Margot
The week prior had brought rain in the form of thunderstorms that tested the window panes of the (not-a-)cabal's new home. They discovered several new leaks each time a new front rolled in and patched them during breaks between. Margot proved herself useful in scrambling deftly over loose shingles and capable enough with a hammer and nails.
By the time the weekend had come the rain had broken, and by afternoon Sunday the sky was bright blue and perfectly clear of clouds. The temperatures rose back to the mid-seventies and though the sun shone bright upon the grass it wasn't dry quite yet. It made for a lot of slipped sneakers and curses while the pair of recent Initiates struggled and practiced against each other in the backyard.
Or, more accurately, Ned tried to teach Margot why her way of holding a knife was going to break her wrist. She was dismal with the rubber knife and her eyes flashed reactive fear when first presented with it. She'd pushed soundly through the trigger but her hand shook the first few minutes that she held it. It took the back of her t-shirt and pants getting soaked wet on the grass from falling for her to get frustrated, but at least that helped push past the lingering ghost of terror-addled memory.
"So, like this?" She asked with a frown. Her hair was tied back and her face furrowed with a scowl of concentration. To her credit, she had finally corrected her grip.
Ned
The Orphan is dressed in simple black. A t and track pants. Bare foot and in slow circling patterns, he makes his way around Margot while speaking to her, eyes on her features with a calm that is at once serious as it is attempting to be relaxed. He's patient but not terribly sympathetic to her mood and bubbling panic. This was meant to challenge part of her as well as get them both used to it all.
"I just want to be clear about something here...Knife fights are ugly. There's no parrying or blocking or anything because the blade-" Ned hefts the rubber practice piece in his hand, effortlessly "-weighs nothing and gives you that extra half a foot of reach. Golden rule of a knife fight is you have to take hits to get hits. Normally, that's a death sentence regardless of the winner-" he taps his forearms, indicating where the knife point goes, demonstrating with a point first tap against the braided muscle of his own limb "-but with some Life, Matter or Forces, it is a lot easier to pull off I've found. You want to make sure though, if you get stuck, to get stuck in the forearm, above where the tendons are. Right here in the meat and muscle so when you flex your arm, excruciatingly that is, you jam their knife in place.for the split second it takes to put your own blade in their eye, neck stomach or groin."
The four 'Wounds of No return' Ned had called them. Places where death is assured immediately or eventually without severe and imminent healing/medical attention.
"Ultimately we want to be able to work you up to something longer so you can keep your distance and a finesse piece so you're not relying on strength to produce harm but knives get you used to the Death aspect of an up close and dirty scrap. Once you've gotten used to a blade near you and the awareness that comes with that, a fist to fist fight won't be nearly as terrifying."
"Solid grip. Make sure not to death grip it. A little loose and keep it moving. Don't pause long enough for someone to knock it out of your hand. If someone takes a swipe at you, don't try to go for a kill shot. If you can disable or strike at their fingers or knuckles-" Ned flicks his own rubber blade forward, raking 'lightly' along the knuckles and soft webbing between the index and the thumb, where Margot holds her own blade "-all the better. Disabling a hand is as functional and deadly in a fight, as the full limb or a gut shot. Just be mindful of your own hands and fingers as well."
Margot
It was serious business, learning to wield a knife. The two looked pretty serious about it, at least. Ned was offering great detail and suggestion and lessons about knife fights, how it was more than just hack and slash and pray for the best. Margot soaked all of it in with that concentrated and halfway incredulous flex to her brow. She looked to his arms and hands, the knives and grips, and nodded occasionally with understanding.
"With Matter you could just turn the other guy's knife to putty," she mused over how to wield magick in a handfight, a favored topic over the past week or so (when she wasn't spending her time studying up on ghosts and summoning).
She tested her grip against her other hand, and looked up to Ned's face after he'd flicked the rubber of his own blade against her fingers.
