fandomhigh | Pointy End AWAY From You, Wednesday

Entry tags:

weaponry

Pointy End AWAY From You, Wednesday

Class met in the Danger Shop today, largely on Obi-Wan's insistence: he had no interest in seeing anyone hurt using weapons that might be unfamiliar to them.

Laid out on a table at the front of the shop were several smaller bladed weapons, knives primarily.

"Today, we'll begin with a fairly simple weapon," he said. "Many of you might have held a knife at least once in your life."

"And not just for cutting up nerf in a fancy restaurant," Anakin added. "Knives are versatile and easy to conceal. They can be used as a mid-range and a close range weapon, or as a boredom alleviation tool, if you get good at flipping it."

ANAKIN.

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes. "Do not start flipping knives," he said. "This man is also an expert in the realm of accidentally causing himself harm." COUGH. "Knives give you an edge in an encounter with a bare-handed fighter, but they are not toys. They are lethal weapons, and they can both harm and kill. Keep this in mind, both if you use one, or if you find yourself facing an opponent wielding one. Do not, for instance, attempt to grapple with a thusly-armed opponent, because you will be killed."

Anakin gave Obi-Wan a sour look because SOME OF THOSE harms had been on purpose from Obi-Wan. Jerk. (The fact that Anakin had been evil at the time was completely beside the point.) He then settled into a ready position. "We'll walk you through disarming a knife-wielding opponent, and how to win if you're both armed. If you're armed and they aren't...well, we don't really want to know why you're starting a fight."

"Before Anakin shows you the actual disarming technique," Obi-Wan said, picking up a knife and sliding into a ready position himself, "I should note that the absolute best way to avoid getting struck with a knife is simply to run away. There are very few situations in which running is not an option. That being said..."

He struck out at Anakin.

Anakin reached out, right hand at Obi-Wan's windpipe, almost faster than thought.

Obi-Wan's knife-hand kept going, but he was clearly slightly off-balance now.

Anakin moved to smack Obi-Wan in the forearm hard enough to make him drop the knife.

And the knife dropped.

"Don't think this is easy," Obi-Wan said, pulling his arm away. "It may look it, because we are used to it. But pulling off this maneuver is complicated, and reliant on some measure of luck. Again, run away, if you at all can."

Anakin nodded. "And be careful. I know what I'm doing, which is why Obi-Wan doesn't have a broken forearm or a slashed neck, but do this at half or quarter speed until you figure out the rhythm, okay?" He clapped his hands and a half-dozen knife-wielding holograms (that looked remarkably like Obi-Wan with a terrible mullet) appeared before the students. "We'll be walking around to correct your technique if you need it."

"And after that, we'll progress onward to actual knife-fighting techniques," Obi-Wan said lightly. "But we felt teaching you how to get out of a knife-fight was rather more important."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Now I want to start some kind of club for us," Kathy said, ducking under her opponent's arm and lashing out to kick him in the elbow. Okay, technically that wasn't what they'd been learning, but it worked, right. "Where we hang out and practice knife-fighting. I bet Jalian and Mara would be down."

Kathy, this was how gangs started.

"That sounds like a lot of fun!" Raven said. "Do you think the school would let us have one officially?"

Raven was not the one to point out the gang thing, no.

You'd think Kathy would be better at realizing it, considering the gang she'd run as Lady Dokkaebi that weird weekend, once.

"Honestly?" Kathy asked. "Probably. I mean, we might need a few teachers willing to sign off on it or something--" and, gee, wherever would they find teachers willing to do that? "--but as long as we did, I bet the school wouldn't care."

Raven shook her head in wonder. "This school is amazing. They would have had kittens at my old school if we tried to start a ladies knife club. We'd have to call it 'home ec' and do it in secret."

"They'd also have kittens about you going to school with me, Kira, and Jalian," she pointed out. "Never mind actually being friends with us."

"Ugh," Raven said, and threw her hologram a bit harder than entirely necessary. "Worse than kittens. They'd about explode. You all with knives? They'd call the National Guard."

"With good reason," Kathy said, striking her opponent's forearm. "We'd definitely be there to take down the racist patriarchy. You're in, right?"

