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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:22:04 GMT -6
The pen was just about big enough for the one Laredo to move around comfortably, as it had held three whole half grown sarane without much trouble. At least the Laredo did follow on a lead, which was a little better than Aster had been expecting. Probably the work of the fellow he had hired to lead it around and all.
The Laredo didn’t really react much once Aster closed the gate behind it. Aster didn’t know whether to be happy about this or not. “Well, I hope you budge a little more when there’s something on the line, like your hide,” Aster said.
Here goes nothing, he thought, and tightened his grip on the foam dart gun.
He fired a foam dart at the Laredo, who… didn’t react much, at all. Aster frowned, and fired another. Nope, nothing. He sighed. Okay, maybe this was a bad idea.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:22:14 GMT -6
He was quickly realizing that he ought to have taken the Laredo’s relatively thicker hide into consideration.
“Alright tough guy, you stay here,” Aster said. Not that the Laredo seemed like it was going to go anywhere anytime soon, but still. Aster went back to the storage shed on the property to rummage around for something more suitable, and eventually managed to produce a slingshot and a pack of rocks. Not something he would ever use in, say, real combat, but he was at least good enough of a shot to hit a target the size of that Laredo while it was in a corral, unmoving. And that meant it was good enough for his training purposes.
He felt a little bit bad about the rocks, but the Laredo’s hide was pretty thick. If he thought he could have gotten the result he wanted just using the foam darts, he really would have stuck to them.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:22:27 GMT -6
Hopefully this would only sting a little, and do no lasting damage. It had to be just a little unpleasant to invoke the Laredo’s desire to get out of the way of another potential hit, after all.
It didn’t take him long to get back to the corral. And sure enough, the Laredo was still there, with no sign of it having moved in the intervening time while Aster was gone. Aster frowned at it, but in the spirit of just… getting on with things, he decided to just go for it and launch his first ‘attack’.
The rock flew from the slingshot and hit the Laredo square on the shoulder. This time the Laredo hissed, in what aster hoped was protest, so at least he had managed to accomplish that much. Aster was sure this wasn’t going to make the Laredo like him any better, but he fired again after a pause.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:22:37 GMT -6
The Laredo stood there and got hit again, and again it hissed at him. “Come on, guy. You just need to budge out of the way,” Aster said. He didn’t think talking to the beast was going to help, but he did it anyway, maybe to vent his own feelings. “Let’s try this again.”
Aster fired maybe four more shots before he finally managed to annoy the Laredo into moving. And then it was happening all at once. Aster fired, and the Laredo scuttled out of the way. The rock missed, in what was beginning to feel more and more like a miracle, even though it had absolutely no right to do that. Most creatures… picked this up a lot faster than this Laredo was doing, or at least made an effort earlier than it had done. But he supposed some of that was the thick hide, and some of it was the… lackluster brain power.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:23:08 GMT -6
But hey, he’d missed! That had been, in the end, the only thing that Aster had wanted to see. “Good boy,” Aster said, and fed the Laredo a treat. Boy, he hoped this thing was food motivated, or at least food motivated enough to prompt it to work for treats. Aster didn’t know what he was going to do if it wasn’t.
Luckily for him, food was an easy language to understand, apparently even if you weren’t all that bright. Hell, maybe it was specifically because the Laredo wasn’t that bright to begin with. It snapped up the tidbit that aster had offered, then looked to him for more.
“No you don’t,” Aster said, shaking his head. This wasn't a free hand out situation, this was training. “You gotta work for it. Come on, you’ve got the hang of this. Let’s try again.”
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:23:19 GMT -6
But just because the Laredo had done it once didn’t mean that it was going to do this consistently. It didn’t, for example, move out of the way on Aster’s next attempt to hit it. Which was disappointing, but not surprising - at least not at this early stage in the training process. Aster bit back another sigh, and began the process of hassling the Laredo into moving once again.
The one merciful thing was it took fewer tries this time. Just two, and then the third missed its mark as the Laredo scuttled out of the way. The way it moved was a little funny, especially on something of its size. Aster was reminded very strongly of the scuttling lizards of his arid homeland, despite the difference in scale. If it weren’t for how slowly this training was going, it might almost have been endearing, a little.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:23:44 GMT -6
Training did require patience though, and the Laredo had demonstrated the behavior that aster was looking for once again. And so Aster offered him another morsel, and another, “Good boy.” And then they resumed.
It took the better part of a day, but the Laredo seemed to be coming to a slow understanding: if someone was shooting at you, get out of the way. It took less and less time for the Laredo to begin dodging again, until it was doing so almost every time Aster tried to go for it. Almost, anyway.
Aster made sure to give it a treat every time it dodged successfully, just to reinforce that success. Just the stick was usually not a great way to train a creature; you had to work some carrot into the equation too somehow. And he really wasn’t trying to get this Laredo to hate his guts or anything.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:24:38 GMT -6
It was going to have to, hopefully, listen to him when it was in the pit.
