Eleanor Gray and The Problem Student

[Malkavia]

Shimmerlace took a long swig from her pink-bedecked bottle. Plastic, of course. Steel wasn't quite iron, but—

"Style, hm? Well...Let me tell ya!"

Her eyes narrowed on the bottle. A bit of the huff and puff lingered from the spin-cycle sprint, and she gulped down another quick, cold splash. Her hand swept out on front of her, one leg back as she cleared out the scene of her imagined exploits.

"...I'm sure you can imagine the sort of—flips, like, and Jumps. Probably with kicks and the like."

Well shit. Where were the words when you needed them. A sort of script did unfurl for her—A fey ribbon unfurling in the blackest canvas of the audience eye, flickering devastation with the lightest of touches yet the most almight of crashes, but. She glanced at Eleanor. Shitter of it was, she could probably even say that, and Miss Madam Mayor Gray would probably keep a straight face. How to give the ribbon flesh, though...What she needed here were technical words. Engine parts. How the doohicky connects to the whatchamacallit.

"I'm...not givin' you much of a grasp much here, am I, hah? I uh—" She almost said I'm sorry and had to bite down hard. "...I know the shit when I see it, right? Stuff what pops, right? Stuff that makes you kinda. Jolt in your seat, remember you got a fuckin' heart in ya that can pump if you slap it right. Fuck, not helping. A bit of a blush had begun to spread over Shimmer's face as she shifted from one foot to another. "I guess I think a hurricanrana's kinda neat, when the right...person does it? C-can I ask, your, um. Thoughts." Ma'am.

[FreestylePoet]

Shimmerlace breathed a tapestry into the air, tone a proper two-beam loom but words a spool of craft store yarn. First came the outline: Flips, jumps, kicks, and "the like." Then color, and splotches of it all over. Somehow both neon and pastel, tempting and vivacious like buttercream. And then... nothing. An example, if that, of vague promises.

To Shimmer's credit, Eleanor could actually fill in the blanks. She could picture it, really, she could! The unfettered hair, the various accoutrements dotting young Shimmer's attire, all of it a whirling dervish of pink and silver. It might have even connected, legs clamping around some poor sap's head and swiftly introducing face to floor. Squint hard enough, and Eleanor could almost overlay a black tie, lavender bob, and falling striped fedora.

The question was: Could Shimmerlace? Eleanor narrowed her eyes. She needed a moment to think this one through. Her glasses had a smudge on them, though, and the first priority was to pull them off to clean with a humid huff. She did so without breaking her gaze from Shimmer, then let the silence hang for another beat. Finally, she spun on her heel and began to tip-tap her running shoes to the ring.

She slipped into the square circle, gait quickly accounting for the bounce of canvas. The training ring looked as normal as always. No bucket strung by fishing line, no squeaky mallet behind the post, and, God forbid, no painted tunnel with a fake horizon. ACME's only cameo, it seemed, was the earlier bench press gag. Good. That would make this much easier.

Eleanor turned around, the corner of her lips ever so slightly quirked.

"Hit me."

[Malkavia]

A large digital clock’s bright red digits blinked Shimmer’s peripheral vision. Tick, tick, tick, tick. The Pixie had stopped expecting any answer from Eleanor other than prolonged eye contact, an upward raised brow, and the weight of the clock. Shimmerlace untied her ponytail, then re-tied it into a tight bun. By the time Eleanor had slunk into the ring, she was prepped. Veteran and rookie’s eyes met over the ropes.

The Lioness Gym rings had been designed for glossy magazine spreads and online backdrops. The light fixture over each arena consisted of three concentric squares, the largest tracing the ropes below. While far from real stage lights, the yellow-tinted light still produced a gleaming silhouette around Eleanor’s profile. Something hungry stirred in the Teatime Maître’s gut.

So, advice is—just fuckin’ dive in. See what comes out. She controlled her breathing, touched her toes, and rotated her shoulders. Well…sure. Grand. I can do that. Endorphins buzzed under her skin. Aye. I can fuckin’ well do that.

