No strings on me (Cobie and Seni)

Cobalt yawned a little bit as he waited for the person Richard said was going to teach him something that could be very useful in both his work for the government and his freelance assassin work. He had been rather tight lipped on the subject but he had told him that the person teaching him was Richard's 11 year old apprentice. Having been formidable himself at that age, Cobalt decided to reserve judgement on the girl's skills. There also had to be some reason why Richard, who was not a stupid man, would have taken the girl on as his only apprentice instead of an older child. Contenting himself to wait, Cobalt sat on the wall of the arena, ready to jump in when the lesson began.

Senium, who was suffering from one of her bad days at the moment in time, she hated that today was the day that they were playing up on her because it was needed for the training that she would be doing, she needed to be able to make nimble movements with her fingers.

Hoping that it would sort itself out by the time it came to teach the man, who Richard had told her about, she half carried, half dragged the puppets that she needed for today behind her and came to rest in the middle of the ampitheatre, looking around for the man who she could be teaching.

Her glamour charm still intact, Senium sat down on the puppet and waited, flipping her hair into a bobble.

Cobalt frowned a little bit. There was the strangest smell of blood and decay in the air. Richard had told him that this was normal around the girl. And that if he asked questions about it that the German would turn his blood to acid. The fire in the man's eyes had convince Cobalt he was being truthful.

It became fairly obvious who his instructor was going to be when a small girl, about the age of 11 by looks alone, walked into the arena dragging several large puppets behind her. Deciding to introduce himself, Cobalt walked over to the girl and smiled as he waved at her,

"Yo!" he greeted her brightly, "You must be Senium. My name's Cobalt. Richard told me about you."

Senium smiled a little when the man that she was going to be teaching revealed himself, she was glad to see that he was the man that she had spotted and they wouldn't be having an audience today, after all these powers were meant to be secret, and they couldn't be taught to just anybody, they needed to be sure they would use them correctly.

"Hello! Ah yes I am Senium, but you can call me Seni, it's a pleasure to meet you Cobalt, and yes, my Master is very kind, he told me that you would like to look into my art."

She gestured to the cloaked puppets, their actual forms invisible from sight, and she wondered just how much Richard had told Cobalt about her art and decided that would be a pretty good place to start;

"Uhm, what exactly did Master tell you about what my abilities are?" she asked.

Cobalt smiled at the girl when she visibly perked up at meeting him. He was glad that he'd had the foresight to book out the entire arena so that no one would be allowed to watch them train. Apparently it was secret or something,

"Alright then I'll call you Seni if you call me Cobie. Cobalt makes me feel kinda old." he joked lightly, "Richie boy is probably right! He knows what I like in my magics after all. Worked together a long time ago."

He peered around the girl's small form to look at the rather weird assortment of puppets. Having been told nothing by Richard, Cobalt was at a loss as to what power the girl had that involved puppets,

"Yeah Richie didn't tell me anything so I'm kinda in the dark here." he replied, scratching the back of his head sheepishly, "He just told me that it was very original and very useful."

Senium was glad that there was a nickname that she could call Cobalt, after all it was getting to be slightly normal for her to be told to call adults by their first names and she hoped that she would remember to use the correct address at the correct time, especially in school.

"Okay then Cobie," tilting her head to one side she was very interested by the way that her Master and Cobie had seemed to have worked together at one point and she wondered if they were still close "It sounds like you two know each other very well." she said cheerfully.

With a small 'AH!' Senium smiled lightly and she decided that she would show off her magic to the best of her ability, closing her eyes she gathered her focus and she opened them, making a small 'Hah.' noise and strings flew from her finger tips and attatched to the puppets limbs.

They flew out from under the cloak, one in a man's form, and one in a woman's that didn't look far of Senium's features, they began to run forward to the center of the theatre and the swords concealed in the man extended, the woman's mouth opened and her darts were primed.

"I control puppets and animate objects by projecting my magic in the form of strings. I'm a puppet master."

Cobalt was rather relieved that Senium was going to call him Cobie and not Cobalt. Truth be told the only people who called him Cobalt were his employers and this girl was too nice to be in the same group as them,

"He and I worked together for about a year before we went our separate ways." he told her with a smile, "Of course we parted under... less than ideal terms. But we've patched it all up now!"

Cobalt watched as the excitable girl closed her eyes and started to concentrate. It made her look rather cute, the way her face scrunched up like that. His eyes widened when magic strings flew from her fingertips and connected with the puppets at various different places. As the puppets primed themselves, ready for battle, Cobalt couldn't help himself. He moved over to the female puppet and examined the darts closely, grinning as he did so,

"Poison darts right?" he asked before turning back to Senium with a huge grin, "This. Is. So. COOL! You have got to teach me how to do this! Oh I've already got so many ideas!"

