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Post by Noa on May 7, 2021 13:00:56 GMT -6
One corner of Noa’s mouth pulled into a slight smile. “Not bad,” he announced. “We can work with this. Come on, Nightshade.” He called to the Wiurn, and led him by the head. Together the two of them passed between the first two poles.
Nightshade… wasn’t hard to work with, but he also wasn’t like Grunty - or even that Houluh that Noa had picked up, come to think of it. Food motivation was always the simplest and most straightforward, but in the case of Nightshade, as far as Noa could tell, what the Wiurn liked most was… attention.
In the case of today’s training, it wasn’t an issue. As long as Noa was still paying attention to him, Nightshade did his best to do as Noa asked of him. And if that was following along as Noa led him by the nose through a series of poles, then it was what it was. They didn’t go through the poles very quickly just yet, of course, but that was to be expected. This was a first pass, just to get Nightshade acquainted with the idea that he was supposed to be walking through the poles at all, instead of around them, which would surely have been much more convenient.
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Post by Noa on May 7, 2021 13:01:20 GMT -6
Unfortunately, the order of the day wasn’t convenience so much as it was agility, and to help make him more agile, Nightshade was going to have to go through some hassle like this.
Rhys, for his part, had settled somewhere nearby, to both allow himself to watch the proceedings and to stay out of the way. He knew that Noa would call for him if he had any need of him, and in the meantime it was better not to be a nuisance. The process itself also wasn’t very exciting, at least at this juncture, so there was little enough for the Faeron to comment on in his usual manner.
After walking Nightshade through the first time, Noa turned around, and walked them back through it a second time, going at the same pace. As he did, however, he kept a careful eye on how often Nightshade was getting stuck. Right now it wasn’t much of an issue, since Noa was being very careful to lead Nightshade through at a pretty good, pretty wide angle for entry whenever they passed between two poles. But if they wanted to go faster, eventually they’d have to go for a more efficient route.
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Post by Noa on May 7, 2021 13:01:53 GMT -6
And once they did that, there would be more chances for Nightshade to get tripped up then. But so far so good… And so on the third pass Noa led Nightshade through a little faster, though he kept the same roundabout trajectory as before.
{Are you just going to keep leading him through over and over?} Rhys said. {Will that really help him get faster?}
“I’m getting him used to it, since I don’t have a ribbon to explain,” Noa said. “Once he gets used to it, I’ll have him do it on his own.”
{Wouldn’t it be faster to get me to explain to him then?} Rhys, perched on the cart that was currently unused, offered his assistance. Noa stopped to think about it for a moment. He had never had need for that kind of thing before, both because Rhys hadn’t been present, and because he’d had a telepathic connection via ribbon to whatever creature he was training at the time. But this provided a different circumstance in which that sort of assistance might genuinely be of some use.
“Let’s try later,” Noa said, “once I’ve gone through it a few more times with him.”
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Post by Noa on May 7, 2021 13:02:03 GMT -6
Rhys agreed, and Noa continued to lead Nightshade through the poles. Now their passes became less and less meandering, and Noa was walking Nightshade through the poles at tighter angles. Occasionally they did have to stop, because Nightshade hadn’t gotten the approach quite right and had gotten caught on one of the poles. But because Noa had eased him into it gradually, and because they weren’t going very quickly right now, it didn’t happen often.
Eventually, Noa reached a point where he thought Nightshade would be able to manage on his own, at which point he turned to Rhys to relay some instructions. “I want him to start going through on his own,” Noa said. “It’d be good if he could do it quickly… But the most important thing is not to get stuck on the poles. Think he could handle that?” Noa said.
{Let me try…} Rhys stared at Nightshade, whiskers waving in the air, and a moment later, Noa could see Nightshade looking up as if something had caught him by surprise. It was actually pretty funny to watch; Noa suspected that Rhys was having to explain what was happening before he could explain what it was that Noa wanted Nightshade to do.
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Post by Noa on May 7, 2021 13:02:15 GMT -6
After a moment, Nightshade looked to Noa, then back to Rhys. A few more moments passed, and Nightshade approached the poles on his own. He nosed at one for a moment, flicking out his tongue to inspect it, before stepping through it and looking to Noa.
“Yep, that’s it,” Noa said. “Keep going.”
Nightshade went through the poles once by himself - a little faster than he had done when Noa had been walking with him, but not by much. {He wants some chin scratches if he did well,} Rhys offered, and so Noa walked up to Nightshade and obliged him. Nightshade seemed pleased with the arrangement, and returned to the poles for another round.
