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Post by rvm45 on Jul 23, 2015 8:33:16 GMT -6
Chi
Chapter One
Any good skeptic will tell you that chi, chakras and chi meridians are pseudoscientific gobbledygook and arrant nonsense.
My teachers conceded that point, but they had another:
The human mind or brain’s ability to visualize something can have some powerful effects. Visualizing sitting in a lounge chair on a sunny beach can lower your blood pressure. Imagine a grease-clogged sink suddenly busting loose and draining can cause clogged sinus to drain very rapidly—even when the subject hasn’t been told the purpose of the exercise.
There are limits. One must go through a relaxation protocol—you know—your feet are very relaxed and peaceful. Now your calves are starting to relax…
It can take ten or fifteen minutes to get into the right state of mind. Experienced practitioners learn to get into the relaxed state instantly, but a few folk seem unable to get there at all. Then a few seem unable to visualize with any power even when hyper-relaxed.
There are other limitations. Sitting on an imaginary beach may lower your blood pressure for a few moments, but if you have chronic hypertension it will soon climb back to normal. Your sinuses will soon be stopped up again and if you use the clogged drain image two or three more times, it will lose all effectiveness for several hours.
The ancient origin of the outfit is shrouded in obscurity and I’m not sure that I was ever given a full disclosure of what little is known.
But they discovered that learning to visualize the chakras and chi meridians and learning how to move the old chi around enabled one to do things that seemed incredible, even unbelievable. Their rather busy system might not be any closer to ultimate truth than Plato’s shadow puppets, but it works
They recruited me. The first year I got room, board and a modest clothing allowance plus one hundred seventy-five dollars a week—paid in cash. The second year I got a thirty-dollar per week raise and for my third year another twenty-five.
I wasn’t terribly ambitious. I had a ten-by-fourteen foot room with several amenities and the camp was in beautiful country way out in the boonies of Idaho.
We trained in a variety of martial arts. Our martial art training was intense. Learning to control the old chi was rather laid back and haphazard—or so it seemed.
Later they explained that the process couldn’t be hurried and that feeling any anxiety or pressure to produce was very counterproductive.
About two thirds of the outfit’s members are the sons and daughters of members and they’ve been training in some fashion since early childhood. The rest of us go through a three-year training process.
I’d stayed on at the camp as a part-time teaching assistant and a casual for almost a year after I gradated. I did graduate—not “Aquituate” as my father used to say.
My casual pay was only ten dollars more per week than a third year student’s pay—but then graduates are paid rather generously per mission and the casual pay is like a salesman’s guaranteed minimum.
One final thing—because the outfit uses terms like “Chakras” and “Chi”—and because they seem inordinately fond of kunai knives and throwing stars—don’t assume that they are descended from some Oriental group.
People from the outfit see martial art movies and read cheap paperback adventures too.
The disparate clues that I’ve heard dropped seems to indicate Irish or perhaps Slavic roots perhaps with some Romany influence…
But the outfit is very much an American institution. I don’t mean to imply that they’re particularly patriotic—except when it might suit their purpose to appear to be. But these dudes would be as out of place in a Tibetan monastery, a Shaolin temple or a Ninja camp as you or I would be.
************ **************** **********************
Eight month’s into my fourth year, I was summoned to the dispatcher’s. I was alone. If I chose not to accept the mission there was no need for me to know the sordid details or to know who was going.
“This is a high risk mission. You will be going against the Russian mob in Chicago. They play very rough indeed. Your commission is eight thousand dollars—you know that the outfit keeps twenty-five percent. There is the possibility of earning a fifteen thousand dollar bonus and that will be all yours.
“You are being asked because you speak both Russian and Italian, and largely as support. You will probably be asked to take at least one suicide mission in the course of your duties.
“If you do well—and if you survive—this should lead to more missions for you,” Harold the dispatcher said.
“I accept,” was all I said.
“There is just one thing—I take language courses in my spare time. I’ve taken Pimsleur’s level one, two and three in both Russian and Italian and I’ve read a few books in each—but I’ve never spoken face-to-face with a native speaker of either,” I said.
“Never mind. You took our language proficiency test—by the way, those are the same language tests that the State Department uses—and you’re fluent enough.
“Why have you studied so many languages?” Harold asked.
“The truth? There were a few languages that I had a special interest in, but basically, I hate the idea of people being able to hide things right in front of me by using a foreign language.
“Logically, I know that I can’t master every language on Earth but every time I knock a fairly common language in the head I drastically reduce the number of folks in the world who can talk around me,” I said.
“Well that’s largely why you’ve been asked to go on this mission. We don’t want either the Eye-Talians or the Rooskies to be able to talk around our team.
“By the way, go by the armorers. He’s got a couple goodies for you. You’ll have a couple days to break in your new play pretties and to bond with your new teammates,” Harold said.
************* **************** ********************
I have a standing order for a left hand saber similar to the US Heavy Cavalry Saber of 1860. The 1860’s thirty-six-inch blade is already three or four inches longer than most sabers. I wanted mine to have a thirty-nine-inch blade.
Many metals don’t spawn at all well. The armorers use some mystery metal—at least its composition is a mystery to me. The mysterious alloy is heavier than aluminum, weaker than the better steels, pale blue in color with a tendency to be brittle—but it spawns perfectly.
The longest blades the armorers can make fairly reliable are the twelve to fourteen inch Bowies or Kukris that many members favor. Of course the thick-bladed Kunai knives with their six-inch blades or tomahawken heads are no problem for the armorers.
One fellow was really taken by the profile of the fourteen-inch Windlass Laconia—a budget double-edged and slightly leaf-bladed short sword. The armorers managed to create a fifteen-inch version and that had been the length frontier for sword blades for several years.
The thing is:
There are Japanese, Chinese and Korean groups similar to ours. I don’t know what their metallurgists know that ours don’t, but Katanas and Daos with yard-long blades are de rigueur with those dudes and our people haven’t come off well against people with full-fledged swords.
How can someone like me hope to prevail against someone who’s practiced kendo, iaido and jodo from early childhood?
If the situation ever arises, I plan to cheat like Hell.
Olde tyme saber fighting was a fully developed martial art though modern day fencers have gotten a bit away from the practical aspects. But there is HEMA—Historical European Martial Arts—and for some reason there had been a resurgence of traditional Polish Saber fencing.
Sabers were primarily cavalry weapons. The best that I can tell, no one ever ordered a saber with a thirty-nine-inch blade or a handle that allowed two-handed use while still keeping the saber’s generous hand protection because it would be pointless and unwieldy on horseback.
I could do half-assed kendo and iaido and so I knew what to expect from them in a broad sense, but few if any of them would have experience blocking Polish Saber technique—especially with a super-saber that I didn’t need to be able to use from horseback.
It was academic, because the armorers couldn’t make me a saber.
They had perfected something almost as neat though—two hangers—one right handed the other left handed.
A hanger is a relatively short-bladed saber. Some cut back on the guard as well, but mine had generous hand protection and they had twenty-five inch blades. For defense, they don’t give up much to the longer saber, but they lack some reach and aren’t nearly so good in attack mode.
The sharp relatively long blade would allow me to go through the mundane though, like Samson going through the Philistines.
They also gave me a new semi-automatic pistol. Designing guns that can spawn is a major pain. I’d put a lot into this design and I’d even leant the occasional hand in building prototypes. Since the gun was to be alloy, I suggested using the Star PD for dimensions. They’d stolen a march on me though and completed my gun without my knowledge.