… In that respect maybe this hadn’t been the best way to start their relationship. But the instinct to get away from something annoying was a pretty basic thing, and Aster had felt sure that if the Laredo could pick up anything, it was this… And this was a pretty vital skill to have in a fighter too, so if the Laredo couldn’t pick this up, their chances were pretty slim. Aster could already tell by its anatomy and the few noises he had heard from it that this particular reptile wouldn’t be capable of a roar, which already hurt its chances.
But in for a penny, in for a pound, he supposed, and he had already begun the training process, so he ought to see it through at least a little.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:24:50 GMT -6
And he hadn’t wanted to expend a potion on anything more likely but more finicky in nature for a tournament where you had to train a common creature from scratch, so here they were.
Aster ended the session there, took the Laredo back to its enclosure, and got on with the rest of his work for that day. They came back together the next day, the Laredo on his lead once again, and once again they began the process of Aster slinging rocks at the poor beast. It took the Laredo some time to remember the previous day’s lessons, and Aster could see it in the creature’s reaction times. But after his first success, the taste of the treat seemed to jog its memory somewhat, and its performance improved.
By the end of the session, it had shown some improvement over the end of their last session. It was dodging pretty much every time now.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:25:02 GMT -6
It was slow, but Aster had sort of known it would be, and he consoled himself not to lose heart at how things were proceeding.
It took the work of several more sessions before the Laredo was dodging consistently enough for Aster to begin moving around the corral while he fired. It was essentially the same process and the same progression that he had used for the Sarane whelps, but much slower, thanks to the Laredo’s slow wits. But gradually they were getting there, and it didn’t seem to have as much trouble with this stage as it had with the last. The transition to paying attention to Aster as a stationary nuisance to paying attention to him as a moving one went more easily than Aster had any hope of anticipating. It only took them two more sessions to get to a consistent dodge rate once again.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:25:59 GMT -6
… Aster knew the last stage would take some time though, based on how everything had been going so far.
And so he began it in stages, partitioning off only a quarter of the perimeter of the corral at first. The Laredo found this particular development completely inscrutable, and for some time whenever Aster was behind it, the Laredo’s dodge rate dropped significantly. It took time and patience for the Laredo to clue in to the idea of using something other than sight to sense the incoming attacks. But they did get there gradually, and as they did, Aster began partitioning off more and more of the corral walls, until the Laredo was forced to do this at all times. But by then it was beginning to get the hang of it; and the process of teaching the Laredo to dodge an incoming attack, though long and often tedious, eventually came to an end.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:26:42 GMT -6
By that point though, Aster was well and ready to move on. The next thing he taught the poor beast would be simpler, he decided. There was no sense in investing too much into the beast when Aster had scant time left to him; the tournament in question was only a little ways away.
He decided to go for a skill that the Laredo had already demonstrated for him, and opted to teach it to sprint. After all, if it was going to fight, there had to be some things it could do on command. And a dash seemed easier, he thought, than an attack to start with.
For this… Aster got one of those things they used in dog races, a rabbit pelt with the scent of a rabbit daubed on for good measure. Laredos, he had heard, liked rabbit meat, so he hoped this would be enough of an incentive.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:27:05 GMT -6
Maybe it would prove to be too much of one, but he could always adjust things as they went along based on how it was going.
“Alright, let’s see how you like this,” Aster said, and dangled the lure in front of the Laredo. He had it on a fishing pole, so he could retract it quickly or direct it from afar as he saw fit. He was probably able to outpace the Laredo in a general sense, but he didn’t want to spend his afternoon sprinting around away from a lizard big enough to bowl him over. It might give the Laredo some bad ideas, such as trying to chase Aster down instead of just sprinting.
The Laredo’s reaction was instantaneous. The tongue flicked out once, then twice; and then the Laredo dove for it all at once.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Aster said, backing up a bit.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:27:35 GMT -6
Okay, maybe he had gone a little overboard with the rabbit lure. At least the Laredo was incentivized, he supposed. But since they were already here… Aster flung the lure away and had just enough time to yell, “Dash!” before the Laredo went at it, full tilt.
The trouble, Aster could see, was going to be getting the Laredo to associate the word with the command. Well, there were worse problems to have, he supposed.
But the Laredo had done what Aster wanted, and nominally after the command had been spoken to boot, though at the moment Aster seriously doubted that the Laredo had even registered that a command had been spoken at all. “Good boy,” Aster said, and fed the Laredo a morsel of real rabbit meat. It was snapped up in an instant, and the Laredo was looking for more… and looking fit to savage the poor lure.
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Post by Noa on Aug 1, 2020 18:27:45 GMT -6
“Oh no you don’t,” Aster said, and quickly pulled it up high out of the Laredo’s reach.
He couldn’t keep it that way for long, so he decided to just get right back into it. “Dash,” he said, and flung the lure away again. Again, the Laredo chased after it, and again Aster rewarded him once it was over.
They continued this a few more times, and Aster noted that the Laredo didn’t seem to get winded the way most creatures did when they first started this kind of training. It must have had some inherent endurance built into it. Aster was mildly surprised; he hadn’t taken the Laredo for that kind of creature. But hey, that did make things easier on him, and Aster wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Goodness knows he was going to need all the help he could get with this one.
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