Training, in various ways...

[morganknight]

After a few days -- weeks -- however long he'd been here, Morgan had finally settled into what he considered to be an adequate training regimen, for those times when he wasn't needed in Medical.

As a general rule, he began his day in the Sensorium, shaping it in the image of the mountaintop dojo he favored. One lone building atop a peak in the midst of a mountain range, lacking walls so the cool, thin air could drift through as he ran through forms and katas. A path wound its way around the peaks, and the frigid springs that formed small lakes and streams that poured off the edges in grand waterfalls. Next to this path ran a series of poles on which he ran, or jumped, when his regimen called for that sort of exercise.

Training in a simulated environment like this was old hat.

After he finished there, it was off to the river, where he (with some effort) persuaded his plantsuit to retract till it resembled closer to a bathing suit than anything. For what felt, at least, like an hour or two, the Akashic stood motionless in the river, submerged up to his neck. Legs spread, arms out, and hair streaming behind him in the current, he meditated. Harmony and moving in tune with the universe were key to his philosophy, after all. The currents, the flow of water around his fingers and limbs, and the silence were magnificent for that sort of understanding.

Then, off to the W.I.T.C.H. bus! Since Kaya had so kindly allowed him use of its training facilities, he made good use of that offer. This section of his training he devoted to melee weapons -- primarily his sword, of course, but he allotted time for other swords, staffs, daggers and knives, and tonfa as well.

And last, perhaps the oddest of all training exercises if one didn't know that to the mind of an Akashic, all things are martial arts: Morgan returned to the sensorium, not to fight or exercise or run, but to play. Electric guitar in hand, voice lifted in defiance of his one-held belief that he simply sounded terrible, and whatever backing was necessary conjured by environment, he rocked out, mixing up from simple guitar covers to lead guitar and vocals in full songs.

That lasted until he was exhausted, satisfied, or -- admittedly -- hit hard enough by nostalgia that continuing became prohibitive. Then it was time to clean up, relax, and see what else he had to do.

Comments

[morganknight]

Sorry, Sakura, Morgan just knew the type -- he was, after all, Stephen Valkonan's best friend, and when's the last time anyone had seen HIM out and about?

"All the more reason to come on in. Unless that's an actual seriously necessary report, but my experience is that anything that has 'report' attached to it is generally pretty dry."

[encourage]

"If they were wet, they'd be harder to turn in," she pointed out, like this were an actually serious statement. (To her credit, at least it wasn't.)

[morganknight]

She earned herself a flick of water that never really threatened to even get close to her. "As Stephen would say, that was Morgan-bad."

[encourage]

She stepped back, smiling a little. "Hey," she complained, though it never went past the single word protest. "It does get hot jogging around here. I swear I'm never getting used to the humidity." Eyeing the river with far more speculation, Sakura shrugged. "Swimming's good for cardio exercise, too. Easier on the joints!"

[morganknight]

"One of the best workouts you can get, outside of the insane sort of stuff I do like lifting rice from one bowl to another with chopsticks and vertical crunches." He took his training seriously, but he didn't take the fact that he took his training seriously, seriously.

[encourage]

he wondered if he might not fit in with Gai and Lee in some of their training styles. "Funny you don't see more of it in a swimming sense where I'm from." If his agreeing cut away at the base of her last reserve against joining him.

Without grand comment, she plopped herself down and carefully removed her shoes. She had two pairs now, one bought on XaXing, the other "earned" on Galilee. Her XaXingian ones were the kind of functional sandal she preferred, so she was careful in setting them to the side. Otherwise she fully intended to swim in what she had on.

[morganknight]

Well, that wouldn't be much in the way of eye candy, but eh. Eye candy wasn't all that nutritious anyway. He'd just consider 'helping a workaholic relax' as his good deed for the day.

"What're you more used to then?" he asked.

[encourage]

"One good friend of mine was splitting water with air as part of his training. Water walking itself is good training for constant control and adjustment." Still different from tree walking, where you had to mitigate pressure to keep from harming what you walked on.

Sakura stepped into the accidental shallows by the shore, eyeing the depths nearby. She wouldn't dive if it wasn't deep enough, though she could make her dive shallow... decisions!

[morganknight]

It was easy enough to tell the water was a shade over five feet deep or so -- because it had been up to the neck of the 6'2" man when he'd been meditating.

"Oh, those are familiar, at least. I've been doing that a little out here too, I have to admit."