Senium was loosing herself in the feeling of not being in pain any more and she knew when she let the control of the strings dissappear she would be in a lot of pain, using her magic always did that to her, but she wasn't about to tell Cobie or her Master that any time soon.

Seeing that Cobie was looking at the puppet, the female one, Senium gasped lightly and quickly relinquished her control over the two of them, and their limbs became limp once more. With a large smile, she turned to face the man and giggled lightly.

"You have to walk first Cobie! It'll be a while before you can use big puppets like these, so I have a small one for you to test out your skills on, just until you know what you're doing. Is that okay?" she asked, taking out the small pocket marionette that she carried with her most of the time.

"So...do you want to start now?" she asked, slightly breathlessly.

Cobalt wasn't really paying his whole attention to Senium at the moment, mainly because he was looking at the puppets, but even distracted as he was he could tell that the technique was making Senium rather out of it. When Senium gasped, the puppets suddenly fell over and Cobalt's eyes widened. He held up the man and the female puppet long enough to move away from them,

"Awwwww bring me down why don't you." he complained in a playful manner before grinning, "Yeah I getcha. Walk before you run and all that kind of thing right?"

He moved closer to her to take the little marionette doll from her and to hold it in his hands. He glanced at Senium,

"Are you alright?" he asked her in concern, "You look a bit... unsteady."

Senium felt a little bad that she was making a grown man start out on such a small level but she didn't want him to be discouraged when he couldn't move the larger puppet, after all it took immense control and it needed lots and lots of practice to be able to master it, at least it took her a while.

"Well yes, its always a good idea to make sure that you can use the smaller things, so that you're no overexterting yourself, you don't want to damage your magic."

Gasping a little Senium nodded and smiled lightly she was okay, for her standards, and she knew that she needed to conserve her energy for this training session, she would need it after all. Motioning to the stands, she sat down on the lower teir and smiled wider;

"Of course! I'm fine, although my magic is not the strongest, sometimes I think my core is damaged." she giggled "Now, the first thing you need to do, is visualise the strings attatching to the joints you want them attatched to."

Cobalt normally would have felt slightly insulted that someone thought his control was so weak he had to start at basics but he'd never even heard of using magic for this so he wasn't going to be insulted because he was genuinely ignorant. He nodded in agreement as he started memorising the weight of the marionette in his hand, to get a feel for it,

"Yeah... work my way up to a full scale one in awhile." he agreed before chuckling a little bit, "I wouldn't worry about damaging my core. It's pretty tough after all the stuff I've put it through."

He smiled a little bit and put a hand gently onto her should to help her to the stands. The buzz of magic he felt from the touch told him she was wearing a glamour but he ignored it. If she didn't want to show him then it wasn't his business,

"Well if you're sure." he shrugged a little bit before focusing on strings attaching themselves to the marionette, "Okay... I'm visualising. Do I just kind of... push magic out in a trickle or something?"

Senium wasn't sure that she was going to be really very good at teaching someone older than her the art, after all they would most likely get it very quickly and that would make herself feel very stupid for taking longer than her student to learn the thing that she was teaching them, although she should be proud of them.

"I'm sorry I didn't mean to insult your power Cobie...I just...I'm not really very good at this I've never done it before..." she stuttered, biting her lip.

With a smile Senium waited until she was sure that Cobie had given enough time for the visualiation, and then she smiled and shook her head a little at the question that he asked her, instead she reached for his hands and held them up, spreading them out.

"Now here is where things get complicated, and now is the time that you need to pay the most attention, you need to assign movements to each action, you know like that muggle game DDR? With the dance combinations? You need to make your own combination of movements that will trigger the puppet to move, for example, to get the male puppet to respond I slash my first and index finger through the air. You need to make a quick and familiar combination to get any puppet you use to respond while remembering to visualise the movement."

Cobalt saw immediately that Senium thought that he'd been trying to undermind her teaching abilities or something along those lines. He shook his head a little bit and smiled,

"Relax Seni, you're doing a great job of teaching me so far." he assured her with an eye smile, "Just keep up with what you're doing. I'll be quieter now, like a good student."

Cobalt chuckled a little bit when she shook her head at his little attempt at sumarising the whole exercise without knowing it. As instructed, Cobalt began to pay more attention as she began to explain it. As she explained it, Cobalt had only one question,

"Alright... I'm getting the idea of the basic idea but I have a question." he paused before looking at her, confused, "What's DDR?"

Senium beamed at Cobie, glad that he wasn't going to be upset if she made him feel a bit like a child by accident, after all she was going to speak to him as if he didn't know anything about the art, because to be quite frank, he didn't know anything about it.

"Okay, but if you have a question please ask me, okay?" she said with a friendly smile.

A little put out that after her long explaination he didn't comment on the techincal aspect at all, rather focused on her analogy of what she had said it was like, sighing lightly she thought of how best to explain it and she tapped her chin with her finger lightly.