"What do you think I'll find that's longer than a knife? A sword's a little obvious." She grinned a bit, then sat down in the damp grass to start unlacing her shoes and tugging off socks. Ned was having better luck not slipping around in his bare feet than she was in her sneakers, may as well take that lesson out of his book too. "I think I'd like a bow and quiver, though."
Ned
Ned stepped back as Margot settled into the wet grass. He was continuously curling and uncurling his toes in the blades of green. The wet was easier to handle in bare feet, admittedly, but that didn't stop the occasional slip or pin wheeling of arms when the ball of the foot caught shifting grass and rain at the right angle. Ned kept his feet spread and weight evenly distributed as best he could without better training to make it comfortable. He had spent a good portion of the fight, silently reprimanding himself and readjusting his posture accordingly.
"You could, but a lot of my working, is touch based so Threat level makes it not worth it. You're actually better off applying any working benefits to yourself. I've figured out how to deflect and adjust kinetic and gravitational flows to skew people's strikes. So incoming harm is pushed away or aside. I'm sure Life has a bunch of applications as well and giving your clothes some semblance of hardness with Matter could easily produce some functional armour."
He plucks at his t-shirt, the concept of shifting it to leather patches around vital areas or even plastic for that teflon feel was something Ned had toyed with when he first learned more about the Sphere.
"Not sure. Anything longer would be too situational. Couldn't just carry it around all the time unless you stored it or made it collapsible and that'd be a needless waste of Work on your part. Better off just construction or building something on the spot, over carrying something around but...A staff, a spear, or even just a short truncheon for joint strikes-" he taps his elbows, knees, wrists, shoulders while he speaks "-would make for a very effective disabling device. Throw in some Prime or Spirit and you've got plenty of options for a variety of opponents, really." Ned's tapping his chin, a hand on his hip while he stares up at the sky for a second, squinting in the sunlight.
"Bow could work. Also problematic for situational benefit but long range is definitely something to keep in mind if we decide to go on anymore missions or pre-planned efforts."
Doc
From around the other side of the house comes the sound of a 200- Jeep Wrangler and its owner returning from wherever the hell they had both been that the kids thought they would have uninterrupted yard time.
For being an unpredictable and questionably sane individual, their mentor manages to follow a schedule based somewhat on what the rest of the world is going. He goes to work Monday through Friday, sometimes showing up on Saturdays if he needs to get caught up on paperwork, and on Sundays he devotes himself to whatever project happens to have snared his attention.
Fixing up the death trap underneath the house was his primary goal. It is no longer possible to pass into the catacombs where they encountered the warped avatar of a nascent god, where Doc discovered what lay down the corridor they hadn't explored themselves and decided without conferring with the others that it never needed to meet them.
In the weeks since then, presumably with Kiara's help, he has mowed the lawn and smoothed over the open graves and planted trees that will by this time next year be tall and lush. The porch is still a death trap and the roof needs help, but there is no longer a gaping hole where explosions failed to level the entire house and the dust and bones left over from the previous family have gone away.
The clap of the driver's side door and then enough of a span of silence that no one would blame the two if they thought their mentor had decided to retire to the basement, where he is working on transplanting his laboratory, or if he had gone back out again, taken the light rail into the city to do whatever it is he does when he's downtown. Disciple Shit.
They aren't so lucky.
<i>... but long range is definitely something to keep in mind if we decide...</i>
He's wearing a lab coat and scrubs and slip-resistant shoes, which means he probably intends to go back to his government job after this or else was up to his elbows in autopsies and didn't bother changing into street clothes before coming home. In his hand is a device neither of them have seen before. It looks like a walkie talkie, but if it had been microwaved with a graphing calculator rubber banded to it and the resultant mess is what came out.
Sepúlveda stands watching them for a few seconds then sighs and starts fiddling with the device.
"'Doc, help,'" he says in a high-pitched voice they can presume is an attempt to mimic Margot, his eyes on whatever it is he's doing and not on them. "'We were playing Cowboys and Indians and I shot Edward in the eye with an arrow.'"
