Chapter Twenty-Four

A day and a half was an awkward interval of time. It was brief enough that I wasn’t doing much of substance before the party. While Lily had located the headquarters of the more dangerous threat facing me, she’d also gotten enough other information to make me very nervous about assaulting that headquarters. I knew that there were multiple people involved, and that they had the building fortified, and very little about their actual capabilities.

So, a direct assault was risky at best. And, furthermore, even if I pulled it off, there was a good chance I’d be injured in the process. I was well aware that either going to this party while injured and vulnerable or failing to go at all was risking things much worse than simple death. Even Saori had agreed that attacking now rather than waiting until after the party would be idiotic, and when Saori told you that an idea was reckless to the point of stupidity, you knew you were in the realm of genuine insanity.…

Chapter Twenty-Three

We met up again at a motel, very similar to the one Lily had picked. It was cheap, it was convenient, and perhaps most importantly, it wasn’t something I’d done before. That, I had observed, seemed to be a common factor. I could get away with something once, but this Sidhe assassin learned quickly. I had met with Toby in a public park safely, but when I did the same with Johnny, there was a sniper waiting. The second time I went back to my house, it got burned down. My best bet currently seemed to be to keep moving, keep changing up my patterns.

Strictly speaking, Saori could have just met me at the Blackbird. We would be going back there tonight, anyway. But I didn’t want to sit still for that long. It would be too obvious, too predictable. It would also, I thought, make that sanctuary almost useless. The whole reason I was relatively confident in my safety there was that the attacker would likely wait for me to be more vulnerable. If I didn’t actually make myself a better target sometimes, they would have no reason to wait. This was…tidier.…

Regionalisms and Jargon

The narration in this chapter states that the long jump is grouped with athletics rather than gymnastics. This phrasing is accurate, but there’s some interesting context that makes this more meaningful than it may seem and that I want to unpack a bit. In most parts of Europe, “athletics” (accounting for language variation) is the term for sports which involve running, walking, jumping, or throwing. The running long jump is clearly included.

But this isn’t the case everywhere. In the United States, including Pittsburgh, “athletics” is instead a catchall term. It groups together essentially everything which could be considered a physical sport or training for one. It is also used to allude to physical prowess in general; picking up something very heavy might be called an impressive display of strength, but it might also be called an impressive feat of athletics. That particular group of sports, meanwhile, is called track-and-field.…

Chapter Twenty-Two

There was no show at the Blackbird Cabaret tonight. But I could, just barely, make out light behind the blackout curtains in back, so I was pretty sure Capinera was there.

I was still somewhat nervous as I approached the building. I could feel the power woven into it like a thin, humming spiderweb I was brushing my way through. Those wards were pretty damn strong, for me to feel them from the parking lot. When the Blackbird Cabaret closed and locked its doors for the night, you’d be well-advised to take it seriously.

I had never asked Capinera what the wards would do to someone dumb enough to try and break in. Maybe I was afraid of what the answer might be. But I was guessing that whatever the answer was, it ended with dead people in the parking lot.…

Chapter Twenty-One

The next day opened so peacefully that it was a little creepy. I woke up in the back seat of an appallingly green car with a fox curled up on my chest and a dog sprawled over my legs, both still fast asleep. The location was strange enough that I was momentarily disoriented and unsure where I was, but the company was familiar enough that there was no real anxiety in it.

We often ended up in roughly this circumstance. Of the three of us, only Raincloud could really be said to sleep well. But Saori’s issues were mostly to do with difficulty falling asleep to begin with and nightmares once she had. Duration was usually decent for her, and for me it just…wasn’t. I was almost always the first to wake up, and given that all three of us were fond of each other and tactile in how we expressed affection, I often did so like this. Saori slept in fur as often as not, and she tended to end up lying on top of me regardless of how we were arranged when she went to sleep, so when we slept together, this was how I woke up.…

Ukemi

When Kyoko talks about taking falls here, she’s referring to some specific skills. Learning to fall down or be thrown without being injured in the process is a major skill in a variety of martial arts; judo and aikido are the two where she learned it, in large part because I have the most experience with them. Though given that both are Japanese in origin, and she was studying in Tokyo at the direction of her rather traditionalist father, it also just makes sense. There are numerous differences between judo and aikido, but for the purpose of this note I’m going to be treating them as a unit, since falling is mostly the same set of skills in both; this skillset is referred to as ukemi. For terms I’m generally going to be using a mixture of English and romanized Japanese, mostly because it’s the format I learned in. If you want to follow along with the descriptions, there are numerous videos which showcase the falls in question.…