fandomhighdorms | 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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"Raleigh," Isabelle corrected, although it was like an afterthought. "And, just a little. A Greater Demon came from the ocean. That kind of thing."

Her term, not his.

"You could call 'em that," Chuck said, tilting his head. "Big fucking lizards is what I'd go with."

"Greater Demons come in all shapes." Lizard included. So that still worked with Isabelle's chosen way of understanding these things. "And you've stood eye to eye with one?"

"Scissure. It attacked my hometown," Chuck said. "Razed a good portion of it to the ground before they managed to take it out."

He was nine. It had killed his mother. He wasn't sharing either of those details.

She wasn't asking for them, either.

In fact, all she said was, "Hmm."

"Hmmm," Chuck echoed, with a plastic smile.

"And how much does that have to do with ––" She gestured vaguely at him, and the salle. "–– this?"

"I'm a PPDC cadet, training to become a Ranger," Chuck replied, and there was clear pride in his voice. "Rangers kill kaiju. Which is what I plan to be doing, less than a year from now."

Now there, that was the kind of pride Isabelle saw no reason to mock or belittle or even comment on.

"And Fandom is...? A detour? A training ground? It makes an okay training groud sometimes."

"My old man thought I'd learn something here they don't offer at the Academy," Chuck said, because he definitely wasn't going to cop to being here because the PPDC brass thought he had trouble playing with others. "I still think he's full of shit."

"That's because you still think I was lying at the picnic."

Well, partly that.

Partly that. Mostly other stuff. Like that 'doesn't play well with others' thing.

"This school is like the Breach, I get that," Chuck said. "Werewolves? Come on."

Unlike giant demon lizards! Those were perfectly normal.

"And tell me, did you believe huge lizard things coming from the ocean would be real before they happened?"

This was a perfectly logical question.

"You show me some werewolves wrecking Sydney and I'll think about it," Chuck said, rolling his eyes.

Was he seriously looking to be the poster boy for all mundanes everywhere? Really.

"So because you haven't seen something, it doesn't exist anywhere else, either?"

This was how they kept the Shadow World from people like him, yes.

"It's called the scientific bloody method," said the guy who was really not in the running to replace Gottlieb or Geiszler any time soon. "Anything else is just bein' gullible."

Isabelle rolled her eyes.

"Werewolves don't go on rampage in cities, anyway."

"I'll make sure to remember that."

"It'd do you good because there are werewolves in this town." In these dorms, even. Occasionally in her bed. "All the stories continue to be true."

Chuck rolled his eyes. "You'll have no trouble pointing them out, then," he said, moving sideways in an effort to slip past her.

Isabelle moved in front of him. Held out a hand.

"My whip."

"'Fraid not, nice as this little heart to heart has been," Chuck drawled.

Isabelle aimed a punch at his already sore ribs. And then went to stomp on his other foot.

See, she wasn't about to let him waltz out of here with the whip she'd gotten for her twelfth birthday. And was not averse to the idea of breaking bones – his, obviously – to make sure of that.

Chuck was going to be nursing these bruises for a while.

He grunted, shifting his body out of the way on instinct as soon as the punch hit his ribs - not because he saw her foot coming, but because he was preparing for a swing at her face. Which he was now executing.

Isabelle ducked enough to avoid the full force of it. Not all of it, though. That was going to sting for a while, too. But that was what the unfinished star rune on her arm was for.

She hissed something unladylike as she suddenly dropped lower in her stance. And then pounced. He was bigger than Alec and Jace, so she knew trying to topple him from anywhere near his shoulders wouldn't work. Mid-section, though, there she thought she had a chance, through the element of surprise and focusing all her unnatural strength on this one task.

Also with the way she led with her shoulder, if nothing else, she thought she had a decent chance of knocking the breath out of him. She could work with that too.

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