The brass in cartridge cases doesn’t spawn at all well, so the cases were also of mystery metal. I had one hundred and fifty loaded rounds. Ammunition was unlikely to be a problem but I was disappointed that they only had five magazines ready to go. Star magazines hold six rounds so I had (6x5)+1=31 rounds on tap.
Sure a normal human would be most unlikely to ever need more than thirty-one aimed shots. He’d have eliminated the problem, been killed himself, would be under cover or would have successfully broken contract.
That didn’t always hold true for me though.
There were two other firearms users on my team. Joshua was six-four and looked like a bodybuilder. The chi control exercises taught us to supercharge our muscles but more supercharged muscle equals more strength—and more padding and resistance to injury. Big muscles also exhaust one’s chi faster.
Josh carried a big Colt Walker replica. The cap-and-ball revolvers didn’t need the tricky to manufacture cartridge cases. He also used a double barrel muzzle-loading 10-gauge shotgun all cut down.
Ladonna was one of the very few black people in the outfit—at least the part of the outfit that I’d seen. She carried a pair of .44 Navy Colts with five inch barrels.
No, Colt never marketed a .44 Navy, but they could have and replica makers have. Anyway, these were built from mystery metal in the outfit’s armory.
Organic materials seem to spawn with no problem, so my Star had stag grips and Ladonna’s grips were mother of pearl—and yes, I’m certain the armorers remedied any tendency the pearl grips had to be fragile in use.
The last member’s name was Gerald. He didn’t carry a firearm—at least not one that I could see. I don’t know what his particular expertise was supposed to be.
At any rate, the three of them had worked together on several other missions and they functioned as a well-oiled team. I was there because I spoke Russian and Italian. That was why they’d probably opt to send me on a kamikaze mission on my own to create a diversion when it was time to attack.
I’d never died back then, but everyone said that it was a major drag. Still, you need to do something to get your foot in the door and get the experience for bigger and more lucrative missions.
************* ***************** ***********************
I got up early the next morning and gave myself a shot of 250 milligrams of testosterone in each thigh and took a Dianabol tablet. Arnold used to joke that Dianabol was the breakfast of champions.
Yes, calling heavily on one’s inner energy is exhausting. Anabolic steroids help restore the chi. Interestingly enough, if you really scrape the bottom of your chi reserves, the hormones seem to disappear into the chakras with minimal effect on the material body.
We split up into two groups of two to drive to Chicago. Ladonna said that I drove too slow and cautiously and she insisted on doing all the driving.
“All right, you keep staring at me, but then you look away when I look back at you. Do you have a problem with me? Are you some sort of racist? Spit it out and get it in the open between us,” she said.
“We don’t have to like each other to work together,” she added.
“Yeah, I have a minor little glitch in the old software—or maybe its hardware—bats in the belfry—Ding Dong!”
“What…” Ladonna started.
“You asked. Hear me out. I find that with very few exceptions, I’m only attracted to black women. Women of my own race might as well be men for all the interest I feel in them…” I was trying to explain.
“So I’m the first woman that you’ve seen in a couple years? You can look all you want. Looking is free, but quit dropping your gaze every time I look at you. It makes me feel paranoid.
“Lets practice. Go ahead, look me up and down while I’m looking right at you…”
Ladonna had the personality of a Bloodhound—grouchy, grumpy and touchy.
*********** ************** *************************
Ladonna and I went to the hospital to interview the old man and his nephew. I’d see pictures already, even family tapes of the old man. At sixty-three years old, he was trim and active.
Then one of the mobsters had raped his daughter. The old man had insisted on filing charges. Then he’d got into two or three pissing contests on the street with the low-ranking teen soldiers.
They’d killed the girl, though not right away. The outfit has its resources and we were treated to a view of official crime scene photos as well as autopsy photos and reports.
What they’d done to the girl was pure sadistic brutality. What they’d done to the old man was far worse.
They’d amputated his arms about hallway up the humorous and they’d amputated his legs about two-thirds of the way up his femur. They’d split his tongue and then they’d filled his head with LSD-25 for five days.
A butcher could have done the amputations, but it would have taken someone with medical skills to do the clean neat stumps and to tie off major veins and arteries as well as antibiotics to prevent infections. These slime wanted the old man to live and be an emphatic warning to others.
Then the demons in human form had put what was left of him on his own doorstep for his wife to find.
The old man proved surprisingly sane. With so many traumas to his body they hadn’t tried to undo his split tongue. The old man slurred his sibilants and drooled a bit but he showed no tendency to relapse into Italian.
His nephew called me to one side.
“I’m not mob, but I know people who know people—if you catch my drift. The mob put me in touch with you people and they’re footing the bill. I want to be very straight with you. Word is that you’re very dangerous people to try to con.
“They aren’t paying you purely out of the goodness of their hearts. Anything that you can do to weaken the local Russian mob is protein for the old school mob people,” he said.
After I gleaned every bit of data possible from the old man I told Ladonna and the nephew to leave. I told them I needed to ask the old man something in the strictest confidence.
“Have you made your peace with God? I’m going to do this, unless you tell me explicitly that you’d prefer to go on living like this. Refusing to tell a lie can’t be construed as suicide, now can it?”
Tears came into the old man’s eyes.
I had weapons, but there was no call to bloody a weapon. Smothering or choking the brave old man would cause him more pain, however momentary.
I focused my chi into my right index finger. I poked my finger into his forehead right where the Hindu diagrams show a third eye, though there was no special significance to the site. Almost anywhere on the skull would have worked.
My finger knocked a circular divot out of the skull and penetrated the brain up to my first knuckle. The energy shielded my finger from any danger of being cut by sharp bone fragments.
There are adepts who can shove their fist through a human torso. I can’t do that, but a finger suffices, even to the sternum. It’s just not as flamboyant.
I’d compressed his brain a bit so as my finger withdrew there was a small pop and a small spurt of blood rushed out. My finger wasn’t bloody having been swathed in chi—or whatever in Hell allows one to do such things.
As I joined Ladonna she said, “That wasn’t very detached and professional.”
“No it wasn’t,” I agreed.
“If you hadn’t, I would have,” She said.
In the ordinary course of affairs, we should have been well out of the hospital before the old man’s cadaver was discovered. We lucked out the wrong way.
When we stepped off the elevator onto the ground floor, four uniformed security guards greeted us with drawn pistols.
For just a moment I was angry and I was tempted to shoot it out with the cretins to show them just how far they’d stepped out of their league, but that would have been pointless.
Have you ever watched a good stage magician? We were taught to never hesitate to use sleight of hand, misdirection or even flat-out lying if it contributed to our aura of great power and invincibility.
But back to stage magicians, while it isn’t always true, nine times out of ten the stage magician has already completed the hardest part of his trick before you start watching him trying to catch him at it.
I cannot teleport or become invisible. Yeah, sometimes I can cloud the minds of two or three non-practitioners, but not a whole roomful.
But Ladonna and I had already done the hard part. We were never really there to begin with. We’d spawned and sent our spawn in our places. True spawn vanish either when they are struck down with injuries that would kill a live body, when the live body turns them off or when they turn themselves off.
The spawned both turned themselves off and vanished. That popping sound is air rushing into the vacuum created when spawn vanish.
It isn’t hard to change a spawn’s face enough that even if there are security tapes we wouldn’t be recognizable. Spawn really seem to bollix most electronic surveillance gear anyway, but it isn’t something that you can count on.
Popping the cork almost invariably sends a tape-erasing EMP through most surveillance gear. Eye witnesses? Within hours they will have convinced themselves that they saw something else—anything else—rather than people vanishing before their eyes.
