fandomhigh | Read the Room: Practical Self-Defense (Thursday, 9/5, First Period)

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self-defense class

Read the Room: Practical Self-Defense (Thursday, 9/5, First Period)

The Danger Shop was set up to look like … the interior of a crypt. Complete with eerie, if conveniently bright, flickering torches set into sconces on the walls, and an ornately carved marble coffin in the center, its lid rotated at just enough of a noticeable angle to imply that its occupant was no longer there.

As for Kennedy, she was leaning back against the foot of the coffin with her arms crossed and an attentive expression on her face as she watched the students filter in. If this scenario was at all creepy, she seemed totally unbothered by it.

Then, as soon as it looked like everyone was present, she pushed herself away from the coffin and dropped the program in favor of a playground setting with a large (as in conveniently sized for teenagers, though it might be a bit cramped for, say, a goliath) jungle gym setup as its centerpiece. Monkey bars, swings, slides, seesaws, a rope bridge, various ladders and ramps and stairs, the works.

And a tomato about the size of a beach ball, with teeth, just rolling casually past in the background.

"Sorry if any of that wigged you out," she said lightly, flashing everyone a quick smile. "I'm Kennedy, and I was a student here oh god ten years ago, and welcome to Practical Self-Defense. And just to avoid any letdowns later, in case reading the class description isn't your thing, this isn't going to be the kind of self-defense class where you're a certified newbie badass by the end of it. There's other classes here covering that angle already."

She started to pace around the seesaws as she continued, "See, here's the get-to-the-point-ness of it. Maybe big bad stuff is going down back home in your world all the time. Maybe you're from somewhere totally mundane, and Fandom is as much with the wacky as you're ever going to get. Doesn't matter. One way or another, being able to save your own ass is a more useful skill than being really flashy about kicking someone else's, and that's what we're gonna be focusing on here. But, since this is the first week and it helps if I know what I'm working with here, we're starting with the traditional. Introductions, I mean."

She made a point of looking from one student to another as she went on, idly picking up an entire park bench for a second before putting it back down. "So like I said, I'm Kennedy, and I graduated from this place in 2011. I'm also a Vampire Slayer, which is pretty much about what it says on the package, and that's an eight year career for me so far, not counting how I started training for that when I was in kindergarten. I had a pretty memorable training experience where me and a few other girls got surprise locked into a crypt with a vampire, not that I'm going to spring that kind of deep-end thing on all of you. On the other end of the scale, my first week here in Fandom? We had a minor invasion of oversized aggressive vegetables." She smirked at the giant toothy tomato as it rolled away and eventually blinked out of the program. "Less dire, more messy. Anyway. I wanna know your names, maybe one or two interesting facts about you if you feel like sharing, and what kind of fighting or self-defense experience you might have. Then I want you to look around this playground, imagine someone's chasing you through here, and tell me two or three things you could do, using what's around you, to try and slow 'em down or shake 'em off."

[[OCD is up! Have at.]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Name, an optional interesting fact or two, and two or three ways you'd use this playground environment to try and shake off a pursuer.

"I'm Norman Babcock," Norman offered, "I..." Didn't know everyone in class well enough to really just out with the 'speaks to ghosts' thing yet, "once went for a car ride with a zombie riding in the back seat with me," a shrug, "and I guess if your pursuer is a tomato, getting up high on the equipment might help. They don't have arms to climb, right? Maybe you could try to smack 'em with a swing or something if they're a little taller than a giant tomato, but I don't know how well that would actually work."

"Norman," Kennedy repeated, with -- in a theme that would repeat all the way through this section of class -- a serious little nod and a look that suggested she was committing that to memory. It was a habit she'd gotten into back in Sunnydale, after she'd been given charge of the younger Potentials' training, and she'd kept it up ever since. "You know, to tell the truth I'm a little fuzzy on the details of what the veggie invasion was actually like? But I'm pretty sure they didn't have arms, so you're right, getting the higher ground would be a solid plan."

A beat.

"I ... kinda really want to know about the zombie thing now. Well, mostly I want to know if it was a lot more low-key than people might think it sounds like."