Shimmerlace charged. Her eyes flashed, coattails whipped, and she leapt, grabbing the second rope in two fists. The feeling of leather in her palms struck her like it had on her debut, tingly, unreal—the first, now second glittering touch of a real LAW ring that in each case made a tight grin split her face. Momentum at her back, she pulled, diving forward, rotating her hips between the first and second ropes in a movement that felt as liquid as the best sex. Energy built by the sprint exploded into the roseate blur of a rope-swung dropkick that was—alas—aimed ten degrees north of its intended target.

[FreestylePoet]

That didn't take much, did it? It was one thing to dictate an after-action report on an airbike, but no wrestler could turn down an outright challenge. A sly grin and two cheeky words was all the segue Eleanor needed, and now Shimmerlace Snuggleblossom was on her way, bounding and streaking down the padded gym floor. Hands cocked at her hip, she furrowed her brow upon her protege's approach. Repose wouldn't be enough for long, but foundations were necessary for a good lesson. All she needed to do was wait for Shimmer to pick a move, and-

Oh, great. The little rascal had the good ring sense to fly in at a low angle. Lesson plans never survived first contact with the enemy, did they? It would take some more effort to illustrate her point, but at least Shimmerlace gifted her a two-foot whiff to work with.

Eleanor lunged, planting her foot into the canvas. A pink coma at her wake, Shimmer flew by, and the veteran swung her arms low. Timing was key. She wrapped her arms around the midsection of the missile. Her lanky arms had deceptive muscle, and they pumped in time as Eleanor reversed Shimmer's momentum altogether. Catch low, swing up, and like a bucket of water towards a flaming bush, the former mayor flung her student back towards the ropes!

The ropes would no doubt dig into Shimmer's back, but the rest of the counter wouldn't be far behind. Eleanor closed the gap in an instant, climate-inefficient yellow gleaming off her eyes. She took Shimmer up in her arms once more, this time using the rope's bounce to flip her student up and over! With a grip on the Lioness's hips, Eleanor fell back, dropping the poor rookie on her head. A simple roll-up, maybe a hook of a leg, was all it took once the canvas settled.

Eleanor raised her foot and thumped it on the canvas. "Fast." Did it again. "Fun. And?" Once more. "Three. Ding ding ding." If Shimmer didn't have the wits to kick out, their spar would be over. "See what you did wrong?"

[Malkavia]

Shimmerlace made a noise like she was on the brink of being sick—a stumbling kinda groan with the same teetering motion as her eyes, as they wandered left and right. "Nyeeeeegh…"

She might have looked knocked out of her gourd. And she was. A high pitched ring at he back of her ear was a spotlight on the ache inside her skull, which had become the cap to a body she was only half-aware of possessing. Yet in spite of that, she could feel the gut level emotion: seething frustration, especially when the word three made it through the mental fog.

"Hrmph…" Her lip curled. Three had been the signal that pierced the blurry fog cloud, and now she was coming back fully. Clear enough to see her rolled up leg pointing skyward. She rolled the ankle, tracing shapes. Flexed her toes. Imagined the look of her from the outside, pink and silly. By now, of course, she could have kicked out…but why? There was some fun to being folded up all rollypolly like a bug. The frustration at the base of a less conscious fairy began to dissipate as she blinked and crooked the smallest of grins. "Hmmm. Whaaaat went wrong, what went wrong…?"

She mentally traced the half second where the world had gone tits-up. Here was she, rushing headlong through lights and a gust of wind, expecting the CRASH of her boots into an Eleanor-shaped wall. Whiff.

”Wellll…" Of course, a lot of Cold Iron had followed—loss of control, back slung hard enough on ropes to sting, arms that wrapped, then dominated her waist. Eleanor Gray’s rebuttal had been a showcase in efficient, technical, brutal wrestling. Still. That first whiff felt in her mind like the critical pivot.

”I s’pose my…nyech…" Shimmerlace made a face and smacked her lips. Still refusing to kick out, she found her mouth had gone dry, sticky, and bitter. ”Bleck. Mmm, right, so…my commitment to taking air-time, eh, gave bit of an open door. Yeah?"

