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Post by Jack on Aug 22, 2020 22:31:43 GMT -6
Well this looks... weird
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:00:50 GMT -6
Aster hadn’t expected to get into contests at all, of course. Initially, and for most of the years he’d been here, they seemed like a tremendous waste of time. Showing off a creature’s talents for an audience couldn’t be further from his list of priorities.
And to be fair, until recently, they probably wouldn’t have been the best use of his time. Until recently, he hadn’t really been in a position to take on fun little side projects. But in the last couple of years, he had gotten some creatures trained up pretty well, and had gotten himself established well enough that he was no longer living hand to mouth or looking over his shoulder all the time.
And as it turned out, the Contest Hall had some neat prizes. So at first he had entered a couple of the competitions when he had a creature suited for them.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:01:53 GMT -6
But now he found himself leading Nightshade to the gardens for a training session with the intent of teaching him some things for a contest in particular… And it felt, a little, like self betrayal. Or maybe hypocrisy.
Well, there was no one there to see him do it. That was why Aster had chosen the gardens as the setting for this. His own was in a rather overgrown, abandoned area, and there wasn’t anything there he would particularly miss if it got destroyed.
But, well, using the contests as motivation to work with some of his creatures wasn’t a bad way to go either. And he did have plenty that he wanted to work on with Nightshade. Not basic obedience - Nightshade wasn’t the sort of creature anyone loosed unaccompanied into town, and so long as Aster was with him and keeping an eye on things, Nightshade behaved well enough.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:02:53 GMT -6
But maybe putting to the test the sorts of strange skills the Wiurn had. After all, Nightshade looked so strange. He had to have some tricks up his sleeve.
… That said, the skill Aster wanted to teach him first was pretty standard. It was a basic thing to have a creature of his size learn to roar. To that end, Aster had a tape recorder with him, to play back recordings of Avander’s roar. That was the best way he could think of to prompt Nightshade to get roaring himself.
He set it on the ground, went through a few basic commands with Nightshade to get them both warmed up, then hit play.
Good ol’ Avander. Aster would know that roar anywhere. It sounded terrible in real life, but the recording was quieter than the real thing and a little tinny besides, so this version wasn’t terribly frightening.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:03:13 GMT -6
It did the trick of getting Nightshade’s attention though. The Wiurn jerked up as if startled, zeroing in on the source of the noise. His attention wasn’t on Aster at all, which was odd for him; Nightshade usually quite social with Aster.
He didn’t immediately respond, but Aster didn’t expect him to. That was why he hadn’t given a command word. It would take some time for Nightshade to process it, and then Aster would see how he responded. Maybe this wouldn’t even work, though he felt that there were good odds that it would.
Some time passed, and the recording played another roar. This time Aster could see Nightshade lower his head, the look in his eyes shifting. Aster saw his chest inflate with a deep breath, and said, “Roar!” just before Nightshade opened his mouth and let out a roar of his own.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:03:44 GMT -6
“Good,” Aster said, and scratched the Wiurn under the chin. Nightshade rumbled in satisfaction, though Aster could tell that he was also a little confused, unsure as of yet what he was being rewarded for.
Aster let the recording keep playing. Soon enough, another roar rang out, and Nightshade prepared to answer with another roar of his own. Aster gave the command word as soon as he saw the intake of breath. “Roar,” he said. And then, after Nightshade did just that, he rewarded the Wiurn with more pats and chin scratches.
This went on for a few rounds, before Aster decided to test something out. He knew the timing of the track pretty well, so he picked one of the longer lulls. Before any roar from the tape recorder played, he said, “Roar.”
Maybe nothing would happen. But maybe he had said it often enough for Nightshade to associate the word with the action now.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:06:34 GMT -6
If that was the case, then he could ‘trick’ the Wiurn into doing it on his cue.
His gamble was rewarded on this occasion, as Nightshade roared out after the command. Aster immediately went in with the praise and the pats, before Nightshade could second-guess himself, and turned the tape recorder off while he was at it. The sooner he could move Nightshade into responding to the command and not to the recording, the better.
In the interest of that, Aster gave it another attempt immediately, and repeated the command. At first, nothing happened, but when Aster prompted a second time, Nightshade roared. It was a quieter one, more uncertain, but Aster had already seen that Nightshade could produce adequately loud ones.
He was sure the Wiurn would go back to those once he was more confident about what Aster was looking for. So Aster praised him for that attempt, and then called out the command again.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:08:55 GMT -6
It took a few more tries before Aster felt sure that Nightshade had the idea down, but the Wiurn picked it up pretty well after that. All the immediate, positive reinforcement helped, and conceptually it wasn’t a difficult thing for a Wiurn to grasp.
Some of the other things Aster wanted to teach him might take a little more doing. Nightshade was capable of a lot, but conveying the idea of a more esoteric ability to a creature with basic creature intelligence... Well...
He'd figure something out, he supposed. For now, he was content to have them take a break.
