damned_institute | Night 43: F21-30 Hall

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Night 43: F21-30 Hall

[in F22]

Falis was sitting on Senna's bed, her back to the wall with the shinigami laying against her, when the weird intercom thingie went off. She looked up at the little box for a moment before frowning. What the fuck had that been? Damnit! Where was Dominikov when she needed him to figure shit like this out for her?

A sharp pain ran through the hunter's left arm accompanied by a searing heat she recognized from the night before. It seemed peoples' fears were going to be true this night. Taking a peak at the flesh underneath her bandage, Falis grimaced seeing the decay return and it work its way up to her shoulder. At least it stopped there, but she wasn't sure it'd stay stopped all night long.

Her eyes slid back to the sleeping shinigami. Falis licked her lips. Damn, she looked and smelled... No. She was not going to do this. She was stronger that whatever fucked up zombie sickness. Senna was important to the hunter. She may be Falis' prey, but not prey like this. Resisting the hunger that lay in her stomach, she idly combed her finger through Senna's hair as she rest her head back against the wall and waited for people to show up or for the shinigami to wake.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Meche, as the only one in the room immune to the raging teenage hormones that were practically rebounding off the walls all of a sudden, was quickly starting to feel like the fifth wheel here. Nothing like young love to make a girl feel old.

"Well, I could use all the help I can get," she said honestly. Then, trying to be tactful, she added, "But you know, we've already gotten a good start for tonight, so I could always head back to my room and work on my stance some more. You must both be tired after last night." Tired probably didn't have a lot to do with it, but Meche was remembering pulling the shades down on a train ride last week and feeling a little empathetic. Anyway, the children here had to grow up so fast. For all that she felt like their mom sometimes, it wasn't her place to stick her nose into the ways they supported each other.

Had that really been only last week?

"I'd love to eat you right now," Falis said to Hokuto in a low voice that hinted at her current predatory disposition. Once the words were out of her mouth, she realized how true they were given how much flesh Hokuto had exposed, as if she was taunting the hunter. She swallowed hard. "So best you not come to fucking close looking like that," she replied, before turning away from Hokuto back to Meche.

"Oi! I didn't say you were done, did I? Show me another thrust," she said, emphasizing her words with her own powerful demonstration, "now that your back isn't all fucked up."

Hokuto wasn't sure if she should blush, back away, or both. Something about the way Falis had said it... worried her. "Well, since you're busy," she managed to tease, this time glancing a little more obviously at Senna.

For the moment, she stood back to watch the training lesson. Tonight, they needed to relax, or at least work off their stress. She was content enough to just watch.

"That's the thanks I get for trying to be nice, huh?" Meche cracked, but if she was honest, she was glad not to be leaving this early. She still wasn't too solid on these simple thrusts, and they hadn't even gotten to how to dodge or strike again yet. Being able to hit any way but straight forward was still a distant pipe dream. Time to get back to it.

She replanted her feet, brought the spear up, and thrust forward. She could really feel the difference in her back--fixing that probably wouldn't stop her from getting sore eventually just from the weight of holding the weapon up, but it did ease the pain from earlier. This attempt she felt good about.

If only Meche knew her presence was helping Falis to resist the urge to devour her girlfriend right then and there.

"Good!" Taking up a stance across from Meche, she held her spear at the ready like she was the woman's opponent. "Now when dealing with a live target, your strongest attack will always be the thrust. You just need to look for the right moment and adjust to the needed angle. By remembering the core stance and positioning, you can produce a thrust just as powerful in any of the forward directions."

Slowly, she demonstrated one aimed at Meche's stomach instead of her chest, the spear's point stopping a few inches away. "You just angle the motion down a little."

Returning to the ready position, she showed a strike to Meche's shoulder that would have disabled the limb if it hadn't stopped a few inches away. And again, she demonstrated, with one at the woman's thigh.

'The principle is the same. Remember, it's a dance and even though the steps are the same, it's your partner, your opponent, that leads you to what the step's adjustment is for that specific pass."

[skipping Hokuto with permission]

Meche watched carefully again. It was tough to keep herself from flinching every time the spear looked like it was going to drive itself into one of her limbs; by the end of the demonstration, she was gripping her own weapon so hard her knuckles had started to ache. Still, it was easy to appreciate the girl's technique, and she was moving slowly enough that Meche could at least begin to follow it. Alita's thrusts were so clean no matter where she was aiming.

"I understand that with a human opponent, but what should I do if I'm trying to fight a monster that's bigger than I am?" she asked. "Should I keep aiming at my height and try to hit its legs?" She was probably getting ahead of herself here, but the monsters were really what she wanted to know how to deal with. Meche was hoping she wouldn't find herself fighting too many humans.