[FreestylePoet]

A pinfall was probably the most disappointing way to lose a match in women's wrestling. Submissions and knockouts could happen to anyone at any time; they were designed to be final. Count-outs were easy to blame on an overzealous referee. Orgasms were... well. But pinfalls? Most wrestlers pinned someone by just laying on someone. Maybe hooking a leg if the audience was so lucky. Super easy to escape if you had even half a wit about you. It wasn't that you couldn't get out if you tried. It was that you were so completely beaten that you couldn't even try.

Thankfully, this wasn't a real match. All Eleanor had done was ask Shimmer to make a move before turning her world upside down. She'd caught the Young Lioness by surprise. Hanging a pinfall loss on poor Shimmer's head, then, wasn't nearly as bad. Maybe Shimmerlace Snuggleblossom wasn't ready to headline a card quite yet, but the pieces were there. It was about training recklessness into bravery, guesswork into instinct.

"That's not a bad guess." Eleanor rolled off of her charge and helped her back to her feet. "When you're in the air, a smart opponent knows exactly how you're going to land. But it's also one of the best ways to hit fast. Maybe a slingshot over the top ropes would've been faster, but..." She shrugged. "You did fine. Some people obsess over form. They'd say your arms weren't squared or that you pulled yourself through the ropes at an angle, and they'd be right. What you really did wrong, though, was forget something even more important than precise form or picking the right move."

She dusted Shim's shoulders, then gave a smirk. "Just one word. Remember it, and you'll be fine: Fundamentals." She left it there before remembering that life wasn't a movie. Pithy one-liners didn't get her as far as they used to; she actually had to explain things. "How long have you been wrestling, anyway?"

[Malkavia]

Once Shimmerlace got to her feet, she put her back to the ropes and bounced, back and up, while she listened with her arms crossed. She bit down on her tongue and wished, not for the last time, that the count had been just a touch slower.

The problem wasn’t that our Gray Matron’s words of wisdom were particularly amiss. She mentioned Shimmer’s arms had crooked at a less than ideal angle—yyyup. Now that Shimmer pictured it, she’d felt the weakness in the yank on the rope. A note for the next iteration.

The humiliation, too, did not cut particularly deep. Whirligig topples through the air often crash and roll, and bitter’s a flavor, and when Shimmer got back to her home a few hours hence, the diary notes on that particular SPLAT would glow an excited pink.

How long have you been wrestling? The question hung gray on the air. Shimmerlace suppressed the sigh she felt but imagined it hung in her eyes. She felt a tug to spin a yarn about her time in the Erl King’s Hunt, but, well, when the doctor asks for a medical history…

“About six months. Five months at the Académie de Lutte de Marseille, and a three-week stint with the LAW bootcamp thing. Eh. Look—” She pushed off the ropes and stalked a slow arc around Eleanor. She shook herself loose, rolling a shoulder still stiff from where it had hit the mat. “To be perfectly real, Eleanor, that word fundamentals...kiiiinda like most of that schooling if I'm frank...makes your girl here think of viola lessons.”

Shimmerlace assumed the upper-body posture of a musician, drawing an invisible bow along implied strings. She squeezed her eyes shut, lips curling into a smile. “...Mind. I fuckin’ loved the sound, at the time. Deep tones that flowed like nectar in the deep parts of your spirit, full of subtle details. But like…All that stardust turns to ash once you start dissecting and talkin’ about intervals and key signatures and...all that bullshit. Fundamentals.”

“...So I never did learn to sing. What I did learn, though…The fantastical arts. The rabbit and hat business. That...” Once again, Shimmer’s blood pressure started to press against her chest. Images of Eleanor’s annoyance, even contempt bustled at the bottom of her mind. If you’re not going to listen… She swallowed but looked to Eleanor and nodded to underscore her words. “That I learned to do damn well just by diving in and getting soaked in the guts of it. Couldn't tell you to this day what the fundamentals of it are, but I can feel what works. So." Shimmerlace turned on her heel to face Eleanor, fists up. Smiling through the anxiety. "Not meaning to knock whatever you're about to say or nothin'. But waddya say to getting back to the guts and mess, ey?”

