Sword Training

The training room was devoid of people, or at least it mostly was. An older student in black was training against a dummy, a shortsword in each of his hands. Montare had recently replaced his daggers with shortswords, and was practicing using them. He continued to slash and swing at the dummy, until he heard the door to the room open, which made him pause.

A thin figure smiled in the doorway, with her head tilted to the side. "And what did that poor dummy do to you?" She had a compound bow slung across her back with a quiver full of arrows hanging on her hip. "I hope I didn't interrupt anything."

Montare turned around at the sound of the voice, letting his arms hang at his side, still gripping the shortswords. "No, it's alright. I guess you came here to practice with that bow?" he said as he pointed at the bow over the girl's back. "I haven't seen you around the school before. Are you new here?" Montare questioned the girl. Even if she was a student he was simply failing to recognize, any girl whom had been at the school for very long would be unlikely to act even remotely nice to Montare, at least if rumors were still being spread.

"Yupp, completely fresh meat. Go easy on me." She pulled at the gray badge on her school blazer that signified her 'initiate' status. "And I'm a disaster with a bow, so I guess you could call it practice. Nowhere to go but up, right?" It had felt a bit odd, to see so many students carrying random weapons around ranging from swords to axes to spears. It seemed like a casual thing at this school. Culture shock, after seeing "GUN-FREE ZONE" signs everywhere her entire life.

She'd picked up a bow out of sentimentality more than anything. When she was younger, she'd had a brief stint with a troop of Christian girl scouts that specialized in children with disabilities, diseases, and terminal illness. They'd made her fletch her own arrows, assemble her own bow out of elastic yew and linen, and then let it fly at a couple targets. Jane hit the ground twenty times for every time she hit the target, but something about it had still stuck with her.

Jane wasn't expecting to be shooting arrows at anything any time soon, but if she could pick a weapon, it might as well be something she vaguely enjoyed. "Do you mind if I watch?"

Montare nodded at Jane's comment, knowing the necessity of practice well. If it weren't for his constant practice, he'd be nowhere near as skilled with daggers, and practice was the reason he was becoming just as skilled with shortswords. While it did of course take him years to master daggers, a lot of that skill could be applied to shortswords. After all, they were just longer and heavier.

"Sure, you can watch." Montare answered, before turning back to face the dummy he had previously been training on. Raising his swords once again, he began to swing rapidly with the sword in his right, more focused on landing many hits that aren't particularly harmful on their own, but can be dangerous when someone has a lot of the wounds. It would also be easy to notice that the sword in his left hand would be held backhand, and not being used to swing. While it wouldn't be apparent against a training dummy, normally the backhand sword would be used for blocking most of the time.

At his invitation, Jane let herself inside the room, closing the door behind her. The place was full of training dummies, blunted blades, practice staves, padded armor. She only had to wonder what exactly everyone was training for. It was something like you'd find in some backwoods militia camp rather than a prestigious boarding academy. Something about it reminded her of her loony great uncle that lived near the Canadian border.

She took a seat on a nearby bench and rest her face on her hand, watching him beat the poor sack-person to stuffy bits. After a few minutes of silence, she spoke. "And what are you training for?"

"I'm training because it's something I've done my whole life, and because I want to become a Guardian when I graduate." Montare answered as he continued his assault on the training dummy, which by now had cuts and slashes covering the entirety of it. It was a wonder the thing wasn't falling apart after every hit it received now. Still, Montare didn't stop attacking the dummy, and his habit of only stopping or using another dummy when the current one could no longer stand led to many dummies needing extensive repairs and stuffing replaced before they could be used again.

"Your whole life, huh?" She knew a little about the Guardians already, from what counted as her small 'orientation' when they first recruited her to the school, but at times she felt completely lost. They really just dropped you in here to fend for yourself, didn't they? Jane couldn't help but be curious. "With swords? Against dummies? Why?"

She'd grown up in the backwoods, the city, the boondocks, but she'd never known a childhood where training with shortswords would be considered 'normal.'

"Because everyone thought I was something special." Montare answered simply, as he finally stopped attacking the dummy, if only so he could focus on the conversation. "You'd think it would be impossible to seem like something special when everyone is a shapeshifter, but it happened anyway." he commented only half jokingly as he slid his shortswords into two scabbards forming an X shape on his back.