You could be blasé about an awful lot after you'd gotten acclimated to "there's a vampire chained up in the basement in case the ancient embodiment of evil tries to possess him again."

"I mean, the biggest problem with the zombie was that my sister kept complaining he was taking up too much of her side of the car," Norman offered. And paused. "There was some other stuff, but it wasn't really about the zombies anyway."

He shrugged a little.

"They were all kind of like the ones at Caritas," he offered. "Normal people, just... kinda dead."

And kinda awful.

But mostly dead.

Aww, they weren't actually fighting anything? They were just talking about it? These classes had really spoiled him rotten, but, after that initial disappointment, Prompto grinned a little because, despite the energy in him that now had no choice but to be slowly released through bouncing, he much preferred just talking about it, anyway.

It was nice to not have to kill anything.

"Prompto Argentum," he offered with a nod and a sheepish sort of smile. "I'm actually training to be a Crownsguard right now, which is, like, my world's version of the king's personal bodyguards and stuff, so I'm really more about the king's defense than self defense? So I need to get better at that. I was doing a lot of training with my girlfriend this last year, but she's graduated and back home now, so I've really got to step it up now and take initiative, you know?"

He bit his lip, taking a moment to consider the playground again before getting to the rest of it. "And, obviously, you could always just sort of try to lose someone in all that equipment. I'm pretty spry and can fit into tight places," ohgodwhywashesuggestingthat, the whole idea of tight places made him break into a sweat, but there it was, "and so there's that. I don't know, I'm sure some of this equipment is a little loose, too, you could probably find something to make into a weapon. Time it right to smack 'em with a see-saw or get them all wrapped up in a swing..."

Yeah. Someone definitely grew up with a healthy dose of comics and cartoons over here.

"Prompto," Kennedy said, again appearing to make a point of remembering. She made a sympathetic face, though, at the mention of his girlfriend. "Long-distance is rough. That working out okay for you so far?"

Because if anyone got screwed over the way she had because of Fandom weirdness, she might have to have a few words with the island.

"Anyway, yeah. So your training's been more focused on offensive techniques, am I getting that right?"

"So far, so good," said Prompto, with that sort of crooked, uncertain, terrified smile that went along from pretty much still standing on that tumultuous precipice where even long-distance had been a desperate bargain. "And, yeah, that's right. I'm sort of the long-range guy in my group, too, the gunslinger, sniper, that sort of thing always looking for those shots that'll take care of business before it gets too up close and personal, if you know what I mean."

"I'm Grog, and I've been training to fight since I could hold a weapon." Shocking information there, definitely. "If someone was chasing me through here... I mean, usually if someone's chasing me I'm going to get them to stop by knocking them out or something. Like, I could use those ropes or the chains there to choke them out, I wouldn't just run away."

"Grog. Hey." Kennedy had to grin a little. "It's not really my style either, to tell you the truth, but I'm right there with you in that training-since-forever thing. We'll get to stuff that isn't all about running away later in the semester, promise, okay?"

She'd have wholeheartedly approved of the reasons behind how he'd ended up living in Westruun with a bunch of gnomes, for the record.

"I'm Gratuity Tucci." Tip waved her hand. "Most people call me Tip. I'm pretty scrappy, I've had training in how to handle a sword, and -- well, I've lived here for three years." She thought that should rather count as self-defense training by itself. "Oh, and I once fought off an alien invasion using a hoard of cloned cats."

She looked around the playground thoughtfully. "I mean, it kind of depends on who's chasing me, but if I time it right, I could smack or squash them with the seesaw. And if they're big enough, I could probably hide in the middle of the jungle gym where they can't reach me."

"Fandom vet by this point, huh, Gratuity?" Kennedy grinned at her. "It's kind of a little like boot camp just being here, seems like."

She made a thoughtful noise, but seemed to approve of the answer; it wasn't so much a right-or-wrong thing as it was getting an idea of the way the kids thought, anyway.

"These aliens, were they . . . was this an allergy thing? 'cause I feel like that wouldn't surprise me at all."