Nightshade wasn’t, as it turned out, the type to rush things. He went a little faster each time, but not dramatically so. It seemed that he had taken Noa’s advice about not getting stuck to heart, since at least he never got caught on the poles. Noa watched him go through them a few times, then called the session to an end. He was satisfied for now; it was a good first session, and they could do some more serious work next time.
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:02:58 GMT -6
Nightshade's gym training had gone reasonably well in that they had managed to make a start of it, and Noa looked forward to a fruitful second session when they had a follow-up. And so with Nightshade established, he decided to turn his attention to Azalea too. The two of them had thus far been partners in their time at the Pit, fighting the bigger challenges that had been dubbed 'bosses', and the fights had illustrated some gaps in the creatures' respective repertoires... which Noa intended to patch, but a part of that would involve gym training anyway, and since this sort of thing had a tendency to take time, he figured he would at least get started on this first, before moving onto things he could teach more quickly. Rhys was accompanying them, as was generally the case these days. Azalea didn't seem to particularly mind. The two of them got along very well; Rhys had a cheerful temperament, while Azalea was fairly mild and eager to please. They also both liked flowers, which was sort of a ridiculous thing to have in a Pliathor whose talents were meant to be deadly, sometimes there was no helping it with these things. 1
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:03:27 GMT -6
Well, Noa's Thundergug was a lazy, gluttonous lug of a thing too, he supposed; and even Avander had his vain streak. He had dealt with creatures whose personalities were more violent and to the point, and if given the choice, he did prefer the quirkier ones he happened to work with.
The woman at the counter of the gym usually didn't mind much when he showed up, since he was a fairly regular sight in these parts, but on this occasion even she did a double take. Azalea was, to be fair, a lot to take in. A Pliathor that moved about out of the water wasn't a sight that you got to see every day.
At least Azalea's teeth didn't show like those of her normal brethren, and the flowers decorating her back tended to take some of the edge off her presence. But she had been taught how to intimidate opponents, and she had never quite forgotten it, and now there was something in the way that she moved instinctively that tended to unsettle people and creatures alike.
Fortunately for the woman at the counter, Noa didn't spend much time there; just long enough for her to register that it was him.
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:03:59 GMT -6
He confirmed this by making eye contact with her, and then he was off to the area designated for large creatures.
Noa felt like this was pretty much the only part of the gym he had any real acquaintance with, since the only creatures he ever trained at the gym all ended up here due to their size. Normal equipment... He didn't know anything about that. It was a shame that it was outdoors, though he understood the necessity - or at least the lack of funding, perhaps, that made it a necessity. It was hard to get a facility large enough to house the full range of sizes that the creatures of the labs were made in, and harder still when one considered the possibilities allowed by that one potion sold by the Travelers Emporium.
{Oh, this place again,} said Azalea. {It looks different now.}
"That would be you being bigger," Noa replied. He said it offhandedly, as if it wasn't a big deal, but in truth it wasn't a transition that he himself had ever had to deal with. He had, after all, never been transformed into something else; and aside from the potions that he had fed to Azalea, he didn't actually know of any magics that could do that.
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:04:25 GMT -6
But then, it was probably better to treat it casually, rather than to give it unnecessary weight. If he made a big deal of something, his creatures might take their cues from him in that regard and begin panicking on their own, which he definitely didn't want.
Azalea was pretty good at moving around in her new body by now, so Noa wasn't worried about her ability to actually perform any of the things he wanted her to do. Granted, most of her time up until now had been spent on land, so he figured he might as well keep up with that pattern, and not throw her for a loop by making her swim now. "Let's take a couple of turns around the track to get you warmed up," Noa said. "And then... Well, I guess we'll see from there."
Azalea agreed, and once he showed her where to go and what to do, he could leave her to it. It was neither her first time here nor her first time doing training with Noa in general, and the ribbon she had allowed Noa to issue more specific instructions than he could have done with Nightshade in his last session.
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:04:37 GMT -6
Which was just as well, because Noa was finding that he needed the time to think. He could do the poles with her, which is what he usually did with his other creatures... But considering how long she was, and the particular way she moved, he didn't know if that would do as much for her as it would have done for Avander or Nightshade, or any of the Sarane.
Maybe he was also getting kind of bored of doing the same exercise with all his creatures. But it wasn’t as if he could go do the tires with her either, since she didn’t really move using her... legs. They were much too short to be used that way for consistent travel over land, though she could lift herself up on them if need be, a very little – relatively speaking – off the ground.
“Any ideas?” he said to Rhys while they watched Azalea make her turns about the track. It was kind of funny watching her do it, because she slithered around on the ground; and because she was so long, she covered much more of the track than the Wiurns did when they did the same exercise.