************* **************** ********************
The thing about creating spawn, you have to give them half your chi. You aren’t in contact with them while they live—though you can talk to them or phone them or whatever. When they vanish though, then you receive all their memories instantaneously.
The human mind and brain doesn’t seem well able to understand two sets of sensory data taking place at the same time—so it puts the events in a kind of sequence. It’s as if you read a book telling about the same instant of time experienced by two different people.
It is exhausting to run spawn. When a spawn is killed, you lose all the chi that you’d invested in him. It can take hours or even a day or two for some folk to recover enough to spawn again. When a spawn is terminated voluntarily, you get sixty to eighty percent of your chi investment back somehow and there is far less fatigue involved. Being killed is very exhausting.
Ladonna and I had checked into a nice hotel with the fake ID the outfit had given us. We were sharing a room though it had two double beds. Sharing a room and never being apart meant that we could watch each other’s backs.
Josh and Gerald were at another hotel altogether and we had no apparent contact. That meant that even if they found half of our team that they couldn’t take all of us out with one raid.
I was sitting on the bed when the spawn memories rushed into me along with the leftover chi. Ladonna was taking a shower in the other room. She’d left the door open per SOP. We weren’t children and I wouldn’t sneak a peek at her naked body.
Having the door open would make it that much harder for someone to subdue one of us without the other knowing.
“Ding-Dong!” Ladonna sang out when she got her spawn’s memories.
“Me too,” I observed.
She started dressing rapidly while I took a dozen brewer’s yeast tablets, twenty of the finely powdered dessicated liver pills. The powdered liver was contained in gelatin capsules. I also took a thousand units of Vitamin C, B-12, Folic Acid and Niacin—all things calculated to speed the replacement of chi. I washed it all down with twenty ounces of whole milk with a generous dollop of whey protein.
Ladonna took the milk and the vitamins that I offered. I’d thought that we’d eat some jerky-jerky, chocolate candy and dried fruit and then go have a large supper in a couple or three hours.
Spawning can make it rather hard to eat enough to keep one’s strength up—especially for girls. It does mean that one can pig out without worrying about the old waistline.
“Get your stuff together and put your shoes back on,” Ladonna said.
“I have a premonition.”
No one in the outfit that I know of can “see the future”, but a number of members get forerunners and vague but generally accurate premonitions.
“Lets leave and find another hotel,” I said. “We don’t even have to go to the car. We can go to alternate ID and rent another.”
I had a full-size government model 1911A1 along with several magazines—I just couldn’t copy them for a spawn. Ladonna had a Browning High Power and a short-barreled 20-gauge magnum double barrel set up to be really quick to reduce to possession and then reassemble.
I held the Star in one hand and the hanger in the other and spawned. Both my spawn and I put the Star and the hanger away. I put my Star into a shoulder bag while he slipped his into his waistband. Both of us strapped the left-handed hanger onto a belt on our right, meant for a left hand draw.
He felt to be sure the four extra Star magazines on his belt had spawned along with him and gave me a thumbs-up. Ordinarily anything spawnable will spawn, but there are occasional exceptions. It’s always better to check.
Ladonna held a Colt Navy in each hand as she spawned. Then she assembled the 20-gauge and held it hidden inside her long leather coat. Long black leather dusters are de rigueur with the outfit and other chi using groups. I owned three different ones.
I let my spawn out and he went right to take up a casual position by the ice machine. Ladonna’s spawn followed a moment later.
We were going to go to the left and into the right angle hallway. Then while one of us kept watch on the hallway with a dental mirror the spawn would take the elevator down and assume positions to best cover Ladonna and me when we exited the elevator on it’s next trip.
A trio of AK-toting toughs stepped from the branched hallway to my left as I stuck my head out the door. When they saw me they let loose with long bursts of full-auto fire as I ducked back into the room.
Ladonna’s spawn strode down the hallway with a Colt Navy in each hand, calmly gunning the men down as they reloaded. One of the men got smart and dropped his AK and reached for his pistol. He’d started the project too late in the game though.
My spawn took cover behind the ice machine and watched the branch hallway to the right to guard from attacks from that quarter.
Ladonna’s revolvers were already dry as two more men came from the right-angle hallway to the left. She’d already started to holster since reloading a cap-and-ball revolver isn’t something that can be done under fire. It’s far too slow.
She had time to throw a Kunai knife through the eye of one Russian mobster. The other had one of the Saiga 12-gauges converted to full automatic and equipped with one of the drum magazines. He cut Ladonna’s spawn down before she could throw her second knife.
Two more reinforcements came running down the hallway to the right. Both of them had the drum equipped Saigas. My spawn got one and then he caught a shot that pretty much ruined his right hand.
He drew his hanger as he raced toward the second gunman. He caught a couple shots to the chest but the light vest we wore sufficed to stop the lead buckshot balls. He caught another shot to his right forearm that pretty much severed it.
Then he cleaved the gunman’s guts wide open with the hanger. The follow-up blow spit the man’s left collarbone and went deep into his chest.
Meanwhile, Ladonna had received all of her spawn’s memories and she was better at sorting it all out on the fly than I was—even if she hadn’t been watching the action through a dental mirror the whole while.
She did a dive forward roll into the hallway and shot the single gunman left on the left hand side with two quick shots from prone. She sent a round of magnum #4 birdshot fired from a custom extra-full choke through each of the gunman’s knees.
At spitting distance birdshot can be more destructive than a slug or buckshot. She practically severed each of the man’s legs. She leapt to her feet and gave him a chi-boosted kick to the head just in case.
She quickly picked up an AK, made sure that it had a full magazine and shoved a second loaded magazine in the front of her britches.
My one-handed spawn picked up a loaded Saiga and walked over to join us.
I put a quick tourniquet on his right arm and returned his hanger to its sheath.
“It hurts like Hell to have your right hand blown off!” he said.
“Did you think that it wouldn’t?” I asked him.
He had been me and he would be me again in the near future, but at that moment there was a duality to our existence.
We rode the elevator down. Ladonna and I tried to get behind the scanty cover when the doors opened while the one spawn that we had between us ran out of the elevator like a Marine storming the beach at Iwo Jima.
They’d left two men behind in case we rode the elevator down. There had to been some sort of leak somewhere. They might not have had a clear understanding exactly who and what Ladonna and I were, but they knew that we were heap big juju. Why send so many men otherwise?
My spawn got one with a long automatic burst of 12-gauge then he dropped the empty Saiga. The downstairs men were armed solely with pistols to be a bit less obvious, I suppose.
My spawn used the stump of his right arm to partially protect his vital organs. He was hit in the arm and torso six-to-eight times. The weapon was a Beretta—probably a 9mm.
The light vest wasn’t rated for 9mm, but it was about all that I could wear and still move freely.
He drew a Kunai and rammed it up to the hilt right under the man’s sternum then he rammed a left-handed chi finger into the man’s skull. An instant later he died.
That was jarring!
We got onto the city street without further incident. We walked briskly and did all kinds of tail-losing maneuvers. Neither of us was up to creating another spawn to watch our back-trail.
Finally we went into a Dairy Queen. Anyone who knew anything at all about how we functioned would know that we’d be ravenous, but they couldn’t guard every restaurant within a three-mile radius of the motel. There were far too many, not to mention convenience stores and groceries.
Two large malts, two large cones along with four hamburgers and two orders of fries—though it might have been a bit much for two people—and a half hour of sitting got us fairly well back to fighting shape.
Ladonna went into the restroom and attempted to call Josh and Gerald on a burn phone that had been in aluminum foil until the moment that she dialed the number. Getting no reply, she stomped the phone, rewrapped it in foil and inserted it into the trash.
