and the property values just keep going up

[cross_and_bow]

Time passes. Juliet practices, Shell Bell makes squares - increasingly irritable about it, she really doesn't like the perpetual discomfort, but she bites down on that as best she can and churns them out - and Tony installs things.

Finally he has installed enough things.

Comments

[dearsweetsoulful]

"Shall we, then?"

[eversomuchfun]

"Let's."

[cross_and_bow]

"I need a notebook and pen, I didn't bring one, and it'd be a waste of a square," says Juliet, "one sec." She stops at the bar, procures both, and then goes with the Sherlocks to the outdoors area, sets her writing materials down, and stands ready.

[eversomuchfun]

Sherlock delivers a very short explanation of the repeated-sequence training technique, and then waits a beat.

[dearsweetsoulful]

They attack in perfect tandem.

[cross_and_bow]

Okay, this is harder, this is much harder. Even if Soulful doesn't know about the bayleaf and other blessings, he's still a Sherlock, and a vampire, and there's two of them.

Juliet loses a lot, and makes a lot of edits just to get fifteen seconds into the sequence without getting knocked irrecoverably on her ass, and collects a lot of scratches and bumps. She mimes having a stake, since of course she isn't going to actually stake either Sherlock and in a real fight she'd want to cut opponent numbers as fast as possible.

There turns out to be one key adjustment she has to make to teach her autopilot to fight two skilled opponents. She finds it only after laboriously correcting her way through the full first sequence with small-scale changes (dodge here, quicker on the counterattack there, this shift of weight is a tell and that one is a feint) and beginning a new one, but then it's the first thing she finds, and then she does better.

[dearsweetsoulful]

"Amazing," murmurs Soulful.

[eversomuchfun]

"Isn't she?"

[cross_and_bow]

"Slayer instincts are so amenable to what us Bells do best after - before? - besides ruling worlds," says Juliet merrily, after meditating over her newest little change (namely: if she has any significant amount of one Sherlock under her power she can swat the other one with same) and shutting her notebook to hop up for another round.

[dearsweetsoulful]

The first time she exhibits this heuristic, Sherlock giggles.

[cross_and_bow]

"Hey, in a long fight, no point beating up on my hands and feet and elbows more than I have to," she giggles back between ducking punches and delivering a kick to whichever Sherlock is handiest.

[eversomuchfun]

"Wise words," says Sherlock, hitting back.

[cross_and_bow]

Duck and roll and sweep and mime-stake and she can concentrate on the other one. "Thanks very much for your help, by the way," she tells him.

[dearsweetsoulful]

"A pleasure," he says cheerfully.

[cross_and_bow]

Juliet attempts to finish him off with a mime of throwing the stake. "My best guess is that would've hit, am I wrong?" she asks.

[dearsweetsoulful]

"Not sure."

[eversomuchfun]

"It could have hit," says Sherlock. "But if he were me, he could have dodged."

[cross_and_bow]

"You just know my tells better?" Juliet queries.

[dearsweetsoulful]

"And it's harder to dodge an imaginary weapon."

[cross_and_bow]

"Well, I could get something non-wooden, I suppose, throw my pen at you," she giggles. "Nah, the balance is wrong - okay, I guess stake-throwing is a live-fire exercise. Let me patch a couple rough spots and we'll do this one again and I'll handle that part some other way."

[dearsweetsoulful]

He nods.

[cross_and_bow]

She gets through that sequence, and the next one, improving almost as fast as she did the first time she started sparring with Sherlock and modifying her instincts in this way - with him alone her progress slowed down as low-hanging fruit was picked, but now apparently there is much more. "Now we just need to find a third vampire or otherwise durable Sherlock to join the party," she says, after meditating over another edit. "I'd get amazing. Maybe Shell Bell should stick her head out the door humming to herself for several hours to see if hers will wake."

[eversomuchfun]

"If she has not already gone home," says Sherlock.

[cross_and_bow]

"I think Shell Bell would drop by to hug us goodbye before going home. It hasn't been that long, she could be a while writing up notes or she could've run into somebody. But it would be about as unfair to make her stand there for hours as it would be to insist on breaking her arm."

[dearsweetsoulful]

"...Would breaking her arm have some beneficial effect of which I am unaware?"