…or, A History Of Violence
There was an interesting interlude at lunchtime, when the nymph with glasses led the black-haired girl past the food court in a t-shirt and underwear. Marlot sat, stony-faced, pretending not to notice.
“I’m not saying anything,” Missy said.
Her clothes did a bit to hide just how skinny she was, but seeing her without pants, I had to admit the girl had nice legs. She wasn’t quite elven slender, but she had a cute ass.
I was surprised when it appeared they were allowed to enter the cafeteria in that state, but I didn’t say anything even then.
After lunch, the first class I had was my thaumatology lecture.
“Unless perhaps you are a martial combat major, this is the single most important class you will take during your academic career,” Professor Meinke said at the beginning of it. “Thaumatology is the study of magic itself, which makes this a foundation subject for anybody who would study any other aspect of magic.”
I was sure he was right about this, but it was dry stuff, all the same. At least I’d only have to sit through it twice a week.
After it was finally over, I had to trot out to Hauldhagen Field, a broad space on the north end of campus for the class I’d been really looking forward to: mixed melee, my required weapon proficiency class.
The field had obviously been made by clearing space on the edge of the woods. It was bounded by thick trees on three sides, with a line of trees to the south screening it from view. A broad, hard dirt path connected it to the network of sidewalks on the main campus. The two towers, the dorms I already hoped to spend my sophomore year in, were visible to the southeast.
Mixed melee was a huge class. According to a blurb in the course catalogue, they’d recently combined a couple of different sections together in order to emphasize the “mixed” nature of it. As with most of the classes I’d been in, the students were largely human, though there were a few long-bearded dwarves and a sprinkling of students with obvious dwarven heredity. The proportion of those with elvenblood seemed much lower than on the campus at large.
I had an inkling that this was going to be more of a straight-up brawling class than anything else.
The instructor, Coach J. Callahan, didn’t seem to have arrived yet. People were milling around in groups, hanging out by the tables where the equipment was laid out, showing off their weapons, or even doing some light sparring. Not everybody seemed to be comfortable with their weapons. A few students, probably other freshmen, were looking around at the more confident members of the class uneasily.
I wasn’t worried, myself. I knew I wasn’t the best one on the field. I would have known that without looking. That was the point of the combined class. I could handle myself, though, and I’d get better.
Some of the more experienced-looking students fell quiet all at once and started to pay attention. I paid attention, too. Through the trees, a tall, hawk-nosed, dark-haired man was coming up the path. He wore a loose-fitting, light gray shirt, a tight pair of dark blue shorts, a whistle on a cord around his neck, and a sword on his back. He looked extremely serious.
Right alongside him was a girl I took to either be his assistant or a favored student. She was dressed in leather “barbarian chic”-type armor, with the segmented skirt and everything, and had her flame-red hair up in a spiky mohawk.
They marched into the center of the field. Most of the group had been clued into their approach by now, but the man blew his whistle to get everybody’s attention.
The girl with the mohawk stepped forward, her hands on her hips.
“Good morning, class!” she called.
There were scattered replies of “good morning” from around the rough circle, but not many. She smiled. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant smile. She had a bit of an underbite that made me wonder if she didn’t have some orcish or ogrish blood. Orcish was far more likely, considering her build and stature, though either one would have been a stretch. I would have believed elven blood before either of those, though her features were far too rough for that.
“Let’s try that again,” she said. “I said, ‘Good morning, class!’”
This time, I joined in the slightly louder chorus of voices that answered her. Not everybody did.
“You,” she said, pointing to a round-faced girl with sandy colored hair. “You didn’t say good morning. Why?”
“Um… because it isn’t morning?” the girl said.
“Come here,” she said, beckoning to the girl, who looked at the dark-haired man in confusion. He simply nodded at her, and she came forward.
As soon as she was in arm’s reach—before it really looked like she was—the girl with the mohawk punched the blonde girl in the face. Blood exploded from her ruined nose, and she went down.
“Fuck you, it isn’t,” the barbarian woman said, and she kicked the downed girl in the ribs. I spent a moment wondering why the instructor hadn’t intervened to rope in his assistant, then realized I was looking at the instructor. She put a booted foot on the whimpering girl’s shoulder and said, “Welcome to Mixed Melee. I am Coach Jillian Callahan. This is classified as an ‘immersive’ class, and you’ve just seen one example of what that means. What would qualify as assault outside my classroom counts only as a ‘learning experience’, within these four walls.”
