xp_logs | Wednesday afternoon, Alison and Kylun

Kylun manages to wrestle the Danger Room's scenario toolset into submission, and Alison catches him enjoying the result. He leads her through a guided meditation, then throws her off-balance with a bit of well-earned praise, and she makes him an offer.

Kylun's first attempt at a custom Danger Room program had gone better than his wildest expectations. All the modern trappings of the room--the chrome walls, the robot drones the others favored, even the metallic smell--were gone, replaced by walls of dark grey stone, brilliant sunlight streaming in through windows that opened onto a panoramic mountain vista. The room's only adornment was a thick mat of woven wool, stretching to cover the entire floor, a circular design dyed into its center. Kylun paced slowly around the circle's edge, his hands tracing precise, unhurried arcs through the air, his mind following the patterns toward tranquility. He had always preferred the more active forms of meditation.

When she'd spotted the motion from the Danger Room's observation booth while picking up some files she'd left behind, Alison had paused, trying to puzzle out patterns and movements that were both familiar and yet not. After a moment the files were forgotten, left on one of the seats within while she wandered down, sneaking in quietly and leaning on the wall near the door to watch. She suspected her presence was known, really, and if he'd wanted for no one to watch, he simply would have flagged the training session as such...

After a few minutes, Kylun paused at the top of the circle; taking a few steps into the center of the design, he brought his hands together in a reverent gesture and exhaled slowly, his eyes drifting shut. He held the pose for a moment, then straightened and turned to Alison, smiling quietly. "Truly an amazing place, this room. I could almost imagine myself home again."

To Alison, the projections had a flatness to it that was just enough to throw off the semblance of reality - the way her eyes registered light, she'd been told. Once the system was perfected though, it should be able to go unnoticed even by her, was theory.

"Yeah, it's something else," she replied, some of the calm from what Kylun had been doing having communicated itself to her, even if she'd only seen the tail end of what he'd been doing. "It's a nice alternative to work with when there's lousy weather outside." Her lips quirked at that - Kylun's idea of bad weather might turn out to be a bit more drastic than hers.

"There is beauty to be found in the storm as well, but that was not the contemplation I had in mind for today." He smiled wryly, turning toward the 'window.' "I am perhaps too strongly enjoying the possibility of choice; days like this were rare on our mountaintop. The sunlight was easier to . . . program? . . . than more complicated weather, as well, and I did not want to overreach my abilities."

"Ororo has a few programs you'd probably like," Alison murmured, smiling a bit as she looked around. Sunlight was nice, really. "Some of them are fairly spectacular - you can guess that weather variations feature pretty strongly in them..."

"With her abilities, I would expect nothing else." Kylun cocked his head slightly, watching Alison look around the room. "Would you care to join me in another round? This pattern is not complicated; with your Tai Chi training you should be able to follow me easily, and I suspect you might be in need of tranquility."

Alison's observation of the room ended as her gaze settled on Kylun, and the look in her eyes had something of that decidedly interested glint associated with seeing something new, yet familiar - and it being offered for closer perusal being a very good thing indeed. "I'd like that. A lot." She wasn't warmed up exactly, but the pattern had been simple enough that it and of itself it seemed to constitute a good warmup. The earlier parts of the Form in Tai Chi did that, as well, after all. She offered him a small bow, hands resting flat against her thighs - the equivalent of what any student would offer a sifu, and then straightened, waiting for him to explain or just begin, as he wished.

Kylun returned the bow solemnly, and moved back to his place at the top of the circle. "Take your position opposite me, to maintain balance and so that you can watch me, and do as I do. This pattern is called Zz'shendar--you might say 'Light of Patience.' He smiled. "A simple pattern, and one of the earliest I learned, but I find that a return to the subject of patience is often necessary in this place."

The lilting language struck an instant chord within Alison, her mind trying to shift it just enough to put a sense to it she knew - but it wasn't Askani, though the familiriaty it evoked made her smile just a bit, even as she moved into place. She suspected he would do the same thing a Tai Chi instructor would do, when teaching in mirror image - reverse whatever form he was doing, so that she could follow and learn it with more ease.

Which is exactly what Kylun did, his hands tracing the slow pattern, gestures slightly exaggerated for Alison's sake. "There is no prescribed visualization for this exercise," he murmured, once he was sure she had the basic movements down. "Simply concentrate on your breathing. Breath is one of the great circles of life; it connects us to all things, past and present and future. The air you breathe in is the same air I breathed out a moment before. It was once the last breath of a man rich in wisdom, dying in the fullness of age; breathe out, and it will nourish the first cry of the youngest infant, half a world away. When we have moved on from this life, still our breath will remain, sustaining those who come after us."

There were shifts in stance she had to adjust slightly - nuances from the traditional Tai Chi she knew that weren't quite the same, close enough for her to slip back into old habits without thinking about it. Still, the ebb and flow of the form was based entirely around breathing - finding the center and then the stillness within and that Alison knew. She was smiling slightly by the time she'd gone finally through the pattern without hesitation, having found the right rhythm by listening to the cadence of his voice. The cues were all there, she realized, easy to discern and anchor the motions around of and through as the pattern unfolded.

