Literally at the second evening they would arrive at Chateau d'Or, Liz just tells her that some famous military specialist will come to train her. She's given his name, picture and time when he will arrive. Liz herself will have to attend to some business, so Alex will be on her own. Ward did not raise the question of why she would need military training, considering her successful barista career. But still not feeling herself in a position to question the motives or desires of her sister.
Tal would be transported and asked to wait for his new 'cadet' to arrive. A lot of Chateau civil service personnel would be passing by around him. Still behaving like a barista herself, and not picking too bright clothes, she would look no different from them. On her side she would easily recognize him, taking some time to think before approaching him. Alex would get close to his flank. He could barely hear her weak voice.
"Tal... Yahalom, Ravis, Sir?" She knows she looks stupid, but there's little she can do about it. For some reason, Ward thought that it would be a good thing to keep talking without waiting for his reply. "Reporting? For duty? Sorry, sir. You have arrived too soon or was it me being too late. I had no time to get a camo on. Will I need it?" She would then attempt at saluting, trying to look like in movies. Alex looks like she has no idea what she's doing or why she's here overall.
Chateau d'Or has a shooting range, some ruined structures a few miles away that can be used for tactical training. Spaceport and pretty much free flight permissions are given in advance considering the status of Captain Hall. It was not an ideal infrastructure, but it meets the necessary minimum.
A certain mister Ravis stood leaning against one of the many ornate pillars inside of Chateau d'Or, arms crossed over his slick, black synthetic jacket as he slowly panned his head from side to side, taking in all the new, interesting sights and sounds of this strange place. His good buddy Jasper Kincaid, another contractor who he'd served with on both Sprague and Sydney for probably a year, maybe more now, had probably put it best: Tal had somehow managed to shittalk his way on the Neural Net into an exclusive contract with Sydney's provisional governor herself, getting a free loaner ship, free lodging, extra base pay, and hot meals for however long it'd take for him to train one individual. Indeed, it was all a bit of a shock, especially considering how fast his arrangements had been made, and the somewhat scrawny, disheveled-looking military contractor dressed in an outdoorsman's jacket and a pair of high-cut combat pants gave off the impression that he'd been plucked straight out of a warzone, contrasting wildly with his newfound environment and the well-dressed civil servants carrying out their provisional duties on this fine autumn day.
Sighing, he eyeballed his watch, wondering how long he'd been standing around waiting. Having been a longtime resident of the forward operating base at Port Jackson, he leapt at the opportunity to relocate, even if only temporarily, and so had made the trip over to the Chateau far ahead of schedule, not faulting his new protege for being as late as they seemed to be. Besides, the downtime gave him a few moments to sit back and plan out their regimen, which would likely focus on basic weapon handling and practical applications for self defense. The Captain had alluded to something more akin to a BAF basic training course, but he figured most of what constituted "basic" training for a house military was wholly unnecessary and ultimately, a waste of time and effort for them both. Hopefully she wasn't too much of a fast learner, though. He could get used to living in a place like this.
Surprised was he, then, when someone approached him from behind, sneaking up right next to him before speaking. Immediately, he tightened up his posture, pushing his body off the pillar and turning to face the strange woman--wait, was this the person he was supposed to train? She knew him by name, somehow, something that most of the nameless, faceless denizens of this villa wouldn't ever have to bother with, but she didn't exactly look like much. Definitely not the type to be molded into some kind of high-speed, low-drag killer, but whatever. If he had to roll with it, he'd roll with it.
First, he raised a hand once she finished speaking, trying to stop her from going further. "I'm a contractor employed in an advisory role, you don't have to maintain formalities around me. Just, call me Tal." He didn't bother to mention the forty-five standard Sirian minutes he'd been waiting for, since it looked like she was having enough trouble existing as it was. "I showed up early so we could get started faster, you didn't need to bring anything except yourself. Come on, let's go hit the range and get this show on the road."
