Logs:Better Instincts
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| RL Date: 7 April, 2013 |
| Who: Barnabas, Mave |
| Involves: High Reaches Weyr |
| Type: Log |
| What: Bones puts Mave through the paces as part of his unique training, then agrees to a second hire on. |
| Where: Lake Shore, High Reaches Weyr |
| When: Day 14, Month 6, Turn 31 (Interval 10) |
| Weather: Warm sunshine and cloudless skies make for a beautiful day and pleasantly warm evening. A breeze tempers the heat with no humidity lingering in the air. |
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| Lake Shore, High Reaches Weyr The rest of the bowl may be barren, grass barely surviving at best, but here by the lake, it's brilliantly green in the warmer months: thickening and thriving in the silty, boulder-dotted soil just before it transitions to soft sand and thence to the cool, clear water itself. A large freshwater lake fed by a low waterfall, it not only provides warm-weather bathing space for humans and dragons, but has one end fenced off as a watering hole for the livestock in the feeding grounds. The water there is often muddier than the rest of the clear lake, whose shallows drop off abruptly several yards out into deep water, and whose edge undulates against the coarse-hewn bowl wall: here close enough to just be bramble-covered rocks, there far enough away that a narrow land bridge divides the main lake from a smallish pond. Between are several rocky outcroppings that form excellent makeshift diving points, though only one -- across the bridge -- has a set of narrow, slippery, quite possibly tempting stairs.
"Get out!" She's heard before seen, that subtle flower of grace. "Get out, get out of my hair before I eat you!" Hands scrambling to bat in the air around her head: must be Mave. On approach to the shore, she's plagued by the blue firelizard squawking up a lively alarm, ranging between helpful and irritated as it earns an open-palmed smack or dives claws into the girl's hair, wrenching strands of it, often accidentally from getting caught, out of the proper runner's tail. Hitting the sand, she backhands the creature with a finality that he flaps up a few more inches, just hovering and spying, and giving Mave rest enough to rub at her eyes till Bones comes into focus. Dressed ready to move and sweat, she yet suffers from morning-sluggishness-- or is that training catching up to her slowness. Her shoulders stiffen when she rolls them back, but her greeting to Bones is full-force, a chipper hum as she bounds down to meet him; a pace interrupted when she slows to stare blankly at the assorted items, posing, "... did someone else's greenhouse wash up on shore?" The first sounds of approach are met with a smile and turn of head to look back over his shoulder, but as Bones spots the wacky battle, he's at first concerned for her safety. He turns fully towards her and takes a few steps in her direction with bare feet, but stops as she's cleared herself of the hassle of firelizards, and waits for her to close the rest of the distance. Bones is equally prepared for a day of physical exertion, wearing nothing more than leather cuffs, and dark pants that are soo loose and thin they might almost be describe as billowy. "Huh?" He doesn't get her joke at first, untill he looks out at his gear with a stranger's eyes, and then gives a laugh. "Ha! Nope, this stuff's all mine, and it's gonna put you through your paces today kid, just watch." Sure, joke. That's what it was. So answered, Mave mouths an oh that is not reflected in her eyes, narrowed as they are in continued wondering; but how... An eagerness to find out smoothes aching muscles enough that she's the ability to lock her arms and give each a preparing stretch. Second order of business: redoing the hair that the blue pulled out, so that none strays into her face distractingly. Bumps along her head show that her hair will never be straight, but it pulls into a fairly taut tail, high back. A yet-nearby chirp has her side-eying the hovering firelizard with a scoff, "I'm never setting my alarm ever again. Shoo!" Her voice raises, "I'm here! It's over!" Wriggling out her shoulders to relieve that tension, she glances, finally ready, at Bones. Bones moves towards where he's collected his gardening tools and sets out to do the last bit of preperations for the training regiment he's set out for the girl, starting out with a traditional shovel that he uses to start digging a narrow pit into the sand. "Now, here's the thing..." he starts as he balances some heavy, bare toes across the top of the metal portion of his shovel, helping to kick it into the earth and then heave the sand over his shoulder. "What's the point of two fighters both teachin' you the same techniques all day, right? Jo's got the skill to teach you how to throw every punch man ever invented, and then tell you which ones he shouldn't have bothered, eh?" It doesn't take long for a shallow hole to have been dug, and he tosses the shovel aside to go fetch a clay pot big enough for