trans_9 | the test of techniques/the forms/and stances/the flow/the rythm/the internal answers [open]

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the test of techniques/the forms/and stances/the flow/the rythm/the internal answers [open]

God knows where she'd gotten the blades.

They hovered in the air, little menacing antigravity buzzsaw shuriken. Violence lay coiled within them, not directed outward but in, at Sheeana who stood poised with her arms spread. This was the attitude with which she called the great worm. Her toes curled in, feeling the strange, unfamiliar grass (coarse, yes, like the rare poverty grasses that sometimes grew on the leeward side of the dunes but still far too thick for her liking and multicolored). She opened her awareness, allowing herself to become part of the place and her of it.

Seven, a warm up. Their timer finished counting down, they converged in on her

There was a series of contortions that blurred in and out of visibility. She leapt. She hugged the ground. At one point she found herself poised on one hand, feet thrown up into the air like a Minoan athlete over the bull.

For practicing the Weirding Way, no artificial lightshow would do, no matter how real feeling.

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Tess had gone with slight heels today. Just enough to make her feel a little taller—that was always nice. For someone as soft-looking as she, she manages to wander the city with remarkable fortitude. Click click click click of her heels, up and down the broad avenues for hours without stopping, always looking around at the buildings and streets and odd configurations with the intense curiosity of a child.

And then she came upon this strange sight. At first, only confusion, and then fragmented thoughts started to connect together. She'd heard of meleeists, masters of the killing touch, but for every story, there were a dozen poseurs who were nothing more than idiots with a knife or a sword, hopped-up targeting software, and a death wish.

Her throat and face twitch slightly with subtle commands, and the display projected into her retinas from the faceplate-halves withdrawn to flank her face replays what she's seeing, slowed down enough to make out the detail. No. It doesn't fit—it's too fast. She watches more, still trying to figure it out.

And somewhere along the way, Sheeana got an audience.

Lex didn't interrupt, instead quietly watching her move with an odd fascination. Apparently, thousands of years of knowledge in that girl's head included new and interesting ways to kick ass.

Sonic was content with watching for the moment. Whatever the woman was doing, it was on par with Knuckles' meditation by all appearances, and the hedgehog knew that interrupting that kind of thing wasn't cool. He stayed out of the way, leaning over the roof of a building not far from Sheeana, but with the perfect view for watching those blades move.

Bet those things would leave more than scratches, he thought to himself.

Sheeana could sense movement behind her. It did not overly concern her (she was in the middle of doing something that looked a bit like The Worm) except that the intruder brought with them strange scents and fidgetings, chemical noise that buzzed at her heightened senses.

She risked a glance back and...KZZZzzggtkk, one bit into her should and continued on its merry way.

She drew the crysknife. Inside of a minute and a half, each one had been knocked out of the air.

With each of the blades safely dug into the ground, she paused, slowed her heart rate and willed the wound close. The trickle of blood (much too little for the depth of it, for Fremen blood coagulated quickly) abruptly stopped. On the microscopic level, skin cells began a frantic dance to close it. In an hour, it would be closed.

Only then did she turn to face her visitor.

Sheeana drew her blade from a prone position. Bending, twisting, she moved in the rythmless dance she used to communicate with shai-hulud. And down the blades went, like falling stars, stirring up loam and grass.

She sniffed and turned to face her audience. Seeing who it was, she gave him a coy hint of a smile and upturned chin.

The next thing she did was draw the bone-white crysknife. It cut the air with whooshes that sounded like the wind over the dunes.

She was that wind as she moved. And she was the worm as she breakdanced her way through the final three blades, catching the last between her palms from her back, a quarter of an inch from where it could have torn vertically into the cartilage of her nose.

Okay, that earned a respectful whistle. "Nice moves! I thought that one was going to get you for sure!" Jumping down from the building, Sonic landed easily on his feet and brushed himself off, walking closer toward the knife-wielding woman. "Name's Sonic. Sonic the Hedgehog!"

There was a slight grin pulling at his lips from that look.

"I hope you didn't mind the audience."

"I have no worries about being observed. Even if someone were to watch every minute of my training, they would be unable to replicate it." She had considered teasing him or acting perturbed but decided on arrogance as the best tac.

Lex chuckled a bit.

"I wouldn't doubt it. The entire time I was watching, I kept thinking: I dated an Olympic gymnast once, she probably couldn't pull off half of those moves."

He stepped further into the room.

"I didn't know being a Reverend Mother involved knife fights, though."

Sheeana rewarded him with a chuckle behind her hand. "We must be prepared for all eventualities. The Weirding Way simply comes out of the same physical and mental training that allows us to become Reverend Mothers in the first place."

