Session 44.1 - Zone Defense

Starfall is skybound, making its way from Thalatte to Mechanon, a short overnight trip. In the long gallery that has been set aside as an on-board gym, Isaline Osler is barefoot, wearing loose drawstring pants and a t-shirt. She's practicing with the short gunblade acquired during a very unusual academic presentation.
If the grumbles and muttered profanities are any indication, it is a very hard weapon to practice with.
Yves' nose appears at the corner of the doorway to the gallery, then the rest of him, cautious ever since the knife-throwing incident among some of the actors. Who should maybe be practicing with blunted knives, but who's he to judge? "How's it going?" he asks.
Isa finishes a thrust that does not appear to have gone as planned, and turns to look at the door, pushing a loose strand of hair away from her forehead. "Yves. The balance on this thing is garbage and it's driving me mad. Other than that, fine. You?"
"I was, uh, I was thinking..." He takes another step inside now that there's not active thrusting at hand. "...maybe I should try to get better at... not being shot? When people keep shooting at us? Or stabbed, but not getting stabbed is a little easier, since just not being near the stabbers seems to do a lot of the work there."
"I'm sure Linnet would appreciate as few of us getting shot as possible."
"We would also appreciate not getting shot," Yves says, with a tiny shudder. "That man who interrupted the /perfectly/ good academic presentation... well. Let's not have a repeat of that. But, uh. What do you /do/ about shooting? Compared to stabbing, it's not like you can just stand back, and it's not like it works like avoiding magic, either." He pauses, struck by that thought. "Does it?"
Isa sets the gunblade on a rack, and starts looking over the small training arsenal she has been assembling, the better to drill actors in non-stage combat with. "A little? Try not to be where the hit's going to land. I've seen you and Linnet blanket an entire area with magic though, which makes that tricky."
"Oh, but magic's easier," Yves says earnestly, drifting a few steps closer. "There's the aetheric disturbance where it's going to be, and you just sort of..." He waves a hand vaguely, as if that completes the thought. "I could always help you practice, if you wanted to work on that."
Isa blinks. "I never thought of that. I guess there'd have to be other senses at work, huh."
"It's like..." Yves frowns. "I mean, it's like..." He tries after a moment, a third time through. "You can see a person drawing back a bow if you can see at all, right? But if you don't know a lot about bows and arrows, just seeing the pulling doesn't really tell you where the arrow's going. I mean, it doesn't tell /me/ much, beyond the direction. But I guess if you know a lot more about, uh, arrows and things, you have a better sense of where it'll be, and when. Magic's like that too. I think anyone can sort of...see?... the lead-up to it, and that's something going to happen. But if you've done a lot of, uh, magical arrows? not literal ones? I guess just /magic/ as such, before, then you kinda know where it'll land. Mostly. Or when. Or at least what you'd better be, uh, seeing or doing to have it not... stab you..."
Yves frowns into space. "...I probably should've picked a better metaphor. Anyway, it's like that. So I figured maybe you could tell me a little more about how to see where things are going to be for, like..." He gestures at the gunblade. "....stuff."
"Ah. I think I get it. Like, if you grabbed that sword there and charged me, I'd know where you were going and about..." she thinks, "nine different ways to deflect it before it could hit me. When you throw a lightning bolt, I can make a vague guess based on the direction you're giving the death stare, but that's about it."
"Right!" Yves brightens as his ramblings are thus coalesced. "And with these distance weapons, it's... death stare direction, as far as I can tell. Which makes me feel like maybe I'm going to get shot a lot, in the future? Or hit with things from a distance? Which I don't really enjoy? I mean, I don't judge, there are those who do enjoy that sort of thing, but even then I would think it would be a distraction to be enjoying it too much in the middle of a real fight, which seems to be a thing we're doing a lot more lately than I ever did when I was doing, like, lab chemistry."
"I mean, we're fighting more. Not... enjoying that more. So far as I know." Yves coughs.
"I mean, it justifies my existence on the crew, so I can't complain too much. But I think I know what you're getting at. Good news: it's much the same theory, just anticipate where the shot's going and try your best not to be there. Bad news: what's coming at you is a lot smaller and a lot faster than a fireball."
"Smaller good, faster bad?" Yves hazards.
Isa picks up a small hatchet, the sort you could easily hide under a coat. "Big. Slow. Easy to see coming." To demonstrate, she turns to the side and throws it, watching it spin end-over-end to thunk into a target on the other side of the gym.
Yves swallows. "...so, uh, you just see it coming and sort of... step to one side or the other?"
Isa nods, picking up a crossbow bolt. "Side to side is best. Back and forth is pretty close to useless and up and down is harder to recover from." She holds the bolt point-first between her eye and Yves', at this angle it almost disappears. "Small. Faster. Harder to see coming."