"And what makes you so special?" She smiled and raised her head, more than a little intrigued. In normal circumstances, she wouldn't have taken a claim like that very seriously, but when you were in a school where people could shapeshift and raise the dead, things weren't normal anymore. "Is this like one of those stories where you're a secret prince or the chosen one or something? C'mon, you can't leave a girl hanging."

"I guess you could call it a chosen one kind of thing," Montare answered, followed by the non-verbal answer of shapeshifting into a wolf in a matter of seconds. "Apparently it's something special to be able to shapeshift into a wolf instead of some other animal." A bear? That's normal. A fox? Nothing out of the ordinary. A wolf? Whoa! Montare could not figure out why being able to shift into a specific animal, especially when it wasn't some mystic, magical animal. Perhaps it was just a strange cultural quirk.

Jane opened her mouth to ask what he meant by that, pleasantly surprised that she'd been right on the money, but she never got the opportunity to speak.

The wolf was talking.

She'd seen a couple wolves up close, in the zoo and in the woods with all her crazy hippie cousins in Maine, but seeing a guy turn into a giant furry dog before she could say "CHOSEN ONE" was something else. So she jumped in her seat, her heart skipping a beat or two or five while the wolf continued on, as cool as a cucumber.

Jane slumped back down in her seat with a deep exhale of breath, smiling again, if still a little shellshocked. This school took a little getting used to, didn't it? "So that's your power..." Talking animals freaked her out ever since she first dropped acid. From then on, Disney movies had always made her a little queasy. She hadn't been expecting to see one in real life. This was real life, wasn't it? "So why swords when you can turn into a wolf?" Jane asked with a small giggle, brushing her bangs out of her face with a light hand.

Montare took notice of Jane's surprise, but simply ignored it. He thought it was a bit strange that she was surprised, given how she was in a place full of people that could shapeshift or control fire or turn invisible and probably anything else a normal human being can't do. Then again, she was a new student. Maybe she just wasn't used to things yet.

"Because I can't bite through as many things as a sword can cut, and it could always help to change things to catch someone off guard by fighting as a wolf instead of using swords and vice versa." he answered matter-of-factly.

"I guess that makes sense." She tilted her head, still trying to wrap her head around how it even... spoke. Could a wolf do that, even with a human brain, or was it just another part of Beata's incomprehensible magic? "But who are you gonna fight with swords, Mr. Chosen One? Is there a Dark Lord that's gonna rise up and you have to beat him?"

That was always how it played out in books. For awhile, that was all Jane could do. Lay in a hospital cot and read, until she'd cleared out the whole library of donated books, and then reread them. The only other option was to watch the same handful of movies over and over, play the same games until her brain was numb and she knew the whole thing backwards and forwards. It was making her feel stifled just thinking about it. "I mean, even if there wasn't, you could lie and say 'yes' and I'd still believe you. It's hard to be skeptical about anything anymore." Some days it felt like she was living in one of those books. An edgy teen supernatural fic peppered with plotholes.

"What the fuck!?"

It had been a long day for Maisie. The girl stretched with irritation, painted scarlet in the sunrise, a lighter in one hand and a cigarette balanced precariously in the fingers of the other. She lit it, took a draw, and breathed a long sigh. Going to class was not something she was well versed in, not something she necessarily had a habit of doing, but it was the first day of school and she kept finding the dodgy glares of people glancing at her in the hallways. Her teachers looked onto her strictly from the moment they read her name from the attendance sheet. Her uncle was watching her. What a fucking asshole...

Another draw, another shaky breath. She had peeled off from the courtyards to weave through the lesser-walked paths of Beata Academy, the freshly untrodden grasses beside the track and gymnasium, ducking behind walls so that she could have a smoke. She didn't have many left. Maisie had heard from a few people, some whispering mouths and shadowy figures, that they were sold in Rosebury, but she didn't know where.

She passed by the gym's rear entrance, peering into the windows of the many empty subrooms. A dimly lit dance room, a cluttered music room engulfed in darkness.

A training room with a wolf.

The cigarette nearly fell from her mouth as she rushed up to the window, pressing her fingers to the glass and peering in long and hard against the reflections of the sunset. Yes, That was a wolf! A girl was beside it, and rather calm at that. It bothered Maisie. It seemed that she was more angry at the girl for under-reacting than scared for her when she screamed "What the fuck," when she cracked the door with a wide-eyed peculiar stare. "What are you doing? Run!"