Ruler of Neverland

Weird Noises - 2

"In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps."
― Dejan Stojanovic

- Jacob's P.O.V -

I guide them down to the training room, which is located in the basements. As soon as the dark and the cold staircase has ended it open up to a big room full of every equipment and weapon you can think of.

Alice stands with one of her feet on a bench. She is trying to secure her shoelaces with a double knot, the one I used to do for her when we where little. She wears a fully black training suit that nicely hugs her figure. I can feel how my cheeks turn a color redder and I quickly look away in embarrassment. Lucky for me Alice is still trying to tie her shoes while Chloé and Nate are busy looking at all the mesmerizing weapons.

"What is this place?" Cholé asks as she looks at her surroundings in wonder. "This is a old training center. When this house first was built in 1809 it was used as a training station for the guards. They had to learn all thoughts of things, archery, fencing, combat battles, knife throwing, melee fighting just to name a few. Here they trained to perfect their skills or to helped training the new recruits. When my parents took over this house from my grandparents they thought it needed some refreshment to match the new age. We still have some old weapons but most of them are new ones. We also installed some new lights", Alice explains as she points up at the ceiling where the bright cold light come from.

"Wow.." is the only thing that slips out of Chloé and Nate's mouths as they walk around the room. "So what do you want me to demonstrate before we eat some delicious dinner?", Alice asks us. "Can you really use all of these equipment?", Nate asks as he points at the wall full of stuff. "Yeah most of them, or at least a little of everything" she answers back.

I have already seen Alice use almost everything in this room at least once, so I let the other ones answer the question. A long time ago we used to train here together every summer . My favorite was fencing, especially fencing with Alice. We had always been equally skilled so she was a worthy opponent.

I look at Nate and Chloé as I wonder what they will pick. After they had looked at all the weapons multiple times Chloé finally answered "I would like you to bring out your inner Katniss". "Oh, excellent choice my tribute", Alice says as she heads over to the bows and arrows.

She puts on the armguard on her left arm, picks up some arrows and puts them in her holder. But before picking up the bow she starts to braid her brown flowy ponytail, "I need to get into character if I want to succeed", she says to us.

When she's done with the hair her beautiful brown eyes glow golden as she carefully picks out a suitable bow. At last she goes for a brown one. Its abrasions and scratches tell me that it clearly has been well used, even though it looks modern. "We could go out to the bigger archery course, but it seems to have become quite windy.", Alice says while exposing her beautiful teeth and walks over to the very end of the not small, but smaller archery course then the one down the hill.

She takes out one arrow as she concentrates on the board. The string goes back and she lets the end of the arrow rest on her right cheek. The four of us are more concentrated on Alice than if we would have a Harry Potter marathon. I watch as Alice inhales and exhales deeply before, finally, releasing the arrow. She doesn't put one, nor two, nor three but four arrows in the bullseye, one after the other. In between the arrows, no one dare to even breath.

- After the demonstration -
- Alice's P.O.V -

"How did you learn how to use all those equipment, Alice?", Chloé asks me. After the short demonstration I started to feel like my arms were burning. I guess I'm not in such a good form, which isn't weird considering the fact that I haven't trained archery in almost one year. Therefore the others head up to the kitchen to heated up some delicious frozen pizza and I took a well needed shower. With pizza in one hand and Cola in the other the four of us headed to my room.