“We’re supposed to check in at 10:30. I couldn’t raise them. I think they’re in trouble too,” Ladonna said.
“Okay. It will be their turn to call us at midnight if we don’t raise them at 10:30. You’re the senior member but I don’t trust the idea of getting a room and then unmasking a phone anywhere close to it.
“My advice is to try to find a bar—busy, cheap and one that serves food. We wait there until midnight and then we unmask the next phone.
“Whether we raise them or not, we make tracks. Second port of call is an all-night grocery. We ought to lay in a bit of concentrated food. Then we try to find a run-down motel that has weekly rates and pay cash.
“Hopefully after a good night’s rest we should both be able to spawn once again—not that we can afford to sleep at the same time,” I said.
“Are you naturally this paranoid or do you work at it?” she asked me.
“I know that I’m paranoid. What worries me is the idea that I may not be paranoid enough,” I replied.
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Jul 26, 2015 19:30:24 GMT -6
Chapter Two
Ladonna went into the bar’s restroom and opened the aluminum-lined pouch containing her phone. She came out a few minutes later.
“They called. Something is really wrong. They told me to go to ground. They said to wait three days and then call them again. I’ve run several missions in Chicago. That’s one of the main reasons that I was chosen for this.
“There’s a run-down motel close to here that’s just what we need,” Ladonna said.
“Before we leave, you stand watch while I use the restroom,” I said.
************ **************** *********************
I gave the room a good sniff when I went in. My father taught me many years ago how to recognize the slightly pissy smell that means bedbugs. There wasn’t any bedbug smell. The room just smelled musty and unpleasant.
“This room stinks!” I said.
“I’ll open a window. Don’t be so prissy,” Ladonna said.
I wasn’t being prissy. I was simply stating the obvious.
“I’ll put the AC on fan and open the windows,” she said.
I took off my long leather coat and laid it carefully on a chair. I had my stag gripped 1911A1 in a “Summer Special” type inside the waist holster. I snapped open the straps and laid the gun—still inside the holster—on the table. A moment later my magazines and my hanger followed.
You can’t sleep or even sit all laid back for any length of time without seriously warping a holster big time.
“I can sleep in this chair,” I said. “You can take the bed and have the first sleep.”
I meant to give her five hours. I knew that I had sufficient reserves to stay awake that long. Even while I was awake but resting my chi was gradually building back up.
I excused myself and went in the bathroom to inject some more testosterone. Having spawn killed really wipes one out. This time I harpooned my buttocks because both legs were still a bit tender from their last hit.
Then I got into my cooler and took out one of my “super bombs” it was sixteen ounces of whole milk, four ounces of cream, and a heaping tablespoon of whey protein and another tablespoon of desiccated liver powder—all thoroughly shaken and chilled until there were small ice crystals in the milk.
I downed my milk, rinsed out my bottle and headed for the lounge chair by the table—where I’d placed the bulk of my weapons.
Ladonna intercepted me halfway there.
“You like me don’t you? You look at me enough. When you live life on the edge of the razor as we do, you learn to never resist a temptation because it may never come your way again,” Ladonna said.
She extracted my Star and placed it on the table beside my full–size .45. She gently guided me to the foot of the bed. She kissed me and then pushed me somewhat forcefully onto the bed and climbed astraddle me.
“Now is the time for all good men…” she started.
She didn’t need to finish the catch phrase. The flimsy door flew open and a seemingly endless stream of enemies rushed in. Ladonna kept me too wrapped up to offer even token resistance.
I was shot with a tranquilizer dart. They forced an ether-impregnated cloth over my mouth and nose and I was Tasered and hit with stun guns a half-a-dozen times.
I returned to conscious rather abruptly. There was a man wearing a bloodstained white smock and looking more like a meat cutter than a surgeon standing next to me.
My arms were secured out to either side as if I was being crucified horizontally. My tormenter held a syringe in one hand.
“It is time for you to wake up. You needn’t try to free yourself. We’ve taken account of your abilities. Besides, look up at the mirror…” he said while pointing a thumb upward.
I glanced at the full-length mirror on the ceiling and a felt an electric bolt of horror run up and down my spine. I was naked and both my legs had been amputated well above my knees.
Dude, when you got the whip you better take advantage, because if I ever get the whip in my hand, I’m going to repay seventy and sevenfold.
“I’ve taken some pains to drain your energy and keeping it drained. Still, even if you managed to twin, you’d only succeed in creating another legless twin,” the doctor said.
Obviously you know very little about me and my kind. We don’t “Twin”; we “Spawn”.
In one way, he had a point. Now imagine a legless man with over three times the upper body strength of an Olympic gymnast—actually stronger in the upper body, pound for pound than a chimpanzee.
Still, my time as a field agent was drawing rapidly to a close.
The cretin had no idea that I’d given myself a 500mg shot of testosterone in each glute and had taken three Dianabol tablets.
My mangled body was almost swimming in chi and the lack of legs was causing my chi to resonate at higher frequencies than ever before. The higher frequencies are where the really effective mind control begins.
“The first time that I feel that you’re not being forthcoming with us, you get another shot and you wake up with your right arm gone,” the doctor said.
Take away my body and my spirit will still be free you manure muncher.
There were four men standing behind the doctor. They were all big broad shouldered men with brightly colored shirts, expensive suit jackets and no ties. They all left a couple buttons undone and you could see beaucoup monochromatic tattoos beneath the thick gold chains and occasional gold crosses.
“My friend, the man with the shiny violet colored shirt said with a heavy Russian accent.
“Think of the things that a man can still do with two good arms, his balls and his yard. Please don’t force us to turn you into a total freak,” he said.
For all the doctor’s apparent arrogance, he was as close to hollow on the inside as any nominal human that I’ve ever plumbed.
I took over his mind. His chi was skimpy and disorganized but I managed to get an abnormal amount of chi gathered in his right arm. He’d sucked the two cc syringe full of air.
He moved like a striking rattlesnake. He jabbed the needle icepick style into the purple shirted Russian’s right eye, injecting the air in the syringe with his thumb to add to the pain and the carnage.
Once someone loses an eye, its no longer a game.
The Russian dude drew a boxy semiauto and shot the whole magazine into the doctor’s chest.
Even with his right eye in ruins, he had enough presence of mind to reload—dropping the empty magazine on the floor. He transferred the pistol to his left hand and held a silk handkerchief to his ruined eye with his right hand.
I was picking my next mind control target when the door opened and two Oriental men walked into the torture chamber.
One of them made a hand gesture at me dispelling all my remaining chi leaving me barely enough to keep living. He had a rapid exchange with his subordinate.
Guess what you leather tongued knob-gobblers. Korean is another language that I’d mastered.
“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.
The Russians had a hurried exchange in Russian.
“Are you the leader here? I’m asking you,” the boss Korean said to the one-eyed Russian.
“We just thought that we’d soften him up for you,” the Russian boss said defiantly
The senior Korean dude used his open hand and struck the Russian on his neck so strongly that his head flew off. I’d never even heard rumors of that sort of that sort of massive chi power. There is more than one type of spawn. The full spawn are sometimes called “wet spawn” because they can bleed. Only an original can throw full spawn. Full spawn can last for days—probably for weeks, though it is hard to imagine someone investing that sort of chi for so long. They exist—as I’ve already said—until they’re killed or they or the original decides to pop the cork.
Dry spawn can be thrown by the original or even by a wet spawn. They’re noticeably weaker than the original. They cannot eat or drink and their maximum life span is three or four minutes.
