thecapitol | [OPEN] Mingle Training Log

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[OPEN] Mingle Training Log

Who| Aang and anyone who wants to learn non-bending airbending
What| Aang and Zuko have been training anyone willing to learn. This is one of those training sessions.
Where| The Training Center
When| Dawn, after the mini arena is over
Warnings/Notes| Possible concussions

A

"Okay, I know a lot of people have had their bodies reset because of the arena. If you have, you should start off by getting your body to re-learn how to walk your bagua circles. Or if you're new this session, you should learn for the first time. You'll hurt yourself on the other equipment if your body doesn't know how to move."

Aang, looking chipper as usual and not at all like he's been recently murdered and brought back to life, picks up an iron ring in front of the group, holding it up so everyone can see it.

"Grab one of the throwing rings and put it on the ground. That will make it easier to walk a circle. Now watch, then try to do what I do."

Then he begins to walk with exaggerated slowness, explaining every element of the movement as he goes.

B

When one section is walking their circles, Aang leads everyone else to a strange series of heavy boards.

"Airbending is about evasion. Everything is done with spiral movements, and you're supposed to be able to change direction at any time without losing momentum. These are airbender gates, and they're probably one of the best teaching tools we have right now."

Aang flips a switch on the wall. Fans in the ceiling and walls start rotating, causing all the heavy boards to begin spinning at varying speeds.

"The goal is to get from one side to the other without touching any of the gates. You have to pay attention to how the air is moving and use what you know from the bagua circles. Watch me, then try to do it yourselves."

Aang smiles, pulling his arms close to his body, and then steps backwards into the spinning gates. For a moment, it looks like they're going to crush him.

But at the last moment, he's moving. Swirling between them without any visible effort; it doesn't even look like he's looking where he's going while he does so. He steps to the other side unscathed.

"Your turns."

Forewarning: he made it look much easier than it actually is. Most people will be turned into pin balls and at least one person will end up with a concussion. Those boards will leave bruises.

C

"Okay, this is the fun one!"

Now instead of spinning concussion machines, they're in front of a grid of tall, thick bamboo stalks, with standing posts on either side with a large hollow circle in the air. And Aang is holding a ball.

"This is a game airbenders play. It teaches teamwork and balance at the same time."

He jumps off the ground like a spring, twirling in the air and landing with on foot on one of the bamboo stalks. He should fall and break his tailbone, but he's able to stay perfectly balanced on the plant without any visible effort. "The rules are simple: you pair off into teams, then try to throw the ball into the other team's goal more than they throw the ball into yours. You can't touch each other and you can only catch the ball if it's dropped or thrown, but if you fall, you're out of the game."

He starts spinning the ball on his finger, grinning down at his students. "So who wants to play?"

[OOC: Zuko is having his own section on the other side of the room, but since he's been dropped and is due to die next arena, that will be handwaved. Otherwise, this is a mingle log, so anyone can tag anyone and Aang will just be flitting around. Have fun!]

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Mindy had actually been waiting for this, and under better circumstances, she would have been pretty excited. She did come to Aang's training session, looking slightly haggard but at least willing to learn. She watched the beginning with the iron ring, setting in her mind what she knew about fighting and filed it away. Aang's way of fighting looked like a kind of martial arts, one that seemed to be pretty rooted in evasion. While Mindy was one for action, evasion was just as important: the person who relied on upper body strength could be completely torn apart by someone who used their weight against them.

Then again, D'Amico had been able to take her out, so there was something to be said about using what suited you best.

She started with the gates: she'd been keeping herself fit, and one of the things that had kept her alive so long was being so quick footed. It took a concentration that she had been reasonable assuming she understood: after falling on her ass halfway through the exercise, she realized she needed to learn a little more.

She started again, sweating a bit and a bruise on her forehead where she collided with one of the gates.

It didn't take long before Aang noticed that Mindy was beating herself up on the gates. Her footwork was off--airbending was very different from street fighting, and being quick on one's feet didn't necessarily translate to being maneuverable the way an airbender has to be. There was a reason bagua circles were taught and not, say, lateral ladder drills.

"Don't force your way through. The gates aren't an enemy to beat or an obstacle to overcome. They're just part of the environment."

Aang hovered near the edge, wincing whenever someone got smacked particularly hard by a gate. "Let them decide how you move."

Mindy had a slew of angry retorts to give, but she took a deep breath. Aang is trying to help, she told herself, and when she mastered that anger, she accepted that truth. He was trying to show her a better way to move, a way that didn't have to involve being light and quick. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she could see the purpose OF this: the movement had its own flow. How was it any different from that Samba she learned a week ago?