"It's a muggle dancing game, you have to move in the right combination of ways to get points and win the round."

He smiled, happy that she was smiling so freely around him when it normally took others much longer to feel so comfortable around him. It kind of hurt his case that most people either knew him as a professor or a killer for hire. Or both. He was kind of ignorant here so he was open to everything,

"I'll be sure to ask any questions I might have." he told her with a smile, "After all, you're the expert her. I am but the green as grass student."

Cobalt winced a little bit as he read the annoyance in Senium's body language. Apparently she'd not taken kindly to the way his first question had been about the analogy used. As the analogy was explained he scratched the back of his head sheepishly,

"Sorry that was my first question... just never heard of it before is all." he apologised before thinking of a more technical question to ask, "So to move a limb I have to move in a series of motions with my fingers, right? Are certain digits focused on certain body parts or is it the motions themselves more than the figers that move?"

Senium turned her head to look at Cobie, glad that he had apologised but she was still slightly annoyed by the way that he had acted, who cared what DDR was? She'd even said it was about dance combinations she was sure of it. With a sigh she listened to what he had to say and thought about the best way to answer his question, it was second nature to her now to do all of these things.

"No, to register that you want to move the puppet in the first place you need a motion to deploy the magical threads from your fingers to attatch to the chosen target, this needs to be a quick movement so that you can switch your attention from puppet to puppet if need be."

Humming lightly, Senium thought she might as well develop a little bit on what needed to happen after that; "Once you have the puppet registered to your thoughts and movements, then you can control it purely by visualisation, and the hand gestures are only needed when you need to deploy a weapon or hidden feature of the puppet."

Cobalt could see that Senium was still rather annoyed with him but there was little that he could do about it other than be sure to be a much better student than he had been so far. To show that he did really want to learn and that he realised that the question about DDR had been rather stupid. He frowned in concentration as he thought about it,

"Right..." he mused as he thought about her words, mulling them over in his head. Movement was needed, swift movement, that would register movement with the puppet once he had properly visualised the strings. He nodded a little bit, "How much magic do you have to include with the swift movement? In general terms... a lot or a little?"

Cobalt smiled a little bit at the thought of moving and attacking with a puppet purely through visualisation but he dampened his hopes. It would be a long time before he reached that level of development but he couldn't help but ask,

"How long did it take you to register your thoughts and movements to your puppets well enough to move them purely on visualism?" he chuckled sheepishly, "I know I'm years away from that level but I can't help but be curious."

Senium smiled a little, glad that they seemed to be moving onto more technical questions that she was actually able to answer with some ease, she had thought that she would choke up and stutter, but it was about something that she knew, something that she loved, and maybe that fact gave her more confidence than it would have done speaking about any other issue.

"Well to you it wont feel like a lot, because it depends on the strength of your magical core, mine is very small so it takes about half of your energy, to initialise two puppets, so about a quarter per puppet, but those are the large ones, so...a small one for you won't be any problem, I don't think you'd even notice." she grinned happily.

Giggling a little Senium was glad that he had asked this question. Senium was proud of her swiftness to pick up the art and she knew that she would only get better with practice.

"It took me 6 years to learn the art fully, I am still developing power and control now, but, for you, being an adult, and powerful, it will take about half that time."

The fact that they had moved onto technical questions was a blessing for both of them as it meant that Cobalt wouldn't get distracted at all and it meant that Senium would be able to be a lot more confident in the way she spoke to him as it was obvious that she was the master here. Glad to know that his training puppet wouldn't drain him as much as Senium had made it look on the big puppets, Cobalt nodded,

"Well I'll probably lose a lot of magic when first getting started." he admitted with a slight blush, "I have a tendency to kind of use slightly too much magic and then scale down. This'll be the hardest step for me I think... but then again all the steps are gunna be hard."

At Senium's giggle it was clear to Cobalt that the girl was proud of how quickly she had mastered the art of puppeteering. When she told him that it took her 6 years to master it to the level she had he couldn't help but clap,

"Amazing!" he congratulated her, grinning widely, "Hell if I can get it down to your level in 6 years I'll be amazed, this stuff is really advanced."

Senium blinked lightly and she wondered if it was normal to have adults blushing around you, she supposed that it was because he was a little bit embarrassed about how he learnt magic, but she didn't mind, in fact, sometimes that could be a good thing. Even if it did put more power behind the spell than needed.

"Oh I wouldn't worry about that, if anything in this art that's a good thing, you just make the attachment to the puppet stronger, so, don't worry about it." she smiled.

Now, her cheeks were graced with a blush when she saw that Cobie was clapping for her, it was going to be fun teaching him, and maybe at the end of it she would have a new friend, and perhaps he would be able to teach her a little something.

"I know you'll be able to do it in no time at all Cobie, but now, you have to make your movement, and keep practicing it until it becomes ingrained in your magic and the puppet."