“You broke my nose!” the downed student wailed.
“Yeah, and now I’ve broken your hand, too,” Callahan said, stomping on the girl’s hand. “This is an immersive combat class, sweetheart. Laws and rules won’t protect you here. So long as I leave you alive and in good enough shape for the healers to put you right, you have no recourse.” She’d been speaking loudly enough for everybody to hear her over the girl’s anguished cries, but now she looked up and addressed her comments to the class. “The history of the world is the story of people who possess the will and the means to fight enforcing their desires upon people who lack such means. If you work hard and pay attention in this class, you’ll walk off this field at the end of the semester with the skills you need to stop somebody from doing this.”
She punctuated her speech by kicking the downed girl again, harder than before. It was a sickening display, but an effective one. The terms for W.P. classes did waive liability for just about anything short of death. It could have been argued that she was overstepping the spirit of the rules even if she was within the letter of them, but it didn’t seem like any of us in the class were going to argue that.
It wasn’t like we hadn’t taken this class thinking it was hardcore.
“You are your only recourse. If you don’t want to be punched in the face or kicked in the ribs, if you don’t want to be called a fucking pansy or a useless cunt, if you want the privilege of disagreeing with a tyrant who tells you it’s morning when the sun’s in the western sky, you have to be both willing and able to fight.” The girl was pushing herself up onto her knees with her uninjured hand. For a second, I thought Callahan was going to attack her again, but instead she turned to her assistant and said, quietly, “Take her over and give her the potion,” then resumed her speech to the class. “I know you think it’s not like that in the real world, that ‘Oh, we have laws and rules and civilization’ now, but the only reason those laws work at all is because somebody is willing to use violence to enforce them. When push comes to shove, it’s the side that pushes harder that wins, every time.”
The man helped the girl up and led her over to the equipment tables. There was a single blue glass bottle. It seemed to be the only one. It was pretty obvious that Callahan had planned the demonstration out in advance. That actually made me feel better about the whole thing. It was shocking violence, but it was controlled. She was doing a good job of looking like she was out-of-control, but that much of it was an act.
“Now, we’re going to get things moving by getting you sorted into two groups: hopeless and less hopeless. Anybody who’s on the skirmish team, go over to the east side of the field. Anybody who has at least six credit hours of combat classes that don’t include the word ‘basic’, east side. Anybody with a beard down past their navel, east side. Anybody whose name I read off, east side.”
She started rattling off a series of names. She stopped when she got to “Johnson, Steffain” and nobody hurried over to the east side. She looked around the field and repeated the name.
“That little faggot,” she said, shaking her head.
As much as I reflexively froze up at that word, part of me wondered if that was just her preferred insult for men, or if she had used it for a reason. I was thinking of the Steff I’d met at the Prism Pride table. “Steff” could certainly be short for “Steffain”.
She resumed reading the names, finishing the list in short order. About a quarter of the class was now in a cluster on the east side of the field. “Right. Dobbs, get them mocked and start them working in groups. Break up the cliques. Don’t let the skirmishers all fight each other. The rest of you? Anybody who knows they don’t belong on the east side, stand back a ways and get ready to watch. Everybody who thinks they might, go put your weapons in the mockbox and report back here. If you don’t know how to use a mockbox, go join the watchers.”
I followed several other students over to the tables. The mockboxes were very similar to the ones we’d had at Agora High: leather-bound wooden cases in varying sizes. If you closed them with an object inside, its mirror image would be laying atop it when you opened it. The spectral weapons felt solid, but it was an illusion. They could inflict no real harm.
Spectral weapons were one of my favorite pieces of magic, because you could do whatever you wanted with them without risking death or even temporary disfigurement. I’d have been less cavalier about learning to throw an axe around if I’d had to worry about stray hits.
“Make sure you leave your real weapon on the table and take the copy with you,” the man called Dobbs told his students, who looked resentful of the condescending instruction. “If you can’t tell which is which, hold it up to the sunlight.”
Once we’d all gotten our spectral duplicates made and re-assembled, Callahan addressed us.
“Right, I’m going to call you two at a time and have you face off,” Callahan said. “If I tell you to join the east group, go. If I tell you to join the west group, go. If I tell you to switch partners or to keep fighting, do so. Winning does not mean you go east. Losing does not mean you go west. I will be watching what you do and how you do it.
