Chapter 3Where Cara meets Natalie again, refuses to refuse the call to adventure, enters the world of martial arts (kind of), meets the lord-bishop of Monasteria for worldy reasons and walks “The Path” right through a new rival.
Two days after the encounter with Natalie, Cara was sitting behind the counter at the refurbishing centre where she worked, soldering away on a broken piece of electronics humming to herself. She was in a good mood. She was reminiscing about her training the night before, remedial footwork, again, but she hadn’t had so much fun doing her laps in a while, as this time she was imagining being Natalie, trying to emulate how she had moved when she fought. Of course Master Manfred reprimanded her for leaving the line of attack and reminded her to stay in her lane. She had just nodded and mumbled an apology, walked a few steps as she was told but the moment, Manfred’s was looking into another direction she went back to her experiments. That cost her push-ups… as did the little jump forward she did, just when Manfred had turned around. She had done a lot of push-ups and she still felt them today. Worth it though.
“Hey.”, Cara had somehow missed that a new customer had entered the shop. ‘There goes my easy Friday afternoon…’, she thought looking up.
“Oh! Hello Natalie.”, Cara said almost dropping the circuit board, she quickly recoverd her composure and her grip. “Do you need help with any old technology?”, she asked, carefully putting away the board and her soldering iron. She got up shifting into ‘professional mode’.
“In case that you need assistance with a personal electronic device we can repair most of them. You can pay in any of the European currencies with rare items or materials, please see the official list for exchange rates and rest assured that we can bring back most artefacts, Monasteria has one of the largest electronics mines in the region.”, Cara smiled her best service smile and was about to start explaining what needed to be done if Natalie needed help with something larger.
“Thank you, Cara.”, Natalie said with with a crooked smile and slightly raised eyebrows. “But I don’t need any assistance, with any small artefacts.”
“No?”
“Nope.”
Natalie looked at Cara, Cara looked back expectantly. Natalie’s half smile began to falter.
“Cara?”
“Yes?”
“This is the point where you ask, what I am here for instead.”
“Oh… I was wondering why you didn’t say anything else…”
Natalie waited for a few more seconds, deciding to make some encouraging hand gestures.
“… er…”, Cara said, Natalie’s smile returned and the gestures became a bit more pronounced. “Why are you here, if not for a repair?”
“I,” Natalie said, straightening her stance as she spoke, “am here to get you, Cara. You asked me to be your master. And as… someone… reminded me, I actually need to prove that I can teach the art to someone else. I do like your spirit. So, here we are. Think it over, if you accept I’ll take you as my trainee, I will teach you what little I know of the old Liechtenauer style, to the best of my ability. Sleep over it, you can give…”
“Yes.”, Cara said.
“…tomorrow.”
“Yes.”, Cara said again.
“I wasn’t quite finished.”, Natalie said, “If you agree, you will have to become my trainee full-time. I think I have found a way of how to fina…”
“I will be your apprentice.”, Cara said.
“Do you have that much money?”
“No, I’m pretty much broke.”
“Aren’t you jumping the gun a bit then?”, Natalie asked.
“You were about to say, that you had found a way to finance it.”, Cara said.
“What about your job?”
“I’m almost done for today.”, Cara said. “And I work for the city, which has a very strict ‘Either you work or you can fuck right off policy’.”, she added raising a finger as she quoted the ‘policy’, “So once I’m done with that,” she pointed at the circuit board. “I hand in my resignation, cash in my last wage and off we go.”, Cara smiled.
“Just like that.”, Natalie asked.
“Just liked that.”, Cara smiled.
After a short pause Natalie said, “OK, then. Get your work done. Afterwards we will have your first training.”, as she said this Cara’s face lit up, “And then tomorrow first thing in the morning… after sleeping in and a decent breakfast, we go a visit the lord-bishop.”
“The lord-bishop?”
“Yeah, he is the source of income I mentioned before, I have an offer he can’t refuse. I hope.”
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