Missing Vampire: Reward Available (Hypernaturals 6)

Training

The next two weeks passed exactly as Helen dictated. There are good things about it. For one thing, Morgan, Jessica, and Helen treated the entire training schedule as being their own as well. Morgan and Jessica learned the wine trade alongside me, rode horses with me, walked the vineyards, sussing out how to tell if a vine is doing well or not. Studying the soil for pathogens. Learning the good bugs from the bad.

In an open field next to the stables, the global Crew trained together, usually in Helen's dictated twice a day. There are other Vampires flowing into Claremont, answering the call, and not all volunteers have been Crew in the past. They were set up in a more rudimentary area to work on the basics. Rachel worked over there as while she has had a few lessons, she is still a rank beginner at the art of fighting, Vampire style. Vampire style is knowing as many holds, moves, and punches as there are to learn but modifying them to be appropriate for Vampire levels of speed and strength. 

Morgan and I fight in a modified version of that, because while we are not the same level of physical power, we are both far faster, and we can go into Hypertime and then take our time planning out our next moves and responses.

Hypertime/speed almost always beats raw power. Power requires actually touching someone. Morgan and I can stay out of reach most of the time. On the other hand, being that fast requires massive amounts of brainpower. My brain is tired long before my body is, and that is part of the point. Push the brain to perform at ever-higher levels.

Everyone I know from the NorthAm Crew that was on our Mexican cartel 'adventure' is here now, with the exception of Cert. Alice, Valeria, Harper, Mia, Ava, Marina, and Jimena joined with Luciana, Helen, Jessica, Morgan and I to form a training 'pod'. We worked and trained together before so we felt like this would allow us to up our game even further.

The point of all this is not ONLY knocking off the rust but cross-training, so we also spend one hour each day mixed in with other pods. When we do, Morgan and I are so different from what they expect that it is very valuable for knocking down expectations and challenging fighting styles.

In the end, it (as it usually does) came down to Morgan and I in a pod of two. We train each other all the time, and we are so much faster that no one else can get their fingers on us. By the end of the training session we are coated in sweat from moving around as fast as our half-power muscles will let us move, and more than once we found our Crew-mates sitting in a half-circle and watching Morgan and I go at it like we are today's entertainment.

Vera and Angel did bring popcorn, watching, munching, and laughing. Wine may not go with popcorn, but they went in for the wine seltzers using the unsellable wine.

The unsellable wine is not horrid. I talked to Fiona about making pre-canned beverages under eighty-seven layers in protection to keep it from getting back to Claremont as a brand. She is looking into it. No point in wasting a seasons worth of wine just because it is only good, not great.

One early afternoon session, that turned into a bigger audience, Rachel, Fiona, and others from other training groups came over to watch. Morgan and I had kinks worked out by then, and are fighting in a blur of moves, countermoves, throws and rolls.

One thing neither of us dared to do when facing each other is go up into the air. The minute we are disconnected from the ground, we cannot maneuver. We do not have wings or rockets. Going up and leaving the ground is a sure way to get slammed back into it. The problem is that it is a perfectly valid way to fight a Siren or a human. They do not think of a fight as occurring in two and a half dimensions (We can't tunnel into the ground). To allow for that, Morgan and I agreed in this session to allow for aerial maneuvers as if we are each slower than we are. That meant I could jump over her and not get a face full of grass as a reward, and she could execute a beautiful spin and twist, arms tucked in, upside down. Like high diving but going up, not down.