One Day at the Crescent Academy

There is some commotion just off the road leading to the marina, and travellers on the road might be tempted to see what's up. In the broad parade ground a small catapult has been set up, triggered by quite a long rope. Holding the rope, on the other side of the parade ground, is Goldenblade, and she yanks the rope hard. This does nothing immediately, but half a minnute later, the catapult fires a duffel bag full of loosely packed stones and debris directly towards where she's standing. Goldenblade dashes left, hits the turf, and turns perpendicular just as the bag of gravel hits and bursts, rocks going everywhere at high speed. Not enough to injure, but it'll sting pretty badly, as Goldenblade finds out!

When things have settled down, she stands up, sighs, and looks over her body, noting where she took a few smacks from the gravel, then goes to shovel more gravel in a new sack.

    Being of at least a little bit craft-oriented nature, as well as a curious person, Naniko watches this display with a weird mixture of feelings. She walks toward where the other is and waves. "Um, hi," she tries. "Are you busy? I don't want to interrupt what you're--" She hesitates. "--attempting...what are you attempting?" she finishes, figuring direct questions are easier than working it out for herself.

Goldenblade looks up, smiles, laughs at the question. She explains, "I'm attempting, with indifferent success, to train my reflexes for avoiding attacks." She looks over her device. "But this thing's a bit too predictable, so I'm mostly just wasting time, I'm afraid. But no one to run dungeons with, so I do what I can by myself."

    Naniko nods. She looks over at the catapault and considers where things would land every time. She looks at Goldenblade for a moment, then suddenly lunges forward, punching the other girl in the face.

Goldenblade is distracted by resetting her catapult and looks up as Naniko rushes at her suddenly. And then she's not there. Leaving a trail of flames like certain Delorean cars at 88mph, she darts to the side, laughing with amusement as Naniko tries to catch her off guard. Naniko will find herself amid the flames and GB nowhere to be found.

Until she sticks her head up from where she took cover, laughing, "Sorry for the flames, you startled me."

    "I was meant to," Naniko says. "You said it was predictable. I couldn't let you know I was coming." She brushes the front of her poncho and steps away from the fire a bit. "You look pretty good at evading attacks already."

Goldenblade nods slowly at it being meant to startle her. "Good point," she agrees, nodding about the catapult being predictable. As for being pretty good at evading already, she agrees, "I'm not the /very best/, but I'm in the top 25, I think. And I'm working hard to improve it, because the challenges in the game keep getting harder, and I want to stay relevant. So I've got to keep up. Just like life, really, if you don't keep improving, you'll get passed by those who are."

    Naniko listens to Goldenblade for a bit, nodding and acting quite interested while looking at the catapault. She suddenly raises her leg as if flipping up a table that had fallen on her leg. Instead of wood being flipped over and upright, however, water explodes from water gathered in the soil, splashing in a gushing jet toward Goldenblade's face!

Goldenblade is caught slightly less off guard, this time, but it's a more serious attack that comes at her, and she's only a hair's breadth away from taking the hit when she vanishes from sight. Reappearing from the shadows, she grins, and gives Naniko a thumbs up. "That one was closer," she admits. "I had to pull out my other big dodge."

    "Yeah, well," Naniko says, stretching a bit while shrugging her shoulders back. "I'm feeling pretty much in my element. Been drawing water into the area through the soil since we started talking," she says. "On guard!" she shouts, swinging her arms together like the Hulk. Water rolls through the soil and suddenly splashes together in front of her toward Goldenblade!

Goldenblade is, this time, just flat out lucky. Naniko's been testing her twice now, and so the third time is pretty much expected. This gives her an edge, which if she didn't have it, would absolutely have resulted in her getting soaked. As it is, she manages to jump clear of the water, holding out one hand to deflect most of the water coming at her face.

    Spreading her hands, Naniko raises them like she's non-verbally commanding the water. The splashed water droplets halt their ballistic trajectories and fly up into the sky! She quickly throws her hands toward the ground and ice impacts the ground where Goldenblade is as thousands of little needle-like daggers.

Goldenblade has been dodging left and right and backwards all day, and she can't keep the pace up forever, taking the water right in the face. "Auuuugh!" *gurgle*gurgle* "Ugh..." she shivers, shaking her head to clear it. "Well, you got me," she says with a chuckle. "But I'm hard to catch, eh?"