"You aim for whichever of the four major strike areas are available to you," Falis replied. "You're a fucking smart lady. Think about it. When you're facing an ogre is a strike at the leg where it has more than enough muscle to absorb the hit going to work?"

She shook her head. "You've gotta get it down to your level, so you go for one of the two out of four areas you have in reach." She thrust the spear down at the inside of Meche's foot, again stopping short, then she pulled back and thrust toward the woman's pelvis. Granted that last one was far more affective on a male opponent than a female one, but it still fucking hurts.

Meche tried to make a list of important-sounding strike areas Alita had demonstrated how to hit so far (chest, stomach, shoulder, thigh, foot, pelvis) and was pretty sure she must be missing something, because she was definitely coming up with more than four. Then again, it hit her that what she had signed on for didn't look like it included a whole lot of complex strategy lessons. The Alita School of Spearing apparently had two main components: 1) learn to hit things and 2) hit whatever things you can. Hard. With power coming up from the ground. Use a knowledge of human anatomy whenever it seemed to apply and just take your best guess when it didn't. Well, that was easy enough to understand, anyway. Meche had gotten used to that kind of fighting in the forest. But...ogres?

She lifted the spear and tried some very slow thrusts in the general direction of various points on Alita's body, careful to keep the spear well away from anything it could hit. "All right, I understand. What next?"

On the last strike of Meche's, Falis shifted the spear in her own hands from a thrusting position to bring the non-pointed end down across her body to block it. She grinned.

"Blocking." She kept her body in the position it was, the spear diagonally across her body after she had guided Meche's spear to the side away from her target. "The important part about blocking is keeping your balance and making sure your spear covers as much of your body as you can when doing so."

[still skipping Hokuto until she wants to jump back in]

Learning to block sounded like a good plan. Meche drew her spear back and then positioned it in front of her body, trying to imitate the way Alita was holding hers. It was pretty easy to keep it still like that; she just wasn't sure she could move fast enough to actually use it to block anything.

She hefted the weapon back up into the thrusting position and then down into the blocking position again, watching carefully on the swing to make sure she didn't manage to stab herself. The tricky part was figuring out how far to hold the spear from her body--the way Alita was doing it wasn't coming naturally to her yet. Meche frowned and studied the girl's position again. Was there a "power coming up from the ground" trick to this too?

It was really too bad that her own skills didn't exactly come in handy like this at Landel's. If only there were a market for reading stories or filing papers, she thought wryly. Obviously her resume could use a little work.

Blocking was not something that had a power from the ground aspect. It was all about flexibility and grip. Watching the older woman's struggle, Falis stepped out of her stance and brought her spear before her, holding it in one hand before her perpendicular to the ground. The hand was exactly where it would have been had she been in the core stance.

"You need to get used to the swing before you can be effective at blocking."

She then rotated her wrist, bringing the spear's point from threatening the ceiling to threatening the floor. She reversed the rotation, putting the spear back in its starting position. After a brief pause, she rotated it the other direction, bringing the point back to the floor, but in the opposite direction. She repeated the motion, all the way from one side to the other slowly, as if she was twirling the spear without it ever completing a full 360 path.

"Give this a shot and keep doing it until you feel comfortable."

Meche nodded and angled the spear straight up like Alita's, then took one hand away. This thing was too heavy to thrust with one-handed for long, but not so heavy that she couldn't hold it out and spin it--for a while, anyway.

Keeping the spear almost at arm's length now (was that right?), she rotated her wrist slowly to one side, trying to keep the movement smooth and steady. It should look fluid, Meche thought, like drawing a semicircle in the air with one pen stroke. Like a dance, Alita had said. She brought the point back up and then down and up again to the same side. Doing it so slowly really made her aware of the muscles working in her arm--not painfully, just that it had been a long time since she'd had muscles to think about. Meche wondered idly if all this would be easier if she were still in the Eighth Underworld.

She rotated the spear the other way. It took a number of attempts, but after a little while the swing started to feel a little more comfortable, at least--if not exactly second nature.

While Meche spun the spear, Falis kept the motion of her own up. With an almost seamless transition, the spear moved from Falis' right hand to her left hand. She rolled her right shoulder, eyes flickering with pain with the motion.

"Okay, switch hands now. Stop if you have to, but be prepared for it to be harder unless you're same-handed."

"I wish." About the most strenuous thing she did with just her left hand was smoke. Meche switched over and swung the point of the spear clockwise, but this time the movement was much less steady. When she turned it the other way, her wrist didn't want to bend as far toward the outside either. "You weren't kidding," she commented as she tried again. This was probably good for flexibility and strength in this arm, but she still hoped she wasn't going to have to use this move too much.

This set of reps took longer to start to feel easier. When she finished, she switched the spear back to her right hand and propped she shaft on one shoulder while she flexed and stretched her left arm out again. "Guess it's not as easy as you make it look, is it?" she asked Alita with a little smile.

