Disclaimer: I didn't make or own GOLDEN SUN OR ANY OF ITS SEQUALS. NEENER NEENER!

Chapter 14: Zestyness and Musings on Adept Love

Jenna sat back as Mitch shut the coach door and groaned. Her arms felt like they where on fire, but she didn't have the heart to ask Mitch to stop. Mitch's idea of 'Easier to pull' must mean 'Jenna can fire sixty-seven pinning her friends (although not Mitch) to any number of walls and carts. Isaac had to get a new scarf before departing because of all the holes. Every other arrow, Mitch had to show Jenna how to correctly fire again, but Jenna did this on purpose because Mitch stepped in behind her and moved her hands into the correct locations, after which he would say something like 'Keep trying Jenna, you'll get better', which made her shiver all over.

"Here we go again…" Mitch sighed, patting Jenna's arm lightly, causing her to wince, "Are you alright?" he added.

"Huh?" Jenna replied, "Oh, no. I'm fine." She smiled.

"That was fun," she said weakly, "And so tiring…" she smiled softly at Mitch, "Do you have a pillow anywhere?"

Mitch leaned to the side and took one out of his backpack which, not to Jenna's surprise, let loose a landslide of sound that abruptly ended when he zipped it back up. He handed it over to Jenna, who took it gratefully and scooted to the other side of the bench seat. She leaned up against the wall with the pillow wedged underneath her head.

After a few minutes of moving about, Jenna decided that this was not going to work. She opened an eye and spied Mitch. He had retrieved another pillow and was leaning against the opposite wall to Jenna. One hand was on his thigh and the other was holding one of his books near his knee. At about this time, a tenor saxophone would start to play a dramatic solo. Jenna opened her other eye and inspected him happily. He reached up and massaged a temple wearily.

She sat upright and watched him read for a moment. Mitch noticed this and smiled at her and chuckled before turning his gaze back to the book.

Jenna yawned and stretched theatrically. In one swift movement, she took her pillow, fluffed it up a bit, and draped it across Mitch's lap. Mitch had to move his arms out of the way as she swung her legs up onto the bench and rested her head on the pillow.

She didn't think it would have worked, but Mitch simply chuckled his little chuckle and looked down at her. She looked back up and deliberately snuggled her ear against his belly and winked. She felt warmth on her forehead and shivered when Mitch started to run his fingers through her hair.

After a few minutes of this, Jenna's arms suddenly didn't hurt so much. In fact, she couldn't feel much of anything anymore. Jenna was completely exhausted and her eyelids suddenly became very heavy.

"Mitch…" she sighed softly, "Mitch?"

"Yes Jenna?" Mitch replied, looking down at her.

"So tired…" Jenna moaned, wrapping her arms around Mitch's waist and squeezing him as if he were a giant teddy bear, "Sleepy…" She felt Mitch plant a kiss on her cheek.

Had Jenna not been so worn out, there would have been a pretty good chance of things going farther, but instead the girl sighed happily again. She closed her eyes and after a long moment felt a blanket being tucked in around her.

"Thanks Mitch," she whispered when he had finished without opening her eyes.

Jenna couldn't be sure, but as her vision closed, she thought she heard a whisper of, "Sleep well Jenna…" and she fell asleep two minutes after Mitch started stroking her hair.

Quite a few hours later, around five o' clock

"Jenna?" Isaac called at the coach door, "Mitch? Are you two coming or not?" He knocked impatiently again and was answered with a snore. Isaac looked at Garet, who, curiously but carefully, opened the door and immediately ducked to avoid the fist of an irritated teenage girl that, fortunately for him, didn't come.

"I don't think she's going to kill you," Isaac whispered as to not awake them. He motioned for the others to some over.

"What?" Ivan asked, "What is it?"

"Shhh!" Isaac commanded.

"Aw!" Sheba whispered, "That's so cute! Do you have that picture-thingie that Kraden made?" (Another invention by Kraden. He named it a Cammerra because this sounded like an Ancient Angarian word meaning 'To see a memorable image'. It also means 'To prance around commanding people to pose in front of a strange box')

"I think so…"

Isaac returned a few minutes later with the device. It ran on metal capsules of stored Jupiter psynergy that Kraden called Energeisore Batteriehs after an Ancient Angarian phrase meaning 'To have a trademark in the form of a bunny with a bass drum'. It was astonishingly small and Isaac pointed the lens at the couple and made sure that the Flasheh (Lit. 'A small, bright light used to blind and irritate') was off.

"Put his hand on her waist," Isaac demanded, doing the second meaning of the verb Cammerra, "Now put her hand on his chest…There we go…Snuggle them up closer…Alright, that's good…Hmm…"

After a few minutes of this rearranging, Isaac stopped and smiled as he pressed the small button on the top.