"The Weirding Way," he repeated. "An interesting name." Perhaps the Normal Way simply got boring after a while.

"I'd like to hear more about it."

In truth, Katara had actually been looking for that party that Allan had been taking about. She had missed the first few days because she'd been busy with other things: the mistletoe, training, meeting with her brother and hanging out with Meluly. Thinking o her, Katara did feel troubled though. There seemed to be something wring with her, something that didn't feel right, but Luly had left abruptly, leaving Katara with questions to think about. What could be so bad that would force her to leave that quickly?

But that could wait. Katara was walking the city for a little while, trying to gather her thoughts, when she saw a flurry of movement not too far away. She looked in that direction and saw Sheena, the Reverend Mother, practicing an art that was much quicker than even what she could do.

Katara did not underestimate what she could do. She was quite accomplished as a waterbending master, and she could do flips and jumps that would make most women green with envy. But even she was not as fast as this, even she did not have this discipline just yet.

But she wanted it, that was for sure. She needed to only watch a few minutes before she had an itch in her limbs, and a desire to push her body further than it had been before. Master Paku had been a great teacher, and one of the best Waterbenders in the world, but even he could not move like this woman.

So Katara, momentarily forgetting about other obligations, sat cross legged and watched, taking in every movement, every gesture, recording it into her brain.

Sheeana removed the crysknife. Even in the daylight it gleamed as bright as the three moons. The handle was set with cabachons that seemed to have formerly contained jewels but now was empty. The edge was the sharpest thing in her universe and it bit into the metal.

She began moving faster, leaping up to stomp them to the ground, sprang up from a crouch like a sprinter to strike it through the center.

The last she handled from her back, catching it by the flat between crysknife handle and palms a quarter inch from where it would have torn vertically into her cheek.

It spun a moment, blowing cold air on her cheek then died down. She carefully removed the blades from the end of her crysknife and the places in the dirt where they'd bit into the loam and grass and stacked them. She then flicked the crysknife across the top of her forearm until a drop of blood welled up there, which she sucked away.

Only then did she stand and regard the younger Waterbender. Qhatara was watching her with an almost Bene Gesserit level of concentration. Her body was humming with eagerness. It wasn't, she observed, all that dissimilar to sexual arousal. Merely different muscles were being activated, different centers of the brain.

She waited for the girl to ask questions.

When Sheena was done, Katara rose from her seated position, and gazed up into the eyes of the Reverend Mother. In normal circumstances, Katara would have gushed about how unbelievable and cool it was, as she had with the superheroes she'd met on the ship. But Sheena's abilities were skills, and they were earned with practice and hard work, as hers had been. It was true she was born with the ability to bend, but how good she'd gotten and how far she'd come had happened with hard work, practice and dedication, not inborn ability.

Katara gave Sheena a bow. It wasn't a quick bow, like she'd done in greetings before: this time was slow, deliberate. It was a sign of respect to one who, now, she realized abilities made her a master like Paku of the watertribe. In that sense, she was in awe, and was glad she had made the beeline here instead of to the Hanukkah celebration. That could wait.

"I haven't been in the presence of a master before, at least, not realized it fully until I saw with my own eyes," Katara began. "Now I feel like I've been asking you and Arha the wrong questions. I can't move as fast as you, I can only come slightly close. How did you come to learn how to do what you just did? What fighting style is it?"

"I'm sorry," Tess says, and in her voice are all the notes of genuine regret. "I didn't mean t'distract you." That's one of the things about her—when she says something, she really does mean it, even if it's only for the moment, until the tracks of her thought reconfigure into something new.

There's no panic in her voice, though: she can already see that the bleeding is slow enough to be controlled, and that Sheeana's manner is such to consider the wound no threat. For one with a suit like herself, an inner protective layer would have sealed the wound in suit and in skin without even a touch of blood getting out, and so she wonders about how Sheeana's wound is knitting itself...

Sheeana parted her palms vertically, the Fremen equivalent gesture. Her eyebrows arched, pleased when the girl spoke. Despite needing that moment to take in enough oxygen, there was not a drop of sweat on her.

"It is good that you consider the question. The first thing a Bene Gesserit acolyte learns, besides the basic physical postures, is how to ask incisive questions. The right question cuts through ghafla like this crysknife does." She held the blade up where it caught the light and glowed like a little crescent moon, though the artificial sun was still on the horizon. She then returned it to its sheath.

Incisive... She remembered this from her first days as an acolyte. ...comes from the word for 'to cut'.

