Juncture 3.2

The training I was getting put through was intense. By the end of the first week my entire body was sore enough to keep me up at night tossing and turning. By the end of the second week, I was fatigued enough to pass out as soon as my head hit my pillow each night.

I would wake up early in the morning, dress, and head directly to Avice’s perfect isolated plains, where I would train for up to two hours. Every time I walked into the field, it was just after sundown, and it was brightly sunny, but cool enough that it was comfortable.

Avice would have me run distances, sprint, do strength exercises, and spar with her. She would do all of them alongside me, often jogging ahead of me as I paced breathlessly, looking back disappointingly, or continuing to do pushups long after my muscles had given out and I’d collapsed to the ground.

During our fighting exercises, she would lash out violently at me from every direction. I doubted she was going easy on me, and if she was, I was terrified to see what she was like when she was going all out.

Occasionally, she would be there with a variety of weapons, and we would do the training with those. There were quarterstaffs, knives, swords, spears, guns, shields, chains, and other weapons I didn’t have names for. We would use these, and I would come out of the training with shallow cuts across my forearms and chest. Avice would give me a gruff “walk it off,” and I’d be excused.

After the morning training, I headed back to the facility, and I would grab what usually amounted to a late lunch and early dinner combined. I would have thirty minutes to sit and eat, and then I had to report to a small room directly across the hall from where my living quarters were.

The room was small, containing only a high-tech computer monitor, a small desk, and a chair. Once I sat down in the chair, I would be prompted to place my hand on a small gel pad on the desk and speak my name. When I did that, my lessons for the day would officially begin.

The lessons were mostly videos along with a voice going over the topic at hand. I was pleasantly surprised at this, there wasn’t anything that I had to read. A lot of the classes would be about history. There would be a short audio snippet introducing what time period we would be going over, and the monitor would drop me into the action.

I really enjoyed the war videos. These would switch between bird’s-eye views of the battles, and the different formations, and first-person perspectives of the war. My running theory was that they wanted to hammer in the very real effects that war had on individual people. I got to see a whole lot of people getting stabbed, speared, chopped, crushed, and just overall brutally murdered.

The political videos were much less interesting. Mostly, they were just charts on screen laying out who was where, when they were there, and what their motivations were at the time.

I napped a lot during the political videos.

After the lessons for the day were finished, I would be sent back for more training with Avice. This training was much less intense, mostly stretching, yoga, and slow muscular exercises. Even though it was easier, it was more painful, as it compounded the fatigue from earlier in the day.

I would limp back into the OST headquarters an hour or two after the second training period, and either head back to my living quarters, which is what I usually did, or if I was particularly hungry, I headed back to the cafeteria and grabbed a snack, then went to my quarters.

My room was pretty nice. It had an adjoined bathroom with a pretty large shower, a queen-sized bed, a monitor like the one that was in the classroom, and a big armchair. There was also a bookshelf completely stuffed with novels, but I didn’t have any discernible reason to be using that.

When I stepped inside, I stripped, got into the shower and stayed in there for an obscenely long time. I would let the hot water caress the injuries I had gotten during the day, and just relax. Then I got out and got into pajamas.

Holy crap were they comfortable. The day-to-day clothes that the OST had gotten for me were starchy, plain affairs, but the pajamas were a whole different beast. Wearing them, I doubted I would even need a bed to feel comfortable at night. Fluffy, soft, downy pajamas, they were.

I’d get into bed and turn the monitor on, it was voice-enabled so I didn’t have to get up. I would call out a command, and it would put on a movie. They had all of them.

Quite literally, every single movie ever made. And presumably all of the movies that would ever be made. The first week, I pounded through all of the Harry Potter movies in four days. Then I watched all of Lord of the Rings after that. Back at home I didn’t have access to a television, so regularly watching movies was pleasant.

After I watched the movies, I would fall asleep and wake up early the next morning to do it all again.

The funny thing was, despite how difficult the training was, or rather because of it, I was really enjoying it. I could tell that I was getting stronger, faster. I had more stamina, I could run for longer. I liked that I could see the results immediately. It made it worth the occasional cuts and bruises. I was also able to recognize battle formations from the videos, and see how they worked. It gave me an insight that I didn’t have before, and I could tell that I was actually learning, for what felt like the first time in my life.



I hadn’t seen Major General Siegfried since I had been put into basic training. It was a little disappointing, I really liked the man. Maybe I would get to talk to him soon.