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Rudolf Sagramore
Later on that evening, it was an unusual form that came shuffling over to where Skael’s proudest representative sat, someone who had more or less never forged occasion to speak beyond..,
“Hey. Any chance you’ve got a pot going already? I could use something to take the edge off. Getting worn down.”Well, that. That was usually the long and short of it.
As greetings went, it was casual enough, a beleaguered wave of one raised hand following the hail and a summary halt upon his slow gait. It served well to contrast the wear and tear he spoke of, painted across his frame— electrical burns across the skin and wild spikes of his pale hair, worse than he’d left their most recent trial with. There was an air of ozone about him, which when mixed with the shadows hugging his person more closely than normal, almost gave a “freshly charred” impression.
Rudolf had evidently been put through the ringer, during whatever he’d been up to once they had earned their night’s rest. Even so, there was another reason to bridge the gap that had sort of gone unaddressed, this time.
“Also, a favor, if you could hear me out.”As Rudolf approached, Eliane was seated with her uniform jacket off and a needle and thread in her hands. She was repairing a torn stitch from their last battle as she rethreaded the fabric. By her side was indeed a full thermos of coffee, still piping hot. Looking up at the sound of footsteps, the pink-haired girl cocked an eyebrow at Rudolf’s state.
“You look like shit,” she commented, stating the obvious before she slid her caffeinated thermos in his direction. “Is this favor related to…” she made a hand gesture, encompassing the entirety of the man’s ragged state.
“No,” he shook his head, before plopping down at her side and accepting the offered thermos with a tilt of the head and a quick
“Appreciate it.”He took a measured sip, refusing to be greedy. As road coffee went, enthusiasm like hers no doubt beget quality— nowhere near the best brew he’d had in his life, but nonetheless hard to beat, for what the circumstances were. He’d had it impressed upon him early that no matter what you held dear in matters of taste, you needed to respect coffee that still got the job done. Not everything needed to be a damned artpiece.
Nodding, he slid it back over and continued.
“At least, not exactly. I was wondering if you’d be willing to get me up to speed on handling firearms. Considering how often we run into Valheimr that use them and how short I am on distance options besides… y’know.”With his other hand he turned his palm upward and wiggled the fingers towards the sky, mimicking flame.
“I figure being more familiar with anything I might be picking up in a pinch can’t hurt. Hardly a more qualified teacher than you around.”Eliane, of course, prided herself on being able to make a great brew wherever she was. Although she was not privy to Rudolf’s thoughts, they no doubt would have been a great complement. Tying off the end of a string of thread, she secured her stitching as she finished the repair. Holding the fabric outwards with a judging stare, Eliane nodded in satisfaction before slipping the jacket back onto herself and stowing her sewing kit away before accepting the returned thermos.
“Hmm, a crash-course on small arms, then?” The pink-haired officer gave Rudolf a critical look for just a moment, she shrugged and nodded. “Sure, I can do that. You’ve definitely come to the right person,” she boasted, before standing up and giving him a somewhat pointed look. “Is it just a practical understanding you’re looking for, or are you looking to truly understand how firearms actually work as well?”
“The latter.”His reply was all but immediate, unflinchingly meeting the look she gave with a nod. After multiple hours of having bolts of lightning thrown at you, even Eliane’s intense personality seemed something of a reprieve. He continued on, rolling stiffness out of his wrist. “I’ve been taught to seek as thorough an understanding as I can. Everything’s got a structure. If I know how a gun works, I know how to attack it better when the enemy uses one, right?”
Pretty fundamental logic. Every good strategy worked this way at some scale— and atop that, he’d already seen his share of the subject material in action. Enough to glean basics like the trigger mechanism loosed the shot, the aiming seemed somewhat similar to a crossbow, what impact the bullets imparted, and so on.
Taking the more thorough option would serve to shore up the gaps much better.
Eliane readily accepted that answer, giving an approving nod back. She would hardly turn down an opportunity to expound on the particulars of firearms, after all. “You’re right. In fact, I was going to clean my weapons after finishing with this, so now’s a good time as ever!”
Standing up, she began to gather her belongings even as she continued. “Between my gunblade, rifle, and the lovely autocannon that we picked up, the guns I have are a fairly good representation of most of the mechanisms you’ll encounter on the field. You’ll get a far better appreciation for how to fire, aim, and how to respond when being attacked by most firearms by seeing how they work under the hood.”
With her stuff gathered, she marched on towards where she was temporarily keeping the autocannon and her rifle– her gunblade, of course, still strapped to her belt. While her stride was imperious, she did glance back to see if Rudolf was following. “So what happened, anyway? I don’t remember you looking nearly that bad after the last fight. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t get knocked on the head.”