She was just working through anger, and right now, she could work it out here: doing this required stepping into that world of his, where movement was a dance, but also something that came because there was a pattern.

"Like a video game," she said softly, and began again. She moved farther, but was still working on keeping her balance. This time the gate got her right in the back of the head, forcing a swear out of her as well as blinking lights in her eyes for thirty seconds.

Aang winced again when he heard the solid thwack of the board hitting her. Oh boy. He hoped that she didn't get too injured by the equipment.

"You know, there isn't any shame in coming out and working on the bagua circles a little more. A lot of it is in the muscle memory, and no one has been doing this that long." He was doing his best to not sound patronizing, since he knew how frustrating it was to not be good at something you thought you should be.

He didn't know it, but Mindy was actually well used to getting a little bit of pain in her training. After all, getting a few planks upside the head was nothing compared to being shot or the muscle fatigue of self training.

"I..." She groaned, rubbing her nose. "I want to see if I can do this without it first. I know I'm not gonna be able to get it all, but I can give this a shot." She made a frustrated sound, then rolled up her sleeves and moved back to the beginning, taking a breath. This time, she closed her eyes, keeping the obstacles in her mind. She'd been through the gates enough to have an idea of the patters. She started again, this time shifting to avoid the places where she'd been hit before, and moving when she needed to. This time, she got through halfway without being hit, and made a motion to get through the rest.

"You really should try to..." do this the right way, but she's already back in the gates. Alright, fine, let's see if she can avoid getting knocked out.

The points of the gates isn't necessarily to get through them; the point is to reinforce teachings about how to move and change directions without losing momentum, a system of movement that is pretty exclusive to airbenders where he comes from. But seeing as he isn't actually trying to teach anyone to airbend?

If it works for her, it works for her. Hopefully, he won't need to drag her to the tribute doctor woman.

In truth, as stubborn and as determined as Mindy is, she's starting to see, through trial and error, what Aang is trying to do. Her movement, usually jerky and quick, is starting to look more like something that Aang had been teaching earlier. Now, he saw, she could apply his movement to this, and once she cleared her head and did just that, she saw that getting through this was much easier now.

It also helped, of course, that she didn't have to get knocked on her ass to learn it too.

What Aang would see now is that Mindy's not charging through quick, like she had been earlier, but taking her time and shifting her weight as needed, moving to the balls of her feet and shifting her body to accommodate the movement needed.

In that case, Aang will back off and move onto other students until it looks like she needs help again. Better to focus on the students who are having the most trouble than babysit ones that look like they mostly know what they're doing.

Mindy just happened to be very good at keeping her balance and shifting quickly: now that she'd listened to Aang, she could adapt what she knew to this. It was all about staying fluid, being fast, and watching how the obstacles moved.

It would be awhile before she could do it with her eyes closed. Anything new, she understood, took a good deal of time. But she had patience, and she'd been knocked down before. Mistakes were possible. Failure was not.

As one of the new students, Haruto has quite a bit of work to do yet until he's ready to move on to anything involving spinning boards or bamboo rods. His footwork is technically correct, but he's still working out for himself how his weight should rest. And what to do with the rest of himself in the meanwhile. His last real properly-disciplined martial arts training had been years ago in his youth, and the rest of his fighting skill had been picked up and polished when he'd had no choice but to fight. Magic helped smooth out the gaps. But there was none of that here, and it still felt strange. He was coming to realize that he'd need to train that feeling out of himself as fast as possible.

He slid into an outside turn, but wobbled, footing unsteady. "Tch...!" No, no, that wasn't right... and where was he, now? Shaking his head and re-positioning himself, he started a slow walk around the ring again. He'd have it down soon, he was sure. Pretty sure. Fairly sure.

"It's okay to be a little frustrated."

Aang practically appears next to Haruto, giving the man a casual nudge to adjust his posture. Personal space doesn't matter between Sifu and student! "A lot of this is just about building up muscle memory. You'll get a lot better fast; trust me."

Haruto makes a startled sound, and that posture-correcting nudge nearly knocks him on over. But he plants a foot and catches himself and straightens right up. Good job, Sifu. Apparently he's learning something here. "I'm sure I will. It's just been a while since I've done something like this." And he grins, quick to try and cover up any of those previous signs of awkwardness and uncertainty. "I'll be trying the gates before you know it."

"Oh! Careful." Aang hadn't meant to nearly knock him over and gives a sheepish smile.