tree. Even empty, Bones grunts lifting the pot, and again once he settles it's near four-foot diameter into the hole. "Stand in here." In the pot? Yes, that's where he's pointing anyway. Mave's leveling a contradictory glare of suspicion with a pressed mouth of trust at Bones, leaving her nearly blank after the war of not-understanding. Encouraged though she was to nod over differences in teaching techniques, her chin's held slightly high in question as she steps carefully around to the indicated pot. Toes touch the pot's outer edge, pushing sand about. "In it." A question, as well as a command to herself. With a last flicker of eyes to him, she sucks it up-- inhaling, and quite openly gets to wiggling down, making a funny grimace at the feel of the clay, scraping lightly at its sides. "I feel like you're about to push my head down, cover me up and leave me here to sprout," she admits, a joke with a little waver of nerves. Her uncertainty grows when there's thick clay restricting her in a full circle. "That's almost like a poem." He says, musing over her choice of words. "And it ain't too far from the truth. I'm gonna plant a girlseed, and grow a man outta 'ya!" Now, he goes to getch a long strip of linen, the kind one would use to wrap up the tightly clenched fists of a boxer. Instead, he reaches for her wrists with it, and holds them together. "Or I'll grow a woman, whatever. Semantics. You'll be tough is what I'm saying. Anyhoo, this is the part where shit's gonna get weird if I don't explain what it is we're doin' here. When I learned to fight, there weren't no teacher, and you had to get your ass handed to you a dozen times over just to even get to a place where you could start learnin' anything. You remember that first lesson I taught you? The most important rule of fighting?" He pauses to see if she'd recall it, but in the meantime he'd start to bind her wrists together in front of her, restraining them together like some sort of prisoner. If she trusted him, of course. "Uh huuuuh." Skepticism abounds: poetry, out of her mouth, growing a man, woman, Mave-thing. Glancing down her body, now partially trapped in the maw of a clay pot, she evaluates her scrawny legs' chances of sprouting. Tugging on her wrists brings her up, hands reflexively jerking backwards but stilling at seeing him there. An unhappy squirm has built inside the tensing of her stomach, stressing a couple of overly wrought muscles; her high-strung nerves obvious to a man so trained, though she does her upmost to keep most of the discomfort from twisting her mouth, except the corners that twitch with a childish-like whimper. "That I'll..." fingers twitch, but as she attempts to recite from memory-- hah!-- she soothes her pains, steeling herself with a sense of adventure instead until her uneasy expression's passed. Or appeared to, through sheer force of will. "Forget everything once it all starts." There's a pause in the man at her tension, but he continues on once she's found her resolve, binding her wrists up not all too tight. In fairness, she could absolutely free herself with just a bit of struggling and twisting, but that's by design by the big man above her. It's more of an honor system restraint than anything else. "See, you're nervous right? That's good, that's what we're workin' on getting rid of. See, fightin' is kinda like... lifting heavy weight around. Y'can spend all day havin' somebody to teach you how to do it proper. What kinda grip to use, how to bend your knees, yadda yadda yadda." as he works, there's extra linen, and he uses that to wrap once around her waist like a belt, forcing her to keep her hands down. "But y'don't ever build up the muscle till y'actually start lifting. Y'gotta actually get that feelin' of panic and fear in your head, and make it your best buddy. I had to do it by actually fightin', and this whole time I've been thinkin' about how to get you in that spot, in that fighting place in your head, without actually messing you up." He takes a step back from her to survery his work. "Oh man, if somebody saw this on the beach right now, it'd look so messed up. They'd probably throw me back in the mines, ha!" "Wait," Mave's been struggling, not outwardly, but inwardly with listening while batting down the flush of noise in her ears. Dressed for it, and she's already sweated from the jolt of preparation and unknowing Bones' process brings on. "Am I getting rid of the nerves or being friends with them?" Using nerves for good isn't where she's stuck; really, that much has dawned as logical on her face, and it's left to decoding her instructor's wording. Truly restricted when he steps back, adventure takes a second-seat to anxiety when it flares back up, truly feeling her limited movements, the small space, and how her legs bump into unyielding, cold clay. She's small enough to fit but restraints are a different danger, a little beat of her heart-- conquered by a blast of worry for something not herself: "N-no!" She stammers hopefully, lurching forward in her determination while