“I’d usually scamper off to get Eos or Miina to patch me up a lot sooner than this,” he hedged, half-joking as he offered a shrug. He was, of course, keeping pace— for all the autocannon had melded into the general ensemble of the Kirins’ supporting cast, it still was prodigiously hard to miss. No prizes for guessing where they were headed.
“But no, you’re not seeing things. You remember the midpoint of the battle? Adrammelech calling that big Thundaga down to where I was before Izayoi caught it on her sword and redirected it?”Subconsciously, his hands floated through the air as he described it, reaching high before swinging down with a pantomime blade. Still trying to grasp the rhythm.
“I badgered her into teaching me how. She’s the ‘five minutes on theory, five hours on practice’ type of instructor, it turns out—“ he smirked, tone flippant through the explanation. It probably wasn’t a full five hours, but a little artful exaggeration was in order after how long it had felt bearing the brunt of the shocks.
“This sorry state I’m in is the fruits of my labor.”It didn’t last as they drew upon her little armory at the side of camp.
“With Arton gone, I’m more or less the next best suited to be holding down the front line, fielding the bigger hits. Gotta learn all the tricks to keep myself standing while I have time.”He was never a particularly large-statured person, but even then, he seemed to shrink a little. For a moment, he looked small, then…
“So. Where do we start, Professor?”He dropped to a knee, eyes fixed onto the tools of the trade before him, ready to absorb as much as he could handle.
“About what I expect from her,” Eliane nodded, with a slight upwards curve to her lips. While she was hardly as stern as Izayoi, her training methods weren’t entirely dissimilar from the swordswoman. The Skaelan might put a little more savviness or accommodation, but in the end she agreed with that sort of practice. “Reminds me of when I trained up my teams back at home,” she chuckled, with fond memories in her mind.
That was right. She
was a leader in her guard force.
“Were you successful?” she asked as they stopped in front of her now familiar weapon.
“Not as thoroughly as I’d like.” he replied, gaze sliding from the rifle to the mounted cannon.
“Getting there, but I’m having to take shortcuts too often to deal with realistic mana amounts.”“Eager aren’t you? We’ll get to the rotary gun last. It’s the most complex, after all.” Instead, she unholstered her gunblade, pointing it downwards as she popped open the cylinder chamber. There were still six bullets in each hole. In front of Rudolf, she flipped the gun over, emptying its contents into the palm of her hand before handing over the weapon to him. “Well! Let’s start with what you do know, yeah?”
“Sure.”Flexing his singed fingers, Rudolf gingerly took the hilt and blade into his palms, eyes scanning the length of the almost-right edge of steel. Well-kept as any of her sister firearms, naturally, the temper and alignment seemed good. Lighter than he expected as he closed his hands around the pommel, given there was a whole firing mechanism built into the crossguard and ricasso…
Almost unconsciously, he settled back into a fighting stance, rear hand floating near the hip as he slowly carved through the air, clicking the cylinder back into place with a flick of the wrist. It was different from the saber form factor it resembled, he could feel it, but for something that was effectively smashing two radically different weapons into one another, the balance
was impressive. He’d held plenty of
pure swords that were less finely-crafted, by his arm’s measure.
All this being true, he glanced over to her after settling back to a neutral base, flicking the chamber back open, well aware that judging the thing
as a sword ran almost directly counter to what they’d set out to discuss. He began to rattle off what he remembered.
“Well, regarding Gunblades, I had the privilege of sharing some jobs with SEEDs on mercenary work a little after the Blight got real bad in Edren. From what I remember.. Basic premise of it’s that the cylinder stores cartridges which, when you depress the trigger mechanism mid-swing, let you utilize the explosive force to amplify cutting power, or change the arc of your strike, as the shock travels up the length of the blade. I’ve heard certain models skew more heavily towards the rifle end of the angle than it feels like yours does— that there’s a bit of a range between focusing on the ‘gun’ or ‘blade’ aspect.”He held the gunblade out, towards the trees rather than camp, and let his finger rest on the trigger as he tried to line the spine of the saber up with his gaze, pausing for a moment before pantomiming a loosed shot.
“I feel like the curve you’re working with here would lend less to treating it like the usual rifles Edren’s been adopting and more like a saber you can swing really hard at the right moment.” he stated frankly.
“I’m not super experienced with the former— the past five years have all been me and a bunch of hardline, stubborn as old goat swordsmen. Not an environment that makes for a good deal of exposure, even if they’ve been forced to accept things are changing around them.”He pointed the tip towards the earth, mimicking her posture when she’d handed it over in the first place.
