fandomhighdorms | The Salle, Friday afternoon

The padding was still Tahiri's least favorite part of this exercise, but she'd learned to live with it (shut up, Riina) since it meant neither of them was going to be as likely to pull blows. She'd brought her lightsaber and remotes down anyway, to get in some practice later, but those got set aside in favor of her own gaderffii.

She'd have to be careful with it anyway -- those balancing flanges were sharp, after all.

"Every weapon has forms, no matter where it's from, seems like," she observed as she started putting on the padding.

Dinah slowed, then finished the last form, and grinned at Tahiri. "Yup. Everybody has to practice until muscle memory takes over, I think. Shadow boxing. Katas. Whatever." She twirled one stick, and smiled. "Next time we do this at the beach, I've got stuff to show you with the water. How do we want to do this, this time? And what first?"

Tahiri considered a moment, and her eyes flashed with an eager intensity that was more than a little bit of Riina. "Eskrima sticks for you, and I'll go unarmed, see if I can disarm you. Then maybe we can switch and see how you do."

Dinah's eyes lit up in anticipation. "Works!" She got into a ready stance, and grinned at Tahiri. "Whenever you're ready, Sir Tahiri."

Tahiri groaned and shifted her feet into position, bringing her hands up into guard. "Don't you start that too. I'm not sir anything."

Gigggling, Dinah flipped the sticks in the hands, caught them, then started a low attack. "You're not a lady anything either!" She slashed the sticks at Tahiri's legs from two different directions. "Knight Veila!"

"Technically it's Jedi Veila," Tahiri replied, feigning exasperation from somewhere a few feet above Dinah's head, having drawn on the Force to augment a straight upward leap.

Hey. She didn't get to look down to see Dinah very often. She was enjoying this for the half second before she let gravity pull her back down again, okay?

"Jedi Veila," Dinah repeated, cutting the stick through the air beneath Tahiri for a second, amused, then concentrating and taking two careful steps up in the air, before aiming again. "I can do that too now!"

"Not quite," Tahiri laughed, aiming a light Force shove at about where she guessed the pivot point of Dinah's right-hand stick would be as she dropped. The left one still clipped her as she went by. "But you couldn't do that the first few times we did this."

"Nope. Karla taught me, it's taken months-- gah!" The right-hand stick dropped to the floor, and Dinah glared, then dropped down after it, reaching out to hopefully have it zoom back to her, if Tahiri didn't intercept it fast.

The thing about Jedi reflexes, well -- Tahiri's hand snapped out to grab the stick, but deciding it was more of a challenge if she went without a weapon for a while longer, she didn't close her fingers around it.

"Maybe I should learn that trick, too. Try it while dancing sometime, it's fun," she said with a grin, darting in to aim a kick at Dinah's knee -- oh, come on, like she could reach her chin. "Since I hear you've got someone to do that with now."

Dinah's fingers closed over the stick as Tahiri made the dancing comment, which resulted in her blurting, "What? Ow!" Time to pay more attention, and her left arm shot out on reflex toward Tahiri's side as she hopped away, knee stinging.

Like she could reach Tahiri's knees with her sticks. Please.

"Maaaybe?"

"Uh huh. Hey, I get to tease you now. It's only fair," Tahiri replied, twisting to minimize the impact of the blow, which she chose to take in favor of the opportunity to whip a knifehand chop at Dinah's wrist.

As distraction techniques go, this was definitely a good one. Dinah went into a kick-and-parry sequence to give herself a second to find an answer and managed, "Jak, tall, blond, long ears, what've you heard? Hai!" And then jumped up and tried to stay there, three feet off the ground.

Well. Wobbling. Not very impressive.

"I just hear your names come up together on radio a lot." Tahiri was smirking now, the kind of expression she must have picked up from Ben. And maybe, just maybe, reaching out with a tiny Force nudge to . . . encourage that wobbling a bit.

Tumbling dooooown! And Dinah's face was strawberry-red as she caught herself on her hands. "He's my boyfriend now," Dinah admitted, getting back to her feet with a stagger. "If that's what you mean."

"Aha," Tahiri said smugly, taking advantage of the moment to exert a Force yank on the sticks. "That was what I meant, actually."

She got one of the sticks away from Dinah, but not both. Dinah clutched the one in her left hand with extra force and got back to her feet. "Um, so yes. I don't know if you've met him, but he's really cool. Took me zoomer-driving and got me Beaver Buzz energy drink..." Dinah moved back on the attack, hoping to get a few hits onto Tahiri before she got a good grip on that eskrima stick.

