| Welcome to Xmen Revolution. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| You Are Not A Warrior; [Keniuchio] | |
|---|---|
| Topic Started: Aug 10 2014, 11:37 AM (157 Views) | |
| Chevron | Aug 10 2014, 11:37 AM Post #1 |
|
Unregistered
|
July 29th Cromartie Park Gym and Spa 1pm It was so god damned hot. Farrah Collins worried about silly, inane things in the moment, despite the burning in her gut, in her arms and legs. They ached and she was more concerned with the sweat on her brow and the stink in her armpits. More than a month now it'd been since the bloodshed in Africa. She'd gone there, naive to what was to come. Expecting to just be a serving girl. To dispense drinks and conversation and entertainment. But it had all gone sour and lopsided. It made her painfully aware that relying on her powers always was a bad idea, because when they weren't available, well, she was painfully ineffectual. And given the knowledge about the Inner Circle that event had brought fully to light, she didn't want to be caught unawares a second time. And so she had sought out some sort of training. It had been Harada, a member of the White Court, who had extended an offer. She wondered if she annoyed him, with her whining. But it hurt. Everything hurt. Her fists were practically bruised. He didn't care, or at least she figured he didn't. What was she aside from a mewling low-rank. These internal conflicts haunted her. She wanted to learn, but did it have to be so hard? And did they have to do it here? This place was far more exclusive than your average 24/7 Gym but still? She hated being this exposed. Nearly six feet tall, broad shoulders. Self consciousness and agoraphobia were two things she had in abundance and it gave her the willies. Harada had her doing these same repetitive motions as well. She wanted Kung Fu or something. Ralph Maccio got karate at least. "Ugh! God Dammit!" The initial utterance was loud, but she made a point to be very quiet when she cursed. Eying her wrapped hand, she lamented to broken nail before the heavy bag swung back bowling her over onto her bum. "RGGH!" |
|
|
| Keniuchio Harada | Aug 10 2014, 03:35 PM Post #2 |
|
Unregistered
|
Harada was a strict taskmaster. Not because he was cruel, or did not care about those that he worked with, quite the contrary. He pushed those that he trained hard because they had to be able to protect themselves in the heat of battle. The past two years had shown critical flaws in the ability for the New England branch of the Hellfire club, the club had also gone from three knights to protect the inner circle to just the one Knight which meant that Harada's duties were four fold. As such he pushed those hard, some would say to the point of breaking, but Harada knew better than that, he did not want them to break but they did need to learn and as the saying goes, there is no gain without pain. Farrah's frustration was not lost on Harada, many made the false assumptions that learning martial arts instantly meant starting with punches, or kicks, or even the stances needed to do such. That wasn't such the case, at least not with Harada's method of teaching. Instead the mind and body had to be in synch first, and they had to be in the right frame of mind. Something that Farrah had not reached yet. "You need to focus." Harada said calmly as he inspected how was stood before stepping forwards and adjusting her stance quickly. "Do not focus on what others may, or may not be thinking about you, and focus instead on the bag." It was perhaps cheese and cliched and may remind others of an older martial arts move created before the time of true special effects, however it was a tried and tested method with Harada who was one of the few true samurai left on the planet. "Your stance needs work too. Watch." Waiting for Farrah to step aside, Harada stepped into the bag and demonstrated how, lifting his fists and arms upwards and keeping his feet so far apart. "Once you have your stance right, then you can begin to move onto specific disciplines, ones I will gladly show you." To demonstrate he then quickly punched the bag in quick succession before looking to Farrah. "Do you understand?" Stepping aside from the bag, Harada gestured for Farrah to once again take up her stance. "Now again. This time tune out everything that is going on around you." |
|
|
| Chevron | Aug 14 2014, 12:20 PM Post #3 |
|
Unregistered
|
Do this, do that. Chevron wondered how many ways there could possibly be to throw a fist for a punch or swing a leg for a kick. But it seemed like even entertaining the thought of asking Harada made the man's brow twitch into something between disappointment and offense. Giving a whimpering whine as she pulled herself to her feet, she fought the mighty urge to roll her eyes when he started talking about her stance. She'd signed up for this. Sought him out, knowing him to have gone toe-to-toe with some of the clubs worst enemies through word of mouth or historical reference. Why she was so intent on being so malcontent was beyond her, but she chalked it up to aching bones and muscles that, before this endeavor, she hadn't even known she possessed. His strike was quick, and evoked from her the mental image of a snake, whipping its fangs out and receding before you knew what happened. Like on AnimalPlanet or NatGeo. The thought of snakes gave her the creeps. "I think so..." She murmured timidly as his demonstration ended and she was invited back to her spot. After that she tried to correct her footing, to drop her shoulders from her ears while keeping her arms high and arced. The tape around her hands seemed to do so little, but she winced at the thought of not having it. Were her knuckles bloody? No. That was her imagination and her whininess showing through, two things she'd have to overcome if