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.

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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?"

"Cyborgs?" Meche couldn't keep the surprise out of her voice. Weren't those supposed to be very human robots, or something like that? She'd never spent a lot of time watching sci-fi movies. They weren't "living," she didn't think, not in the same way a human was. Still, she didn't want to say no, especially since it sounded like Alita was talking about some of her friends.

"I never met any, but maybe I just never went to the right parties," she replied. "There weren't any in the Land of the Living I came from, so that could have been it. I don't see why not, though." After all, the place had demons and birds and demon birds and she didn't even know what else. Considering all the weird people and creatures Meche had seen there, she didn't think cyborgs would be much of a stretch.

"Of course cyborgs have souls," Hokuto said, glad for the distraction. "What does it matter if some of a person's parts are artificial?" Okay, they might have different definitions of "cyborg", but to her, it didn't matter much. Even if they were talking about outright robots... if something had been around long enough to learn to care about others, to make friends, then it had a soul.

"That's good. I was kinda worried that maybe they just... stopped being. Completely and shit," Falis replied. As she talked, her fingers found their way to the back of Hokuto's neck where she drew her nails across it.

Damn, she needed to stop and get away again. It'd be so easy to snap her neck and feast at her leisure...

Jerking her hand away, Falis walked back to the middle of the room and hefted the spear. "Enough talk," she said, a little gruffly. "I ain't gonna be satisfied with tonight's training until you can fucking block one of my thrusts."

Oh, dear. Meche shot Alita a grin that held a lot more confidence than she felt, and pushed herself to her feet. "It seems a little silly to get up for just another thirty seconds of training," she answered with a tiny wink at Hokuto. They might be here all night.

Well, she knew the basics if nothing else, so sooner or later she'd probably block a hit just by blind luck. Not that her luck was all that good at the best of times. Meche headed back to her place in front of Alita and got into the first defensive stance her teacher had demonstrated, with the spear held in both hands across her body. She was pretty sure that one-handed spinning position had just been for practice, but if push came to shove, she could do it all right with her right hand. But well enough to block someone with years of training?

Hokuto frowned a little, worried; there was something definitely off about how abruptly Falis had moved away from her, and she didn't think it was because of their company.

She's trying to wear herself out, it looks like... why is that? She really hoped what had happened last night was over... and if it wasn't, she wasn't sure what to do.

Falis shook her head when she say Meche's stance. "Remember, everything starts from the core stance," she told the woman, adopting the position herself.

"It's from here you have the most flexibility. You can move your spear in any direction, be it rotating the back up like I had done to block," she said with a demonstration, "or you angle the shaft, covering your body as much as you can, to alter the incoming strike just enough to it misses you." This she showed by taking her spear, moving it a bit to the side and down, as if guiding an incoming attack to her left and thus missing her body.

Back to the ready position. "Got it?"

Oh, that was right; the power-coming-up-from-the-ground position. It was pretty frustrating to have gotten that wrong--but, Meche reminded herself, this was only lesson one. Since she obviously wasn't a latent spear prodigy, she'd just have to work as hard as it took to get good.

She moved back into what Alita had called the "core stance" and took a deep breath, trying to prepare herself for the first attack. "I'm ready when you are," she said.

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