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:04:57 GMT -6
Rhys gave it some serious thought. {You could make her dodge things, the way you do in regular training,} he said. {Would that work?}
Noa thought it over. He did need to work with Azalea on her dodging skills again. Being left without her hearing after her transformation had made her pretty much impervious to being disrupted by roars and the like, but it had also dampened her ability to avoid attacks . The gym wasn’t the place to do it, but maybe there was merit in Rhys’s suggestion.
“I’ve got it,” he said, and began taking out the poles that he usually brought with him to agility training sessions. He began to set them up in hurdle formations rather than the vertical weaving pole structure in which he normally used them.
Rhys, watching him do this, was puzzled. {You’re going to ask her to jump? I don’t think she’s going to be much of a jumper.} His assessment was probably correct; Noa wasn’t sure if any creature who moved that much like a snake was actually capable of jumping. Maybe they were, but Azalea was probably too heavy for it, one way or another.
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:05:55 GMT -6
Fortunately for all of them, jumping wasn’t what he had in mind.
“I’m going to set these up as obstacles for her to avoid,” he said. “Try moving this one around, Rhys. See if you can do it with your telepathy.”
Having been given something to do, Rhys set himself to it, and the hurdle moved easily under his efforts. {It’s not that heavy,} Rhys said. {I can do it.}
“Good. I’m going to make more of these, and you’re going to shift them around on the parts of the track where Azalea isn’t, so that she won’t know what obstacles are where each time she makes a lap.”
{More work, huh...} Rhys sighed. {How did I know that this was going to happen?} Still, despite his comment, he didn’t refuse to do it. And it definitely wasn’t something Noa could have done by himself, since he didn’t have any telekinesis to speak of. There were spells for it, but most of them were weaker than what Rhys could do. And trying to move the hurdles by hand by himself would have been strictly impossible, since he wasn’t even close to being faster than Azalea at her full speed now.
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:06:20 GMT -6
Rhys could move things from a distance, and so the task fell to him to facilitate the training that Noa wanted to do.
Azalea finished her laps, and Noa finished putting the hurdles together. “Do you feel warmed up?” he asked her, rubbing her nose as a little reward for the work she had put in so far.
{Maybe. How do you tell?} Azalea asked. Apparently that kind of question was beyond her intellectual means. {I don’t feel hot or anything,} she added helpfully.
“That’s fine, don’t worry about it then,” Noa replied. Best not to make this more complicated than it had to be. “I’m going to get you to go around the track some more, but this time it’ll be a little different, okay? We’re going to put these hurdles on the track, and if you see one, you need to go around it. Do you think you can do that for me?”
{I think so,} Azalea said.
Noa smiled. “That’s what I like to hear. You can go slow to start, until you’re used to it. Just let us set up first.” With that, Rhys began moving the hurdles, distributing them at irregular intervals around the track.
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:06:41 GMT -6
By the time Rhys was done, they were pretty well scattered along the length of it. With the preparation set up, there was nothing else stopping them from... well, starting with the meat of the training, really.
“Have a go at it,” Noa said. “Start anywhere you like.” He himself was in the space inside the center of the track now, where he would have an easier time monitoring her. It also gave Rhys a nice vantage point from which to rearrange the hurdles.
Azalea slithered onto the track, then began making her way slowly around it, doing as Noa said and keeping a slower pace at first. Like this, she managed to navigate with ease, avoiding the obstacles as she went. The hurdles were both too narrow and too short to let her pass underneath them, though they weren’t particularly sturdy and would have easily fallen if she had brushed one, so she had to go out of her way to avoid them. While they weren’t difficult to navigate around right now, because they were so easy to knock over, she did eventually knock one down by accident.
“It’s okay,” Noa said, “keep going. But try to avoid doing that if you can.”
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Post by Noa on May 11, 2021 16:06:54 GMT -6
Azalea took another turn around the track, and this time Rhys began moving the hurdles around as she did. He did so well ahead of where she was to lower the chances of her colliding into something as he was moving it, but either way, it did make things a little more challenging for Azalea. It took her a few circuits around the ring before she felt confident enough in her ability to avoid the obstacles to increase her speed, but once she felt that she could do it, Noa prompted her to try.
Speed wasn’t really the issue, if Noa was being honest. Azalea could move pretty fast over open ground, much faster than one would expect of a creature of her size. But what he needed from her was for her to be... light on her feet, metaphorically speaking, and able to adjust her trajectory quickly. As Rhys moved the obstacles, she was forced to practice that sort of agility, adjusting her course on the fly to avoid incoming obstacles. And the easily toppled nature of the hurdles enforced the need for that precision, since she needed to be able to not clip the hurdles at all to keep them upright.
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