“But I do know that you generally want any projectile you’re trying to aim on a straight track, and that when the trigger sparks up all the powder in there, the explosion gets pretty violent if the steel isn’t up to the task of keeping it going through the barrel and… nowhere else.”He had a pretty academic idea of it all, everything being equal. With maybe a little nudging through the foggier elements, he could describe the basic physics at work.
Having observed him mimicking a shot, Eliane nodded at Rudolf’s words. “Yeah. This weapon is more blade than gun, and using conventional ammunition, it’s not as powerful as my rifle if you’re using it simply as a gun.” Taking the weapon back, she beckoned him over to a spot where she could properly disassemble the revolver part of her weapon. “Your understanding’s better than I expected at least, so maybe I won’t have to baby you through this,” she chuckled.
I may have bitten off more than I can chew here.“To start, this gunblade is a double-action design, which means…” It didn’t take long for her to begin in depth about how her weapons worked as she went through each weapon, explaining the mechanics behind how they were both fired and aimed. By the end of it, she had gotten
very technical, especially when it came to the rotary cannon and her observations on how Valheimian firearms were made and used.
“Kept up, Rudolf?” she finally asked, having essentially lectured for the past hour or so.
“We’ll see in the morning,” he tiredly groused, poring back over the sheet of hastily scrawled notes. Some time after they’d gotten into differences in powder compounds, he’d realized it would be a hopeless endeavor to try and lock the full breadth of her technical lesson into the mind alone— doubly so in that he had come into this already a little mentally exhausted by the stress-testing Izayoi had put him through.
“I’m gonna want more sleep than I’m likely to get to sort it all out.”A slow release of breath, shoulders finally going a little slack.
“But at the very least, this’ll be a good start for the future. I’ll definitely know what I'm looking at better, the next time Valheim’s got a pistol to my brow. Hope Esben doesn’t try to pull that con with us again… But yeah, I should have the broad strokes.”“Eh?” Eliane looked somewhat unimpressed. “It’s only been an hour.”
“Multiple hours of trying to learn to redirect lightning directly before this.” he flatly countered.
“...I suppose you’re not interested in the practical either.”
At this, he closed his eyes and massaged his temples for a moment, breathing deep. For a moment, he surely looked exasperated— but with a couple smacks to his cheeks, whatever ailed his mood was gone. Hers being a denser lecture than some of his cram sessions on Lunarian history aside, he had gotten what he asked for. Hadn’t just come this way to kill time.
“No… No, I am. No point in stopping at theory and definition when we’re this far in the weeds, and I might need to pick up one of their or your guns if something goes way, way screwy.”He inclined his head, short and sharp.
”Please. I’m the type where feeling it all hands-on helps things click anyway.”Eliane flashed Rudolf a wolfish grin at that reply. “Perfect! That’s the spirit. We’ll work on shooting
and dodging, then.” It was becoming obvious that the Skaelan woman’s method of teaching and training very much skewed towards the training that he had just received from Izayoi…
And sure enough, before Rudolf could even voice protest to the attempted diplomatic tune of,
“No, actually he was plenty experienced with dodging gunfire, do remember how we met”, his small pink taskmaster was off to the races, putting him through all manner of live-fire exercises— metaphorical and literal both.
In all fairness, those protestations died inside him pretty quickly anyway. As the exhaustive nature of her verbal lesson plan had clued him into, the “gaps” he was looking to fill were both wide
and deep. They’d deduced (read: she had decided and he’d been essentially at her behest in agreeing) that the order of operations would place dodging at priority, given the tactical role he had taken onto himself and the frequency with which the information would come up and be relevant. There was a chance he’d have the opportunity to put what he learned to use in firing a weapon himself— there was a
certainty that they’d all be shot at again, given how extensive Valheim’s infiltration of domestic soil had evidently become.
So, the first hour of the night had been spent on theory. The second, naturally, was practice— dry fire exercises, wherein she ran him through the ringer with both of her primary firearms— the objective, even without live ammunition, was simply “don’t get hit”.
The “gulf” in this respect manifested more subtly than in most— he had already glommed onto the basic principles of “the bullets come out the front of the gun, if that’s pointed at you go elsewhere” on his own terms, well before becoming one of the Kirins. With her instruction, though, his eyes were being opened to all the considerations the person at the other end of the rifle was making— their cone of vision, the zeroing of their sights, the firing nets that had already been set, on and on and on.
The rifle cracked, and he felt his shoulder shift, absorbing the kick of the recoil into it and his stance below. Mere fractions of a second later, the sound of impact from afar— they’d sourced and overturned a felled hardwood stump at the grove’s edge as a makeshift target, the bullet sinking into the wood.
Handling had been its own trial, getting all the motions down through empty repetition and close corrections, until finally he had been spared enough rounds to get a feel for actually shooting— barely any, given the scarcity of resupply.
