Once again Slade was impressed, but no longer was he surprised. Young Jinny had cut in half his estimate for how long it would take before she realized that she wasn’t having much luck with being quiet. The more he taught her the more he was certain that she would have ended up in his world one day, in one way or another.

Reaching out he would grab a large, if thin, branch off a near by tree with his knife too keep noise down. “Keeping quiet in wilderness is far and away one of the harder environments” He would start to explain “You’ve no doubt that each step seemed to have something in the way. There are a few ways around that. First is to change how to are taking each step.” He would gesture to Jinny foot with the stick “You are walking heel to toe. Which is fine for locomotion and combat, but for stealth you want to walk toe to heel.” He would tap his own boot before taking several slow, exaggerated, steps.

The lift of each foot was the same, but on the down step he would use the toe of his shoe to brush forward the loose debris before resting on the ball of his foot he would then lean into the step slightly his foot sliding just a bit so that when he set his heel down it too was in the small cleared area he had made before. “It’s simple, but keeping it up at speed is tricky.

“Second is to know how to walk across brittle twigs” He would say before walking around a bit more normally, but it was notable that there wasn’t a whole lot of crunching. “This one takes a lot of personal balance and good sense of awareness. As I’m shifting my balance and point of contact with each step. You need to have an innate understanding of how much pressure what you are stepping on can take and react accordingly with each step.

“Third option, is simply not be on the ground.” To demonstrate that he would simply jump up into the three nearby. “This is my best route for following the third option, which comes with its own complications. Balance and weight distribution as well as acrobatic capability.” He would jump back out of the tree landing softly and quietly. Which if Jinny was paying attention to his feet involved him landing more or less on his toes and smoothly rolling back his weight in a mix of the first and second options he had explained.

“you might be able to use your meta-ability to assist with the first two options or simple negate the complications entirely by going over them”

All in all, a good primer, enough for Jinayah to get started, as well as something for her to work on, since it seemed like she had tracking down pretty well for her first time. Yet, it also wasn’t everything. He hadn’t mentioned anyway to slip past bushes or low hanging branches without disturbing them but that was by design on his part.

She asked about the stuff on the ground, so he answered about the stuff on the ground. This was as just as much about testing exactly how good her instincts were for Slade as it was imparting useful skills.