ic Turned Every Witch Way

[Gizmo]

The Espadas School of Self-Defense and Swordsmanship!

September 29, 2017

 

Whump. Whump. Whump.

 

Erik Espadas' fists impacted the punching bag suspended from the dojo's ceiling over and over, hard enough to rattle the chain and give him time to switch up his footwork between strikes as the bag swung back toward him. It wasn't rhythmic exactly, as his attacks varied staccato triplets of quick jabs to single heavy swings with the entire weight of his body behind them. Even so their was a somewhat hypnotic quality to the overall pattern, his steady breathing framing the train of percussion while a light sheen of sweats showed on the skin exposed by his light tank top.

 

He'd been at it when Raina had decided to set up in one of the stackable chairs lying against the back wall and he'd kept at it for at least ten straight minutes since, gradually picking up speed and punishing the bag more and more severely. He'd definitely seen her come in but hadn't said anything, expression focused and uncharacteristically severe. While the teenager knew the swordsman wasn't baseline human she was pretty sure he didn't have any measure of super strength and wouldn't be punching the bag clean off of its securely fastened chain. He certainly seemed to be making a go of it nonetheless.

 

Whump. Whump. Whump.

[Electra]

Raina put up with the thudding noise without complaint for a very long time. Ten minutes, at least. Erik was about as close to a regular guy as one could get around here, surely he couldn't keep smacking the heavy bag around forever. Or so she'd thought when she'd wandered in to read a library book and wait for her monkey to finish with his playdate. She didn't know what Merlin and VINCE were getting up to and she didn't care that much so long as nothing blew up or melted down, but the metronome-like thudding of the bag was going to drive her crazy Poe-style long before the pair got done playing. 

 

Finally she floated up out of her seat and across the room to where Erik was working. She could tell the moment he became aware of her by the slight tensing of his shoulders, but it didn't stop the rhythm one little bit. "So what did that bag ever do to you?" she asked conversationally. 

[Gizmo]

Erik snorted in amusement but annoying kept right at it, sending the bag into a shuddering spiral with pair of blows. "Looked at me funny," he replied just before meeting the bag's backswing with a haymaker and abruptly pulling short as the meaty sound of impact was accompanied that of tearing canvas. He stopped its arc with both hands and examined the hole, tilting the bag at an angle before too much of its contents could spill onto the practice mats. With an irritated grumble he hefted the bag off of its hook and carried it over to a corner of the room, setting it down out of the way.

 

Straightening back up with a stretch he looked about and tried to remember where he'd put the brush and dust pan before settling his gaze on Raina. He paused for a beat before saying, seemingly apropos of nothing, "Let me teach you how to use a fire sword."

 

It wasn't the first time he'd suggested that particular use for her pyromancy and at this point it was practically a running joke. Usually he pleaded his case with exaggerated enthusiasm before getting out of Talya's way and letting her get on with whatever Raina's actual lesson was for the day. This time however the offer was made with the same intensity he'd been applying to his workout, hands on his hips and looking her straight in the eyes. "I'm being serious. You should know how to do this."

[Electra]

Raina laughed anyway, looking deeply amused at the very thought. "I don't want a fire sword," she reminded him, letting her feet drift lazily to the floor like a balloon losing helium. "What would I even need a fire sword for? I can pretty much cause as much fire damage as I want just with this." She pulled the lighter from her pocket and flicked it to life, but didn't bother to harvest the flame for a fireball. "And I can do it while remaining safely out of range of melee combat. It's really a perfect system." 

[Gizmo]

Erik produced his own lighter from somewhere on his person with a flick of his wrist; he definitely seemed like the sort of father to learn a little slight of hand to amuse his kids. "Unless somebody gets close to you before you notice. Or you can't risk the collateral damage of a fireball. Or you're fighting someone who's been watching and is ready for your signature move and--" He stopped himself there with a grunt and rubbed the bridge of his nose, lighter tucked back away. Maybe it was just the workout suddenly catching up with him but for a moment he looked profoundly tired.

 

He shook it away and folded her arms. "It's just good to have options. I can't help you with most of your magic but this is something I could show you how to do. To help make sure you can protect yourself."

[Electra]

She cocked her head and studied him for a minute, taking in the air of weariness, the punishing workout, the words he'd said and hadn't said. Honestly she wasn't sure exactly what it all meant, except that it added up to something more than one of the impromptu lessons he'd give her sometimes on footwork or the proper way to fall. Rather than keep guessing at what might be being left unsaid, she came right out with her questions. "I get the weird feeling this is about more than keeping me from getting rolled for my lunch money. You let me watch your kids, you know I can protect them and me just fine. What's the sword going to do?" 

