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Karen was still a little nervous around Kang, and quiet, even after spending a couple of days with him, and he couldn't really blame her. At least she wasn't terrified of him anymore, and she wasn't all that difficult to watch over. He'd even managed to find a few things to help keep her entertained in Possessions (the Fairplay memories were definitely coming in handy in this case; he wouldn't have known what type of things human children typically liked to do otherwise).

He had duties at the tavern, though, and decided to bring her along with him. She'd offered to help him out, but there really wasn't anything a child as young as her could do, so he'd handed her some paper and crayons and set her up at a table next to the bar, asking her to draw some pictures for the tavern. That way, she was occupied and out of the way, and still felt that she was doing something to help.

He made sure to keep an eye on her as he went about his usual business, checking up on her every now and then to make sure she wasn't bored.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I know of few of mine haven't stopped training, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of them did. They'll regret it," Kang grinned. He chose not to drink any more whiskey, sticking with ale; he needed to keep a clear head while he was watching Karen.

Healing factors are a bitch when trying to drink for cheap. Though he sticks with whiskey, he's showing no signs of slurring or losing alertness.
"Nokosi, Ronnae, Kaya, and especially Hit Girl have been going at the training like crazy. I'm going to be working on some advanced hand to hand with all of them. They've earned it. I also told Trudy I'd get a team trained to do escort drills ASAP so we have people who know how to escort injured pilots and the like."

Kang nodded, "Kaya's got a hell of a lot of potential. She's a very fast learner. Ronnae gave off the impression of being a natural fighter, too."

"Kaya's had some definite teaching, and she's a hard worker. Ronnae is a lot more comfortable in a fight than out of it. I'm going to teach her taking point position and leading a small squad and see if it helps her confidence any. Given another 4 or 5 years of work and workouts, Hit Girl might be the best of them. If my wife were here, she'd want to adopt her. Only question I have with her is if she can learn to trust a squad enough to handle teamwork."

"Yes, Hit Girl. She's going to be damn good one day, but she's still got a lot to learn," Kang shook his head. "Especially teamwork and trust. Whatever happened in her past must have been pretty bad."

"She and I talked some about that. It was pretty bad, especially for someone her age. If she can learn teamwork and trust though, she's got a lot of potential. I'm going to be working with her a bunch."

"Good. It'll only benefit her." Kang smiled.

"Hoping so. So, how long has it been since you did training, and what all did you cover?"

Kang paused, thinking, "About two months, best I can tell. We didn't get all that far; Ronon and I had them working on a variety of things. Sword drill, knives, hand-to-hand, and general gun usage. I'd started covering tactics, too, and I was giving axe lessons to a few on the side."

"Good deal. What kind of units did you usually work with back home?"

"I was the commander of an engineering regiment back before I retired. We built siege weapons like ballistae and trebuchets, and were expert bridge builders, but we did a fair bit of combat with blades, as well," Kang grinned. He was rather proud of those skills.

"Engineering, huh? Yeah, combat engineers have to be badasses. I bet Jack would love to hear all about building ballistae while under fire. He did a lot the same in the corps - bridges anyway. I think he preferred rocket launchers and tiger pits to trebuchets."

"Rocket launchers were a bit beyond us," Kang laughed. "As you can probably tell from my clothing and this tavern. We didn't even have guns."

"Yeah, I kinda figured. From the sound of your tower thing though, your magic is probably more versatile than ours, which can stand in for technology just fine."

Kang shrugged, "I'm not a mage. I'm a sorceror. Same type of magic, but I don't have to memorize my spells every night for the next day. The downside is that mine tend to be on the lower end, power-wise. So, there are limitations."

"Huh, no one I know needed to memorize spells either. My kind just sort of knows the things the spirits can teach us, but we have to convince them to teach them. The will-workers and the mummy I knew were sort of the same, but they both had a better range of magic than my kind usually gets."

"That's just how magic works on Krynn. There's clerical magic, too, but once the gods left, that didn't work anymore," Kang said dryly. He wasn't all that fond of the gods.

"Huh, guess magic is different from place to place. I guess, in a way, everyone who could use our kind of magic was a priest of Gaia and her spirits. Don't know if our magic is anything like your clerics' though."

Kang grinned, "There's quite a few people here from worlds where magic doesn't even exist. It's always fun to see their faces when they see it for the first time, and realize it's real."

"I bet. A lot of people from my world don't know it exists, so some of them may be like that. All of the people who could use it had to keep it secret in some fashion. The will-workers we knew... some of them kind of disguised it behind new-agey stuff... crystals and meditation for healing and stuff. A couple of them we knew pretended it was all computer tricks. The garou... our kind of werewolves, just had to keep it hidden from most people. Getting found out for what we were was a death sentence."