fandomhighdorms | The Salle, Sunday Crack o'Dawn Until Well Into The Afternoon

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The Salle, Sunday Crack o'Dawn Until Well Into The Afternoon

You got used to certain things, in Jaeger Academy. Like getting up at five sharp and spending the next fourteen hours in the Kwoon, working your arse off. Chuck didn't have any instructors now, or any fellow students to practice against-- didn't matter. He'd been slacking for over a week now, waiting for this new school, and it was time to pick things back up again.

Even if he was nursing a minor hangover. In fact, the hangover helped pick up the right level of aggression - that level that he was unleashing on one of the poor practice dummies right now. Going through the forms, hitting at least half of the major ones. Keep going. Keep working at it.

When he got back to the Academy in summer, he had to be in the same shape as everyone else. It didn't matter he'd be forced to stick to a crazy island boarding school, or that his father seemed to have lost his goddamned mind-- he was gonna keep working for it.

Max sat in the corner of the room, his leash tied to one of the benches. Training or not, there was no way Chuck was letting the pup out of his sight.

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That was getting to be a familiar question.

"Got in yesterday."

He finished this round and paused briefly to pick up his towel. "I suppose I could be slightly worse off with the training facilities..."

Very slightly, was the general gist of his tone.

Alec scowled in agreement. "I know. It's cramped and stuffy in here. Looks like they just repurposed another room for this. And the mats are no good and the dummies don't offer any resistance. Hitting them is practically redundant."

The training room at the Shadowhunters' Institute in New York was much better.

He crossed the room to pick up his water bottle from where he'd dropped it, sparing a glance for Max along the way. Alec wasn't much of a dog person, but this one was pretty cute.

"Better facilities where you're from?"

Edited 2014-01-05 16:50 (UTC)

"This is nothing compared to the Kwoon Combat Room," Chuck shared, wiping his face with the towel. "Outfitted for a range of martial arts, fencing, stickfighting... here, I'm surprised they didn't just put a wooden plank in the ground, drawn a face on it and called it a day."

Max panted happily in Alec's general direction, waddling a few more steps towards him until his leash started to strain.

Alec took a long drink of water, then reluctantly crouched down and presented his hand for Max to sniff. There would be no petting, however.

"That would have had about the same effect," he agreed. "Where I'm from we've got a lot more space and equipment, too. Beams on the ceiling for practicing balance and agility. That kind of thing."

"Same," Chuck said, deserting his dummy so he could go hover over Max.

Max leaned over to give Alec's hand a happy sniff. He would enjoy petting, yes, but new friends, just as much. Hi! Hi hi hi.

"Well, at least the old man didn't send me to a completely civilian school. I guess."

His guess was not a very happy guess.

Sorry, Max, that was all the time you were getting with your new friend right now. Alec put his water bottle down, withdrew his hand and crossed back over to the dummy and his sword.

"It's about seventy-thirty civilian, as far as I can tell." That wasn't a real statistic. And of course it was largely skewed by Alec's judgey attitude. "Most people here would rather watch card games on TV than do anything useful with themselves." Atton Rand, he was looking at you.

Edited 2014-01-05 17:24 (UTC)

Oh, Alec, if Atton Rand gave into the urge to do anything other than watch card games on TV, you'd be in a lot of trouble.

Not that Chuck had any idea who Atton was. He'd probably hate him too.

"I'm missing an entire semester at the academy for this nonsense," Chuck griped. "Jesus. What am I supposed to learn from that lot, exactly?"

But Atton was so charming!

"If you find out, let me know," Alec groused.

Well, that was unfair. He knew a few directionless mundanes who had something to offer. Okay, he could think of one. But Sparkle was a... special case.

"I came here because my adopted brother was here," he shared. "He went back home and it looks like I'm stuck graduating. It's really wonderful." That was sarcasm. He tried it out sometimes.

"I came here because my father thought socializing would be a worthwhile addition to my education."