It only takes a solid punch or two to terminate a dry spawn. It takes more chi to give a dry spawn a Kunai knife or two than it does to create the spawn himself. When a dry spawn pops his cork, his memories are simply lost. They don’t revert to the original.
Still, there are times that a couple of Kunai knives thrown with far more accuracy and power than any normal human could ever possibly muster can turn the tide of a fight and be well worth the lost chi.
I didn’t have a Kunai knife to spawn. You can’t spawn what you don’t have. The doctor had said that I could only throw legless spawn. That might not be completely accurate, but it was true enough at the moment.
Fortunately dry spawn take far less chi to create than full spawn.
You can’t throw either type spawn an arbitrary distance from yourself, but there are a few feet worth of wiggle room.
While the Russian was gunning down the doctor I’d thrown two legless dry spawn—one to my left behind a surgical tray with a number of surgical instruments, the other was to my right behind the gaggle of Russians.
The left one was already hidden. The right one scuttled like a crab to get beneath a low shelf on a stainless steel table.
When the boss Korean decapitated the Russian I’d managed to grab several scalpels to the right and the Russian’s dropped pistol to the left.
I shot the boss Korean in his calcaneus. I don’t care what kind of chi control that you have, when the anklebones on one leg are shattered without any warning you are going to fall
I shot the boss in his head. Pop!
Surprise! He’s a spawn.
Lets see how many Russians we can head shoot in a short but happy life!
I gave the scalpels a charge of chi that made them fly faster and truer—and cut a far larger swath—than they otherwise could.
I hit the second Korean with a scalpel that severed his Achilles tendon. The second throw cut a big part of his patellar tendon. Number three hit him mid thigh—trying to hit the femoral artery on the far side. Number four hit him close to his hip joint.
He’d been reaching for my head before the first scalpel hit him and he continued to reach for me as he fell. Then his hand contacted my head.
A—He was a very strong mind reader and controller.
B—He was not a spawn. Somehow with us mind-to-mind, I knew.
C—He had a horror of being connected to a spawn when one popped his cork.
I was almost out of chi. I’d done all the damage and collected all the data that I could reasonably be expected to. Being an amputee was disquieting…
So I popped my cork.
*************** ******************* ***************************
“Damned nation!” I said.
“Your spawn just popped his cork?” Josh guessed.
There were eight other outfit personnel beside Josh and me keeping the small pole-building warehouse we’d rented secure.
We knew that the real Ladonna had been replaced with a fake before we left the camp in Idaho. The whole project had been a fishing expedition in search of more data.
Now we knew that one of the Korean groups was running the fake Ladonna. They were working hand in glove with one Russian mob faction while they were at war with at least one other group.
When I’d went into the restroom at the Dairy Queen I’d spawned and gifted my spawn with my 19011A1 and some other non-spawning gear. Then once I was sure that Ladonna and my spawn had left, I’d called in for pickup.
That was one reason that I’d been so reckless with the steroids. I really didn’t care what the long-term effects would be on a short-lived spawn.
There was no way that I could have thrown two dry spawn from a mutilated wet spawn without plenty of drugs.
No, the effects aren’t anywhere near that fast with normal humans. People who can spawn aren’t normal humans. Spawn aren’t human at all. It seems that the potential long-term anabolic effects can somehow be turned into almost instant chi.
How? I wouldn’t know.
Nephew had been co-opted by the Russian mob, who were being used by the Koreans.
The outfit had been suspicious from the start, so they’d sent in a score or more of operatives below the radar. Given even the throwaway data about mob members we’d been supplied, the outfit had quickly unraveled all sorts of data about the Russian mob’s activities in Chicago.
There was a great deal of mob activity in the town:
drugs, gambling, prostitution, loan sharking, protection rackets—what have you.
That meant a whole bunch of cash. It wasn’t terribly hard finding out where one could find dirty money in six-figure amounts. Taking it was only a bit harder for us. The main deterrent in effect though was people’s reluctance to cross the mob.
We had no such reluctance. The outfit just didn’t care. The fee to avenge the old man and his daughter may have ultimately been paid by the Koreans, but it was no less binding for that.
We killed all the original rapists along with over fifty assorted mob members for good measure. Along the way they collected almost four million cash in various places.
I mean, all else being equal, why not wait until the intended victim is carrying large amounts of cash?
My bonus would have been sufficient to tide me through several lean years.
I ended up riding back to camp with Josh. That was the new camp. We had to assume that the location was compromised since we’d entertained a fake Ladonna there. No matter. Camps are moved quite regularly.
“What’s the matter Spoil?” Josh asked.
“I knew there were people as twisted as that doctor, but it is something else again to experience it first hand. If that had been me instead of a spawn, I’d be facing a fate far worse than death,” I said.
“Trust no one and never go anywhere that you possibly can send a spawn instead. I know that you deliberately let Ladonna get the best of you, but take it as a lesson in the future,” Josh said.
A little later Josh added:
“Something else bothering you?”
“I was really taken by that Ladonna. It’s too bad that she was fake,” I said.
“Would you like me to introduce you to the original Ladonna?” Josh asked.
“Isn’t she dead?”
“Nah, some of us have the power to keep a dead wet spawn unpopped long enough to make someone think that he killed the original…
“Not long—but folks who’ve just killed someone aren’t generally inclined to hang around more than a few minutes.
“I never could get the hang of it. See if Ladonna can teach you to do it.”
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Jul 27, 2015 19:05:16 GMT -6
Chapter Three
“Josh spoke highly of you. We’d like to offer you a position on our team. When we’re not on missions we train,” the real Ladonna said.
“We don’t train 24/7. That’s counter productive. We do train hard and we train regularly.
“Your scores in long range rifle are only average as well as your hand-to-hand combat skills and your throwing. We’ll try to address those skills,” she continued.
Keep in mind that the outfit’s standards are high and having only “Average” skills there means something different than it would most places.
I’d wrestled for four years in high school, one year of college and had spent one summer at a wrestling clinic. I also had a black belt in judo and though I’d never trained in a striking martial art, I’d developed some very strong high kicks all on my own.
I remember the first day of grappling training with the outfit.
We were seated on what we used to call “Tatami Mats” though they weren’t—not really.
They were some kind of padding sewn into four-foot by eight-foot canvas bags and then knot quilted once a square foot or so to prevent them from bunching. They had multiple handles all around the edges and they were tied together with numerous other mats.
There was an odor of sweat, cotton batting and a faint whiff of mildewed canvas in the air of the grappling room.
“How many former high school wrestlers do we have?” the sensei asked.
Over half the men and a few of the women raised their hands.
“How many have studied sambo, judo or Brazilian jujutsu?” He asked.
By now almost everyone had his hand up.
“How many have trained on mats like these?” was his next question.
I was one of three folk who held up a hand.
“At the YMCA and the YMCA camp as a small boy,” I said when Sensei called on me.
A vinyl-coated foam wrestling mat has very little friction. You learn to use any number of very low-clearance sliding moves that simply won’t be there for you on a carpet, grassy field or whatever.
We divided our time between wrestling on the old canvas pads, in a box with ankle-deep sand, in a pit with sawdust about a foot deep and even on a modern wrestling mat.
We practiced throws and break falls but we didn’t skirmish from standing the first year.
I don’t mind falling when I’m fighting, but I find the falls from letting someone throw me without resisting—to allow him to perfect his throwing technique—to be very tedious and bruising falls to take.
Drilling endlessly is necessary to get really good, but fighting is far more fun, so few commercial enterprises stress drilling nearly enough.
Also, until one gets very good at break falls he will always be inclined to concede the takedown rather than risk a hard punishing fall right on his ass.