He nodded his head down the hall, unfolding his arms and starting off in the general direction of where he thought the range was. Chateau d'Or was something of a maze in of itself, even with all the signs detailing different locations, and so all he could was hope he was headed in the right direction. Oh, and one more thing.
Oh really, now he is not behaving like Bretonian officers do. She's only starting to get into Bretonian social games, but this is not something that she likes. Ward is glad to meet a simple person much like herself. Naturally, Tal, as all professional military people got some specific patters of behavior, but Alex has hope that she will work out the relationships with him. She expected him to be more strict, so the next moment he spoke, she feels much more relaxed.
Alex looked nothing like her sister, she has got some more expensive cloths. But she still preferred a dark-colored jacket and pants, among not very high heeled shoes. Passing on makeup and hairstyle, she looked as common and casual as one could imagine. Lacking any noble Bretonian manners or even local accent. That girl is obviously out of place here and literally everything about her was screaming about it.
Ward instantly got some sympathy for Tal, at least her smile and an interested, close look were signaling about it. Tal could read or even care to try and read her body language. If she had some enthusiasm about this, then it was related to her spending more time with Tal than actual training. Not like she would have to intentionally underperform to make it longer, she's perfectly aware of her low potential.
"Oh, that's so good we can skin on formalities. You can't even imagine how I am tired of..." She would get closer to his ear and whisper. "Of this Bretonian bullshit." She would move back, being happy to admit it at least to someone. "After we are done come to the bar, I will shake some good stuff so you will take some shots there too."
Knowing Chateau just a little bit better than him, leading him to the range. Remembering the way and trying to look into her phone with Chateau's plan from time to time. It had some bots trying to move like the potential enemy would but kind of failing at purpose. In any case, those were much better static targets. Arsenal next to it had the most common basic weaponry in service of Bretonian and Libertorian troops. Some CR designed rifle looks as ugly as their ships. Few Corsair trophy automated rifles are also present, but there's an apparent lack of ammunition for those. It looks like it was fired before them.
"I believe it's here." Alex said, after looking around. Yes, she's correct.
Tal stood by as she overtook him with confidence, or at the very least, more confidence than he had with regards to navigating around the place, making sure to maintain a decent amount of standoff between the two of them as he loosely trailed behind her. Despite his lax attitude and mannerisms, he still maintained a bearing befitting of a professional, and the last thing he wanted was for some random suit-and-tie official to think he was creeping on the Captain’s half-sister or something, a surefire way to get kicked off the planet and blacklisted.
“Trust me, I know. It’s why I ended up pursuing contractor work when I got out of the Liberty Marines; there’s a lot less bullshit between you and just wanting to do your job. I get afforded a lot more, uh, how do I put it, autonomy down at Port Jackson than our BAF partner units do, and it shows.” He hushed down his tone of voice as he continued, not wanting to offend a stray passer-by. “I never understood the hard-on Bretonians have for this formal officer nobility stuff, either. Hell, when Captain Hall first contacted me on a private Neural Net channel offering me this assignment, I must’ve spent a solid, what, two or three hours just sitting in my room writing a little script full of big words and good manners to use in my reply. It worked, but if she knew how I was really rockin’ and rollin’ I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”
He’d intentionally failed to acknowledge her offer to get drinks later, hoping his little tangential tirade would blow it over and that she’d forget the idea wholesale by the time they were done training for the day. Not that he didn’t appreciate it, but he didn’t exactly have the best track record with alcohol, becoming first intimately acquainted with the substance during probably the lowest point in his life, and managing to kick the habit for five, six years now had definitely changed him for the better.
