[Training] monkey see, monkey do

WESSEX

Don’t all seventeen and eighteen year olds feel like they’re not enough? Having just stepped over the threshold of adulthood, there is a yearning to be seen as equals with their peers, as forces in their own right. And they are; they hold within them greater forces for potential than their elders, who have chosen their paths and settled into them. Melita has a hundred different choices in front of her, and Wessex doesn’t want to close any of them to her. If anything, she wants to open more. But there is a logical progression to things, and impatience can only be rewarded with injury, here.

She notes the ever present defiance and simultaneous acquiescence and cannot help but chuckle at the unwavering spirit that seemed to take insult at every turn.

“Tell me what else you know,” Wessex demands, following on the tails of her proclamation of knowing pain. She watches the girl in the firelight, taking in her words and digesting them, whatever they may be, with a quiet reception. Until suddenly, somewhere in the middle, perhaps, or the middle-end, Wessex tries to take Melita by surprised with three short, sharp attacks. The first aims for her right thigh, the staff coming down to tap the top of her leg from Wessex’s left side - that is, directly opposite. It is quickly followed by an underswing aiming for the left side of Melita’s staff, outside of her grip, intending to either knock it out of her grasp or upset her balance. The third is purely a wild, large swing of the Ascended’s staff upward again, as the stick completes the pinwheeling motion begun by the first underswing, so that Wessex has now circled both ends of the staff under and over, returning to center.

She makes no move to defend herself if Melita can get a strike in before Wessex returns to her first position. She’s just testing reflexes, concentration, balance, and stamina.

No, I’ll be the stone
I’ll be the hunter, a tower that casts the shade
I lie awake and watch it all