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Post by Briar on Apr 18, 2021 16:01:36 GMT -6
One of the other things Briar wanted to teach the pups was to come when ‘called’... though in this case his ‘call’ was more a motion, or possibly a noise. After thinking about it, Briar decided that he would pat his thighs with both hands as the signal. It seemed intuitive enough, and relatively easy to perform, not to mention hard to confuse with any hand signals he already used. It was the one that he used for his other Houluh too, and keeping it consistent would be the best bet, since he had so many of them to take care of. Using different signals with different individuals would only be more confusing for everyone in the long run, himself included.
He snapped his fingers to get their attention first, since right now they didn’t have any inkling about the signal that he was going to introduce to them. Later on maybe he would be able to get away with just patting his thighs by itself, since that also made a noise, but for now it was best to get their attention with the cue that they knew. All three pups looked to him, just as they had been trained to. Good, at least they remembered that much… Although considering how much time they had spent practicing, it would be kind of sad if they didn’t. And then, Briar patted his thighs. After that, he held out a treat.
Nana immediately ran to him, and received a treat as her reward.
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Post by Briar on Apr 18, 2021 16:02:00 GMT -6
He expected that much from Nana, of the three pups he was training; she would be the one to come running at the sight of a treat. Doc came with her, mostly because someone else looked like they were doing something - Briar was beginning to think that Doc just really liked to join in, or maybe it was better to say he didn’t like to be left out. Whichever it was, if Nana was running to Briar, then he would too.
Fortunately, it worked out for the purpose of this training. Briar fed him a treat too. Only then did Cipher trot up, having seen both the others getting fed a treat. He was a bit slower than the other two, but he’d done what Briar wanted, so Briar fed him too. He could see the cogs turning already in Cipher’s mind, the way he used to see with Lyra, so he figured that Cipher was in the process of figuring out what the ‘game’ was too. Actually, Briar suspected that Cipher figured out what Briar had wanted much earlier than the other two had with the last two commands, but unlike Lyra, who then carried out the command perfectly every time, Cipher used that knowledge to deliberately test the boundaries instead. It wasn’t what Briar would have hoped for, but thus far he had been able to annoy Cipher into eventual obedience anyway, and he was hoping he would still be able to do that this time around.
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Post by Briar on Apr 18, 2021 16:02:30 GMT -6
He let them wander off, and once they saw that he had no more treats for them at the moment, they all eventually did so. Doc was the only one who stuck around a little longer, but even then the call of his playmates lured him away after a time. Briar wasn’t currently engaging with him for play, so it wasn’t very much fun to hang out around him and do nothing. Briar didn’t blame him, and in fact was doing his best to be as uninteresting as possible, so that they would wander away.
After a little time had passed, he snapped his fingers to get their attention again, then patted his thighs and held out a treat.
Once again, when she saw the treat, Nana came to him as fast as her legs could carry her. Surprisingly, Cipher did too, watching Briar with that same keen and intelligent gaze. Rounding out the lot of them was Doc, a beat behind, likely tipped off by both the others rather than the signal… But he would get there sooner or later. Briar wasn’t concerned, not over a relatively simple command like this.
He gave them their rewards and some pets for their troubles, then went back to being his boring old self until they had wandered away again. Once that happened, he repeated the process, snapping his fingers and then patting his legs. It was easy to fall into a pattern now that they had gone through a first few attempts.
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Post by Briar on Apr 18, 2021 16:02:55 GMT -6
After a while he stopped presenting the treat to see if they would come based purely on the signals. Nana hesitated slightly, but once she saw Cipher getting fed, she came to Briar’s side too, and from there her responses were pretty consistent. In fact, their responses were all pretty consistent after a few more reinforcements.
Briar ended the session there, not wanting to glut them on too many treats in one day. They would be coming back here the next day anyway, and they could continue from there.