But he had managed to catch himself, and that is a good sign. "Yeah, you will be. Just don't feel like you have to rush into it, okay?" Because concussions are no fun, but Aang's always glad to see confidence in his students.

"Eeh..." Haruto doesn't seem to be agreeing with that time assessment, judging by the sudden wrinkling of his nose and dimming of his smile. "I don't think there's a lot of time to waste. They'll be throwing us in another arena sooner rather than later, won't they?" Maybe it's calling attention to the elephant in the room to say it, but... well, too late to take it back.

"They probably will be. But beating yourself up on equipment you only sort of can use will only get you hurt and cut into the time that could be spent doing more basic training that still helps you later."

Aang doesn't seem bothered by drawing attention to it. That is, after all, why he set up these lessons in the first place. People need to survive.

But people won't survive if they try going to fast and end up getting nothing out of it. "The monks always taught that patience was the key to learning."

"A fair point. But I should be doing better than this." He exhales sharply, furrows his brow, and resumes his steps just as shown before. And they're a little better, a little smoother. "I've usually got magic helping things along. It's been a while since I've had to fight without it." It's important to be honest with your teacher. And the urge to brag about being a wizard never really dies, even when there's no longer anything to brag about. "I haven't had to be patient in a while, either...."

"I have bending where I come from. It's hard to adapt, but you can do it. And then you get better at doing it."

Fighting without bending wasn't quite as hard as he had expected--far more dangerous than he'd like, since he has to get much closer to his enemies than he's used to, but the moves he'd use to bend things are the same moves he would use to throw a person over his shoulder or into the ground.

"You've talked about that.... how does bending work?" His curiosity is to his detriment, for his next step is sloppy, but he catches himself in doing it and is back to smooth and careful motions once again. "I mean... it doesn't work here. But where you're from?" A wizard should be open to new concepts. Especially when you're a wizard that keeps getting chucked into alternate dimensions.

"Bending is just using the chi inside of yourself to manipulate the elements. Motion is the best way to focus your own chi, so each kind of bending has its own system of movement."

Aang gives a shrug and a sheepish smile. "The monks would talk about it a lot and how it worked, but I might not have always paid attention as much as I should have." So he can't explain how it works very well compared to people who've actually researched it.

The Signless is intensely lucky that trolls are, in general, a little more resilient than humans. Flexibility is where he's always fallen short: he can move quickly, but bending and twisting like an airbender is still something he's learning and that means that after a few tries with the gates he's looking a bit worse for wear. His ponytail is coming out of its tie and he's pretty sure his nose is one smack of a board away from starting to bleed.

"This is... a lot harder than you made it look," he tells Aang, brushing his messy bangs back out of his face while another of the students takes their turn through. He doesn't seem discouraged, though; indeed, he's looking at the gates with bright eyes, taking in how they move, already planning his next attempt. He can't learn if he doesn't keep throwing himself into it, right?

"It always ends up harder than it looks." He knows their pain. Trainee airbenders never do too much better their first time.

He's tempted to tell Signless not to push himself so hard, to take a moment and check out the bagua circles again, because he can't help but worry a little at how beat up everyone is getting, but he bites his tongue because that's a part of training. There is no such thing as an airbender who didn't get a few cuts and bruises in training. "Try thinking of the gates as parts of the environment, not obstacles or enemies. It's like moving around a tree instead of climbing or punching it." Except the tree keeps moving and smacking you in the face if you're not good enough at moving around it.

At least trolls are built tough. He can take quite a beating before it really starts to wear on him and he hasn't yet reached that point.

"I suppose this is where growing up in a desert does me no favors. We didn't have many trees. But I think I see what you're saying. I shouldn't be thinking of them as something I need to beat."

"Then moving around a cactus? Or avoiding a sandstorm. But you got the idea, yeah."

There's a beat where Aang remembers his time in a desert. It ended poorly.

"They have cactii and sandstorms where you come from, right?"

He nods an affirmative, rubbing absently at one of the sore places on his arm where he can already tell a deep bruise is going to be in about half an hour.

"Oh, yes, and other things. I think my real problem may be flexibility. Even if I can mentally put myself in the right frame of mine, and even if I can walk the circles, my body isn't used to bending so fluidly yet."

"If that's your problem, I can show you some stretches that should help out."

Aang starts bending into some stretches, as if to demonstrate, and it looks a little like his joints must be rubber. That's just a combination of his own regular stretching and youth making him bendy.

"They're really easy to do on your own, too!"

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[OPEN] Mingle Training Log

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B, a million years late with a whole truck full of starbucks

You better be sharing some of that Starbucks

well of course

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