For what it was, the range at Chateau d’Or was perfectly adequate for his needs, featuring wide lanes, reprogrammable targets, and an adjacent arsenal that’d been inventoried and restocked by the occupying force. Tal made entry first, squeezing past her and looking around for his belongings—ah, there they were, in the very distinct tan-colored high-impact oblong crate. While they allowed him to bring his own weapons and gear for the purposes of demonstration, the local administration were adamant on storing them under lock, key, and guard inside the firing range’s arsenal room at all times, and so he had to take a second and a knee to reunite himself with all of his equipment. There were no building policies on empty pouches and belt mounts, including the two rifle magazine ones on his left hip, and so he first filled them with full 40-round magazines for his rifle, followed up with the polymer retention holster with his handy laser pistol tucked inside of it, which went back right at home on his right side, snapping into place on the mount by means of sturdy quick-locking hooks. Next came safety glasses and electronic hearing protection, two definite necessities, and then his rifle, a long, unwieldy, attachment-laden Ageira-produced light arm on an old, worn-out combat sling that he lazily looped over his head and under his left arm. Perfect. He was now sporting a shot-for-shot recreation of his appearance during his final days on New London as part of the relief force: low visibility, but practical, with the veneer of an expert.
“The first thing we’re going to work on here today is stance, probably the most important thing to get right going forwards. Humans weren’t born shooting guns, they’re a foreign object to us, so we have to compensate for that accordingly. There’s a lot of...biomechanics, kinesthetics, and other sciences behind shooting people, shit that’s been vigorously studied, researched, and developed since way before the sleeper ships left Sol. It’s nothing like what you see on those weekly Neural Net holodramas.”
Standing up, he walked over to a nearby gun rack, pointing at one of the gold-plated, painstakingly-engraved Corsair automatic weapons. “Hey, check that out. Been shot at by plenty of those,” he remarked to ease the mood, his eyes wandering and eventually coming upon the standard Bretonian particle rifles sitting right above the new-model tachyon rifles that the Libertonians were issuing. “So, I’ll let you demonstrate with this here. Chances are, if you’re here and you get into a combat situation, you’re probably going to be armed with one of these. You ever handle a weapon before? Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot, always keep it pointed downrange, and don’t point it at something unless you’re going to shoot it.”
Carefully, he took the Bretonian rifle off the rack, making sure it was depowered, devoid of a powerpack, and set to safe for redundancy purposes, and handed it to Ward.
“Now uh, say some yala-yala motherfucker just hopped the curb 50 meters down the road that-a-way and you gotta gun his hairy ass to the ground. What do you do? Get your gun up, show me your stance.”
Ward smiled when he mentioned her sister. Alex is just sometimes starting to feel her self-importance based on her family line. She really got mixed feelings about it, on one hand, she's not feeling like it's her thing, on the other, it's good to feel proud of herself and her family. Alex could not stay silent about him mentioning her sister among other Bretonian officers. Ward honestly thinks that Liz is better and different. Kind of the childish point of view, but she's fairly convinced in that.
"I don't know, at least Li... Captain Hall is enjoying herself while doing those. You know, Bretonian things. I think she's a great actress above all things." Alex paused, maybe she's saying something that is not needed to be said. "Others are just boring."
Alex got a little bit upset that her invitation was ignored because shaking cocktails is pretty much the only thing she's capable of. And being denied at that field kind of hurts. It makes her angrier and may even have a positive effect on her training. To a degree, that anger can help unprofessional at warfare, of course.
She would stand, listening to his instructions, nodding when he was finishing sentences. That girl can listen and actually trying to understand what she was told. Maybe she will not have great reflexes that will allow her to become a capable combatant. But she could learn a theory, which is sometimes enough to save her life.
Listening to command, Alex is attempting to execute it as fast as possible. Holding her back straight, aiming at the left eye for some reason. Her thumb would also cover a gun sight and all in all, this looked disastrous. Her speed was not overly bad, and her hands are holding the gun's weight quite firmly. If her hands are even shaking, they are shaking very slightly.
”Yeah, well, they all kinda blend together after a while, but I gotta deal with it since they’re the ones bankrolling us. I dunno much about the Captain, though. She’s new around here.”