Once they made their return the following day, Briar let the pups run around for a while before starting with some recall of what they had done the previous session. They responded pretty well, so Briar decided to stop asking them to look at him first before he gave the signal for ‘come’. Once their attention wandered off this time, he simply patted his thighs, and see if they would pick up on what he wanted.
Cipher came to his side right away. Surprisingly, he wasn’t playing games this time around, which ought to be a relief, but Briar wasn’t sure if he trusted this quite yet. Doc started, then hesitated, and while Nana looked at him, she didn’t quite go to him until she saw Cipher getting a treat.
But that was the nice thing about training the three of them in a group like this. Once the other pups saw Cipher getting fed, they seemed to be more reassured.
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Post by Briar on Apr 18, 2021 16:05:13 GMT -6
Doc and Nana came to Briar like they usually did to get their treats as well.
The next time Briar patted his legs, the response was, if not quite as confident as it was before, better than the previous attempt by a large margin. Doc and Nana were still a little hesitant, and halting in their approach, especially since he no longer had the treat out in plain sight. If it had been just the two of them, Briar might have held out the treat again, just as a little stopgap measure to help them build confidence. But they had Cipher as an example, and Cipher had never doubted. In fact, he sauntered up to Briar as if to show the other two up, tail held high as he took the treat with almost a disdainful air. If he weren’t such a pain sometimes, Briar would have found it funny.
From there, it was just a matter of more repetitions, until they were all performing confidently again. Cipher grew bored after a few more tries, and had to be hassled into listening yet again, but by now Briar had come to expect it. At length, all the pups were responding to Briar's satisfaction, and they could move on to something else, after a short break.
Briar was probably not going to do too much more with them today, since they had already finished up a trick this session. But it would be nice if he could get them to stay too.
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Post by Nadia on Apr 20, 2021 5:15:32 GMT -6
I wonder who - or what - writes up all those bottle tags.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:10:09 GMT -6
He might as well get a start on it now. For this he imagined he was going to have to work with them on a one on one basis at first, though maybe some of the cleverer ones might learn from watching their fellows. Cipher, in particular, might pick it up, though considering he didn’t know Cipher that well, and the general unpredictability of the pup, it also wasn’t something that he wanted to count on.
Either way though, the best way to start was just to get into it. He approached one of the pups - Nana, since she was the most food motivated, and he figured he could do something with that. He asked her to watch him with a snap of his fingers, then raised his hand up flat. She looked at him, and didn’t move; that was enough. He gave her a treat. Then he gave a different signal - a clap - and led her into moving with another treat. He wanted to give them a release command so that he didn’t always have them coming out of ‘stay’ with ‘come’; and in general a release command was a good idea to have anyway.
He was pretty sure she didn’t know what was going on yet, though the activity did attract the attention of the other two pups. It would take time before any of them absorbed the actual intent behind the tricks. But that was fine; Briar knew it would take more time and more attempts.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:10:35 GMT -6
And he was ready to repeat it until they got it. He had managed to get this far like that, and the pups were getting used to the training process now, so it wasn’t even as hard as it used to be.
Usually he worked concurrently on all three pups. In this case, however, he felt like he wanted to lay a little more groundwork with Nana first. Even though the other two pups were watching him now, he stayed focused on her. He went through the same process, getting her attention, then putting up his hand vertically, open and flat. He only held it like this for a few seconds, so naturally she didn’t really move during that time. He fed her the treat, then clapped his hands together, and led her around with another treat again so she would move around.
He could feel her paying more attention this time around. The treats were flowing, so clearly Briar had something he wanted her to do. But she definitely hadn’t figured out what it was yet.
He meant to continue with her like this, but by that point Doc was nosing his way in… and it was true that Briar would have to address him at some point too, so with a sigh, he got out another treat and began working with Doc too. He did the same things with Doc that he had done with Nana, but Doc was a little more… wiggly than Nana had been.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:10:55 GMT -6
Briar actually had to repeat the attempt a few times before he actually stayed still for even the two second duration that Briar was starting them off with. Only then did Doc get the treat. At least getting him to move again after the clap was easy. Briar didn’t even really need the treat as a prompt for that.