[encourage]

Opting for a shallow dive in a direction no rocks appear to be lurking, Sakura submerged for the latter part of his statement. Resurfacing, she swam out to feel the tug of the river current, letting herself be pulled along for ten feet or so. "A little of which?" she called back to Morgan.

[morganknight]

"Water splitting, water walking... Water's good in general. Fluid and weighty as these things go, but such patterns to read!"

He grabbed the water's surface like it was a ledge, then hauled himself up and over in a flip, splashing back down in a cannonball. Surfacing was just a matter of putting his feet down, so he did, grinning at Sakura from behind a curtain of hair.

"And it's fun."

[encourage]

Treading water, she found herself smiling. "For all we can do, we don't actually do that pretty much ever," she said, pulling herself up to the water's surface. She stood there, dripping, for a moment, then bent backward into a lazy, controlled back bend and (not-quite) flip. "When you're running across water, you think about how long until you get to the other side, not what you can do while you're on it. Outside of a fighting context."

[morganknight]

That was a sight worth watching.

"Sounds like an entire land of shameless workaholics." He swept his hair back (seriously, Sakura, he put your pre-Important Haircut locks to shame), twisting it up idly out of his face.

[encourage]

"A village full, at least." She stopped spreading her weight around the water's surface area, falling back in with a muted splash. When she resurfaced, she finished the thought she began when speaking. "People have enough time to play, if they want to spend their free time doing things like that. It's just more civilians who spend time in the water instead of on it."

[morganknight]

"I always took the position that anything is training," he said, lifting his feet up to tread water. "Which makes it a lot easier to do things that are outright fun, after all."

[encourage]

"Wouldn't that change from person to person?" She knew it did among her friends, and almost drastically so among people here. Finding common grounds that were enjoyable and profitable in more tan just a sense of "fun" had been a challenge, if she could appreciate that more now than she had in the past.

[morganknight]

"Absolutely, but if whatever is fun to you is also training, you never have to feel guilty about slacking off to do it, right?"

But she better not dare argue that paperwork is fun!

[encourage]

"And people wonder why reading medical books is such a good use of my time."

She almost sounded like she wondered. In the end, she ducked back under the water and started swimming in something like earnest, kicking off at an angle for the far shore. The river didn't pull so strongly here, if she knew there were sections where it did. Strange thing, this artificial river.

[morganknight]

"I admit I did some of that," he said in her general direction once she finally popped up again. "But I always found the most benefit from just hand-on experience and effort. Of course, it's easy to get healing experience when you keep getting into scrapes..."

[encourage]

"Or when you're working in the hospital under your mentor," Sakura added for her part, turning around to let herself float with the light tug of the current. She watched the artificial sky, wishing that it were real in the back of her mind. "Being able to apply what you read about, that's got to be half of the exciting part. The knowing is fun, yet the working with what you know? Learning more, doing what you might have once thought impossible? That's... amazing."

[morganknight]

He found that profound enough to not saying anything in response for a moment, simply nodding as he thought about it.

"Not that I spend much time thinking anything is impossible," he finally said. "Unlikely, but that just makes achieving it all the more rewarding!"

[encourage]

She was quiet in turn. That brand of optimism, with a little less conscious thought around it, belonged to Naruto back home. Blind optimism on his part. He refused to believe less was possible than what he wanted to do.

She admired it in him, and it was enough to make her pay some attention to Morgan now. "While not everyone can be like that, it's nice to know we have a few around here who are."

[morganknight]

"Everyone can be like that," he said matter-of-factly. "Look at all the possibilities here on this ship alone! It's just that some things are a lot harder than others. By the time I learned enough science to build a giant robot it'd be a moot point for our war, after all... Doesn't mean I couldn't learn if I knuckled down to do so!"

[encourage]

Whether she agreed or not (and she did agree that putting ones mind to something meant one could achieve nearly anything), she was left thinking over the idea of this being their war.

Because it was. It was, in a sense, the only thing they had, past each other. A war with more sides than they'd explored or had the opportunity to see from more than one angle. A war to fill in the empty space of missing worlds and universes, missing friends, family, and the futures they once had.

She rolled over, using her arms and then legs to pull herself further under the surface of the water. When she came back to the surface, she was doing laps against the faint tug of current, still silent. Sakura was caught up in her own thoughts.

[morganknight]

"Those thoughts had better not be turning dark," he said, after a minute. Oh yes, he was quite familiar with the introspective workaholic sort, including the general path their minds seemed to take. That well-described his best friend, after all.