Tal watched her as she brought the weapon up, taking a step back and leaning to his right to get a better overall view of her posture and form. It didn’t come as much of a surprise to him that she carried herself the way she did, for it was fairly typical of newer shooters, and he knew exactly how to correct it. Good thing he decided to try and catch it now, so that he could get her to start developing muscle memory for a solid, balanced stance.
“Alright, so, you remember that stuff I said about guns being foreign objects to us humans? This is what I mean. You pick one up, and you assume this stance is optimal because it’s comfortable, and you think you’re balanced, but let’s talk about biomechanics. When you’re standing upright like that,” he paused, stepping over and putting a splayed out hand over the muzzle of the empty weapon, “I can push you right off your center of gravity, just like this.” He applied a firm, constant pressure to the weapon with his palm, pushing her backwards with relative ease.
“What you want to be doing instead is something like this.” For demonstrative purposes, he entered his ideal shooting position: left foot forward, bent at the knee, right foot backwards, totally straight, roughly shoulder width apart. The rifle smoothly swung up in his hands, his upper back arching forwards as he pulled the wide-cheeked buttstock into his shoulder pocket, his offhand wrapped firmly around the thin free-floated handguard, thumb-over-bore. “Leaning forwards into your weapon, but not driving the weapon forwards, good skeletal balance, positive weapon control, both eyes open looking through the sights. Remember, when it comes to maintaining a strong standing position, you want straight lines going along the body. Straight lines are strong, angles are not. So, try that again. Lean into your weapon, and make sure your footwork is like mine right here.”
Tal dropped his weapon to low-ready, keeping his feet planted in the same positions for reference as he turned to look at her. When she adjusted herself properly, he reached over and put a hand back over the muzzle, trying to push her back with the same firm, constant application of force to no avail. “You see what I mean? I can sit here and pound on this thing all day and you won’t move. Now, let’s see what happens when you lean too far into it, because that’s also bad. Here, bend over a little more.”
He put a hand on her back and ushered her forwards, into an even lower, hunched-forwards version of his example stance. “Now you’re bent over too far. When I push on you again, like this, I can just throw you around like it’s no big deal. So, remember. Straight lines are strong, angles aren’t.”
She seemed to be picking up on it quick enough, at least in theory. Practical application would come later, and a good understanding of the theories behind the science would build a healthy foundation for when they got to the meat of the training. “Next, let’s talk about target transitions, or if you need to move off-center for whatever reason. Lotta guys like to do this number.” He resumed a firing stance with his own rifle, turning his entire body a few degrees to the left, then back to the right, stepping both feet toward that direction so that his beltline faced the imaginary enemies.
“You don’t really have to do this. It takes a lot of time when you may not necessarily have it. Instead, you can just do something like this.” The same motions, first to the left, then to the right, except his time his feet remained firmly planted as he maneuvered his hips down and around to face them wherever he swung his weapon. “I can do this a lot faster and still remain just as stable. You want your beltline to be pointing at the target as you transition or turn to face them or whatever—basically, whatever you point your dick at dies. Make sure you don’t snap your weapon around, either. Smooth transitions work best; slow is smooth, smooth is fast. You got all of that?”
Ward is was listening, trying to understand everything, but slowly she was losing track of things. As on any lecture, she starts to think about her own things. The first thing that comes to her mind is the pair of kinky boots that she has ordered, it will take one week for them to arrive. They cost her 3 monthly salaries on Holman, thing amount of good things she can afford now is simply amazing. It makes her smile at the part where Tal started to say something about gravity. Alex, of course, trying to suppress is as well as she could, trying not to look like an idiot.
Which brings her back to the memories when she did, those shameful moments are striking especially painfully. Especially first meeting with Steiners and her sister. Not that many times have passed, but even now she would not ever behave like this. It's awful like she was wrong absolutely at everything, especially the attempt of kneeling before Liz at the very first minute of them seeing each other.