[Gizmo]

Erik didn't bother to hide a brief wince at being called out. He unfolded his arms so that he could rub the back of his neck with one hand. "We should have been ready," he answered finally. Heaving a sigh he continued, "We should have seen it coming somehow and Talya's old boss should have never gotten near you and your friends. He shouldn't have even had enough to make you a target to begin with."

 

The fencer's eyes unfocused as he looked off into the distance. "I used to be so careful. The old team never even knew my real name for years. When Ace tracked down my family's house... Dios, I was so mad." He scrubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm. "There were problems with that, too. It was harder to call for help. I dunno. The point is I let you down and I'm not planning on letting it happen again."

[Electra]

"You didn't let me down!" The words might have carried pardon, but Raina's tone was far more affronted than forgiving. "If you let me down, that means you're in charge of me somehow, right? And that it's your fault I screwed up because you didn't teach me what I needed to know?" She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. "I got news for you, then. I didn't screw up that night. I chose not to use fireballs because we were in the middle of a crowded club and I didn't want a Cocoanut Grove on my conscience. And we won, and nobody died, and that was partly because of me! What didn't I do that I would've done if I had a fire sword, huh?" 

[Gizmo]

"That's not what I said," Erik rebutted flatly, mirroring Raina's body language and glaring back. "You kept your head, you thought it through and you got your people home safe. You know you did I good job and you know we're proud of you." The young witch didn't have a monopoly on kind words that sounded more like a rebuke. "But you weren't there to save the day, you weren't on patrol. You were supposed to be having fun with your friends. Instead a nutcase with some genuinely disturbing capabilities knows who you are, knows what you look like and where to find the people you care about and admittedly Raina I am maybe not taking the thought of that very well, alright?"

 

He took a series of long breaths, visibly willing himself to resist the urge to get into a shouting match with a teenager. Instead he admitted, "The sword probably wouldn't have helped. It would have been flashy and stupid and probably made things worse but it is the only thing I am good at and the only thing I can think to do to help keep you safe." He exhaled and looked away, deflating very slightly. "Which is a 'me problem'. I get it." After a beat he added, "I know you didn't screw up. Don't think that."

[Electra]

"I don't think that," Raina insisted, sounding a little petulant even to herself. She uncrossed her arms and instead stood with one hip cocked and her hands on her waist. "And if you don't think some really disturbing people with creepy powers know who I am, you maybe haven't been paying a lot of attention to my career so far. But I've seen how you guys live," she pointed out. "Even when you go out for fun you're ready for a fight, cause that's just sometimes how it happens. I don't see why it's any different for me." 

 

With that said, she allowed herself to unbend a little, flicking a few loose strands of blonde hair behind her shoulder. "But I guess even if maybe a fire sword wouldn't have done any good at the concert, there might be times when it would come in handy," she allowed. 

[Gizmo]

The curt confidence drew an approving smirk from Erik, along with a rueful shake of his head. "Tell you what, humour me for a bit and then we can at least say we gave it a shot." Turning so that he was facing the mirrors on the wall he dropped into a basic stance he knew Talya had drilled into her pupil, pulling out his lighter once again, this time without a flourish. "You should be prepared," he agreed while waiting for Raina to follow suit, "but you oughta be able to take a night to hang out, do teenager stuff. Flirt with pretty boys. Or girls, whatever." She seemed to recall his sister saying something about coming out at about her age while chatting with Cathy. "Just because I can't switch it off--"

 

He paused and glanced over to the young woman. "Talya probably hasn't told you a whole lot about what I come from, I guess?"

[Electra]

Raina drew her lighter as well, this time flicking it on and harvesting the flame into her cupped palm. "Boys, definitely boys," she assured him, though she wasn't quite sure why. Maybe because her boyfriend was in Central America and it was nice to remind herself of him once in awhile, maybe just because it would be easier if it were girls and she wouldn't have to worry quite so much about hurting Fred's feelings except for the whole Alkahest thing. Either way it couldn't possibly matter. "But Talya's been teaching me for months now, I can fight and flirt at the same time without even thinking about it." 

 

She extended her small ball of fire into a slender spear, more foil than rapier. That was an easy enough trick, though she had no real idea where to take it from there. "I talked to your mom a little bit," she offered. "She was a cop, right, got hurt on the job? Raised you guys by herself?" 

[Gizmo]

"That's where all the good stuff comes from, yeah." He looked over her flickering construct with a nod, forming a hardboard of curving filigree around his own hand that extended out into finely tapered blade. "Don't worry about making a cutting edge for now. Giving it enough 'weight' for that to work takes practice so just focus on making the tip. My old man, on the other hand, left just before mi hermanita was born." He pulled himself into an en garde position and waited for Raina to follow suit. "Grew up thinking he was just a deadbeat. Which he was but it turned out he was also the extra special best boy of a secret society cult deal of mercenaries and assassins. Dunno if they're into blood magic specifically but they're definitely big on killing people for power so seems like a safe bet."