Rudolf sought to make that handful she could afford him count, slowly exhaling as he worked the action, the brass falling to the soft, cool earth. By now, he had found the movement to start being baked into his limbs, the way a new sword technique might— a welcome reprieve, after all the hectic cramming he had done today. Just a process he could settle into, and stop thinking quite so hard.
For a few shots more, he kept silent, then…
“So I owe you for this, of course.”He didn’t have much left in the tank. Time to wind it all down, decompress—
“Curious, though: This a bigger favor you’ve got to call in on me than Esben and his arlettes? Or did the walk on the beach square that whole thing out?”— And after an entire month of trusting eachother with their lives (after a fashion), try and actually make a new friend. The week had been horrible, he was exhausted, the least he could do was learn a bit about one of the three left from the original unit.
Eliane, who had been carefully monitoring Rudolf’s performance and progress, shrugged. She had been a harsh taskmistress indeed, working him through the paces of the rigors of her craft, but the pink-haired woman recognized that he was beginning to flag and relented from pushing him further. “Hardly. I can only see the upsides in you and the others being better able to fight the Valheimians,” she countered.
“Well,” he shrugged his shoulders in turn, electing to be only as committal as she was on it rather than fight on the lines of an indefinite propriety. Acceptance, too, was proper.
“I took your time away from other stuff, but I’ll take it.”“Eh… for Esben?” Eliane made another shrugging gesture. “If we’re being transactional, sure. That beach was a
pain.” She said it with emphasis, the memory of the whole thing clearly still displeasing her. “Baking is hardly a favor anyway…”
“Really?” a brow rose.
“Even after all that theater on the docks? Hell, if we wanna talk about squirreling your time away…”He spared a glance over his shoulder, towards the looming form of Ramuh, and the old man their mutual friend was in the midst of a spirited discussion with.
Eliane canted her head to the side at that response, giving him a questioning look.
“Maybe he just likes talking to you,” he offered, killing the urge to mirror the tilted head in favor of sighting the rifle again, training his focus on the irons if nothing else.
“Been pretty often lately, is all. Could just be you remind him of home— Etro knows this place is as far removed from it as you get.”He was a little surprised the heat hadn’t gotten to the two of them the way it had in Osprey. For his money, the humidity here made it all the worse, even if the high and lush forest canopy kept them out of the direct sunlight more often than not. As useless as they’d be in the bog, the thought of it made him miss his hat and cloak.
“Oh– Well, it’s always nice to talk to fellow countrymen,” Eliane readily agreed, bobbing her head. She wasn’t actively complaining about it, but the heat was definitely not something she had gotten used to.
“What about him, anyway?”
“Meaning?”Eliane tilted her head again as she looked back at Rudolf. “Meaning…?”
He lowered the rifle. A gust of wind blew between the two of them, scented by gunpowder and campfire smoke.
“I asked you first.”She stared back at him. “...Nevermind.” Another pause. “Is it really that often?”
“Think on it and get back to me then, I guess…”He mulled her second question over for a moment, before counting the instances off finger by finger. With how hectic everything had been…
“Costa del Sol. The beach while we recovered from the Leviathan fight…” he grimaced, puzzling over something that was missing, just on the tip of his tongue… until, triumphantly, finger number three stood in rank.
“You and Esben recently received orders to pivot us down to Skael, right? That’s what he told me— only time you might have had to do that was when we all split up through Brightlam, before we left with Isolde.” he concluded, holding the count up to view.
He didn’t mirror the full tilt she took, but there
was a crooked, vaguely amused quality to his smirk that defied concrete description.
“We’ve been running ourselves through this country at a pretty breakneck pace ever since we stepped off the boat, so that’s pretty much all the time we’ve had that wasn’t at full muster. Being fair, I guess you didn’t have much room to notice.”The pink-haired Skaeller gave him another look. “Really? That man talks a lot for a spy.” That gesture resolved into an eventual shrug before she began to gather discarded equipment and spent shells– satisfied with Rudolf’s performance after running him through the paces throughout the rest of the day.
”With what he trusts me knowing.” he intoned, bending low to do his part cleaning up the place.
“I guess it’s not too surprising. As for you, we’re far from done, but it’s obvious you’re learning a lot today.”
“May neither bolt nor bullet strike me henceforth,” he wryly vowed, nodding all the same.
“Again, I appreciate the time and study. You said you were planning on cleaning your gear when we were finished up, right? Need an extra pair of hands?”He offered the rifle, stock first as he’d been taught, in exchange for her share of the discarded brass he’d begun to collect in his other hand.
“No, no, I’m glad you’re interested. I like your proactivity.” Accepting the help with a nod, she took back the rifle, briefly checking the weapon before setting it against her shoulder. “Yes. We’ve got some work to do…”
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