"I got years of training, Meche. Don't fucking sell yourself short,' Falis replied, stopping her own spear. "Some people are lucky and born same-handed. The rest of us have to learn it. Even I'm not completely same-handed," she admitted, remembering how her off-hand cut had been off when she'd gone for Cecelia's throat. And she had that fucking witch so fooled, too...

"Really?" Meche asked before she thought to stop herself--not skepticism, just surprise. She knew people here came from a lot of different worlds, but Alita still looked like a teenager, no matter how adult or professional she seemed when she wanted to. She would have had to start when she was barely in her teens at most. Where did children that age train for hand-to-hand combat with spears? What were they fighting?

Then again, she reminded herself, kids these days took all sorts of martial arts lessons or fencing classes, so maybe it wasn't too unusual. There was just something about Alita that suggested that maybe it hadn't been just practice, even before she'd landed here.

"Yeah," Falis replied. "Kinda had to learn to stay alive. I happen to like being alive."

"You know, the alternative's really not as bad as people try to tell you, but point taken." She'd meant it to come off sounding light, but Meche wasn't sure if it actually landed that way. She twisted the spear back and forth in her left hand again, trying to get up a little speed. Maybe now wasn't the time for a philosophical discussion.

Falis snorted, catching the attempted humor as she saw it. "Can't go checking out the lands of the dead until the things that need done in the land of the living are done," Falis replied. "Certain people to kill, things to do, places to see..." She smirked. "You know - the normal."

"All in a day's work, right?" Meche replied with another grin, but privately she was wondering. Killing people? A teenager? She guessed the weapons training really wasn't just for fun.

Hearing that also made her wonder, not for the first time, exactly how the DOD computers sorted things out. Killing people was probably a pretty safe thing to put in the negative column. But how did that fit in with someone who protected other people, even kept their spirits up, who came pretty close to cheating at foot races but gave lessons for free? What would Alita's travel package look like? Or would there just be a cloak and scythe waiting for her on the other side?

What would Meche's own rap sheet look like now, for that matter--barely a week back in the Land of the Living and she was already shooting at small children and knocking over antique stores. The spear turned back and forth with her hand, never quite making a full circle. What they really needed right now was someone to jump in and lighten the mood before she got herself down.

"Once you're there, it's another adventure, right?" Hokuto said hopefully. She was just watching them from where she sat on a desk; she hadn't been following the entire conversation, since she had the usual amount on her mind, but she'd tuned back in when fighting for survival--and what happened when you lost that fight--came up.

Hopefully Falis wouldn't find the conversation too sad or morbid, but she wouldn't mind hearing a few things about the afterlife Meche knew.

"Something like that," Falis replied ambiguously.

With Hokuto piping up, the hunter's eyes turned to her girlfriend and she felt her mouth water. Even though she knew she shouldn't, she rest the spear on her shoulder and moved over to Hokuto. Her fingers racked through her girl's hair as she her eyes roamed over Hokuto's form.

"Something like that," Meche agreed, moving over to perch at the edge of the bed (away from that sword) and take a load off--for a minute or two, at least, until Alita ordered her up again. She'd been standing for a while, and that bite on her ankle was smarting a little. She tried to rub at it through the bandages, but it didn't do much to help.

Hokuto had seemed curious, maybe even a little worried, so Meche kept talking even though she wasn't sure the girl was actually listening. Getting things sorted out for herself was still useful, anyway. "It's a lot like the Land of the Living," she mused out loud. "The idea is to travel across the afterlife, the Eighth Underworld, to get to eternal rest at the end of the road, but plenty of people make that place their last stop. They run businesses--" some of them crime syndicates, "hold festivals--" during which everybody hightailed it back to the Land of the Living, "even fall in love."

She kept coming back to that whenever she talked about the Land of the Dead, Meche realized. When her point was that things weren't so bad in the Great Beyond, that always seemed like the best evidence she had--and the most personal. Meeting someone, having a family--they weren't just for the living. She frowned and leaned back, locking her hands around one knee so she wouldn't fall over. Where was he; what was he doing? And the children?

"You have to take the good with the bad there, just like life," she said after a moment.

Hokuto smiled at Falis, even if she hadn't been expecting a reaction like that in front of anyone besides maybe Senna. She leaned into the touch, figuring they could do that much without appearing rude. "Need me to help demonstrate any moves?" she murmured.

At least, if it wouldn't drive her girl up the wall to see her in action right now... Hokuto grinned slightly even as her face turned a little pink.

"None that I think Meche's interested in," Falis replied in a low voice.

Meche's explanation caught her attention, pulling it somewhat away from Hokuto. "Another life, eh? I wonder if Dominikov, Pete and the girls got something like that." She tilted her head. "That stuff apply to cyborgs?"

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