You could tell by the italics how much Chuck agreed. Which was not very.

"I should be graduating in a month and a half. But no."

And then he said some unprintable things that were rather creative, all in all.

Alec scowled at that. Not the cursing (though he didn't love it) but the other part. "Ugh. Sorry," he sympathized.

What had socializing ever done for anybody anyway? "It's by and large a waste of time, being here."

He paused to thwack the dummy once or twice, though it was pretty much on its way to being a pile of stuffing at this point. "Sometimes there are threats that we get the chance to deal with, though," he added in the tone of someone conceding a pro among a lot of cons. "Did your assigned sibling talk about that?"

Chuck tossed his towel in the corner and went back to his dummy. "Her?" he said. "I don't need any advice from her."

He dropped back into a fighting stance. "Though she did mention something about invasions among all the other ren faire prattle."

Alec would ask who it was, but he doubted he'd know the person anyway. He didn't get out terribly often.

"Well, she's right about that," he said as matter-of-factly as he could. "There are invasions sometimes. Sort of... deranged corpses wearing car parts, I think were the last one."

Chuck squinted at him. To be fair, this was the first guy who didn't give him the impression of being some roleplaying club geek to give him this rap, and he was putting it in sensible enough terms.

"Is this some kind of training course?"

Alec shook his head. "If it was, it'd be misguided, to say the least," he said. "Most people here have never trained for that a day in their lives. Or for anything."

Sigh. Mundanes. "It's real."

Chuck's expression oscillated wildly between 'sort of believing it and being disturbed by it' and 'refusing to believe it' before settling on a nice, neutral, median expression.

"And here I thought the Kaiju were more than enough for the lot of us."

"Kaiju?"

Sorry, Chuck. Welcome to pandimensionalism.

"How the hell is everybody forgetting the giant bloody lizards?" This had not been Chuck's first time encountering this. "Big monsters? Came out of the Pacific? Wreck cities? Those Kaiju?"

It sounded familiar, but not in the way Chuck was hoping for. More like he'd had the same thing described to him secondhand by someone else.

Alec shook his head. "There's another local quirk," he said, in the kind of dry tone that implied that he didn't find the quirkiness cute at all, "where features of different people's homes don't always necessarily correspond." He looked apologetic at that. "I'm familiar with big monsters that cause destruction, but a different kind of them, I think."

Definitely a different kind. "There's someone who describes her hometown as being like something out of a comic book, too. Not that I read them, but -- anyway. It's like a hundred people from different, uh, universes were all funneled into this one town."

Chuck groaned. "Not this crap again," he said.

He was a little more inclined to listen after that... whatever it was... with the old man last night. But still. What.

Alec looked miffed at not being believed.

"Well, think about where the monsters are probably coming from," he pointed out. "Not from under the ocean, is my guess."

The demons in his world were from other dimensions. So the idea of multiple dimensions converging in Fandom wasn't much of a stretch.

"Now you're starting to sound like my father," said Chuck. Which wasn't entirely flattering. But also not entirely terrible. "Yeah, yeah, Kaiju are comin' into our universe via the Breach, this is the same principle. I've heard it all before. Give me a moment, yeah?"

"Yeah, 'course," Alec said agreeably enough, returning his attention to the dummy he'd decimated and giving it another few injuries. "Sorry. It's easy to get my head around because I grew up with this."

"I grew up with Kaiju."

There was a very exaggerated Australian twang on that last word. "And the Breach. But more than one bloody Earth? That's something else, isn't it?"

It still didn't make any sense.

"Yeah, it's... different." Alec wasn't going to dispute that. "I wouldn't have noticed right away if people hadn't told me. The large destructive monsters in my world aren't public knowledge, so I wasn't expecting anyone to have heard of them."

"It doesn't explain how careless some people are, though," he noted, "because there's not exactly a shortage of monsters here."

"How big?"

It was a relevant question.

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