“If you haven’t been called to fight, you can take the time to warm up, if you feel like it, but you will start fighting when I tell you to. Oh, I know what your other coaches have told you. It’s dangerous to fight without stretching first. You’ll hurt yourself. You should never do it. Well, guess what? Fighting is dangerous, and if you don’t know the limits of your body under all sorts of conditions, you’re going to get hurt worse someday. It’s better to pull a muscle here on the field where you can call time out and go to the healing center than it would be to pull one in the middle of a real battle.”
She started off by creating four pairs of fighters one by one, setting them up facing each other and then signaling for them to start. Once all four were going, she moved around them, watching them as they sparred with each other.
We watched along with her as a man with long arms and a flail clobbered another student who was armed with a sword. She had them trade partners, pairing the swordsman off against a woman with a sword and the flail-wielder against a guy with an iron-banded staff. The flail-wielder was knocked off his feet after trying to entangle the weapons and having his wrenched from his grasp.
The stickfighter was sent east. The flail-wielder was pitted against another student.
Callahan sorted two more into the west group and another into the east. She kept mixing the pairs up, to make it more clear when somebody’s weapon or style was giving them an advantage.
“You’re in, Blingy,” she said pointing to the axe in my hand. She pointed to another student with a sword and shield combo. “And you. Face off.”
My opponent was a heavy guy, with the mixture of muscle and fat that often makes somebody look softer and slower than they really are. He held his weapons like he knew what to do with them, but he looked to be fully human. I doubted he could match me when it came to reflexes, but he could probably bash the hell out of me in close.
As we squared off, I had an idea. I doubted many teachers would consider it “playing fair”, but I doubted Coach Callahan gave a damn about that.
Callahan had raised her hand. She dropped it and yelled “Fight!”
I raised my arm, cocked it back, and threw the spectral axe at my opponent’s head. It was a gamble, but I was betting he couldn’t get the shield or sword up in time. If I was wrong, the axe would still come back to me.
I wasn’t wrong. The stunned fighter went down, the illusory weapon stuck in his forehead. It pulled itself free with a lurch before he’d even hit the ground, and flew back to my waiting hand.
“Impressive stunt,” Callahan said. “East side, but don’t get cocky.”
yay first!!!
Getting home and happening upon an update makes my night
Uh oh, Steff missing class. Why am I not surprised?
sweet
I now have a thorough respect and liking for Callahan.
Sonnet later tonight or tomorrow.
Well, it seems Jamie has quite a bit of confidence in his fighting ability. I wonder if its well founded?
Callahan is just insane, I think she takes her class a little too far… Also, Jamie pretty much cheated his way onto the fighter side without actually fighting…
This means he has a class with steff and eventually Mack. Oh and Gloria. This is going to be interesting. especially since he thinks mack has a cute butt and knows steff is a guy but when she shows up in a skirt he might get it or that dress later on.
Callahan is just so badass.
Dang.
miauwk! maybe!
This is a great story, but I found one small continuity error. In this chapter, Rankin is Jamie’s Thaumatology professor. However, back in chapter 5 of More MU, you had Jamie say that his Thaumatology prof’s name was Meinke.
@Glenn: Good catch! I’ve fixed it now.
I’m starting to get so many characters I may need to start making a universe bible, or something.
Ook? Nice class session. It will be interesting in a week or so when Mack transfers to this class and Jamie gets to see her up close.
PS: Has anyone else considered what will happen in the other story the next time Mack copies her fork? Since it wants to be the first thing out of the closet, it is very likely to be on top of the mock instead of under it. Someone could get badly hurt very quickly.
Dang. I’m really enjoying Jamie’s perspective. To Mack, Callahan is just a sadistic bitch. But she’s actually a good teacher.
Even if she’s also a sadistic bitch.
Professor Rankin? Paging Professor Bass.
Woo, top 20! Go Jamie!
Coach J. Callahan
Practices what she preaches—
Being mêlée mouthed?
“Immersion” classes
Appear to be those where you
Either swim or drown
Wham! Bam! Thank you, ma’am!
When Jamie’s silver bling-axe
Came down on his head
Is Hauldhagen Field named for Homestar Runner’s Dolph Hauldhagen the Instruct-TOR?
Ook? Nice class session. It will be interesting in a week or so when Mack transfers to this class and Jamie gets to see her up close.
I’m more interested in seeing his reaction to Mack smacking Gloria around like a ragdoll. Mack’s first mixed melee class was pretty uneventful.