At any rate, in the outfit even a weak hand-to-hand fighter is very good indeed. There is always room to improve though.
Sometimes the best use of one’s time is to work on one’s weaknesses, but there are also times that it is better to further perfect one’s strengths.
Ladonna was an expert long-range rifleman and the team often used her to back them up from a distant vantage point.
My skill as both a sniper and as a spotter improved noticeably—though it would take at least a year or two to come close to her skill—if ever.
I was in about the sixty-fifth percentile for hand-to-hand and Ladonna was more like eighty-fourth or eighty-fifth percentile.
We grappled every day. The new camp was in the Sonoran Desert and there were a couple new venues to fight in—a pool with knee-deep water as well as a soft rubber bottom, because knee-deep water isn’t great padding—and a pool that would just come to a six-footer’s low sternum.
Of course water added the possibility of drowning one’s opponent, but it was more to give you the opportunity to examine your fundamentals because of the novelty.
Yeah, eventually we got to the point that I was mainly perfecting the art of fighting Ladonna—and she learning little new except how to better counter me.
But we’d both improved some before we got there. And there were always some others in the gyms ready for a friendly skirmish—both for bragging rights and to help fellow warriors perfect their skills.
We also drilled relentlessly.
My close range handgun skills were amongst the best. I made it a point to shoot every single day. The outfit paid for Ladonna and me to go to two different weeklong shooting schools to hone our skills.
Ladonna helped me to work on my sword handling skills with boken and wasters. It turns out that there was a fencing club in Denver that was heavy into Polish saber and we both spent three weeks there getting intensive private coaching and the chance to square off against several good club members.
It can be hard restraining yourself when in a learning skirmish with a normal. Pulling moves reminiscent of Spiderman to win a fencing match would be sure to draw unwanted attention.
I’d thought that my spawning skills were well above average—and they were—but everyone on Josh’s team had exceptional spawning talents.
One’s relative chi power can only adequately be expressed as a matrix of numbers. Nonetheless, lets call my chi the day that I left to go to Chicago as “One’.
“Your chi power is 1,” Laddona said.
And she was also simplifying.
“You can create one spawn and each of you will have a chi of .5,” She continued.
“Are you completely wiped out when your chi hits .4?” She asked.
“No, that’s low, but I’d still have quite a bit of fight left in me,” I said.
“If we could just increase your chi to 1.2, you could split it three ways and still have .4—correct? You could create two .4 powered spawn at one time.” she continued.
“First, I don’t know any fast ways to raise my chi potential and even if I did, I wouldn’t have a clue how to throw multi spawn,” I said.
“You need to have the chi to create two spawn at once before any explanation how to do it will make any sense to you.
“There are certain herbs that will increase your chi potential. I don’t mean they give you a short-term supercharging—though some herbs will do that too. I’m talking about permanent beneficial and long-term alterations to the underlying structure.
“There are advanced visualizations and meditations that will both increase your chi potential and allow you to renew depleted chi faster.
“The fastest and best way to increase your chi potential though, is to exhaust it until you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel—over and over again,” she said.
She had me up before sunrise when the pool was relatively empty. I spawned and both my spawn and I swam laps in the pool for an hour and a half.
Then it was time for the two of us to go on a long run in the desert with Ladonna pacing us on a bicycle.
Then a couple hours throwing Kunai knives, throwing knives, axes, tomahawken, stars, spikes and anything else that could be throw.
Throw a dozen Kunai knives then jog to the target in the hot desert sun to retrieve them.
I had to drink and eat herbal concoctions that tasted like bile and green persimmons and then sit and visualize until my butt got numb.
I only got about five hours sleep at night during this exhausting routine.
After about five weeks I managed to throw two wet spawn at once. Ladonna had set .4 as an arbitrary benchmark. It was probably an inconsequential increment, but the day that I threw two spawn, all of us tested out at almost .42—well over .41.
We travelled the next few weeks, going to outfit sponsored training hither and yon. I diligently meditated and consumed the occasional vile tasting concoction along the way.
A few more weeks of intensive training and I threw three spawn—all of us with a rating slightly above .43.
Anyone ever hear of one hundred kumite?
Assemble twenty fighters. Fight each of them in rotation until you’ve fought each of them five times. While your teammates will only have fought five times each with plenty of time to rest in between, you will have fought one hundred times.
I spawned until there was four of me—three spawn and me. We managed to round up eighty students in their last year of training—twenty for each of us. Just to make it interesting, each of us had fought three graduates before we fought the first round of the one hundred kumite.
I managed to make it to one hundred in each case, but shortly afterward spawn started popping their corks from sheer exhaustion of their life force—their chi. I wasn’t anywhere near close to dying and each popping spawn brought me a few dregs of chi.
************** ******************* ************************
In the meantime, Ladonna brought some of the little toy Kunai knives out to the throwing range. You can buy them from “Atlanta Cutlery” or “Bud K” for around thirty dollars for a dozen of them in their own handy little carry pouch.
I mean they’re cute little knives, but they only have like three inch long blades. They’re too light to throw terribly far. They have the mandatory ring on the butt—but it is just a washer—flat in profile and too little to stick a finger through. The steel isn’t the best either…
But what can you reasonably expect for thirty bucks?
She also had a bucket filed with the little stamped sheet metal throwing star.
“Watch,”
she said.
Then se threw one of the little stars hard enough to bury its blade in the pine backstop.
“These are light and easy to carry,” she said.
“If you put enough chi into them, they’ll do damage out of all proportion to what you would suspect. It takes awhile to get the hang of gilding them with chi.
“Another thing, once you master the chi assisted throwing, you’ll break or wear them out pretty quickly.
“It is a good way to learn fine control of thrown weapons whether you ever throw one in earnest.”
Yeah, like the handful of scalpels that I’d thrown at close range. I wish that I’d had this fine control practice then…
I mastered throwing four spawn shortly after the one hundred kumite—which added a great deal to my hand-to-hand skills incidentally.
“Four is enough for awhile. You’ve been driving hard and you probably need to coast a bit. Very few adepts can throw more than four wet spawn.
“For the time being, try to increase your chi level a bit so that each spawn becomes a little more formidable. You also need to learn to cheat a ittle bit and hold a bit more chi back for yourself than you dole out to the duplicates,” Ladonna said.
Three weeks later Josh and Gerald wanted to check on our progress to see if I was up to accompanying them on a mission. They’d taken three or four of the two to three day assignments. Those type things didn’t pay much, but as a team member twenty-five percent was paid to me, even though I didn’t take part.
“I can do three spawn at one time,” Josh said and demonstrated.
“I can do four,” Gerald said and showed us.
“Honestly? I can only do two,” Ladonna said.
I threw four spawn. They weren’t quite as powerful as the ones the others threw, but they were a big improvement than the single .5 Spawn that I used to throw. Each one was about a .65 and I’d held on to .95 for myself.
I wasn’t finished yet though. I had four of my spawn around me at the corners of a square. Each of them threw two dry spawn without warning.
Remember how I said that it took almost as much chi to spawn a Kunai knife or two as it did to create a dry spawn?
I’d gotten the armorers to make me some copies of the cute little toy Kunai in mystery metal. I could give each dry spawn a half-a-dozen of the mini-Kunai for the same amount of chi it would take to give them one.
Each dry spawn held a full-sized Kunai in one hand while the other was drawn back too throw one of the small ones with five more on his belt. One of the few things that dry spawn are good for—besides misdirection and distraction—is to stand back and hurl throwing weapons at the opposition.
I still wasn’t done yet though.
