitor’s closets was overlooked by people who had their own matters to worry about and thought nothing of it.

We were given the rest of the day to do as we pleased, so Jude and I decided to go get something to eat. We emerged from the Association’s headquarters and found ourselves in a remote part of Point Dume’s extensive Manticore Park. That’s when it dawned on me that the reason for the lack of windows was because the entire facility was underground.

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