Now, when the lecture was military-focused, Alex is imagining herself in uniform and shiny helmet. Somewhere in Syndey shithole hunting down the Sairs. Oh, she would waste those barbarians, unloading dozens of magazines. Those savage barbaric brutes are pretty much standing in the way of her family wellbeing. Explosions, fires and smoke, and badass Alex in the middle of all of it conquering the planet for her sister to govern. Yeah, that could be cool, but it's just one of those childish fantasies.
There is no way she could enjoy the corpses around her, blood and maybe some internal organs that flew away from their owners after something big exploding next to them. Much less pleasing picture is appearing before her eyes, but vanishing after Tal is pushing her to demonstrate something that he was saying about balancing.
Now he starts to fix her positioning, manipulating with her body. At some point, she wishes there was some more sex to his training. Yes, he got charisma of an aged stone wall, but after all, he's still kind of a hot man. Sadly, Tal was actually focusing on training her, and her body is flexible enough to adjust to the position he wanted.
The last bits of an illusion of understanding is disappearing from her look. Naturally, she will remember something from this, but she's not able to keep the full picture. But in the end, focusing, she would repeat the movement she needed. Barista is not an easy job, so she had just enough straight and coordination to make those movements more or less on decent, for a beginner, level.
She did try to make her hips move more sexual to seduce him, which reflected the speed and quality of the movement. Other than that, shaking cocktails have provided her with a good level of coordination to focus and look like she knows what she's doing at least in the end.
"Most of it." She replied, making a short nod. "Will have to practice those moves, turn those into reflexes as it is with making cocktails. It's only hard for the first couple of weeks. Then it's all automated. Guess the main difference is that I will become a killing machine instead of a bar machine." And that was her attempt to make a joke. Even Bretonian blood is not providing her with a good sense of humor.
Tal turned his head downrange while she adjusted her posture, idly keeping both arms up as guides for her to shape her posture around. His mind was wholly elsewhere, absorbed in the stillness of the various sizes and shapes of robotic targets sitting at the end of the lanes, and it was only when she spoke up that he snapped back to attention.
“...Uh, yeah. Sure,” was all he said, empty gaze looking over her new stance that now passed muster. From here, it’d just be a lot of training and drilling until she assumed it during any confrontation, for the acquisition of that aforementioned muscle memory. “If you’re feeling confident, we can take some shots today.” Not quite the alcohol type, no. Slowly, he turned and stepped towards the armory, his old hiking shoes clacking on floor tile with each step, searching quietly for wherever he’d tossed that rifle’s powerpack. Starting with the bench but finding nothing, his eyes wandered back up to the gun rack, thinking he might be able to pull a spare from one of the other Bretonian rifles, but instead, he fixated all of his attention back on the Corsair samples, narrowing his eyes and inspecting them with much scrutiny. It’d been months since he’d seen one of these, not since the end of the Battle of Las Palmas.
Unlike her, he’d lived the fantasy, or rather, the nightmare that was combat on Gran Canaria. His response to the Captain over the Neural Net, the one that netted him this accursed reassignment to begin with, had not contained a single shred of exaggeration: for the month-and-a-half they were fighting in Las Palmas, they’d turned it into one of the worst places in the sector as tens of thousands of insurgents bore down upon and encircled the settlement and its defenders. It was Bretonia’s forgotten war, by most accounts, overshadowed mostly by the long-going Gallic invasion as it reached a climax, and it remained perhaps one of the most unpopular conflicts in terms of interfactional opinion, but nonetheless, it was one that slowly and painfully became theirs, a group of primarily-Libertonian contractors fighting and dying for a foreign flag half a sector away from home.
He couldn’t remember if it was one of these types of weapons that’d wounded him badly enough to take him out of the fight. It’d happened so quickly during a particularly risky street-crossing roughly three weeks into the course of battle, that all he could recall was running as fast as he could, suddenly feeling a sharp sting in his left knee, then total numbness of that entire leg as it gave out underneath him, sending him tumbling forwards onto the pavement. For a half-second, he had thought he was dead, until he was shaken back to reality by a missed follow-up shot that pinged off the asphalt right next to his head, mere inches away from turning his face into a canoe, and he was whisked away to safety by the shoulder straps of his ruck. The man who rescued him, Jasper Kincaid, was struck in the neck in the ensuing exchange of gunfire but survived; that same man renewed his contract and was the one who commented on how Tal managed to trash talk his way up to the top.