forgetting in that second that she's tied and bumping in a wobbly step into the front of the pot towards him, "Not for me!" Bones takes another moment of pause to let her relax and find a few calming breathes, even while he smiled all the while at her predicament. Just like the equipment laid out on the beach, this smile is more for himself, pride at coming up with such a training methodology. "You're... you're making friends with the nerves and then getting rid of them. I guess." he hadn't really tracked his own logic as well as she had, clearly. "Whatever, I'm new at this. The point is, if you're out there fighting, you are gonna get hit. That's what this is all about, we're gonna teach you how to take some hits, and not freak the hell out about it, alright?" He takes a step forward with his hands raised up into a fighting stance, but without the tightly wound knuckles of focuses fists. Instead, he's got his palms out and fingers splayed. "Don't worry, I ain't fixing to really deck you here, alright? Gonna start with one to the chest, you just focus on keepin' your balance, and not flinching." Methodology there may be, but what Mave's eyes tell her is she's about to get smacked by a much larger man. Trust elbows for room next to instinct, and a hazier day-dream seeking to take her brain along the path of how the hell did you end up in a pot on the beach about to get decked-- no. Not decked. Repeating it inwardly, she licks her lips, teeth getting in a soft scrape at the end. Hands flex and release, indignant to the idea of not defending but being complacent, even as she tries to widen her stance as much as possible inside the little tree container. "Balance, don't flinch," she repeats once, testing, then, as a mantra to herself, "Balance, don't flinch. Balance, don't flinch." Saying the word causes her to flinch-- and flinching causes her to flinch. With a grunted irritation, she snorts out a breath and waits, in silence, steeling for two seconds before: "Okay." Mave's flinching gets a wincing, the wise old sensei suddenly feeling like five kinds of jackass. Is he really doing this? Punching girls on a beach? Yes, yes he is. "Hey, you asked me to show you the ropes, kid." That's his justification for what comes next, a fast and frightening looking strike aimed at the top of chest. Despite it's speed and technique, it lands home with a surprisingly unpainful slapthudding sound, only the barest hint of sting lingering after the touch is concluded. Bones' hands are back at the ready, up and guarding himself in proper form despite there being no real risk of counter-attack. "How's that? Hurt at all?" Tensed-- too tensed, after all-- for the hit, Mave sways backwards like a pop-up toy, oofing, with a drop of her chin. She instantly attempts to take it back, harming her balance more than the hit had, and causing her hands to twist in retaliation against the binds. When she realizes there's only a sting, flushing erupts across her freckles in angry embarrassment at herself and the fiery sense of disappointment has her glaring, without answer, at a patch of sand below Bones' hip. Attemps at reading the girl's face prove futile, and even as exposed as she is the bodylanguage is just as difficult for the dense gardener to pick up on. He drops his hands and stands up a little straighter to double check. "Hey, don't play with me Mave, did I hurt you?" His misinterprets her masked embarassment as stifled pain, and takes a step closer with concern painting his expression. "Because I ain't fixin' to bruise you up here. If you gotta throw a swift kick to my eggs to make us even then that's what we gotta do." "No!" Again, it's thoughts of Bones that lead Mave on a straight shot out of her own head, pity cast aside like garbage. "Yeesh, no..." A pause as she gathers herself against the flash-bang of annoyance in her chest having little to do with Bones' hand pushing there. "I..." as if he hadn't seen, "Lost my balance and I flinched. No, other than that, everything's great." A combination of relief and amusement flood Bones' at her revelation. The only thing he ended up hurting was her pride, and that has him laughing a bit. "Hahahaha! Oh sweet merficul crap I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. I thought I ended up hurtin' you somethin' bad, girl!" With him recovering, and her spitting out her confession, he puts his hands back up. "C'mon mave, you're gonna end up flinching for the first few dozen of these I throw at you. It's built into you. Built into everyone. You were thinkin' you'd get it right on the first try?" He bobs his arms a little, and then motions towards her with a jerk of his head. "Now I'm gonna throw one at your gut. We'll stick with the body at first because it's a little easier. Now, try not to flinch, but don't freak out when you do, alright?" And true to his word, another slapping strike is aimed just above her belt. Pursing of her lips suggests that she hadn't thought, so much as there'd been a glimmer of hope. Now it's business time. Shame, while heated, dies