"Well, there is a reason I can face the blades and it has nothing to do with strength. We are of similar size and musculature. I am not chemically, genetically or mechanically enhanced. Nor am I manipulating anything outside myself, like your WaterBending. Knowing that, do you think you can guess what it is?" She had a feeling the WaterBender would be able to figure it out with very little prompting.

The strangeness whooshed over her head like those blades. Neither Galach nor Chakobsa contained the pun.

"We Bene Gesserit learn to exercise conscious control of all the body's internal processes, from the muscular level down to the chemical reactions of our cells. The Weirding Way was developed to take advantage of this. With it, the full efficiency of the body is utilized."

Sheeana noted two things about the way the girl spoke. One was the strange accent: vowels got flattened out, words said with a more open mouth. This combined with the subtle waterfat at her cheeks (difficult to tell but there behind that transparent membrane she always wore) led her to believe that her native land was hot and moist.

The second was that she spoke with complete sincerity. She was sorry for interrupting her training. So she rewarded her with a smile.

"It is quite alright. It was my fault..." And by then the wound had sealed off. "...for allowing myself to be distracted." She lapped up the thin line of blood, a gesture from a Fremen childhood. The wound was now closed off.

Sheeana looked down to regard her visitor. Ah, the beast-man from before! He absorbed the impact easily too, probably due to those large feet.

"Sheeana the Reverend Mother." She said with a hint of amusement while she hunted around in Other Memory for what exactly a 'hejj-haug' was.

Katara listened intently. Yes, this was familiar somehow: it was as if she were a pupil all over again, starting from scratch. She wasn't though: the time it took her to became a waterbending master meant that she had to have a keen eye, then use her more than just what was in front of her and, after watching Toph at work, sense what she could not see and be right. She had watched Sheeana quietly, and had found her movement to be unbelievable but even that was an illusion too: nothing was impossible.

So she quietly thought, and remembered the movement: how Sheeana seemed to almost glide, how the blades barely were able to touch her. Even the mere nick that had pierced her body was only a misstep that any other person would have suffered worse from, why was that? They were of the same build, that much was right, so how was she able to move as she did? Unless...

Yes, the impossible was possible. Katara was a martial artist as well as as a bender: honestly, the two went hand in hand, there was no ways out of it. Katara KNEW the limitations of the human body as well, being a healer demanded such knowledge.

"You...you can control your body. Not just control your limbs, but everything, nerves and all. That's an impossibility in my world, but you were trained to do it. You are capable. Is this the power of...of the Bene Gesserit?"

Sheeana's face lit up in a pleased smile. "Correct, down to the chemical processes of our cells." Bene Gesserit teaching was not concerned with praise or admonishment. The student was correct or not, they applied themselves or they didn't. But if it did, she would have praised Qhatara. "I would not discount it as impossible. Perhaps because you can WaterBend...and presumably there are bendings for other substances?...there never was a need to develop these skills. Environment dictates invention."

Though she was unaware, her own heritage provided a counterpart, for Fremen would literally kill for the ability to conjure and control water.

"There are other applications for this control, if you'd like to see them."

"Absolute perfect control of the body?" Now that was impressive. "Something like that must have taken several dozen lifetimes to accomplish." A testament to their work ethic, and ability to improve upon that which has come before, if nothing else.

"Is that unique to the Bene Gesserit, or can anyone potentially learn, but choose not to dedicate themselves?"

"So, do you have some special powers that let you move like that?" While Sonic was perfectly willing to accept that skilled martial artists did exist, he kind of figured that it would take much more than that to move like Sheeana just had. More to her credit that she hadn't been hit once.

"Oh, well," Katara stammered a little. She wasn't nervous, not exactly. It was more of understanding how something like this could happen that was so mind blowing for her. She wished she could learn because she realized, more than anything, that she wanted to further her teaching. It wasn't as if she believed she knew everything there was to know about waterbending, far from it. But there were no waterbenders to teach her now, none left to show her something new. And Katara, without realizing it, desperately wanted to learn something she did not know, wanted to challenge her body again, like she had to with Master Paku.

But that was imposing, and for all she knew, it was a secret, sacred art. She might not ever be able to do what Sheeana could do. She was a Reverend Mother, after all, with years of training. Still, she could learn things, ask questions, watch. Observe.

"There are," Katara sais. "In my world, there are also earthbenders, Firebenders and airbenders. Some of the art has been lost because greedy men sought to control our nations, but our arts, however diminished, persevered. It's through that and the love of my people that I became a waterbending master."

And here, she smiled. "I'd be honored if you could show me, Master Sheeana."

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