PS: Has anyone else considered what will happen in the other story the next time Mack copies her fork? Since it wants to be the first thing out of the closet, it is very likely to be on top of the mock instead of under it. Someone could get badly hurt very quickly.
I got the impression that Mack could tell the difference between the real one and the mocked one. The real one had a lot of previous mentions about how it felt like it was just part of her rather than a weapon because of it’s aura and everything. The mocked one felt like a weapon though and she was able to probe at the spells to see they were actually there.
OOK!
And of course there is the hold it up to the sun thing.
Nice to see Callahan’s bitchiness on a different point of view. It’s no longer senseless violence, the purpose is very clear and incredibly well demonstrated. Nothing short of injury would have gotten the point across. And… we didn’t get that great of a physical description from Mack, did we? Nice.
Looking forward to Jamie’s point of view on the whole Mack vs Gloria bit.
Mook!
This is a much better look at Callahan than we saw with Mack. Of course, this is the first day. Jamie’s right – it’s violence, but controlled violence.
She’s very practical. She sees how the world works and realizes, your opponent won’t wait for you to stretch. They won’t play fair. Most of the time, they won’t give a damn about rules and laws. At the end of the fight, you look to see who’s still standing and that’s the winner, proper form or rules be damned.
It’s a very effective way to teach a fighting course. If I lived in this world and HAD to take a class, I’d want a teacher like Callahan.
And of course there is the hold it up to the sun thing.
Well, that’s only if she’s specifically looking for that. It’s possible that–given that the real pitchfork ends up atop the spectral one–she might now be paying close enough attention to notice. It’d make for an interesting plot point. We shall see.
It pulled itself free with a lurch before he’d even hit the ground, and flew back to my waiting hand.
I had kind of been wondering what would happen if Jamie’s axe got stuck in someone. What happens if the target catches the axe? Does the returns to the throwers hand keep them from holding on to it? Or do they become the new thrower?
“You’re in, Blingy,” she said pointing to the axe in my hand.
Ha, the first time the axe was described I thought, “Jamie has a blinged out axe.”
Also, arf! Mook!
The Art of Self Defense, by Callahan.
More (hugz) to AE. Her intro speech in parts reminded me of Fairborn’s book(and of course I have terminal brain fart and can’t remember the title)
@6 fighting is about cheating. its about doing everything to win. so you use every dirty trick in the book and then some
Arf! I liked the story, of course, and no, we didn’t get this good a description of Callahan from Mackenzie. I always pictured her more barbarian and less “girl with spiky hair”. And yes, this take on the class makes the professor seem more realistic. Just goes to show you don’t always come across right, I guess.
I’m getting repetitious, but … I love this story. I love seeing MU from Jamie’s perspective.
I always wondered what Mixed Day 1 was like..now I know. It just like it is a week later when Mack shows up, only NOBODY in the clas(as apposed to just Mack) was ready for the instant violence.
ToMU+MoToMU=MUniverse Extended
“It’s power level…IT’S OVER 9000!!”
@suryn
It isn’t that he cheated in the fight, it is that he didn’t seem to actually do much fighting and just immediately got placed in the good fighting group with one move. He could just have that one move…
OH how i love callahan….i actually read parts of her speech out loud for my roommates XD……and we all know she really DOES like Steff…
Actually Jamie, she’s got all three. Add dwarven blood to that too. XD Neat session, and it will be very interesting to see Jamie’s reaction to Mack thrashing Gloria eventually.
Alexandra Erin said…
I’m starting to get so many characters I may need to start making a universe bible, or something.
Oh, please do <<_<<
Then make it available at a later date.
I think Jamie got placed in “less hopeless” not for his move being impressive, but for having understood what Callahan was saying about fighting, for knowing his weapon, so he’d be fighting people good enough that knowing a few slick tricks WON’T work, whereas being able to abuse the students in the basic class with them wouldn’t push him to learn more.
In Mack’s defence, she didn’t get the whole ‘war is dirty’ speech because she arrived late. She never saw Callahan explaining her (admittedly functional) teaching methods. Reminds me of some army instructors.
What do (M)OOK and arf stand for?
I love this story as well as regular ToMU. Thanks for writing such delicious things!
I’d wondered why Mackenzie found herself in a class that seemed to have some pretty serious unwritten rules, and whether she’d missed an introduction to them. Now I see that she had – and that Callahan is not very tolerant of people who join her class after the introductory lesson.