Raven shifted into her bruiser form with a grin. "Lead the way."

"The 1950s will have no idea what hit 'em!" Kathy declared. "I'd almost feel bad if they didn't have it coming in spades."

"They do have some things going for them," Raven said. ". . . Though I think mostly it's the 'we're not literally at war with the world' thing."

"Just the Communist parts of it," Kathy agreed, sending a sharp strike to her opponent's neck. "Still, I can see the Cold War being way better than a World War."

Cold War, Korean War, several other wars on the horizon. Sigh.

"Well, I'm not a huge fan of waiting around wondering if we're all going to die in a nuclear strike," Raven said. "Sometimes I look at all the years I missed and just think the whole 20th century is just fucked up."

"From my lofty position here in the 21st?" Kathy said. "You're not wrong."

Raven sighed. "Do you think it'd be wrong for me to just decide to skip it all and stay here? Instead of going back and trying to help out with all the changes?"

Kathy paused to look at Raven and ended up getting her knife knocked out of her hand. Scrambling to snatch it back up, she said, "Of course not! There's nothing wrong with wanting to escape dealing with prejudice and oppression!"

She wouldn't be able to make that choice, but that didn't make it wrong. Honestly, it was probably a lot healthier and safer than what Kathy would have ended up doing anyway.

"And if you find yourself feeling really bad about it, there's nothing that says you can't abuse Portalocity and do both. Write books on feminism and intersectionality here, then go back in time to publish them. Something like that. There's plenty you can do to help that doesn't require you to strand yourself in a time that hates you."

"I guess," Raven said. "And I still have time to figure it out before graduation. I just -- it feels like cheating." She disarmed the hologram a little too hard, breaking its wrist, and grimaced. "Sometimes it feels like my whole life is cheating. I can look like whatever I want, so I'm a blonde white girl. But I'm not."

"You're not," Kathy agreed. "You've got passing privilege and you're using it. And, yeah, if you can pass, I think you kinda owe it to everyone who can't to try to make the world a little better for them, too. But self-care is just as important. And harder to recognize."

Spin-kick and her hologram was on the ground, trying to gasp around a bruised solar plexus. "You want to help your world and do good. I get that. But, believe me, you've got way more options that just sucking it up and going home because you feel like you should."

"I guess," Raven said, looking down at Kathy's hologram. "Someday I'm going to stop feeling like I'm playing catch-up with all this stuff, right? Sometimes I feel like I need to look up half of what you say."

"Huh?" Kathy asked, confused. "Which part do you need to look up?"

Sorry, Raven. Kathy didn't even realize she was doing it half the time.

"Passing privilege," Raven said. "Just -- words that don't get used back home, or in different ways. I don't want to bug you about it, so I look them up later."

"It's not bugging me if you ask," Kathy assured her. "I really love talking about this stuff, so I'm always up to answer questions about it!"

Though if you waited to look stuff up just to not get Kathy's long-winded explanations, that made sense, too.

"So, are you familiar with the concept of 'passing'? Usually it's where a member of a minority can successfully pretend to be a member of the majority. You have the ability to pass for a non-mutant. Me, too, I guess. You can also pass for white, and male if you wanted to, and whatever else is required to put you in the dominant social class. So you have passing privilege, because other members of your social groups don't. I have unpowered-passing privilege, but I'll never be able to pass for a white girl, you know? Or a guy. So in those situations, you'd have passing privilege and I wouldn't."

Raven nodded thoughtfully. "That makes sense. If I weren't able to shapeshift and was just blue and scaly, my life would have gone much differently."

She'd basically be long dead by now. Or adopted by kindly circus folk or raised by the Church.

Kathy nodded. "Exactly. So, you can pass and that's super-useful. If nothing else, if people think that you're a member of the dominant social class, then you can use the social clout you seem to have in order to push boundaries."

". . . Like a spy," Raven said. "Cut them down from within."

She maybe shouldn't sound quite so excited by the idea of destructive espionage.

"Exactly," Kathy said with a grin. "Well, more like secretly change their mind and convince them to be tolerant and that people are people, regardless of what they look like."

Kathy, your naivety was showing.

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