"I'm afraid," Tahiri said, only half joking, and dodging most of the hits with more apparent ease than was actually the case, deflecting a couple awkwardly with the unfamiliar weapon, and taking the rest with good humor. "Do you really need to be more energetic than you already are?"

"When I'm around Jak? Yes!" Dinah twirled her way into another hit, letting glee and fuel her movements as she pushed in closer. "He's nice and cute and funny and he likes me the way I am and it's so fun!" And then twirled her stick like a baton before aiming it at Tahiri's again, trying to disarm her, this time.

"You're babbling more than I do," Tahiri told her. Her borrowed stick hit Dinah's with a teeth-rattling crash, but she was far too stubborn to let go, and twisted her wrist to catch both sticks in a bind.

See who came out of that one . . . could be interesting.

"I have cause," Dinah pointed out, then strained against the bind Tahiri had caught their sticks in, finally using her second hand to push back on the stick with both hands. "How is Ben, anyway?"

Stressing himself over a lot of things, including how she was doing, but there was no point in mentioning it. "Fine. We went to a movie yesterday." Even in the middle of pulling the stick out of the bind and leaping sideways with annoyingly Jedi speed, Tahiri looked perplexed. That movie had made no sense.

Dinah caught that look and laughed, then did a diving-roll forward, aiming her stick at Tahiri's knees. "Which movie?"

Tahiri yelped and had to throw herself into a backwards roll as soon as she'd landed on the mats -- cumbersome when padded -- to come up with the stick already slashing toward Dinah's shoulder. "When Henry Met Suzanne. It was nothing like we expected."

Dinah snorted, and then had to work to block the next blow, taking a breath to get to her feet while still knocking her eskrima back and forth against Tahiri's, trying to get past it to tag her arm. "That one? With the whole 'guys and girls can't be friends' thing?"

"Uh huh." Tahiri thought she could probably keep this up for a while, now that she had a good sense of Dinah's rhythm, and settled into a defensive holding pattern of parries and feints. "And the restaurant and . . ."

The lady who looked like Leia. Weird.

"We didn't get it."

Dinah cracked up, backing off a bit to circle Tahiri, then sending a TK shove at her feet again. "It's more for old people. Who date too long in our world. And are way picky, I think." She paused, then checked, "You got the restaurant bit though, right?"

"Um," Tahiri said, and now it was her turn to go bright red, enough that the TK shove sent her staggering back a few paces, but she countered with a Force-shove of her own. "I wish I hadn't."

Dinah chortled, and had to swerve a bit with that Force-shove to keep her balance, grinning. "Well, that's a start... remember back in February, when everyone was all frustrated?" She snickered a little, and then tugged again on the stick in Tahiri's hand with her TK, hoping to break her grip.

"Yes. Do I have to?" Tahiri complained. She let go of the stick, but added a hard Force spin to it, sending it boomeranging around the room and toward Dinah from behind.

Dinah snickered. "We probably both get that better now. Here's hoping it doesn't happen again soon."

And agghhh! "OW!" Oh, that smack to the spine would've bruised, if it weren't for the padding. "Gah, sneaky." Dinah levitated the stick, then grinned at Tahiri. "Want to try with more than one weapon? TK vs. Force?"

"I only brought my gaderffii," Tahiri said sheepishly, but she was grinning a bit at the success of the trick. "But I can grab one of the practice swords, and hope that doesn't happen again or I'm going to die."

"Works!" Dinah grinned and fell into rest position, waiting on Tahiri. "I got to use a real sword this week in Fencing for once. Interesting. Made me twice as careful, I have to admit."

Tahiri nodded, grimacing, and made her way over to the rack to pick out a sword. "A friend of mine lost her arm in a lightsaber training accident years ago. It makes you think about those things a lot."

It took her several minutes to find a blade, and she knew she'd be at a disadvantage because the thing actually had weight to it, but she picked one out and came back with its hilt gripped firmly in her left hand. "Any rules?"

"Yikes. Yeah, careful, good." Dinah eyed Tahiri's practice sword, thinking, and said, "Good question, since we both can keep picking up our weapons after we drop 'em... two falls out of three?" she suggested, grinning. "And not just with Force or TK, with actual blows?"

The Salle, Friday afternoon

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