"Is there a way to practice seeing that coming without..." Yves leans his head to one side, then the other, each ear dangling in turn as he considers the tiny frontal profile of the bolt. "...just having people shoot bolts at you?"
"Maybe. They made us wear padded armor and a fencing mask and fired blunt tipped bolts at us, so maybe not?"
Yves looks somewhat alarmed. "...maybe I should learn more about shields. Shielding? Armor? It's not my usual area of focus in magic."
"It's also possible that my teachers were sadists. When you're looking at massed fire, shields are your only safe bet. But one-on-one? Watch the eyes. Or keep moving. Ideally both."
"What does watching the eyes do?" Yves asks, now rather mystified. "Intent? Direction? How crazy they are?"
"All of the above. A really good shot can fire without looking but I'll be honest with you, if we run into one of those we're going to get shot. Most everyone else is going to have to take time to aim and that's the window to look for. Now, if they haven't fired yet, moving towards them is actually helpful. People are bad at judging distance when something is moving directly towards or away."
"Really!" Yves reaches for a notebook before realizing he doesn't actually have his shoulder bag and its contents with him. "I should remember that. It's probably like the magical equivalent of getting ready to fling out a spell of your own. Tends to confuse the targeting a little. Not always, but more than running away or swording does. I mean, the swording can be pretty distracting if you get stabbed, but that's distracting for people who are trying to shoot you with a crossbow too, I bet. Or trying to stab you in turn. Pretty sure."
"True. If you can get up in their face they'll flinch at least. So," she says, picking up a crossbow. "Walk me through how you get ready to throw a lightning bolt. I'm looking for the warning signs."
Yves rubs his hands together, tiny sparks rising up. "Right. So, first off, every mage has their own gestures for casting, but /most/ of them use some sort of hand signals that /usually/ end with a motion, or a described vector through where the hands and fingers stop, that indicate the target. So you don't want to get too confused by the specifics, so much as paying attention to the, uh, the gist of it? The direction? Here, let me show you."
Isa gestures to a blocking dummy. "That dummy there has it coming."
Yves swipes through the air, tiny after-images of arcane symbols following his fingertips, hands moving in smooth motions across an invisible single plane. "...It /so/ does," he agrees, and a moment later, the dummy has a crackling and roaring bolt to its center, following the final flick that breaks that plane to finally describe the course of direction.
Isa's eyes widen briefly, and she nods. "Well I think it's suitably chastened. So how fast can you do that?"
"...about that fast," Yves says, after a little thought. "Maybe a /little/ faster, but not /much/ faster, because it's not so much the gestures doing it as... it's like writing out your work for math, almost? The movement is to help get your thoughts in the right place, instead of just trying to do it all in your head. And if you try to skip a lot of steps, you're as likely to get the answer wrong as get there faster."
"And you're very good at this," Isa says with full confidence.
"Very good," Yves says. He offers Isa a rare sidelong grin. "This is what I spent my time learning instead of crossbows or swords or, uh, poetry analysis. It turns out professors don't accept 'I wrote a poem, but it caught on fire' as an excuse."
"My grades in cultural appreciation would have been so much better," Isa laments. "So it's safe to say that there aren't many who could do that faster?"
Yves thinks. "Maybe if they have a Job that I don't know about. There are some weird ones out there. But I think that magic just...isn't amenable to being forced. Like, even if I got sped up with magic, I don't think I could do that twice as fast. I'd just get that done and some other stuff too. Like, there's only so fast you can chug a keg, right?"
"You have clearly never been drinking with the Stahl sisters. But I think I understand. I think that's the big difference with magic. When Orrey does his pocketwatch trick I do get flat out faster." She hefts the crossbow. "Alright, no bolt, undrawn, so don't panic. But try to follow my eyes and my hand on the tiller. With crossbows there's a second or two between releasing the bolt and the bolt reaching the target, but it's too late for the archer to do anything about so it's the best time to move."
Yves stares anxiously at Isa's face. "So if I need to throw something in /their/ face... do it while they're taking aim?"
Isa shows that the crossbow is unloaded one last time, then takes aim at Yves. "Right. Disrupt before, dodge after. Also, keep an eye on nearby cover. Most people can't shoot through walls."
"...wait, /most/, let's talk about that most," Yves says. Though he also seems about ready to fling himself behind the toasted practice dummy just in case. Despite the lack of bolt.
"I am sure there is some Archer that has learned how to do frankly obscene things with an arrow. I hope we don't run into one."
"Or a mage who can chug a keg faster than I can," Yves says balefully, now that he's had a moment to consider the possibility.
"There's a lot to be learned by drinking with someone you might have to fight later," Isa says, then dry-fires the crossbow. "Duck!"