The Cammerra made a snapping sound and whirred before what Kraden called a Phatograf (Lit. 'An image used to blackmail') popped out. Isaac looked at it and sniggered.

"Should we wake them up?" Mia asked, "They'll miss dinner if we don't."

"Nah," Isaac said, "We'll just bring some back for 'em,"
"Should we move them back then?"

"No," Isaac replied, "I still owe Jenna for the time she jumped out at me in the middle of the night last week. Payback is so sweet…Let's go eat, shall we?"

An hour later

Jenna could feel herself bubbling out of her blissful slumber. One by one, her senses returned into that dull state known as early morning syndrome, or at least they would have, had it been early in the morning.

Bleary-eyed, she at the windows and saw that the strips of sharp, stinging light that had previously been there when she had gone to sleep where no longer present, replaced instead by the soft, deep red hue of a late sunset and the gentle rocking motion of the cart had ceased. Jenna felt Mitch rustle a bit and she sighed happily and squeezed his neck softly before closing her eyes again. Mitch nuzzled the top of his head under her chin and Jenna sighed blissfully again and Mitch sighed and looked up at her as he also awoke and Jenna giggled and stroked his hair comfortingly and while this was happening, two independent but totally synchronized mental fuses burned down with amazing speed.

In a feat of amazing agility, Mitch jumped from a prone position while Jenna jerked to the side and landed on the wooden floor. Mitch first crashed into the wall and then landed on the seat, his arms outstretched along both walls. The boy, slumped and braced against the wall, and the girl, lying on the floor, both of them breathing in short, quick gasps and each blushing a deep crimson, stared at one another for what seemed like eternity.

Jenna, being…well…Jenna, made the first move because not only was she not threatened by the prospect of that embrace, she actually wanted it and so she smiled disarmingly at Mitch, who was wearing a look of utter fright and total panic. His expression made her think twice about making a sarcastic repartee and she decided to humor the poor boy.

"Mitch?" she asked softly, sounding like a concerned mother, "Are you alright?"

"Oh Mars!" Mitch whimpered, "Oh MARS! J…Jenna! I'm s…so sorry! I didn't mean to…"
"Mitch…" Jenna repeated calmly.

"…I…I didn't…I swear…I…"

"Mitch?" she repeated again, knowing that it would get to him sooner or later.

"I'm sorry! I…I don't know how that…" Mitch began again but instantly clammed up when Jenna pressed a slender finger against his lips. Her other hand gathered up his shirt collar and pulled him until Jenna nuzzled his nose with hers.

"Mitch. Shut up." Jenna commanded, "Now listen very closely to what I am about to say to you, do you understand?"

"Mmm-mmph." Mitch replied which probably, according to context, meant, "Yes."

"Good." Jenna continued on in her soft but firm tone, "It is alright to hug your girlfriend. It is okay to kiss your girlfriend. These are actually very good things that good boyfriends do. You want to be a good boyfriend, don't you Mitch?"

Mitch nodded with feeling, "Mmmmph MMMMPPPH mmmph,"

Jenna smiled, "Was that 'Yes Jenna, all I want is to see you happy?'"

Mitch's face reddened, "Mmm-mmmph…"

"Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

"Mmmph."

"Do you love me?"

Shock. Disbelief.

"Mmmph!"

"I said, Do You Love Me?" Jenna repeated slowly.

Mitch looked at her with what she thought was the oldest look she'd ever seen…

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The only one who could seriously explain this phenomena was Kraden, who, when he was not creating something like the Better Toilet Brush (which, incidentally, exploded twenty seconds after being turned on), he observed the party's behaviors and took notes on adepthood. One conclusion was this. Adepts where much more susceptible to Love at first sight, which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, or at least anyone who knew that Mitch and Jenna had been together for approximately ten days. Kraden reasoned that psynergy was not simply 'called' when needed, for example, to blow something's head off, but instead was always there and your unconscious self could call it as well, therefore Love, considering how close psynergy was connected to emotions, was dozens of times more powerful for adepts, especially with other adepts. According to Ancient Angarian records from the Golden Age, the average courtship was a little under three weeks. After this time, the psynergetic bond between the boy and girl was so strong that they found each other irresistible, and so marriage was just the next step on the walk of life for them. There was no way for anyone to know this now, but the people of the Golden Age became as much their spouse as themselves. This is alluded to in a few surviving poems of Angarian lore, like a passage in Mayrs To Mie, something like our Odyssey. Roughly translated, it meant, "And so, like his father before him, he married the woman he loved, and so he felt as she felt and sensed as she sensed," This is a bit of an exaggeration, but psynergetic bonds became so strong between husband and wife that even physical feelings were shared. Kraden believes that this has died out of normal people, and they fell back onto the very flimsy technique of Pheromones to find a mate. Because of this, as psynergy died out, so did the power and solidity of Love, which led to an increasing number of divorces and martial disasters. Kraden also notices that normal people find adepts a lot more attractive than other non-adept mates. Apparently, the average individual no longer used psynergy as a linking force, or barely even at all. It happened only in rare, uncontrollable, isolated situations, like when you suddenly and randomly knew that your friend was going to drop in for a surprise visit and three seconds later, there is a knock on the door, but somewhere was a part of them that still remembered, a 'sensor' if you will, that became flooded with emotion, and drew the person closer to the adept, but simply could not offer a 'return' signal, as will be explained below. An adept girl and an adept boy however, is a completely different matter.