I threw another single wet spawn rated .4 while I was still at .55. The new wet spawn threw two more mini-Kunai wielding dry spawn while I threw two more dry spawn myself.
“That’s different,” Josh said.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s like a whole crowd of you standing there.”
“Ladonna told me that very few can throw five wet spawn—though I’ll admit that I can’t throw five at one time,” I said.
“We need to get in some practice runs together and learn to work well as a team. My advice to you:
“The next big downtime that you have, work on building both your chi level and the chi level of your spawn.
“If you can get you first four spawn up to .8, I’d try going for two, three even four second line spawn with chi levels of at least .6.”
Josh didn’t use my numbers. That numbering scheme was a tool Ladonna and I had worked out to tell me where I was in the overall scheme of things.
Josh’s spawn would have been about 3.0 in our ranking system. Even Gerald’s four and Ladonna’s two both ranked above 2.0. The good thing for me though—almost anyone can build up their chi capacity with hard work.
There seems to be an innate talent required to throw “X” many spawn and as the spawn number rises, the number of folk with that innate potential shrink dramatically.
Three weeks later the dispatcher called us into his office.
“Anyone know anything about Atlanta?” he asked us.
“It’s a pretty big city in Georgia,” I said.
“Thank you for your valuable comment,” Harold said.
“Your favorite Russian gang and their North Korean adepts are making a move on Atlanta. We’d like your team to be one of four teams and a couple of independent operators sent mainly to observe, but also to move if need be.”
“North Korean?” Gerald said.
“We’ve known for some time that here was more than one set of Koreans. When the country was partitioned, what was one group of adepts split into at least two groups,” Harold said.
“It was largely due to the intel largely supplied by your group that let us finally pin this group down as being from the North faction.”
“Okay, I’m sure that the fine citizens of Chicago don’t much care for their kinfolk being turned into basket cases…
“They have to be out of their minds to take their show into Dixie. That is the land of the feud and ‘yeehaw’!!!” I said.
“One again, thank you for your valuable comment,” Harold said.
“My mother's people are from Appalachian Georgia,” He added.
....RVMM45
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Chi
Jul 27, 2015 20:06:51 GMT -6
Post by freshwaterpearl on Jul 27, 2015 20:06:51 GMT -6
You’ve given me and my chi something to think about.
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Chi
Jul 27, 2015 20:24:31 GMT -6
Post by millwright on Jul 27, 2015 20:24:31 GMT -6
I did not see two more chapters coming.
Lucky Me
THanks
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Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2015 14:09:37 GMT -6
Chapter Four
I was in the US Army. I realized my first day at the reception center that I’d made the most horrible mistake of my life.
There’s a pop psychology parable about the sensei that leads his pupil to water and then holds him under until he damn near drowns him.
“You need to fight for success with the same frantic and single mindedness that you fought for air while I was holding your head underwater,” the sensei tells him.
Yes sensei. Thank you for your valuable lesson. Now go to sleep so that I can catch you off guard.
But that’s how frantically and obsessively I wanted out. I should have deserted or shown up for formation stark naked and refused to wear a uniform.
No, no…I insisted on putting myself in a double bind. I wanted out without going through any major psychodrama.
I mean I didn’t care about after-effects. One First Sergeant told me that I’d have trouble getting a job if I got a bad discharge. I told him that I wanted out even if it meant that I’d never work again and had to live homeless on the streets getting my food out of garbage cans.
I hated being there that much.
My squad sergeant at permanent party was Ron Jacobs. He was very pro army and he frequently argued with me about my attitude. In the end though, he realized that I was just going to keep trying every trick that I could think of to open the Chinese puzzle box that held my early discharge.
We didn’t like each other, but there was respect and he did everything he could to speed my departure.
Jacobs was one of those big muscular beefy guys with just a hint of a belly roll around his waist. He always maxed his push-ups and sit-ups and turned in a two-mile run well under fifteen minutes on the twice-yearly PT tests, but the US Amy decided that wasn’t enough. He needed to lose a few pounds of fat to make the leanness standards.
Every time that Staff Sergeant Jacobs hit his weight goal, he would have lost some muscle along with the fat. The third time they moved the finish line, he gave up.
He was about two weeks behind me in the separation process and he’d become the only person that I ever met who could curse the US Army with more pure venom and hatred than I could.
“When I get back home I think I’ll go back to my old job,” Jacobs said.
“Flipping burgers?”
“No, I was an undercover narcotics officer for the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation),” Jacobs said.
“You tell a lot of big windies,” I said.
“Where I come from telling tall tales is an accepted and admired art form but I’m sincere about this.”
“Why would you give up a dream job like that to come here?” I asked.
“One of my confidential informants—one of my snitches—they made her somehow. I found her head in my car’s trunk. She was only fifteen years old,” Jacobs said.
“I was prior service with six years in the Infantry. They offered me an attractive re-enlistment package and so I re-enlisted.
“A couple of years ago I hurt my back and I can’t pass the physical examination to get back into the Infantry. I never realized how much rear echelon duty sucks.
“Anyway, I’ve had five years away from undercover work and I think that I can hack it again.”
He went into a thousand yard stare and I decided that he was being truthful.
I wasn’t about to let a chance like that slip by.
“Could you get me a job working undercover for the GBI?” I asked.
“How can I put this? The job involves hanging around with paranoid homicidal maniacs who may decide to kill you at any time for any reason or for no reason at all.
“Then you…you have a compulsion to annoy everyone that you come into contact with. You’re without tact and you have an unpredictable temper.
“You’d never make it as an undercover agent,” Jacobs said.
Then seeing my face he added:
“There are other jobs: serving high risk search and arrest warrants, witness protection or being one of the folk standing by to rush in if an undercover agent is compromised…
“Yeah, I’ll be happy to recommend you for that,” the sergeant finished.
Did you ever hear the homily against gluttony?
“A Good Man eats to live; an Evil Man lives to eat.”
I believe that a weak man carries a pistol to protect his life but good men, strong men carry a pistol because carrying—and mastering—the pistol is what makes life worth living and protecting in the first place.
I have nothing against drugs or drug dealers, but drug enforcement seemed like a spot where a dedicated pistolero would fit in and be appreciated.
I’d turned away from God before I went into the US Army, but I rapidly repented in that living Hell.
At first I prayed fervently that God would get me out. Then I gave up and simply prayed fervently to die—preferably before reveille the next morning. By then I was convinced that every good thing the rest of my life might hold wouldn’t be adequate to balance out the horror of the next twenty-four hours.
Finally I simply prayed for the courage and the wee nudge that I needed to kill myself. I hung on though, because I thought that I could get back to where I’d once been.
When I got out though, I found that once you’ve been through something that dark, even the sunniest day will still have a tint of darkness about it. There is no going home.
I’d become resigned to the remainder of my life being ruined by the bitter aftertaste.
Almost four years had passed and I’d long since given up any hope of hearing from Staff Sergeant Ron Jacobs.
The phone rang and Jacobs said he had some very well paid merc work, but there was a long and exacting training process during which one received little but room and board.
Gosh Jacobs, it sounds interesting, but I’ve hung onto my custom van for seven years now—same one that I had when I was in the US Army. I’ve refinanced it twice to get lower monthly payments and I’ve negotiated to just pay the month’s interest on eight different occasions.
If I can hang in there a couple more years, I’ll have the van paid off and I can tour America on a shoestring budget.
So the outfit paid my van off free and clear and gave me a generous travel allowance—all on speculation with no obligation. I expect that was because Jacobs told them that I’d prove worth the investment.
I met Jacobs in Pocatello Idaho and he guided me to the training camp—one of the training camps. I haven’t seen Jacobs since.