---
Doc @ 8:10AM
[mind 2: mental impulse, "calm." base diff 5.]
Roll: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )
Doc @ 8:11AM
[he'll need to extend this next round to hit both of them. no effect rn. carry on!]
Margot
In the time they'd all spent settling into the house Margot had grown accustomed to Doc's rhythms. The low rumble of a Jeep engine in the evenings was typically overheard through the living room wall, or sometimes through the window in the small bedroom she'd claimed for herself. By now she had a good idea of when to text versus when to go banging around downstairs on the hunt when she was seeking their mentor's counsel. This time when the now-familiar rumble of the Jeep announced his arrival home, Margot glanced back over her shoulder, blinked, and looked up to the sky to try and remember what time it was based on the sun's position. How long had she and Ned been outside practicing how to defend and kill?
She peeled her last sock off and jammed it inside of its partnered shoe, then rose to her feet once more. "Your work requires touch, but mine doesn't," she told Ned and looked at him thoughtfully. "I need some proximity now, yeah, but not for much longer. If I can find ways to disable a threat before they have a chance to attack then all the better. I can stitch my wounds back closed again, but I'd rather not need to in the first place." The engine died and she looked back toward the corner of the house around which the driveway could be found. "I can't stitch your wounds yet, y'know."
It wasn't much longer afterward that Sepúlveda rounded the corner of the house with a device in hand. Margot was in that moment brushing grass clippings from her damp jeans with the rubber blade of the practice knife, and glanced up quickly when the falsetto of mimicry caught her ear. What she heard had her rolling her eyes and putting a fist on one hip. "Yeah, playing. Because god knows how light-hearted and giddy I feel when my tri-county area is apparently full of people who want my ilk dead."
Ned
"We're using words like Ilk now? Is this who we've become and by the way-" He turns around on the Doc, relaxing out of his ready pose and posture with reflexive dismissal, to level a tsking finger at the Mexican Man, come calling "-Indians is an offensive term these days and given your minority status, you should be more careful about such things."
From the White Guy. Who is grinning.
"Proximity has it's benefits mind you. No one is going to be able to fireball or electrocute you without localizing it to ensure they don't hurt themselves. Kind of like a missile that won't arm within a certain distance of the vehicle that launched it. If someone's giving you ranged trouble, punch in close and go for the knife...sword....whatever." He pauses, one hand coiling in the air, eyes drifting to regard it as if he could see certain patterns forming within the movements. "I've been working on this...flashbang delivery. Forces affair that will effectively blind within a certain area. Good for causing general chaos, sneaking away or fouling anyone dependent on standard vision to find their targets. Still working on defending against it though. Closing your eyes doesn't really....work very well." Ned murmurs slightly, a bit dissuasive given he's probably blinded himself for several minutes in experimenting.
"Beyond that, a Kinetic Wedge-" he forms an arrow with his hands, fingertips touching and palms spaced away from one another "-directly infront and to either side, slightly sloped in the faces, can provide a neat little shield to help nudge projectiles out of the way. Only really works from the front but the effort to push things aside is a lot more minimal than just trying to stop something dead."
A pause, eyes roaming back to the Doc.
"Unless of course you've got a death ray or a freeze gun or a puppy launcher handy then I suppose it's just point and shoot."
Doc
... you should be more careful about such things.
"Mexican-Americans make up two-thirds of the North American Hispanic population, güero, show some..." What's the word. "... show some respect."
This without looking up from his device.
Then Ned returns to his lecture, and the Mad Scientist frowns down at the display somewhere on the front of his cobbled-together device. Or the top. It's hard to tell which end is up on this thing.
For a moment it appears as if even Sepúlveda can't figure out which end is up. He flinches, nearly drops it, then gives it a rattle and thumps it against the railing on the steps descending into the yard.
"Point and what?"
There it goes: whatever the two were feeling before, whatever was motivating them and whatever was lurking under the surface, is not just superimposed by whatever he just did. It completely disappears. They are both now calm, beyond calm. No anxiety, no anger, nothing but a sense of tranquility and peace.