 

The swordsman shifted his footwork and clapped his free hand against one knee until the teenager bent hers a little more accordingly. "They've got all these rules about succession and breeding because they're creepy @#$%s, going back generations. That's why I'm built for this." He abruptly uncoiled like a striking viper, fiery blade thrusting forward before snapping back into a defensive position almost too quickly to see. "I was serious about only being good for one thing. It's in me. And me being the Jack is a real problem for them 'cause I won't play ball." He repeated the strike much more slowly, breaking it into several separate motions so that Raina could observe each step. "They tried to kidnap Eden when she was born, tried to kill us all when Talya was giving birth to the twins." His expression was stoney as he related the facts but not so much that she couldn't see a scowl pulling at his lips in the reflection of the mirrored wall.

[Electra]

Raina repeated his motions clumsily, getting each separate move mostly right but not quite stringing them together. It was hard to move and listen and concentrate on the flame at the same time, so that by the time she took the follow-through step, the "blade" looked more like a sloppy cone. She frowned at it, firming up the shape once more. "So did your mom know he was evil when she married him?" she asked, trying the sequence again in slow motion. "Or did he like trick her, and then run away when she found him out?" 

[Gizmo]

"Good. Keep your elbow a little tighter. She knew he had a past he didn't talk about but y'know, blond Europeans," he explained with a dry smirk. Knowing Talya and having met his sister's girlfriend in passing there was more to unpack there than Raina thought she wanted. Erik repeated the first step he's shown her again, stopping with each motion so that she could follow along. "Turns out he'd faked his death to get out of the House of Swords and the way he tells it he was trying to make a go of being 'normal' and left to keep us safe but we didn't hear any of this until a small army of wizards showed up to kill Ellie so really I think he just got bored." His voice was dispassionate, those emotional wounds having long since scarred over.

 

He motioned for her to keep cycling through the steps as he walked over and began gently correcting he stance. "Honestly, @#$% the guy. Mi mama did fine on her own with us. I was the big man in high school, lined up some athletic scholarships... and then she got hurt so I started working." By contrast that seemed a bit harder to talk about for him as he stepped back again and let Raina go through the steps without assistance, nodding in approval and moving to stand parallel to her again. "And then I started making magic swords without an instruction manual and I maybe had some anger to work out about assholes with guns, so..."

[Electra]

"Sounds like you were better off without him," Raina opined, tucking her elbows in as best she could. It felt weird, unnatural, but the sword didn't wobble around quite so much. She broke form long enough to firm up the slightly-droopy blade again, then retook her position and went through the steps again. Her patience for this sort of repetitive practice was limited at best, but she tried a little harder for one of the few adults who gave a visible damn about her. "So did you become a superhero so you could get in with a team to help you fight off the House of Swords?" she guessed. 

[Gizmo]

Erik actually burst out with a short laugh at that and had to stop what he was doing to compose himself. "Ha! No, young me hated the idea of a team. The way I figured it, first off I could handle anything just fine on my own - you can ask Ellie some time how that went, she was the one who had to tape up my ribs every time - and second anybody I trust was either going to let me down or get hurt because I let them down. Keep in mind this was a point where I was only sleeping every other night so I could fit in more training and patrolling while holding down multiple jobs." He shook his head ruefully. With four kids he didn't get a lot of sleep these days either but at least he shared the workload.

 

Noting Raina's waning patience he held up a hand to tell her to wait a moment while he jogged over the one of the equipment bins. "No, I joined up with a team because this real smart guy, super genius right, made a pretty good sales pitch. Got a bunch of us together, a cowboy, a fairy princess, bunch of other jerks and said he'd set us up with equipment, cover our costs, show us where we could do the most good. I figured I could keep doing what I was doing and pay for mi hermanita's school at the same time." He produced a handful of tennis balls and started tossing one in the air casually. "I got killed by a giant demon like a month into it."

[Electra]

Raina narrowed her eyes as she watched him dig the tennis balls out of the equipment. "If you start throwing stuff at me I'm probably going to set you on fire," she warned, then took a moment as his final sentence sunk in. "You got killed by a giant demon?" she repeated. The fact that it was even plausible spoke volumes, she thought, about how weird her life had gotten in the past couple years. Not that it had ever been normal to start with. "You look pretty good for a dead guy, so I'm guessing it didn't take." Her sword, which she had been ignoring now for all of thirty seconds, took the opportunity to roll itself up like a party blower and attempt to regain fireball form. Aggravated, she cracked it like a whip, sending it springing back to attention. 