Kylun returned Alison's smile as the pattern wound to an end; she was, as he'd guessed, an excellent student. "Something perhaps more involved, now," he murmured, stepping to the left, the pattern of his hands becoming more intricate. "We proceed around the circle in the path of the sun, and it becomes our focus. Feel its warmth on your skin--this is," he added wryly, "a far easier meditation here than it was at the monastery-- and let that warmth draw you deeper. The sun is a flame, and the nature of fire is change . . . and yet the sun is constant: it rises in the east each morning, and every evening it sets. The lesson of the sun is this: whatever change may come in our lives, no matter how painful, there are still those things that are constant, that give us meaning and fulfillment just as the sun gives life to the world."

There was a brief, almost poignant wistfulness that welled up as Alison settled into the new pattern, following motions that were at once familiar and yet not. Before she'd ever even known about the mansion, when life had been far simpler, this was all Tai Chi had been about. Doing something purely for the sake of it, for the beauty of the art and the tranquility it brought.

But if she was going to at least thank Kylun properly for what he was sharing with her, then she had to set all of that aside and focus fully on what she was doing. Which she did, attention sharpened and wholly on him through the repetition of the pattern, which was more complex than the other, paced in a slightly different way. A small corner of her mind was very aware of why he'd chosen this particular routine to show to her - and accepted it fully as she allowed herself to find a small measure of solace from recent events.

Kylun picked up the pace, slowly, as Alison's grasp of the pattern became more and more sure. "At full speed, which this is not, this pattern becomes a form well-suited to defending against many attackers. Then we call it sul'ratta, sun-blindness." He added, wryly, "Sometimes, I use it thus for meditation as well, when I feel particularly hemmed-in. Imaginary foes that one can hit are little consolation for real problems that one cannot, but they still provide some measure of . . ." He frowned slightly, searching for the word. "Catharsis, yes?"

Going through the last movement once, to make sure she had it down right, Alison then nodded. "Yes. Or solace, depending on how you view things, I guess." She took a slow breath - the cadence of things was a cue for the breathing patterns as well, in and out slowly depending on the flow of motions and something that was easy to fall into if you'd done that before. "This is close to Tai Chi in a lot of ways," she smiled faintly, the calm still lingering as it always did, even with the situations she could indeed do nothing about at the moment.

"They were invented for similar reasons by similar men, I would imagine," Kylun replied. "If, of course, one did not simply borrow directly from the other; I would not care to speculate, though Zz'ria Rinpoche was never one to scorn an idea simply because he had not thought of it himself." He paused for a moment, working through the pattern in silence, feeling his own calm descend. "You did well in Canada," he said finally. "There was no chance to tell you immediately after the mission, and since then . . . much has occurred, but it seemed then that your performance was weighing on your mind, and I have meant to say something. When the situation changed, you responded immediately, and your plan allowed us to succeed despite the heightened opposition. As far as I could tell, you made only one potentially disastrous tactical mistake, and that . " his lips twisted slightly at an old memory, "is far below the usual number for a young commander. You did well, and I would follow you again without hesitation."

"I..." That he'd meant every word he'd said was clear to see - and while she knew exactly what he meant with the reference to the 'tactical mistake', which was one she'd been far more critical of in her own report, for some reason she still found herself at a loss of what to say in answer. "Thank you." A small nod accompanied that, Alison settling on what seemed simplest in terms of responses. Despite her mood, a small smile escaped her. "It's good to know that. What you think about the mission, I mean." Though knowing he'd have no objections to going on a mission with her again was good too.

"Zz'ria taught us that everyone receives their due in time," Kylun said philosophically. "I do like to do my part to see that it happens in this life, however. I am notably impatient, that way." He quirked a small grin across the circle.

This drew a small laugh from her, even as she tilted her head to the side and eyed him contemplatively. "But you are patient in other ways." She nodded to herself, as though this settled something. "Would you be willing to consider teaching some of the trainees some of what you showed me?" Whether all would be interested or not was one thing, but it would only be from their own choice, rather than the lack of opportunity to learn.

Kylun raised a curious eyebrow. "Just the meditation, or the rest as well? I have trained students before--it is an obligation, in our discipline, to pass on what one has learned when one reaches a certain degree of training--and I have been teaching Marie-Ange for a few months now." He wrinkled his nose. "Though that has been as much a matter of repairing the damage done to her instincts and assumptions as it has anything else; whoever had her first sword-training was a very bad teacher."

"Well." It was amazing how a world of meaning could be injected in a single word. "You could say that, yeah." The wry smile faded a bit though, Alison focusing on the request at hand. "The whole thing, is what I meant. Inasmuch as any are willing, though I'm thinking they might. Particularly if Marie-Ange is already being instructed by you."

Kylun nodded. "I will gladly teach any who are willing to learn, especially the trainees." With a wry smile of his own, he added "After all, as we will soon be trusting them with our lives, it behooves us to ensure that they are equal to the burden of that trust."

A quiet nod answered that, and then Alison smiled at him, expression lightening. "Done, than. And in the meantime, you still have time left to this session..." She raised an eyebrow at him, suspecting he would not mind showing her a bit more in the least.

Kylun's smile broadened. "I did say any who were willing. Very well, then: the next pattern in the sequence begins thus . . ."