Throwing in the Towel (Nineteen)

[Nineteen]

Nineteen smiled, remembering her classmates. Not that she knew them for particularly long, but they'd been a different breed. It was interesting, how from class to class the recruits differed so much. Of course you always had the standard archetypes -- the spunky one, the brooding one, and so forth -- but the overall atmosphere could change a lot.

"It was fun. Me and a couple of the guys there, Gage and Xander, raised our fair share of hell. And then some." She snickered, picked some more at her greatly diminished plate of tofu. "Jullian was Jullian. There was some bogus class about Yeerk-Human relations taught by a YPM girl, but that never really got off the ground. And the Combat Training instructor then, a guy named Kovu, was absolutely fucking crazy. I mean, I didn't have a problem with that, but some people definitely did. If you ever think I'm bad..." Nineteen laughed, and let it trail off.

[Alain]

"Really?" Alain asked, trying to imagine someone crazier than Nineteen when it came to combat training. She wasn't crazy in a way that made him question her ability to teach but he did question (and often doubted) his chances of coming out a particular exercise unscathed. He was almost always right but he supposed that was the point. Better to take their hits now and learn they could handle them than to break down the first time they got seriously wounded in a fight.

"So where are they now?" he asked, hoping it would give him some insight into how Seiya assigned animorphs to faction. "Your old classmates I mean? I don't even know what factions there are," he said, realizing that he only knew the major ones that he was taught in history class. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Vancouver, Chicago and, of course, Dallas.