And seeing as he had gotten around to both the other pups, Briar supposed he shouldn’t neglect Cipher, lest Cipher get the idea that he was somehow exempt from this particular bout of training. Briar did the same thing with Cipher twice, during which he felt all the weight of Cipher’s razor-sharp focus, but he wasn’t actually sure whether Cipher understood yet what they were doing either.
It would, Briar thought, be a matter of more repetitions.
He went back to Nana, gave her the same hand signal, and waited longer this time. She was generally… not sedate, but a steadier creature than her playmates, and it wasn’t hard to get her to stay still. She held still for the duration, and got the treat; then he clapped and got her moving again. With that done, he went back to Doc… and had to correct him twice when he moved, before Doc finally stayed still long enough to get the treat. Doc seemed to be picking up on the ‘clap as release’ aspect of this though - or maybe that was just Briar being optimistic about Doc being unable to keep still for long at all.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:11:14 GMT -6
Either way, as soon as Briar clapped, Doc was off like a shot, running in circles and chasing his own tail. He was hitting that hyperactive phase of his growth, maybe. Briar made a mental note to see if he could do something about that energy level.
Finally, it was Cipher’s turn again. Cipher had definitely been watching the other two as they went about their training, so Briar would have been lying if he said he wasn’t curious to see what Cipher had managed to take away from all that. When he presented Cipher with the ‘stay’ hand signal, Cipher stayed still, until Briar clapped and led him around with the treat. That was all well and good, a surprisingly good outcome for a creature who could sometimes be unpredictable or even deliberately disobedient in an effort to push boundaries.
But the pushing began once Briar gave him the command again.
This time, Cipher deliberately took a step forward, watching Briar as if waiting for a reaction. And Briar gave him one: a correction in the form of a hiss. Cipher stilled, and Briar gave him the command to stay once more. This time, Cipher stayed still until Briar clapped, and got a treat.
Because it felt like Cipher was on the verge of understanding the concept entirely, Briar repeated it with him a third time. This time Cipher was very very deliberate about it - twice he disobeyed, each time wagging his tail with a brazenness that made it clear he was doing it on purpose.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:11:47 GMT -6
But eventually he relented and stayed the whole duration, and Briar was finally able to release him and give him his reward.
And then it was back to work with the other two, who still needed some more repetition before they would grasp what it was that Briar wanted from them. But at least there he had the assurance that he would do what he asked of them once they got there.
After a lot of repetitions, and some corrections for each of them, the pups got the idea that they were supposed to stay where they were when he gave them that hand signal. Once he felt comfortable that they had the idea down, he began to move around while asking them to stay, which also dragged out the duration of the command. All of them moved off their ‘stay’ a few times, though Doc did it the most, and took the longest to stop doing so. Cipher… Well, Cipher tested the waters plenty himself, but Briar wasn’t really going to count that. For Cipher, it was merely a matter of their moving onto what Briar was starting to term the ‘exorcism’ phase of his training for a new trick. Cipher was going to see how serious Briar was about getting his way, and Briar was just going to have to wear him down, the same as always. Briar wasn't looking forward to this at all, but he had accepted it as the necessary evil quirk of training with Cipher.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:13:22 GMT -6
But it did also give them more practice with the release command too. Sometimes he would release them without coming back to them - this took a few tries for them to get right, but all the repetitions and the modeling of the other pups helped them along. Eventually they seemed to understand that when Briar clapped, the ‘stay’ was over, and they could go wherever they liked - to him, or away from him, or off to chase something they had seen a moment ago.
