fandomhigh | 101 Ways To Survive In The Field, Tuesday

"Hey, class," Atton said.

He was sitting at the front of a perfectly ordinary classroom, though his butt was decidedly on his desk, and not his chair. "Welcome to the second day of Blow-Off Week, or as radio likes to call it, Introductions Season. I'm Atton Rand. I've served in two armies, been around for three wars, and nowadays I'm a Jedi knight, which is a fancy word for 'member of a group of monks with fancy powers who are also special operatives'." He shrugged. "Yeah, I don't really get it either, and I am one. I do know you never ask a Jedi about their teachings, though, unless you want to get a wall of cryptic mumbo-jumbo thrown at you."

Somewhere, Mical was getting a headache.

"So I've been around the block a few times," he said. "You don't make it through three wars purely by running on fumes and luck: there are things you can learn to keep yourself going while you're in a threatening situation - combat, infiltration, whatever - and it looks like things might go downhill. Now, there's no substitute for sheer, bull-headed stubbornness, and if you've already got that one, then you'll probably figure out half of what we're going to be talking about yourself if you haven't already. At the same time, having a hard head isn't going to stop your leg from bleeding out if you get hit. You need basic medic skills. You need to know how to keep your adrenaline pumping so you can keep functioning until you're out of there. You need to know how to get out of a locked room. And so on. I know all of that stuff because I've lived it."

He shrugged. "Now I know that at this school, the chances are high most of you know at least some of this already. Maybe even more than me, though I doubt it. So let's kick this off with name and year, and then you can tell me what 'in the field' means to you and what skills you already have that are useful in it."

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"Well, sure. I know a lot more cursewords in Spanish than I do in Italian," Kathy joked. "But, seriously, learning that would be a lot of help. I'm learning Italian on my own from a book in English and I'm in the difficult place between knowing how to ask for directions to the library and actually being fluent."

"Practice is needed to gain fluidity," Laura said, remembering her own tutoring. Lots of pros in their fields, all a bit scared of her, but good nonetheless. And she had Logan's genes, and the man was supposed to be a genius, not only the best at what he did. That left her in a pretty privileged position, if you didn't think about the rest of her life.

"I can help with that."

"Il gatto è sul tavolo," Kathy recited. "Il gatto è sotto il tavolo. Perché mi preoccupo per il gatto?"

Yeah, her practice was pretty much limited to reciting along with the Italian mp3s.

"Mi dispiace, non so dove si trova quella frase, una canzone?" Laura spoke as if she was still talking in English, and she did it at the same speed.

She wasn't up to date in music, sadly enough.

"Right, you probably didn't learn like that, I'm sorry," Kathy said with a small chuckle. "My Italian textbook comes with these mp3s to listen to so you know how to pronounce the words. It's just this bland-voiced woman repeating a ton of vocabulary words and sometimes stringing them into a sentence. Imagine listening to 'The cat is on the table' five times followed immediately by 'My cat is under the table.' Same with behind, above, next to...any and all directions were taught by using the example of the cat in relation to this table."

Laura actually took a moment to imagine that. "A model based on repetition does work, but the practical application is usually overlooked. I was taught by tutors, but I was young too; I suppose that made it easy."

It was also the time of the day nobody threatened her with bodily harm, so.

Kathy nodded. "I grew up speaking Korean and English and learned Spanish as a little kid, so those were easy. And I'm generally really good with languages, it's just trying to remember if it's gato or gatto I'm supposed to be using, you know?"

In retrospect, maybe taking AP Spanish and Italian I at the same time had not been her brightest move.

"We will work on that." Laura considered herself to be an awful teacher... but this might actually work.

Laura will omit the fact she learned all the languages she knows at the same time.

"That sounds amazing," Kathy said, giving Laura a victory sign. "Totally worth sharing chip crumbs with."

Aww, they already had an inside joke!

"Totally worth it." Somehow Kathy had defused a pretty tense conversation. Laura now knew she was very likely to hear the entire story in the future, if only to let her know who she was truly mingling with, but for the time being she had things to busy herself with. Relatively normal things, even. She could get used to it.

101 Ways To Survive In The Field, Tuesday

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