[Gizmo]

He grinned infuriatingly. "The moral of this story should probably be that I've been set on fire a lot and failed to learn anything from it." He began to juggle four of the tennis balls idly. Of course he juggled. "But yeah, Huang's mom and some other folks turned back time, saved the day, it was fine. The point is we were a pretty crappy team at first. We didn't didn't trust each other, we were always arguing, everybody was trying to sleep with everybody." It occurred to him belatedly who he was talking to and he frowned. "Forget you heard that last part. Anyway, we got better. Some folks peaced out, some turned bad, some new people signed up but the ones who stuck around, they were family. We were all living together in this brownstone that we called 'the Brownstone' because I lost a vote and we had each others' backs. Bounty hunters and giant monsters and drug zombies, we could take on anybody. Now, I can throw these at you or we can do more drills. Your call!"

[Electra]

Raina thought about that for a moment, intently enough that the sword turned from silvery-white back to orangey-yellow and started to droop again. She gave it an annoyed look. "If you throw stuff at me, then I don't have to use the sword anymore, right? Because it's stupid to try and defend yourself with a sword made of fire against somebody throwing things at you when you could just turn invisible and fly out of reach, then fireball them from a comfortable distance." 

[Gizmo]

Erik considered that for a moment, still juggling. "That's actually a pretty good point. But I want you to practice keeping the sword 'solid' while focusing on other stuff and the alternative is sparring which would mean I'd have to let you stab me and I haven't shown you how to do that without roasting my internal organs yet." The chances of her being able to get a solid hit on him with her sword under normal circumstance were pretty low but there was only so much she'd learn from failing to hit him for an extended period of time. Even so he was apparently weighing the options seriously. "How about if we try this out I will introduce you to a bunch of talking bees the size of semi trucks. Who breathe fire. And who consider me a folk hero. Because I taught them the art of romance." He shrugged. "Or we could do more drills."

[Electra]

Raina's sword disappeared entirely, flickering out like a snuffed candle, but she didn't particularly care. She was much too busy giving Erik her best nonplussed stare. "You want to introduce me to fire-breathing bees the size of semi-trucks?" she repeated slowly. "Tell me again, is that what I get for doing the thing you want me to do, or the punishment if I don't? Because I think Talya would back me up on that being kind of cruel and unusual. Plus if you let me get eaten by bees you're out a babysitter and pretty much screwed as far as your next date night." 

[Gizmo]

"Sword," Erik reminded her, catching two tennis balls in each hand. "And the dragon bees wouldn't eat you! They're great! My friend grows giant flowers for them and they mostly just chill, doing bee stuff. And their names are all bee puns! The guy who bred the first ones was, y'know, committed to theme. He built some robot ones, too but they're not as big. And meeting them totally helped me bury the hatchet with this other hero." He waved a hand dismissively as he realized he was getting off topic. "She decapitated my buddy and I yelled at her, he was fine, I was totally the jerk on that one. We don't have to go see the bees. What do you want to do? Is this a buy you ice cream situation?"

[Electra]

Raina's stare had by now drifted more toward perplexed than entirely befuddled, though she made no attempt to reignite her sword. "Look, I'll make you a deal," she finally offered. "You put down the tennis balls and show me how to hold and wave around a regular sword, not one made of fire, so I can do the one-two-three-four move without having to worry about burning my own eyebrows off. That way I learn how to use a sword, you get to work through your feelings of misplaced guilt, and nobody gets eaten or decapitated by giant bees. Good?" 

[Gizmo]

"No, the zombie got decapitated by-- Never mind. Sounds fair. I'm probably still going to buy you ice cream, though." He tossed the tennis balls over his shoulder and they landed unerringly back in their bin. "I've got a lot of misplaced guilt and it'd be nice to do that for somebody who won't end up wearing most of it." Walking over to one of the weapons racks instead he picked up a pair of practice foils, returning to hand one to Raina. "Anyway, I got kinda off track there but what I was trying to get at is that I know I'm like this lame old guy who's obsessed with his weird hobby but I do get what it's like to be angry and sarcastic with everybody because if you fight with everybody at least you can actually win something, when you really need a win."

 

He shrugged as moved over to his own section of the training mat and raised his foil. "And I get not wanting to actually talk about any of that because it feels like showing weakness so you make a joke or do something crazy to deflect it. And I get that it doesn't ever really all go away, not totally. So sometimes I still have days where I need to punch a bag for half an hour. But y'know. That's me." He adopted the first stance he'd shown her again.