[ open ]

[mindtricks]

CHARACTERS: cassandra anderson + you
LOCATION: gym
WARNINGS: none as of yet
SUMMARY: anderson offers self-defense classes. people who need no classes are welcome to come spar.
NOTES:



[ anderson divides the vast majority of her time between gunnery and the gym, where she gives self-defense classes both to people that she has a standing appointment with as well as to those who just wander by and express an interest.

in the moments between lessons, she can be found stretching, or having a go at a punching bag. ]

Comments

[dogbane]

No idea. [Some idea, is the guilty thought, a half-conscious whisper like the fumes off the surface of a very old, very sick bog. William came from a world that was terminal, and she has a flash of an image in her head: poverty and squalor, corruption, infrastructure rotted from the inside out in so many places. Yet a minority that persisted, still, in perverse opulence.

Maybe I was weak. But it's not a damning notion, exactly; it carries with it the tired, almost indifferent knowledge, that everybody was weak. Earth was dying.] He can't get at anybody else direct, [he reassures her.] Asks me to do shit sometimes, but it ain't ever been to hurt anybody else. [The opposite.

There's a trembling memory of watching a girl in an unfamiliar uniform with her hand gashed open, cut to the bone, the terror on her face; the feel of her shoulder under his hand, and then the wound closing up like the surface of syrup after a dipped spoon. It took him half an hour, but the memory is a split-second.] Are you gonna--

[And this image is not memory of experience, but the impressionistic scrabble of remembered imagination, cut together with a vid clip or five somewhere. The terror hadn't stayed long, but there had been there. Burnings, lynchings. Hunts in the street, government experimentation that was so imperatively secret that everybody knew it, between the United States of America and the Royal Parliament of Cambodia. Not all of the demons had fought back, but it was their carriers, really, who had paid the price. Some part of William has already guessed that there are far stranger creatures aboard the Tranquility, and perhaps none so frightening as the Tranquility herself, but.

Some worlds teach their denizens to be careful.] --raise some sort 'f alarm?

[mindtricks]

( he thinks and thinks and anderson follows his trail of thoughts, sees the poverty and the corruption, sees the crumbling infrastructure and is reminded in many ways of her own world.

sees the image of the girl's wound healing, too, and makes her decision. )

No.

( anderson is not a judge here, and even if she was: there is no law to cover this and anderson would not consider it justice to condemn him for something that does not appear to be a crime, when he has not done anything bad but only something she cannot quite comprehend or grasp.

people fear what they are ignorant of, that is true, but anderson has always been curious and a quick study. ) Unless you give me reason to.

[dogbane]

Awright.

[Through the conduit of her ability, Anderson can feel it when relief lifts off him like steam off water, good riddance of uncomfortable heat and excess energy. To those of us with ordinary eyes, though, he keeps a good game face. Nods, straightening, folds an arm briefly behind himself. It's a good burn, the stretch of muscle.] Thanks.

[For most people, he'd say more. To be polite, mostly; elaborate about the reception he was anticipating, the kind that he would have expected if he were the first of his kind ever discovered in the times back home. Anderson, though, warrants a sidelong glance, a vague understanding that words need not be said. If nothing else, he thinks of himself as vastly harmless.]

I'm gonna fuck off to the showers, I fink. Thanks, ma'am.

[The shapeless glare off the chromed walls looks like a demon's smile.]

[mindtricks]

( he's right — there is less of a necessity to speak, when your conversation partner is able to pick the thoughts and emotions out of your mind instead.

she inclines her head, agreement and acknowledgement. )

You're welcome.

( both for the training and for not telling on him. )

[dogbane]

Night. [William's smile not only looks genuine but is genuine, goes all the way up to his eyes.

He inclines his head, turns away. His anachronistic sneakers squeak a little as he lopes on out into the hallway, vanishes into the labyrinthine spaces beyond.]