(no subject)

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

Outside, under mixed skies, Charlie has discovered the heavy bag. The heavy bag is getting quite the workout, from a series of punches, karate chops, high kicks, and tackles. It's a very eclectic choice of actions, and while each blow is delivered with a certain degree of force and skill, at no time does Charlie lose his calm.

Feel free to watch, and to interrupt.

Comments

[hermajestysfury]

Sir Nicholas was completing his morning run when he noticed the man beating on the bag. It's not easy to be silent in leather and chain, but he does manage a rather credible quiet as he pulls to a stop and watches.

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

Charlie hears something, but it's just faint enough that he doesn't look immediately. Rather, he makes sure that the next set of moves carries him around the bag so he can see the man with the eyepatch and the distinct clothes.

"Good day."

[hermajestysfury]

"Good day." Sir Nicholas echoes in turn, offering a half bow, "I hope you do not mind that I watch?"

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

"Not at all." Charlie uses a series of uppercuts and jabs, aping some run of the mill boxing moves with just a little more focus than most boxers. "I apologize if I'm a bit rusty, though. It's my first go-round on the bag." The bag might be surprised to hear that.

[hermajestysfury]

"The styles you use are in many cases unfamiliar to me." Sir Nicholas says, "And so I would not know that they are rusty."

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

"They're mainly Eastern. I can't say if they've even been developed in your day - am I right in assuming that you're from a good deal of years before 2007? - but even if they have, I don't think many in the West would either want to know them, or be allowed to." An assumption that might only prove Charlie knows martial arts but not the history of such things.

[hermajestysfury]

"1605, relocated to 2020." Sir Nicholas says with a nod, "But I have been in the twenty first century for less than three months. There is rather a lot of culture shock."

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

Charlie's first thought is that the man really needs to dress differently to avoid the culture shock, but it's really rude to suggest that. "I can imagine...the technology, the changes in race and gender relations, the very size of the Earth and the galaxy...I don't think that you would know what a galaxy even is, would you?" He read that somewhere, that until modern science came along, no one guesses that the universe was full of galaxies.

[hermajestysfury]

"I have been focusing on the job." Sir Nicholas says wryly, "There are more people, and the country is not my country, but the result is still the same. Protect those who cannot protect themselves, remove from power those who do not deserve it, and after that I can take the time to think."

Sir Nicholas likes his armor. It's comfortable. And running in it keeps his muscles toned, like portable weight-lifting.

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

"I've done that from time to time. Well, protecting the people, at any rate. I never got to remove any tyrants.

"But in my own time. How did you get displaced?" Charlie ends his routine for the moment and focuses inward to slow his breathing and heartrate a bit more.

[hermajestysfury]

"I do not know the technicalities." Sir Nicholas warns, "The short of it is that someone from that time was sent into the past. His presence created my time-line, but at the same time was tearing the world apart. He resisted going back, and so I took him through a time-portal back to his own time."

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

"And once you were there, you had to help. Even though that armor you have would be of limited use against armor-piercing bullets.

"Are you dead?" A reasonable question, given the small pieces of evidence.

[hermajestysfury]

"I like my armor." Sir Nicholas says. This is not the first time he's had this argument, alas. "It is comfortable. I am not dead. Why do people keep asking that?"

[ostro_goth]

Teja just watches. Despite all the newly invented things of the future, punching bags still look the same as they always did, he observes.

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

Charlie goes into a set of aikido and then savate moves, even as he nods at Teja.

[ostro_goth]

The aikido moves look somewhat familiar to Teja; they look similar to what Ryu Hayabusa has been teaching him.

He nods back, and keeps watching.-

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

Next, boxing for a bit, and then Charlie pauses to get his breath. Lets loose three rather intense kicks (barefoot) and then karate chops at each shoulder.

He ends by going totally still.

[ostro_goth]

"Greetings," Teja says. "You know very many ways of unarmed fighting."

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

"About..." He counts in his mind. "Twenty? Which is a rather small percentage of what my sensei knew. He could do over 100." Some said Richard Dragon knew every from on Earth, from taekwondo to krav maga, but Charlie never bought that.

[ostro_goth]

"Would that not be confusing once you have to fight in earnest?" Teja asks.

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

"Richard shows his students how to pick and choose the styles that work best. And how to escape from thinking about them too much in a battle. I suppose, if it weren't violent, you could call it the Zen of fighting. But both the Buddha and Richard would make faces at me." He smiles, being a believer in both Zen as a way of thought and annoying any and all authority figures.

[ostro_goth]

"What is Zen?" Teja asks.

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

No surprise that a man from that far past and that corner of the world wouldn't know of it.

"It's a way of thinking, or rather of being so that thinking isn't quite as necessary. It grows out of the Buddhist way of life, and encourages balance and calm in all things, and a letting go of the things in this world - or in the one we left, at any rate - in favor of a better way." Odds are that Charlie's version of Zen is not the usual one, but it works for him.

[ostro_goth]

"Why would they wish to let go of the things in the world - whichever world that would be?" Teja asks. "To me, it sounds as if it were a strange mixture of the things friend and teacher Ryu Hayabusa has been teaching me, and some precepts of Christianity."

[52-dropoff.livejournal.com]

"Some people are very materialistic. They want what they have, and what everyone else has. I think that in some ways, Buddhism in general and Zen specifically are a reaction to that. But Zen has nothing to do with Christianity. I don't think its creators knew about any European faiths. Even there are some similarities.

"And your friend, judging by his name, is probably very familiar with some aspects of Buddhism. It's a common religion in Japan.

"What school of martial arts has he taught you?" Easier to talk of martial arts than of Zen. Charlie might accept it, but he's never good at preaching it.