[FreestylePoet]

Eleanor cracked a smirk. Half her circles growing up – and half her volunteers on the campaign trail – were high achieving kids in twenty different extracurriculars. Viola jokes rose unbidden to her lips. Had she ever heard of a violist practicing, anyway? Only a snort poorly disguised as a hum hid, she hoped, her inner teasing. It would be wasted on Shimmer, anyway; as flightly as her charge was, six months at a real wrestling school was seven months more than most Young Lionesses had. Frankly, it was more formal training than a lot of LAW wrestlers.

"Believe it or not, I was a band geek, not an orchadork. Even back then, I was too gay not to join up." She slid into an easy boxing pose, light on the balls of her feet. Rather than square up herself, though, she instead put up two palms for young Shimmerlace to shadowbox at. Eleanor nodded towards her hands then continued. A straight response wouldn't do. Why not engage the girl while she was at it? "Still, I know how it goes."

The dance was easy. Flip her hips every now and again. Change the targets, up and down. Hop and slide around the canvas, guiding Snuggleblossom through different angles. Of course, try not to get smacked in the face on a misplaced hook. "You're right. As long as everyone knows the song and how to play their instrument, everything works. Strings hit the right notes. Singers harmonize. Drums strike on rhythm every time. Anyone who's ever sung in the shower knows music can come pretty instinctually."

Then, she threw a counterpunch into the mix! Nothing but a wide, sweeping hook towards Shimmer's temple. Well-telegraphed by her shoulder, surely, but perhaps still unexpected. Worst case scenario, it was slow and open-palmed. "But what happens in magic when you decide to call up a face from the crowd instead of your audience plant -- and they're a skeptic?" Eleanor continued to indulge her 'guts and mess' the whole time, despite her poor palms' grumbling. "Eagle-eyed, witty. Maybe even a fellow magician who knows all your tricks and wants your audience. I imagine it's the same thing that happens when you skip out on your etudes."

"Your vibrato goes a little wide." Now Eleanor stopped the drill, planting her hands on Shimmer's shoulder. "That chorist right in front of the mic goes a half-step too high." She flashed an apologetic grin. "And sometimes? The percussion strikes just a bit early."

Then she brought her arms out wide and clapped Shimmer across the ears! Straight from playgrounds and into the wrestling ring, a classic Flashbang! With the double ear slap complete, Eleanor got to work, spinning and tossing her poor charge towards the ring pot. The original move would have sent Shimmer all the way to the corner then followed up with a spear, but she needed to see this. Instead, Eleanor simply spun Shimmerlace by the shoulder as she dashed by.

She climbed up onto the corner and, just for muscle memory's sake, tossed two finger guns towards an imaginary audience. "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre!" she yelled out, as if she were some ridiculous anime character. Then she leapt into the air, jumping backwards but spinning forwards! Gunner Ellie whirled around in the air until she locked legs around Shimmer's neck, herself facing up. Finally, she drove Shimmer to the mat with a poisonrana!

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

[Malkavia]

Orchadork, was it now? That yanked a few memories loose—buses crowded with students in crisp navy-blue uniforms and white linen, the clunk of a case taller than the blonde violist herself, the pine-like smell and sticky texture of rosin on her fingers.

Some of the stiffness in Shimmer’s shoulders softened, and as Eleanor raised her palms for shadow-boxing, she studied the older woman’s face. It was hard to imagine the ex-mayor in the days before she’d soaked up her San Francisco mystique, the Ellie Gunner glow that still managed to cling to Eleanor Gray. What would she play? Percussionist perhaps?

But—then it was back to fuckin’ scales. Shadowboxing was a regular part of the wrestling school regimen, and even if the theory had slipped overhead with the same dull roar as phrases like major third interval, she remembered how the rhythm felt. Her legs became springs. Padum, padum went boots dancing on mat, and her mind flit out to her feet and her hands, trying to remember form, to feel if this was right, then—pap pap. Left hook, right hook.