A few more days’ worth of sessions of practice went into reinforcing the new commands, after which Briar felt pretty comfortable that they had it down. After that much practice, not even Doc was messing up anymore. And to Doc’s credit, once he understood what Briar wanted and developed the discipline to get there, he performed perfectly well, every time. It was Cipher, in the end, whose issues took the longest to resolve… But sure enough, even Cipher shaped up eventually, growing bored with their mental tug of war yet again.
With that, he was essentially done with the very basics of their obedience. It felt... like more of an ordeal than it had any right to be, to be honest. Maybe it was just the fact that there were three of them, and three pups all at once was always going to be a little tough to deal with. Cipher's whole attitude probably wasn't helping the matter though, and Briar wondered if his parents had been like that.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:29:48 GMT -6
With Cipher, there was no real way to know, considering the fact that Briar had adopted him from the adoption agency, and while the parentage was listed, it wasn't as though Briar was about to hunt down his breeders and force them to show him the parents of his own pup. Barring any genetic diseases, which he figured the adoption agency would have to disclose, there was nothing he really needed to know when it came to the parentage of the pups.
Cipher was certainly a curious looking pup. Briar didn't know if he had ever seen a pup with this particular coloration before. He didn't even know what he would call it, if he were pressed - though no one really asked him these things, so there was that, at least. He wouldn't have called his current life idyllic, and there were still plenty of things that weighed on his mind, but it was better than how it had been. Even he was surprised. He still didn't like or trust the man who owned the house with the tower, but Noa had never raised a hand to him, or tried deliberately to starve him, or cut off a piece of his flesh.
These were, he knew, very low standards. But he was also allowed to keep Yeo-reum, and even these hounds, for all that Noa thought them useless. It was freedom he could have had if he simply stayed on his own, but not freedom he would have expected from binding himself to someone else.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:37:40 GMT -6
He certainly wouldn't have done it again if not for the fact that he needed to go back to that house. He wouldn't have bound himself to the whims of another moneyed master for anything, anything less than the sake of the boy who had saved him when he was still small, but he had already attempted to sneak into the grounds only to find himself facing down the snarling maw of a heavily modified Wiurn. And now that he knew the place a little better, he understood that he would have no chance against Avander if Noa ever brought the Wiurn to bear against him.
The arrangement was a necessary evil. It was just a... pleasant surprise to find that it was not as abhorrent as it absolutely had to be - as abhorrent as Briar had expected.
Doc pushed his way into Briar's space again, resting his head against Briar's leg and whining. The other two pups were doing their own thing, wandering around and getting into mischief, but at a glance they didn't seem to be doing anything too terrible, so he let them be.
Crouching down, he stroked Doc's ears, and the pup whined again, but less mournfully this time. Briar didn't begrudge him this. Probably he needed the distraction. His thoughts were heading down an unpleasant path again, and although he couldn't do anything about the weight of his past and his circumstances, he knew that his mood would affect the state of the pups' mental wellbeing too.
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Post by Briar on Apr 24, 2021 19:46:01 GMT -6
And the knowledge that he had to hold it together for their sakes did help to serve as a sort of... tether, he supposed. Yeo-reum tethered him too, though in a different way; the Tat-lung's anger was so consuming that Briar had no choice but to be a ballast to it when the two of them were together. Because they had spent so much time together when Yeo-reum had still been young and innocent, Briar was the only one that Yeo-reum trusted anymore. Briar had never been cruel to him, which helped; and Yeo-reum had remembered his kindness even when bitterness at his treatment had soured him on all other humans.
But it was a sentiment that Briar understood well. He and Yeo-reum were kindred spirits in that sense. He remembered, too, a boy that had been kind to him the once, and now he was bearing all of this to find that boy and repay his debt.
He wondered if it would be easy, if he would be able to trust the man that that boy had become when they met again - if they met again. he wondered if they would become ballasts for each other, if it would help.
But until then, he had the pups to think about. He ran his fingers along Doc's soft short fur, and Doc stayed still for once, without being asked, and let Briar pet him as much as he liked. Doc liked the attention, Briar thought, but even then he wondered about this.
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