He’d looked down to see a weird, burnt mess, small specks of exposed, bright-red unscathed muscle shining through a sizeable smouldering crater that occupied most of what used to be his knee. His personal shield generator had absorbed most of the strength behind the energy weapon blast, likely saving him from losing his leg below the knee, but he was combat ineffective from that point onward. The focus on the Gallic war had, for the most part, drawn most of the BAF’s assets and attention away from Sydney, the skeleton Stirling battlegroup struggling to keep up with logistics whilst staving off well-organized Corsair forces in orbit, and it took significant effort to secure casualty evacuation. To make it worse, the adrenaline rush wore off ten minutes after their brief firefight, leaving him in a state of unbelievable pain for nearly two hours until a Clydesdale, pock-marked with scorches and dents from ground fire came to pick him up and deliver him to Port Jackson, where he was treated at an aid station.
Doctors were miraculously able to save and fix his leg with a hasty but highly-effective patch-job: cleaning the wound, surgically separating any traces of uniform that had fused to his skin, filling the joint with adaptive synthflesh, and sealing it back up with copious amounts of bioglue. After that ordeal, he was told he’d get two days to rest and heal before going back into the fray, and once two agonizingly-long days spent sitting on the floor in an overcrowded medical tent surrounded by the constant cries of the dying were up, he was put on another battle-scarred Clydesdale and flown back over to Las Palmas, where he continued carrying out his duties.
Fast-forward five months, and Las Palmas was doing no better. It wasn’t until after the Gallic war that the Bretonians truly began to rebuild the city, and progress was still slow. Of the ninety-six men and women comprising eight Cold Harbor Special Projects teams deployed on Sydney at the battle’s onset in April, twenty-eight had died as a direct result of combat by the battle’s closing in mid-May, with an additional two dying after the battle when their medical freighter crashed moments after takeoff. Evergreen, despite being the first of these teams to arrive on-station in the city, held the dubious distinction of being the only Special Projects unit lucky enough to avoid any deaths, although seventy-five percent of the team had been wounded-in-action at least once, while a third were rendered totally combat-ineffective within the first week and had to be evacuated to hospitals on Planet Cambridge, and less-than-half ultimately renewed their contracts with the Kingdom of Bretonia.
Tal didn’t know why he did it. After spending almost a month on New London before, during, and after the attempted glassing of the planet, he claimed he was done, but ended up deciding to come back to Sydney, where Bretonian involvement and interest was growing and there was really no place for contractors anymore. Then, him of all people ended up here, in Chateau d’Or, a far cry from the grassroots in the FOB at Port Jackson, to train the Captain’s half-sister for a month, leaving behind the men and women he fought so viciously alongside for these artificially-greener pastures, even if it was only a temporary arrangement. It was ridiculous how untouched things felt on the other side, how the assignment was almost presented to him as some kind of reward for the innocuous, empty bragging of his military prowess over the Neural Net. Instead of anything meaningful, he was promised lodging and bonus pay, as if it’d just all turn out to be okay, but the worst part? He took it. He willingly turned his back on his people, and for what reason? He couldn’t answer that, but one thing was abundantly clear.
He didn’t deserve any of this.
Taking a deep breath, he forced his mind off the subject and the weapons in question, spending a total of five Sirian Standard seconds staring at the rack blankly before finding the powerpack on top of a stack of folders on the bench. Of course it’d be in the last place he looked.
“Alright, here you go,” he sighed, handing her the pack. Not that he could load it for her any better than she could—the weapons he was familiar with from the service were on the rack underneath the Bretonian rifles and on his body. “Load up, fire at that target directly down the lane. Go at your own pace, I’m not timing you today.”