It is nearly impossible to talk about violence, let alone self-defense, when one feels as if they just took the world's biggest bong rip.
Doc starts whistling like oh my what a lovely day i wonder what the kids are up to and tucks the device into the back pocket of his scrub pants. Here he comes, strolling along like they're in the park.
---
Sepúlveda @ 9:55AM
[extending the previous roll, +1 diff]
Roll: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6) ( success x 1 )
Sepúlveda @ 9:56AM
[and since ned is really on a roll over there...]
Roll: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Sepúlveda @ 9:56AM
^ THIS IS WHY WE SPEND WP, KIDS. THIS IS WHY.
Margot
Her choice of words put on the spot, Margot furrowed her brow a little bit at Ned, and blush tried to creep onto her cheeks. "What, 'like'? 'Kind'? 'People'? It's all the same."
The Doc was still fiddling with some device that didn't look incredibly familiar (but truthfully, she didn't have an easy time keeping them all separate), and Margot watched him suspiciously while he and Ned jibed about races in America at one another. Her attention was pulled back to Ned by talk of projectiles and the safety that proximity brought. "That makes sense," she agreed slowly, and her gaze switched just as slow from Doc to Ned once more. The shape his hands made while explaining his Kinetic Wedge was observed, then mirrored by her own hands while she glanced down at them to consider the potential. She didn't have the same grasp over Force that Ned did, having invested more of her time in the study of Life and Spirit and Prime and, as of late, Distance once more.
"Even if he did, Ned, we wouldn't be able to use it." Margot shook her head and looked away from her own hands, back up and over to the Scientist who probably <i>did</i> have a Freeze Ray stashed somewhere for all that she knew of him. Her brow flexed to find Doc still fiddling with his device, and around that time she lifted her voice to ask:
"Hey, what is that--"
"Point and what?"
He'd spoken over, and just as she felt the small clench of bother in her chest for being cut off she felt it unravel and fall away. There was a sense of her mind slipping loose from anchors and floating misty in the confines of her skull. There was almost always an underlying buzz of anxiety around her, and the silence that was left behind in its wake was nearly as loud. Yet, she truly didn't mind. Margot blinked a couple of times, then lifted a hand to glance at it-- fingernails first then fingerpads when it turned over. Next, she brushed her fingers back along her scalp to smooth stray hairs to their places.
"What happened?" She sounded curious without being worried. He could answer that they were neutralized and bombs would burn them down in the next two minutes, and she'd probably answer with cool.
Ned
Ned isn't vocal. The effect washes over them with surprising ease and it takes a moment for him to adjust to the sudden discharge of...emptiness that wakes in his guts and head. The slow tread of calm seems to re-orient thoughts and feelings with an abruptness that takes the strength out from under Ned's legs and he feels the need to climb down onto his ass, pants dampened by the grassy terrain, to regard himself and his surroundings with a brow that finally loses the tiny crease worry, concern and perpetual paranoia have reflexively instilled there.
He flicks his fingers. Let's them play and dance in the air. There's no smiling, just a placid face, filled with a low level of fascination. Fingers that fing. Finging with comfortable and easy-going measure. Watch them waft and sway and wiggle and writhe. Watch them dance.
Ok, maybe a little smile.
"Passive interaction. This is not normal for me. Am I the soul in this moment devoid of all the weight that existing has grown on me or am I merely a body divested of it's passions?"
Ned topples over into the grass, blinking owlishly at the approach of the Doc's shoes across the grassy turf.
Doc
What happened?
As Ned absorbs this newfound state of tranquility, their mentor rummages through the pockets of his lab coat until he finds a marker and swaps it out for the device. It's a dry erase marker, meant to be used on white boards and not his students' flesh, but --
"This is a practical demonstration on the necessity of Mind shields in field work," he says, making a red mark on the side of Margot's neck. "Stab."