She tried to ignore that Eleanor was there, to forget she was doing drills, simple arpeggios. Striking. She imagined a real opponent, a faceless shadow-person with a gloaming jaw in need of a fracture, and it helped that this shadow-person danced, slithered, dodged. Once he even struck back…though with a tempo so largo even Shimmerlace could duck.

Slow, and…boring. Shimmerlace sighed and shook her head, even as she kept hopping. No. She’d tried, but. Drills were drills. She was on the edge of butting in when Eleanor caught her shoulders. Shimmer caught her breath (shadowboxing, if nothing else, got the heart going) and half listened. Eleanor talked magic, and even had a decent example of a challenge. Nothing does test a fairy quite like a hostile assistant. It seemed our band geek was not just listening but thinking, too—though, Shimmer was on the edge of pointing out, hostile partners offered the best proof of magic and improvisational mastery. Before Shimmerlace could respond, however, her ears exploded.

Her hands shot to her ears. Pain erupted inside the canals, and a needle-on-record ring pierced her hearing, all while the world went uneven with a dizzy spin. It was the kind of shock that put the ol’ brain a few seconds behind the present, and when she caught up—dirty fuckin’ move. A wicked fuckin’ move. The kind of move that would have left her grinning if she hadn’t been reeling around to try and center in on the whirl her opponent had become.

She did laugh when she heard the anime-style power-call, an old Ellie Gunner habit. It was quick, involuntary bark. Christ, that had always been cheesy, even by the Feychild’s standards—cheesy, aye, but evocative. The way Eleanor towered in the light, the way her face burst with that Gunner grin, it was all a promise to an audience Eleanor conjured and Shimmerlace believed hook line and sinker. For a beat, they were in a real ring, complete with light, applause. Magic.

Across an entire magic show, only a handful of seconds really count. The performer draws the audience into anticipation, promises them something that makes their hair stand on end, and then, if they’re good, delivers on a few awed seconds to be remembered days, months, or years hence.

And Eleanor delivered. She leapt, flipped, arced through the air, and Shimmerlace felt that flip in her gut in a way that made her eyes shine like moonlight behind her pink contacts. This was the kind of moment she’d signed up for all those months back.

THUD!

And she was out again. Like a light, limp on the ground, after the poisonrana cracked her skull to the ground. But even drooling on the mat, her lips were curled in a tooth-bearing grin.

[FreestylePoet]

The rabbit was out of the hat, and it seemed that poor Shimmerlace's brain was out of her head. A trick well-done, to be sure. Gunner Ellie gave her bow to the nothing-crowd by way of a windy chuckle, and Eleanor Gray took the stage once more as it turned into a sigh. Muscle memory had a way of doing that, she supposed. Opening the mind's eye and bringing back images of more than just the how-to. Not to say that they were unpleasant memories. Just mementos of a person who'd changed since those scenes... And perhaps a little cringe-worthy, to boot.

The smile on Shimmer's face didn't quite make it worth it, though. Knocked-out grins were hilarious in a schadenfreude sort of way, but unconsciousness was better rectified sooner rather than later. In the meantime, she tilted the Young Lioness's head sideways so as to prevent her from choking on her own tongue. It wasn't quite the Bacchus position, but it would do for, what, 30 seconds?

Next, she took a roll towards the edge of the canvas. That, perhaps, was another fundamental to teach Shimmer at some point. It was unintuitive, traversing a ring in this way, but luckily it was quick enough to learn so as to not require a drill for something so... boring? Stupid? Both.

Two things, she grabbed, before rolling back to her student-turned-quarry: A water bottle, which she gingerly placed between the girl's splayed legs, and a bottle of smelling salts. Eleanor pulled the bottle open and held it the medicinally-recommended distance from Shimmerlace's nostrils. A few waves beneath the sniffer, and...

When she woke up, Eleanor would bottle the salts back up and toss them aside. "I hope you remember what I was saying before I... well, lined you up against the metaphorical wall and shot you dead. You see what I mean, though, right? You can be awesome. Ring sense is just another one of those things you need to learn to do it right. Who cares if you can swallow fire if you don't care to watch your alcohol intake beforehand?"