Coach Jill Callahan
Natural sociopath
Kick them when they fall
Perhaps she is right
“Learn to fight” isn’t “Play fair”
A lesson to all
The immersion class
Will weed out those too proud of
Their ability
Blingy has caught on
Honour is second place to
Life and Liberty
On a more serious note, I’m not sure that trick would work with some of the other Easters, and CERTAINLY not with Callahan.
If the axe is enchanted to always return to the one who last wields it, all it would take is for someone to snatch it out of the air as it was being thrown towards them. Now certainly this would take tremendous skill… but won’t it be awful for Jamie when Callahan does it? XD
That was awesome. Just awesome. I’d have to say its the fighting i like most in both of these stories. Without callahans class and Mackenzies demonic rampages, they’d only be half as good…
He has a pimipified (It’s a real word) Axe with elven reflexes thrown in so chances are that he can break out plenty of quick kill maneuvers on less then stellar opponents.
I’m still seeing Professor Rankin mentioned in the story, though the tag has been fixed to say Meinke.
@38: You’re assuming quite a bit about the enchantments on that axe. If I made a returning throwing axe, I’d make it so that once it was thrown, it would always come back to me no matter who touched it since, or make it impossible to catch (modify the handle so you can’t touch it once it’s in flight)
I’d also think that Callahan, not particularly given to flights of fancy, wouldn’t even try catching the axe, but rather dodge it and beat the crap out of Jamie before it could come back.
Callahan manages to be no less annoying even from a perspective of someone NOT hopelessly biased against fighters, but if she gets results, she gets results.
About the axe being caught and used aginst the weilder.
if i am correct the axe will attempt to return to the person that threw it untill that person gently sets it down (rember Iason). that way it can’t be used aginst its owener.
even if sombody else grabed it out of the air (or their body) and tried to throw it, it would still return to Jamie.
(at least that is the way i would enchant it if i had made it…)
yeah… it’s quite fair to put Jaimie on the east side. It’s also a recipe for getting him pasted every single time he comes into class. IF he doesn’t know how to use his weapon, that is.
Callahan may not like showoffs, if you get what I mean…
@35 Nim -
Mook is More Ook – Ook is the call of the wild refresh monkey in its natural habitat. People who wait for the story, constantly checking and refreshing. We say OOK on MU (and MOOK here) to show our appreciation.
Arf is another form of this appreciation. It’s taken from Chapter 1 or 2, where Marlot drew the bilingual cat on Jamie’s door.
One point about Jamie’s axe maneuver no one has commented on: throwing the axe depends on the return-to-user enchantment; otherwise, a successful block would leave him weaponless. So it appears to Callahan that he may understand the idea of the spell in combat.
I also liked Callahan a lot more after this chapter. The words “tough but fair” apply to her teaching style if not to her combat ethics. She understands that a street brawl or a delving melee is not a boxing match or a fencing tournament, and she knows that all the fancy posturing in the world won’t help if you are dancing on the end of a spear. Mixed melee is not so much about learning pretty moves, but about learning how to survive a real fight to the finish. Stopping your opponent before you get stopped is the core lesson of Callahan’s class, and Jamie showed he understood the lesson.
MOOK!
@29 (&6:) As has been pointed out, there’s no way to cheat in a fight. In a duel or a game, sure, but not in a fight.
Jamie’s maneuver is actually quite a bit more revealing than it may first appear. It tells Callahan many things about him:
1) He’s not afraid to take chances.
2) He’s able to size up an opponent and a situation with reasonable competence.
3) He knows how to use his weapon. Yes, the axe is enchanted to return – but as far as I know it’s not enchanted to *hit.* (If I missed that, please feel free to mock me.) That would be a very bad idea, unless the axe was intelligent, because there’s no way for *it* to know where *I* want it to go. I might want to miss on purpose, for instance. Throwing axes is not as hard as throwing knives (in my opinion) but it is no errand for the inexperienced.
She also probably watched his form, technique, and the speed of his delivery and assessed him quite thoroughly. Yeah, he may get pasted a lot in the “less hopeless” category, but she really did have a reasonable amount of data to make the decision with.
M
You know, that fight would have gone differently if the guy had dodged the axe. It would’ve left Jamie defenseless until the thing came back to him, which could’ve put him on the west side in the long run.
One word: “Thunk”
Good chapter. It makes me desire mock boxes and enchanted weapons even more. Also, I can’t wait to see Jamie’s impression of Mack’s violence against Glory Shorts later in the semester.
Ms Alexandra, where is the portal to your universe and how could i barter passage?