quick as a flare. A start of a laugh, because of his, or at her own expense, Mave quells when he raises his hands, licking her lips in a flash. "Okay!" Some of the amusement sticks to her affirmative, making it almost excited. Indeed, with her first embarrassment out of the way, she's room now to fill with a sense of actual adventure; she's doing this. Her belly flops slightly in its own self-awareness, but she stands straight to receive the slap-- and actually flinches too early. Anticipation jumps the gun. Eyes closing in her wince, she opens, body softening just in time for his palm to impact her in the gut. Being loose helps her stagger, after all, and she recovers in good time with a flutter of blinks and a readying shudder of her head. "Okay!" Again! Now there's a grin for the girl at her earnestness in continuing, landing that second hit and gauging her reaction. His strikes come fast enough to trigger the flinches in her, but he uses that same care as before to avoid giving anything more than a bit of lingering sting. Her skin might be a little on the red side after they were done. "See, learning how to throw, how to move, that's the fun stuff. I'll let Jo handle the fun stuff." His third punch isn't annoucned, but it's a little slower, and it'd end up hitting the side of her shoulder. He's casually using her like a delicate punching bag as he speaks. "But this is more what it's really like. A little pain, a little confusion, and fear." His next punch is a mirror of the last, a slowish hook to her opposite shoulder just above her bicep. "There's always a little fear. Unless you're drunk o'course. Ha!" "You saying-- oof-- I'm not having fun?" Wryly done, as Mave continues to allow herself to get smacked on. Without him saying, she flinches wholly against his third attempt, a fast inhale punctuating it and the bang of her right foot against the back of the pot. Since it's slower, there's less wobbling-- just that compunction to move, get balance. "Mmph," she complains on a second assault to a shoulder, their soreness part of that fun with Jo, stiff and aching with use. But, noises aside, after each one, she scrambles to straighten, to present herself, almost bouncing on her heels in a kind of hyper desire to keep going. "I was learned," the way she says it presumes a more distant time than here, or with her rider instructor, or perhaps even anyone at the Weyr, "That a little fear's good. Nerves're how your body tells you to be prepared and not too big for yourself." "Well, you want a little fear." He casually continues their conversation as the light strikes keep coming, the next aimed at the bottom of her ribs beneath a breast. "But you want just enough to help guide your decisions, not so much that it makes them for you. Are you decidin' to flinch, or is your fear doin' it for you?" It's a rhetorical question they both know the answer to. "Fear's doing it for ya, because it's faster. It's instinct. This is just step one, we're teachin' you to get hit and keep your brain workin'." Now he throws out a feint towards her chest again, a punch that doesn't quite reach it's target. Behind that one, Bones ducks low and throws a soft uppercut into her stomach, his palm landing across her belly button. "And then, I'm gonna let you undo your wrists there, and start throwin' some up at your head. That's the real tough one. Your eyes are gonna wanna close, your head's gonna wanna turn away, and it takes a long time to teach yourself to do neither of em." She skips a breath, getting struck in the ribs, face briefly sullen for that sting. And it stops her from getting out the noise her mouth opened for to answer the rhetorical. Jaw closing, Mave listens, instead. Listens, tries to absorb, as if staring harder will cause it to sink in better. "Make a new instinct?" Speaking of, chest feeling in danger sucks it in, funneling breath so that her cheeks shallow. But her stomach takes the blow, curling her. She snaps up with a sudden "euugh," different from previous blows. Her hands jump up, wishing to reach for the cheek she's now pushing out into roundness with her tongue, eyebrows low and thinking. "Oh, that stung more," she complains curiously, rolling her shoulder back and trying to blink into concentration for his new instruction. Nose wrinkling at the thought, she does the usual: licks her lips. A taste swiped across them causes her to falter again. "... oh, I think I..." tongue pokes as she grimaces, "Bit my cheek." Bones smiles at her folding, noting the discomfort of the impact, the surprise of it. That's the knowledge, the sensation that he's trying to impart. But as her reaction lingers, his hands slowly drop down and his lips part to ask what's wrong. The sight of blood at her lip has his answer before the question leaves him, bringing out a wince in him once again. "Whoa, blood in your mouth?" The half step forward is all he needs to be within range to help her untie her wrists, just a few easy tugs from a set of soft knots. "That's part of fighting too, but maybe it's a