He walks over to Ned and looks down on him, a frown knitting between his brows before he goes down onto one knee in the grass beside him.
"I figured this would be more useful than a lecture. Stab--" This as he leaves a red mark on Ned's midline, about where his aorta is. "--seeing as you two appear to think I talk just to hear myself talk."
When he leaves a few more red marks across Ned's chest for demonstrative purposes he does not verbalize what the action is supposed to symbolize. He does not tell them that he knows where to stab a person to make sure they bleed out quick and relatively silent, that scared young Nephandi and inexperienced Technocrats don't give two shits about suffering or doing so in silence. This isn't a lecture.
With a sigh he gives Ned one more 'stab' for good measure, then braces his weight on the younger man's sternum to give himself a boost standing again. One of his knees cracks as he stands. He caps the marker, pushes his glasses back up on his nose, and returns the marker to his pocket. They're both still calm to the point of not caring.
"'Joint strikes.'" One of his canned laughs, and he starts to walk back across the yard towards the house.
Margot
Incapable of being more or less bothered if Doc was approaching her with a marker or a knife, or even if he were Doc or a complete Stranger instead, Margot simply watched with mild, half-invested curiosity as he stepped up to her. Blinked when the lid popped off the marker and did nothing to stop the felt tip of the marker from staining her neck. Stab. She lifted a hand to hold it over the side of her neck and watched as he moved on to Ned next. Her ankles crossed and she sat down in the grass as well. That seemed the thing to do. Didn't you sit down if you were tagged out in childhood games?
"Mind shields," she repeated vaguely, and removed her hand from her neck to look down into her palm. Some of the still-damp ink had bled over and mottled her skin.
By this point Doc was already pushing himself up from a sprawled-out Ned and starting to walk away. A thought occurred somewhere in the back of her head, a vague dark shape behind the thick fog.
"So you could...?" She'd raised a hand up as though she were about to flag him down for a question, like a Professor as opposed to a Doctor. That hand made it up about halfway before the momentum slowed to a top; it bobbed lazy like it were afloat in the water and then lowered again with a small wave of dismissal. "Ah, nevermind."
It would occur to her to ask later.
Ned
The stabbing goes noticed. Some part of Ned's brain currently on lock down is trying to process the entire affair with blunt force reaction. It's mundane qualities come against the wall of resistance that has been forcibly constructed around those thoughts though and all he can do is blink owlishly and half-wince at the sudden pucker of coloured felt on the various parts of his framework. He glances down at each stab with a rudimentary sort of understanding of what is happening, tracing a line between what the Red means and the word 'Stab' signifies but unable to make the connection toward the utter violence it might portray had the market been a knife and the Doc been...well not the Doc.
"You do talk a lot." Admission of agreement. Said with matter-of-fact acceptance and certainty, before Ned is sucking in slow lungfuls of breath and blinking at the yard around them. No doubt there would be repercussions to this moment, most of which would fall under learning Mind as soon as absolutely fucking possible if it meant ensuring things like this couldn't, wouldn't or won't happen in the field.
"I have cake in the fridge." Ned brightens up, remembering the brief trip to the small bakery in town he'd luxuriated on earlier in the day. His smile is goofy, misplaced in the sea of red marks covering him there in the wet and cold grass.
Doc
Maybe if their fearless leader didn't have the intention to get back in the Jeep and return to work, he might have heeded the announcement of cake in the fridge and done something to further ruin the kids' day. As it stands, pretreating their laundry and vigorously scrubbing their skin with soap will wash away the evidence Dr. Sepúlveda left behind.
The calm clings to them as he mounts the steps. Once there, he starts to whistle a tune that might have stricken the both of them as obnoxious on an ordinary day. It doesn't strike them as anything today. They accept it and it continues as he removes the device from his bag and taps at the keys and unceremoniously drops whatever dampening effect he had just laid down on the backyard.
"Kay, bai!" he says, his voice pitched the way it tends to pitch when he is amusing himself at their expense, and then he disappears back inside the house.
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