"I'm Elisabeth Scrivener," Elisabeth said, puzzling over what a playground was almost as much as she'd been confused by what a 'vampire' is. "I've been an apprentice librarian for three years, so I've been taking fighting lessons as part of it- " Those two things were obviously linked. Obviously. "I'm good with a sword and I know how to hit. And here in this...playground?...I guess I would..." She looked momentarily baffled, trying to figure out what all this stuff was. "Stand on that tall thing?" She pointed to the slide. "And maybe throw rocks if I could find some on my way over there?"

"The books are dangerous where you come from, Elisabeth?" asked Kennedy, raising one eyebrow in genuine curiosity. Look, this wouldn't surprise her at all. Also, she was maybe never telling Giles about this.

"Only grimoires," Elisabeth said with a shrug. It was still very weird that no one knew about these here. "Spellbooks of sorcerers infused with demonic magic. Back home, the Great Libraries are repositories for grimoires."

"Lana Beniko." She nodded. "I've been trained in Force and lightsaber combat.

She looked around the playground. "That thing," the monkey bars, "seems to have good metal in it. I would wrap it around my pursuer to hold them. Or I would just jump over that thing in the center and hope they had to go around it."

"Hi, Lana." Kennedy chuckled a little bit, wryly amused. "Ah, Force users. I missed working with you guys. You always get so creative."

Had the possibility of the whole Sith thing occurred to her? Nope.

Meanwhile, since she didn't specify Jedi, Lana was going to guess she meant either.

"I'll try to keep it up, then," she said, grinning.

"Illyana Rasputin." Illyana considered her classmates for a moment, then shrugged. "My non-lethal self-defense needs work."

Just in case anyone got any ideas about her being an easy mark.

"You can try to gain the upper ground, which would help. Give you a better vantage point to hit their head. There's rope, which can be used for strangulation, tripping, restraint. Same with the chains from those things." She pointed at the swings. "Any piece of wood you can break off is a stake. Those metal bars could be decent clubs."

Bobby was just going to take a moment to goggle because why was Ms. Illyana his age???

"I'm Shuri," Shuri said, "and I've been trained in self-defense, but not with playground equipment." She glanced around, assessing her options. "I think it might be better to just run through here as quickly as possible rather than trying to come up with an obstacle course that might trip me up as well as my pursuer. We're in a playground. A moving merry-go-round isn't going to surprise them."

"Bobby Drake," offered the tiny doppelganger of one of Kennedy's closest friends.

"Um, interesting fact about me is, I guess, I'm from the past but I'm living in the present now? Not just in Fandom, I mean. I time-traveled back home too." He shrugged. "I've been learning how to fight since I was a kid, but the focus was really on offensive stuff rather than defensive, so I figured, you know, a class like this might be useful?" He looked around the playground. "I guess I could try and get the high ground," he offered. Since that was... what he usually did anyway. Except his slides and the like were all made of ice.

Kennedy's eyebrows went up for just a second, but really, as far as Fandom surprises went, this was -- well. She kind of liked it, to be honest.

"Hey, Boy Scout," she said before she could stop herself, then laughed and shook her head. "Sorry. Bobby. That was sorta my nickname for the different version of you that I've known for practically forever now."

Her eyebrows twitched upward again, though this time as if to suggest that yes, she knew what he could do because of that, and if that was a secret, it'd be safe with her.

"Oh my god," Bobby groaned. "Seriously. How does this keep happening."

He came to this school to get away from his other self, how did he keep meeting people who'd known his other other self?

Re: Introductions (Practical Self-Defense, 9/5)

brat_inslayage - 2019-09-07 04:59 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Introductions (Practical Self-Defense, 9/5)

reicicled - 2019-09-07 05:10 (UTC) - Expand

"Wait, Bobby DRAKE?!?!?!?" Illyana was staring at him in horror. "What-- why are you here?"

WHY WAS HE HER AGE???

"Uh, because Professor Kitty said it was either here or New York and I wanted to try something different for a change?" Obviously.