A girl adept knew what she liked, and when she found a boy adept that she liked, she latched on with mind, body, spirit, and psynergy. Kraden observed that starting from about the age of fourteen or fifteen, an adept unconsciously 'reached out', searching for a Love, and as a sort of built in safety device, the passion fizzled out quickly if the partner didn't feel the same way. Around the age of eighteen, they had usually found a soulmate.

Jenna had been reaching out for someone. Isaac had gone off with Mia, but Jenna cooled down eventually. Jenna had seen no other boys that she particularly liked on her travels, and Garet wasn't exactly her type and she thought that Piers was a bit on the old side and alright, some of the boys they'd met where cute, but that was it. They were not adepts, so the little safety reflex never got a return signal and so cut off the interest at that point.

What Jenna was experiencing was the first 'True Love' that had been experienced in Weyard for a very long amount of time. Isaac and Mia, for some reason, where having their psynergetic link forming much slower, due to conflicting elements of Venus and Mercury, but by no means did this make it impossible. Anyway, back to the main topic, Jenna was an incredibly powerful Mars adept and Mitch was also a Mars adept and even though he was so much weaker, ancient energies weaved their elaborate net around them.

And now Jenna was latched. If anyone had bothered to invent a tool that allowed people to see psynergy (Kraden hasn't finished his idea for the Pocket-Sized Printing Press yet) and took one look at Jenna and Mitch with it, they would see Jenna's power wrapped around the boy from head to toe, declaring in a rather unmistakable way, 'This is my boy'. Jenna probably wouldn't openly admit it, but she actually ached if she spent too much time away from him. Her chest started to hurt and her head began to throb and her legs felt weak and gradually she saw and felt and heard the world as though through a blanket of fleece if she stayed too far away for too long. This is, frankly, dramatic by even Golden Age standards. That special psynergetic bonding hadn't been used for so long that it actually, in some strange way, became even more potent, like some of the world finest wines, and they overloaded sensors that had long ago been retired and filled the bearer with so many feelings that it was almost impossible to control them. Jenna didn't know this exactly either, but Mitch actually loved her as much as she did him, although he was put into a kind of shock as her colossal strength pumped through him emotions so powerful that he has essentially been numbed to nearly all of it, only feeling as much as his barely-trained psynergy could handle. Nevertheless, if you looked a little closer through the device, perhaps around Jenna's wrist or her ankle or maybe floating around her head or around her waist, one could see Mitch's energy, young and weak and fragile, but all the same there and growing stronger by the day, offering that little safety device its return signal. Although it was so much quieter, like a whisper amidst the crashes of a raging storm, one could tell that Mitch was saying back, 'This is my girl…'

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Mitch shrugged and Jenna gawked at him.

"That's it!" Jenna yelled, suddenly enraged, "All you can give me is a shrug!"

Mitch yelped as one-hundred and forty three pounds of enraged woman bowled him to the ground.

"Do…you…love…me?" Jenna screamed at him.

"I…I don't know!" Mitch whimpered.

Jenna paused in mid-frenzy. It was an odd answer to a question. Besides, what she was doing right now probably wasn't something that a 'Good Girlfriend' would do.

Very carefully, she let go of the horrified boy's collar and took a deep breath. Mitch could guess that he was getting off incredibly easy and carefully said absolutely nothing.

Jenna moved her hand a carefully calculated inch and Mitch flinched again.

"Could you please explain?" she asked, trying to sound disarming. She placed a hand on his arm and tried to comfort him.

"Uh…" Mitch began reluctantly, testing the waters of conversation to see if there where any piranhas in them, "…I don't know…because…b…"

"Because…" Jenna said encouragingly.

"Because I've…never been in…love…before…"

"So…you…don't know what it feels like…" Jenna finished for him and Mitch cautiously nodded, "Oh…" she added, feeling like an idiot. "Well then…uhh…do you…like me? As a friend?"

Mitch hurriedly nodded, "Oh yes!"