Ward closely observes him thinking of something, watching his face expressions change as he went deeper into his thoughts. It was something not good, and Alex as a person with developed empathy could not see such mental suffering. "Dude, you really need to get some drink, you should have seen your face just now. I know you are under contract, maybe some terms are disallowing, but you really need to find a way to relax." She says while taking the power pack. Kneeling down, at first spending her time trying to push it into the slot by the wrong side. After pushing even more violently, her dumb brain is realizing that she's doing something wrong. Then she finally flips it, loading a gun.
She then stands up, looking and feeling awkward as hell, taking up a position for aiming. Wanting to land a headshot, because apparently it's cool. However, bots moved rather fast and it took some time. Aim took to longer than it need be and her hands started to get tired. Finally, she's pulling the trigger, but it's apparently stuck. Tal has set her rifle for safe and Alex has a little idea about it. Pulling the trigger harder is not helping.
Looking annoyed, she almost threw the thing on the floor. Like a little girl who got denied in playing. "Yeah screw this, this thing is not even firing." Ward looks like she just really wants to stop this upset and move to her regular activities. "I mean, let's try next time with something else. Better go to the bar, we have spent enough time training. And you must be tired from the long travel down here. Come on..."
She attempts to put the rifle aside, just like it was a stick or any other casual thing. Though, she thought that he could feel upset that she denies training, rushing in with even more words to excuse and probably avoid him feeling bad. "I mean we both know that I won't be great at this, we have more than enough time to learn the basics. And this will fully satisfy uh, admi.. Captain Hall." Now that was awkward, why would she call her sister an admiral? "It's better to have a good time, no?"
”No, no, I’m fine,” he lied, taking in a deep breath, “I’m just, uh, looking at the little engravings on the receivers here. They’re...intricate. Lotta stuff going on there, so I had to concentrate. Besides, alcohol wouldn’t do me any good, I don’t drink, haven’t drank in...six years now.”
He talked fast, speeding up towards the end of his sentence in an obvious act of deflection. Not that he thought she was particularly gullible or anything, but as more of a natural, panicked reaction, desperately trying to change the topic. By the looks of it, it worked, and he breathed a quiet sigh of relief as he took a step back, crossing his arms over his jacket and shifting his weight around to lean onto his right leg. Confronting his issues was something reserved for himself and/or a close individual, and certainly not the Captain’s half-sister; the additional baggage dumped onto someone else like that probably wouldn’t translate well into post-contract evaluations, dashing his chances at scoring a re-up. Oh, sis! The trainer you hired for me is actually a fucking psychopath!
He snickered at that last thought, taking another deep breath to calm himself as she fumbled with the rifle, eventually managing to load it. When she shouldered the gun, his eyes briefly lit up, noticing that she assumed a proper position, but fell back down when the anticipation over her firing grew longer and longer until he realized that it probably wasn’t going to happen. No thanks in part to him turning on the safety, actuated by an ambidextrous lever somewhere near the thumb, something that she’d neglected to check. Maybe he should’ve started with basic firearm anatomy instead, but it was too late. Obviously frustrated, she had lost interest, though part of him doubted he ever had it to begin with, and had thrown the weapon aside for him to bend over and pick up.
“Here’s your problem,” he illustrated, holding the weapon forwards and using his thumb to actuate the safety lever on and off, “It was set to safe. Now it’s on fire, now back to safe. Marked clearly with little engravings, take note for the future.” That done, he set the weapon back on the racks, getting a glimpse of his watch. It wasn’t exactly a big lesson, no practical applications yet, but it’d still taken a significant chunk of time out of their day, and he figured she was right. Live-fire could happen on a different day, and all that really mattered right now was that she had the theory down, which she did. Not that she’d need it, really, considering someone like her should have a protection detail.
“Whatever, fine, we’ll call it a day.” He didn’t sound angry, at least, on the surface, as he started pulling equipment off of his belt and storing them back in his big box of belonging. “I’ll clean up here and meet you there.”
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