she ever wanted to do more in this organization than serve drinks and dance naked for people with money and influence. She'd come here on invitation of upward prospects. A woman working a pole at night while working a restaurant in the day on top of school and ballet training, she had fiscals commitments, not to mention her medical bills. The Hellfire Club was a way away from that, but she wanted to dance, she wanted to sing. In a world that hated her and those like her, the Hellfire Club could make that happen and offer her a life of comfort on top, but only if she kept herself useful, and serving girls and topless dancers were, unfortunately, the most replaceable commodity they had. She had to be something more. The bag shifted only a bit from each punch, and each thud of her fist made her wince. Was she hitting too hard? Was she not pushing with her shoulder? Frustrating. |
|
|
| Keniuchio Harada | Aug 18 2014, 04:02 PM Post #4 |
|
Unregistered
|
It was never easy to instil the same discipline that he had been learning from a child into an adult that was fully grown and used to the world. Harada had been taught the correct posture, the correct training techniques from day one, sure there had been days where the young boy had whinged, even cried. There were days when he didn't eat when he refused to train, but as he grew stronger he outgrew those weaker instincts. This was what he was trying to instil in Farrah. So when Harada opened the floor to her once again, he stood back and tried to remember that Farrah was not entirely different to how he had been when he had been but a child. The human body was not instantly sculpted to be ready for martial arts, it took time, and honing. Harada needed to remember this when he trained with those that had not been brought up in the same culture as he had. In fact there were very people on the planet that could attest to having received the same culture when growing up. Harada had been born a pauper, a bastard son of a criminal kingpin. He had then been taken in by an aging man who taught Harada everything he knew in exchange for Harada's help around his estate. It was his master that had given Harada his legacy as the Silver Samurai, and it was that legacy that he continued to try and live up to, even if he tended to deviate from that path. The pain in Farrah's eyes was obvious - was he expecting too much too early on? "I think a change in pace is needed." Harada said calmly, hitting a bag was one thing, and really, the bag was nothing like hitting the real thing. It was dead weight. Sure it was good for repetitive practice once you knew what you were doing, but really to understand exactly what you had to do, you needed to hit the real thing. "I think a change of pace is in order." Harada spoke stepping away from the punch bag and climbed into the boxing ring that accompanied the gym. There would be no gloves here though, Harada could take a beating but he knew it would not come to that today. Waiting for Farrah to enter the ring as well, he bowed to her before standing up right and adopting a stance that was not too dissimilar from the one that Harada had been teaching her today. "Now hit me." |
|
|
| Chevron | Aug 21 2014, 10:45 AM Post #5 |
|
Unregistered
|
When Chevron had been a child, she'd been sheepish and shy. She'd never gone out for sports teams, she'd never stood up to her bullies. It was a form of defense in and of themselves, the old 'don't react and they'll get bored'. Of course that didn't help, and the beaten child would come home with black eyes or bloody noses. A mother too deep in her own drunken escapes and a father who wished she'd just be normal hadn't helped to inspire confidence in herself, and so she never bothered to build any. Moving in with her Uncle, things had gone a bit better, but still, she had the experience that saying nothing and being ridiculed was better than speaking up and being pummeled into the dirt. Living on her own had done a lot to help deprogram that mentality to her. You couldn't really rely on parents (surrogate or otherwise) to do things for you when you lived a thousand miles away. Pursuing self-acceptance had done a lot, too. But when she'd taken up the offer to be an entertainer at the Hellfire Club, she thought the extent to which she'd be required to tough things out would be not speaking up against creepy old men with money, and here in the last two weeks she'd nearly been killed two times. More worrying was the detachment associated with that diamond skin. When she transformed, it was almost refractory. The world and its expectations became muted and she found the violence way too easy. But it was a listless and indirect sort of apathy. She needed focus and intent. Knuckles feeling bruised, Harada stopped her from further pummeling the bag, and directed her over to a boxing ring. She watched him step up, moving to the rings apron and staring up to him, pulling herself tiredly up and shaking her head. "This is where I try and you knock me over and tell me how far I need to go, isn't it?" She paced a bit. She was going to get tossed up and she knew it. She knew it was going to hurt. 'You're a fucking ballerina.' She said, inwardly. 'Think about all the bloody toes.' "Okay." She said, obviously unsure. "Just know I'm sorry if I break my hand on your shirt." She took up the stance he'd shown her, and it was ungainly and not quite right, but passable. Her method of punching people had gone through rigorous edits at her sensei's direction, and while that too was ungainly and still a bit wild, she'd at least learned how to hold her hand correctly, and as the limb stretched out, she realized she hadn't really aimed the damn jab. |
|
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · New York City Archives · Next Topic » |






2:39 PM Jul 11