    Naniko rushes forward. "Are you okay?" she asks. "I hope I didn't hurt you." She brushes little broken icicles from here and there off of Goldenblade's clothes and hair and skin, not noticing any blood. "I tried to make sure it was all non-lethal." All the little needles of ice were so fragile, most of them disintegrated on impact, and those that were left were already mostly melted. Once she's confident Goldenblade isn't hurt, she says, "That was fun. Maybe we could do that more often. I want to develop my own water techniques, and you could try to dodge them."

Goldenblade smiles widely and nods, "Oh, I'm fine. It takes more than that to take out this old war horse." She wipes the worst of the water from her face, and the rest of it isn't much affected. Chainmail is chainmail, though of course the underpadding will need the dryer later. "That was fun, yeah," she agrees. "I'll help you train any time you like. That's what this place is for, really." She gestures to her little compound.

    "Oh?" Naniko says, looking around. She looks back to Goldenblade and says, "I hope I'm not intruding. I'm just wandering, mostly. I'm feeling restless."

Goldenblade shakes her head quickly. "Oh, you're not intruding. I'm happy for the company, really. It gets a bit dull sometimes. Everyone's got plans, and somehow they didn't include you, that kind of thing. Probably just an oversight, but I get bored just sitting around, and there's things I can do by myself, so ..."

    "Oh," Naniko repeats. She looks at the other woman and furrows her brow, blushing before looking away. "I haven't really made many friends in the last year. I think I've talked to more people in the last month than the whole rest of my time here. It's embarrassing."

Goldenblade shrugs off the embarassing, but nods slowly. "I didn't make too many friends while I was grinding out the newbie quests, myself, but once I got in with a good alliance and started doing the main content, things got much nicer. Lots of people to talk with, and all kinds of things to do."

    "I get you," Naniko says. She looks over Goldenblade, obviously examining her. "Have we talked before today? I'm possibly the worst with names."

Goldenblade shakes her head. "You don't look familiar to me, no," she says. "But if you're just coming up from the minors, that's no surprising. You'll meet a ton of people right away and it'll be hard to keep everyone straight. That's how it was for me, anyhow."

    Naniko nods. She is quiet for a few moments that seem to stretch on and on. "Sorry," she finally says. "My mind isn't cooperating, right now. There are things I keep wanting to ask, but if you ask them back, I would almost certainly not want to say, so I don't want to talk about it."

Goldenblade arches a brow, but says, "Suit yourself. I'm not going to bite your head off for asking questions, I can always refuse to answer after I hear the question. But if you don't ask, then neither of us will know. But if it's something you don't want asked back, then maybe it's not the right sort of questiom."

    Naniko continues to blush and raises her hood. She finally asks. "Whose memories do you have? What kind of person donated their life's experiences when you were created?"

Goldenblade blinks. "Who's memories do I have? Mine, of course. Or else I don't understand the question."

    Naniko weakly smiles, hiding her eyes beneath the hood. "I'm new," she says. "I am only a year old. I remember someone else'e life. Someone else who was able to log out, put down the headset, lay down next to a loving fiance, make love, get married, and have at least one kid by now. I have memories of 99% of a love story. Whose memories do you have?"

Goldenblade ohs, "I see where you're going with this. Well, my player was an old man, a retired bricklayer, who thought that being able to log on to see his kids and grandkids was better than riding the train 2 hours each way, and living in his house all alone cause his wife had just died. So, that's who I am, underneath the adventurous exterior.

    "If you want to look at it that way," Naniko says. "I am Naniko, first and only. I am a brand new girl, unrelated to any prior persons my memories remember." She huffs out a sigh. "Sorry. I've been dealing with this for a while. I'm good being me, now, but I have a lot of guilt built up based on some decisions that were made close to the end of my donor's memories."

Goldenblade looks puzzled. "If they're just memories that were donated to you, why do /you/ feel bad about them?"

    "Lots of strong emotions," Naniko says. She huffs out a sigh. "I don't know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't bother you with this stuff."

Goldenblade shrugs about bothering her. "That's not a problem, but it sounds like you want sympathy rather than a solution. Well, I'm sympathetic, I suppose, but I'm old, and in my day, problems were only problems until you'd solved them, then they weren't problems. And problems that you couldn't solve were someone else's problems. So, I'll help as much as I can, but I don't do this newfangled group-hug business very well. My kids told me I'm out of touch."

    Naniko tosses back her hood and smiles with tight lips at Goldenblade. "Maybe you were," she says. "Anyway, next I see you, maybe we'll get some better practice in, yeah?"

Goldenblade laughs at being out of touch. "That's fine. Things are too touchy-feelie anyhow. Everyone's got feelings and such. Not like when I was growing up. We kept our feelings to ourselves." She nods about next time, "Sure."