"Good work," Aster said, and gave the Wiurn's headplate a good rub. Nightshade responded by butting his nose into Aster's chest, probably looking for more chin scratches. Aster was in a good mood, so he obliged with a laugh.
He hadn't expected Nightshade to mimick him, and laugh right back.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:26:03 GMT -6
He had gotten his hands on some documents that told him a little more about Nightshade's capabilities, but they had sort of failed to cover this ability of his.
... Aster hoped the ability was just the laugh itself, the way some birds sounded like they were laughing, and not... a mimicking ability. Because that would get real unsettling, real fast.
Experimentally, Aster forced another laugh out of himself, and Nightshade, probably thinking this was a game or a bonding thing they were doing, laughed back.
"You think you're a funny man, huh?" Aster said. Well, maybe this would creep some people out for that Vai Min Mur contest, so why not? "Alright, let's work on this then. What kind of command...?" He muttered to himself, mulling it over. Just 'laugh' seemed a bit... off. Maybe he could turn it into a joke, like some of the commands he had taught Avander.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:46:40 GMT -6
“Alright boy,” Aster said. “Smile for me.” And then he forced another bout of laughter, which prompted Nightshade to respond with a laugh of his own.
Well. Maybe it was a stretch to call it proper laughter, now that Aster had heard it a few times. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would make you think ‘oh, hey, we’re sharing a joke. A chuckle.’ It felt more… If there was such a thing as uncanny valley for human voices, this would probably be it. He couldn’t even put his finger on what exactly was wrong with it, just that something was.
But hey, they were going for creepy, right? And maybe if it unsettled Aster, who knew and liked Nightshade just fine, it would unsettle an opponent too.
Aster rewarded Nightshade with some more scritches. “Good boy. Right, one more time. Smile for me,” Aster said, and forced a laugh.
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:47:03 GMT -6
Nightshade laughed back, with that creepy tone of his. Aster rewarded him, then repeated the process.
It wasn’t that different from teaching him how to roar - just that the sound prompt was different, and Aster could produce it on his own. Maybe the similarity made the transition easier, since they had just done something very similar not too long ago. After a few tries, Aster used the command without laughing himself. Nightshade laughed haltingly, then again a few times, as if he was testing things. That was creepy to hear - something almost like human laughter, cut off, timed irregularly, like a bird trying out a song it wasn’t sure about just yet. A chill ran down Aster’s spine.
“If I had more time,” he said, scratching along the underside of the Wiurn’s jaw, “I’d teach you to do that exact pattern. Then you’d creep someone out for sure.”
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Post by Noa on Oct 1, 2020 23:52:02 GMT -6
But they didn’t have that much time before the contest, and the regular laugh was creepy enough, he supposed. His standards weren’t that exacting anyway.
"Smile for me," Aster said, and waited to see if Nightshade would laugh. Having received praise the last time he did it, Nightshade produced the laughing noise more confidently this time. Aster praised him some more to help reinforce it, then asked him to do it again.
It wasn't very exciting, this stage of rote practice, but it helped the creature get the idea down so that they could perform consistently when Aster needed them to. They ran through the command several more times, until Aster felt satisfied that Nightshade had committed it to memory, before he decided to stop with this and do something else.
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Post by Nadia on Oct 2, 2020 9:15:47 GMT -6
The grass rustles, and leaves drift from trees, signalling the turn of the seasons. Your garden is all quiet thus far.
[Nothing happens.]
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Post by Noa on Oct 2, 2020 13:03:15 GMT -6
Aster wasn’t sure how to coax the other abilities out of him though, so for now he decided to do some actual gardening. It wasn’t his top priority here, but since he was here, maybe he ought to at least make an attempt to clean up this perpetually neglected garden of his. The brambles hadn’t really grown back, but it wasn’t like the soil was properly tilled or anything either… None of it was fit to grow anything, that was for sure.
He looked out at the patch of land and sighed. “Don’t suppose you want to help me with this,” he said to Nightshade. The Wiurn looked at Aster and inclined his head to one side. “Yeah, didn’t think so.” Aster smiled and shook his head, which Nightshade mimicked; it had been a trick that Aster had taught to him some time ago.
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Post by Noa on Oct 2, 2020 13:03:43 GMT -6
He hadn’t given him the prompt to do it this time, but apparently Nightshade just thought today’s game was ‘copy Aster’.
Well, for a while there he hadn’t been wrong, and it had been useful to teach him a couple of things, so Aster wasn’t going to begrudge him that. But it really would’ve been nice to have a big creature who was trained in the art of pulling a plow with him here right now. And a plow for them to pull.
In this case though, none of the creatures he’d trained would have sufficed. Grunty was the closest, knowing how to pull a buggy, but Aster didn’t know if it would translate into pulling a plow, since the sensations involved were a bit different… And Avander didn’t know how to pull anything at all, though Aster might have been able to talk him through it in a pinch.
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