little early for that lesson." As much as Bones is a man for equality, there's obvious touches of gingerness in his treatment of a girl of fifteen. "No, I'm fine," she insists, garbled somewhat by her pushing tongue, and even though her hands, writhing out that last inch into freedom, jump up. Mave thrusts a thumb inside her cheek, swiping and pulling it out to wipe off the saliva heavy blood left there with her other fingers. It's light; she's already licked the rest off her lips mostly by accident. "I just have a nervous habit, of chewing on stuff. That'll teach me, huh!" Her 'huh' echoes childishly of his 'ha', barked in its manner as best a fifteen-turn-old girl can. "While we're paused, though," not one to waste time, she, while playing her fingers around, curling and stretching and pretending to play an instrument on the air, "I've been meaning to ask you, not that I've any right since you're already doin' this, but I wanted a favor, y'know, just your input on this play I'm doing." Bones finishes unwrapping her entirely from the loose restraints he'd previously put to her, and starts wrapping the loose strands around one hand just to bunch it up properly to be put away. "Well yeah, if you're in a fight that's probably a habit you should work on, heh." Still with a touch of concern in the man for her bit cheek, he doesn't press the issue any further out of trust for her assesment that it was nothing too worry on. "A play?" He cocks an eyebrow. "You want my input on a play?" Three or four steps back are taken, and he motions with one of his hands for her to step up out of the pot for the time being. "Yeah." Fiddling with her cheek a couple more times, causing herself more unnecessary pain, Mave lifts her knee up onto the pot's edge when she sees his motion without thinking about what she's doing. Noticing she's leaving, she pauses, almost hurrying to complete, "One of the sets is a renegade ship, and I've seen fishing ships and all, but they look different to you when you're five. Thought maybe you could help me figure out what it should look like, far as bigger ships go." Then she shoves up, balancing her weight on that knee, so that she hovers indecisively on it, swaying tiny bits side to side as she waits between getting out and slipping back down in. "Don't you want to hit my face?" Bones' looks down at the sands at an angle as he scratches the top of his head, not looking up at Mave as he ponders the details of her request. After a few moments of silence, he shrugs up with a smile. "Yeah, sure!" There's a surprising bit of enthusiasm to it before he realizes there's some additional clarification required. "Oh, to the first thing. The boats. Not the hitting. I might slap you around a bit later, but I wanna give your cheek a few to heal up. In the meantime." He moves to grab a hand sickle left stuck in the dirt and starts chopping into the sand to create a clear and deep line in it. "We're gonna have you work on some sprints. Fighting is the most exhausting thing out there, and jogging or shadowboxing just doesn't cut it." He takes about fifteen long Bones-sized paces before he gets to the other end, and starts chopping an equal line at the other side of the sands. Beaming smiles she means to thanks Bones with freeze incrementally as his plan sinks in, leaving Mave looking quite like she might shrink back into the pot and not come out. But, gradually, she pulls her foot up and slinks over to where he's drawn the line, her mouth a firm but unhappy line at the prospect. It's morning, after all, and who knows if she's had breakfast -- what with the state of her alarm firelizard -- and the fifteen paces looks like the length of the bowl the longer she stares down it. An inhale as she takes her eyes from the mark to look over the rolling waves beside them, harsh crashes at the end of gentler arcs firms the disagreement off her features. She calms, breathing the distinctive air. Digging her feet into the sand in preparation for instruction, Bones will find her, for the better part of the morning, a willing participant, even as her body does the complaining for her. Sprinting, and then exhaustion, sap up the better part of her concentration, so that talking falls to the wayside and she'll have to fill him in later on the play details. Hopefully over a giant lunch. |
Comments
Alida (Alida (talk)) left a comment on Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:44:29 GMT.
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- bounceClapGiggle!* Maaan, and *I* can't be there to watch and/or help. Damned Quinlys and weyrling restrictions... *mumbleGrumble* ;)
Azaylia (Dragonshy (talk)) left a comment on Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:53:08 GMT.
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Man. Bones' logic is twisted in just the right way that... what he says and does actually makes sense. What's even more messed up is that Mave seems to get a kick out of it! x3 I LOVE Mave and Bones scenes. c:
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