"Perhaps a little bit…more than a friend?" Jenna continued.

"Kinda…" Mitch said, blushing.

"Exactly…how much more?"

"Enough."

This seemed to satisfy the girl.

"Oh, alright then," Jenna said happily, as if she had not just turned into a sort of female half-demon, "I'm hungry now. Are you?"

There was a relatively loud churning sound.

"Yeah," Mitch said, embarrassed.

As if on cue, the door opened and Mia was outlined in the doorway. She seemed surprised for a moment, not expecting them to be awake.

"Yes?" Jenna asked.

With a vigorous bout of head-shaking, Mia pulled herself together.

"I brought you two some dinner," Mia explained, gesturing to two plates as means of demonstration, "It's soup."

"What kind of soup?" Jenna asked. She had been to enough all-night Contigian take-outs and had learned to ask that question.

"Something Ivan made," Mia replied, "It's got potatoes and cream and onions and stuff in it. It's not bad. There's some bread too."

"Thanks," Jenna replied, taking one bowl and the bread watched as Mitch accepted his bowl and nodded and Mia left, carefully shutting the door.

"It's a little cold," Mitch noted. Jenna, who had missed lunch and had already begun, reached over and took his metal bowl and held it aloft. After a short moment it started to boil and she handed it back.

"Thanks," Mitch said. Jenna nodded but said nothing, as her mouth was full of bread and soup. He watched Jenna frown and reach over to his backpack and open it. All of her things were inside it. Mitch had no idea what Jenna had put into his backpack because he was the kind of boy who blushed at the idea of intimates and would never go through her things for fear of lace. He was therefore surprised when Jenna took out a large jar of jalapeno peppers. They were not the kind of peppers that are used to 'add a little flavor'. They were the kind of jalapenos that bartenders used to sober up that one stubborn drunk. They burned off taste buds and made steam rise from their victim's ears. Water boiled when they were dropped in and the jar even had a little warning label on it that said:

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CAUTION: The contents of this Jar should be handled with extreme care! The contents are incredibly dangerous and by eating one, you void all life insurance policies. If you must, never eat more than one a day.

IN CASE OF INGESTION: STEP 1: Immerse victim in ice cold water. STEP 2: Pray.

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While he read this, Jenna had sliced five of them in half and mixed them in with her soup, which went PPPPSSSSSSSSSSTTTTT and steamed. Jenna then replaced the lid and put the jar back into Mitch's backpack.

"Uh Jenna…" Mitch said as she raised her spoon to her mouth.

"What?" she asked. She had a pepper on the spoon. The soup was evaporating around it.

"Uhh…" he continued as she lifted the soup closer.

"Mmm!" Jenna said and licked her lips, "Zesty! Want one?"

Mitch watched as Jenna caught one of the peppers in her spoon and dumped it into his bowl.

"There ya go sweetie!" Jenna laughed and winked at him, "It tastes good! Go on!"

Mitch carefully watched the pepper sink like a stricken oil tanker, slowly but unmistakably. At the end, his soup went gloop at him. He next made sure that his canteen was full of clean, pure, but above all, cold water.

"Something wrong Mitch?" Jenna asked expectantly. She was watching him.

"No," Mitch lied, "It looks…zesty alright…" A cloud of vaporized cream blew past his ear, scalding it as it went past.

"Go ahead!" Jenna encouraged. She held a spoonful of the stuff in front of his mouth, "Open up!" In the middle of the spoon was a large chuck of pepper. Mitch stared at it as if it were a huge spider.

Mitch opened his mouth to protest but Jenna acted first, taking the opportunity to tip the contents into it.

Strangely enough, it was a lot different than the first time he had one of the peppers. He'd woken up three days later in the inn, surrounded by unfamiliar girls who were all holding huge bouquets of flowers. He eventually was able to walk again in a month or so and thanked all the girls very kindly for all of the food and compassion and asked them to return his shirt, which was eventually found and put back on. This time, his throat squealed in protest and his eyes watered but the experience was not too bad, i.e. he was still alive.

"Yum." He managed, wiping his eyes, "Very zesty indeed…"

Jenna laughed, "Dunno. Mars adepts can eat foods a lot hotter than others I guess." She looked puzzled for a moment, "Everyone else except Garet hates these things."

Mitch was picturing a mystical, magical energy force coating his tongue, protecting his taste buds from the deadly fruit. He tried to forget the picture.

"Yes." He replied, fishing out the pepper from his bowl and nonchalantly dropping it onto the wooden floor, where it started eating away a hole. Satisfied that it probably wouldn't kill him on the basis that he had just survived something that was the culinary equivalent of the Apocalypse, Mitch dipped his spoon into the soup and took a sip.

It actually wasn't that bad.

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