Was he killed? Left the outfit? Is he on assignment elsewhere? I haven’t a clue.
I owe the outfit. They paid my van off. They taught me some truly wondrous skills—and I’m free. I am free to quit tomorrow or later today and walk off without repercussion. I can turn down any assignment that I don’t want to take. They don’t force me to wear a uniform or to cut my hair short like a gay boy and they’ve never even attempted to force me to wear sissy shorty pants.
If I ever see Jacobs again, I want to thank him from the bottom of my heart.
*********** ************** *********************
My training in Idaho was mostly focused on building simple chi awareness and then using chi for physical things—like throwing a Kunai accurately at a target twenty-five yards away, having a five foot vertical leap or being able to standing broad jump farther than Olympic champions can jump with a running start.
Sure being able to plunge a chi shielded finger knuckle deep into a pine two-by-four is a little “Out There”. Throwing spawn didn’t freak me too bad. I kinda thought of them as temporary 3-D me-shaped force fields that I created and projected via chi…
I mean that’s how I thought of them at first.
The mind control and the mind reading threatened my reality paradigm far more than spawning did. Mind reading, mind control and telepathy freaked me out and challenged my Weltanschauung far more than the physical abilities.
Everyone didn’t gag at the same gnats as I did. Still I wasn’t very good at the spooky stuff so it didn’t put a nice big flat spot on my wheel. At any rate, there is little hope of mastering mind skills until one has a firm grounding in basic chi manipulation and the physical skills that it enables.
Also, I believe that they train people that they hope can become highly skilled at mind games somewhere else.
As I said, when they cut the legs off of my wet spawn it allowed me to learn some latent skills far faster than I otherwise would. The smaller chakra body that the legless body possessed and the epic surge of adrenaline both had something to do with my newfound potential.
I learned that there are numbers of ways to protect oneself from a spawn popping his cork while you’re in his mind. The Korean interrogator was both very powerful and rather clumsy.
The situation was akin to surprising a burglar and having him leave a good number of burglary tools behind. Some turned out to be very useful to me. Some were of little or no use and some were mere fragments or broken or too esoteric for me to comprehend.
The things that I didn’t promptly co-opt quickly melted away and were forgotten.
*************** ******************** ***************************
We were occupying an old fire station in Atlanta and the rabbit hole kept getting deeper.
We were mainly watching the opposition and surveillance means long spells of sitting around being bored spitless.
Atlanta was a rather large town by my standards. I found a capoeira coach and sent a wet spawn to practice for three to four hours, three days per week. I also found a tae kwon do sensei and I sent a wet spawn there three other days of the week. I also had a spawn practice boxing two-and-a half-hours five days per week.
I made sure that I picked a tae kwon do sensei that stressed learning picture perfect katas. It was a handy bonus that he also stressed breaking.
Someone who does nothing but study katas—some call it: “Karate Dancing”—isn’t going to be well prepared to fight. Back before all the full contact and mixed martial arts, you sometimes heard of third degree black belts falling flat on their ass the first time that they actually kicked someone.
However, I firmly believed that katas have their place and I’d never been able to study under an instructor who taught katas. Capoeira was at the opposite end of the spectrum. It is considered very bad form to bloody someone’s nose in the fluid free form dancing duels—but that control lets you target vital spots with pin-point precision in an actual fight.
You have to be pretty good at either for it to be of much use in combat. You can learn enough boxing in a couple weeks to be a big help in a fight and they stress crisp accurate punches as well as slipping the opponent’s punches.
Some of the other guys put in a good strong weight bench in the fire house, a power rack and some Olympic bars and plates. I managed to persuade them to add a heavy bag and a speed bag. As our sojourn turned into months we added exercise gear as the spirit moved us.
You can gain skill with spawns but pretty much have to push iron with your original body if you want more than minimal results.
We did a bit of throwing, some sparring and other training to occupy the body and mind. I often had a spawn in the corner practicing katas or capoeira stunts—or hitting or kicking the bags.
I’d seen adepts practicing the chi ball game. Two players work together to form a sphere of solid chi. Then they have a sort of “Push of War” trying to shove the ball deep into the opponent’s territory.
Well, I mean that I’d seen adepts staring off into space and others told me that they were playing chi ball.
Now I could barely see other’s chi balls and I could call up my own ball to fight. I always lost at that stage, but I steadily added to the number of seconds that I could hold out and my ability to see other’s chi balls steadily grew.
A couple of adepts from another team helped me add to my mind skills. I wasn’t terribly good at it, but no one else on my team had anything but the most rudimentary skills.
You know the old axiom:
“In The Kingdom of The Deaf, a Man with a Runny Nose will Ride a Bicycle.”
I was destined to be the dedicated cyclist on my team.
Hunter S Thompson always said:
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Weird stuff…
One adept named “Cary” had a strong mental link with about two-dozen rats. They were special rats. He’d been feeding the mama rat food with small quantities of his own blood soaked in his own chi. As soon as the baby rats were weaned; he started feeding them small quantities of his blood and ever increasing quantities of chi.
He constantly stimulated the rat’s own chi system. Their lifespan more than doubled. Their brains enlarged fifty percent or more. Both their hearing and their eyesight improved dramatically. Their hearts and their lungs were enlarged and supercharged.
In short, they were super rats. They were able to go places impossible for a man to go. They were masters of discrete tailing—particularly at night. If they were attacked they could throw off six or seven dry clones to scatter in all directions and aid their escape…
None of that caused me to start hearing “The Twilight Zone” riff in my head. When Cary told me that he could use any rat that he chose as a real time remote viewing system—then I started hearing the riff and Rod Serling’s voice in the background.
Matthew had a similar gig going—only his animals of choice were pigeons. Pigeons were all but useless after dark but during the day they were wonderful for aerial surveillance and they didn’t invoke the fear and loathing rats did.
Matthew was about six four and skinny as a fence post. He always had jet-black flyaway hair. He was always muttering to himself. He would throw verbal tantrums with little or no provocation and he had a faint but unpleasant odor about him.
Cary was a small fellow—about five foot one and maybe a hundred and five pounds on a good day. He was just twenty years old and had been raised in the outfit. He was friendly but shy.
“I’m small and weak,” Cary said one day.
“You got to work with what you have,” I told him.
“The trouble that most folks have when they think about serious weight training, is that they expect overnight results. They get discouraged and then they quit.
“They tell me that chi is largely the elongated shadow of the physical body. If you could just add five or six pounds of muscle to your frame it would be like adding fifty or sixty pounds or more to your chi,” I said.
“I’ve never studied fighting. I’m terrible at Kunai throwing—or any type throwing. Folks always told me that I’d be an intel gatherer and that I’d be behind the lines and so my time would be better spent building up rapport and skill with my rats.
“I can’t even throw a single wet spawn. I can barely throw a single dry spawn,” Cary said.
“Sounds like stupid nonsense to me. Listen, you already have excellent control of your chi—right? You couldn’t real-time the rats without it.
“I’ll set you up a good solid weight training routine and insist that you stick to it. Your chi-assisted recovery should put you well up into the ‘I can’t believe that Cary isn’t on at least a gram of gear per week’ level.
“We’ll work hard on throwing the Kunai and stars. Almost anyone can learn to throw one wet spawn. When you master throwing one spawn, that one spawn is going to go to the boxing gym five nights a week with me.
“I want you to help me with something in return. I want to learn to master some animal. I haven’t chosen one yet,” I told Cary.
That’s how Cary and I became friends.
I was also working on a couple other pet projects of mine in secret.
I’d worked up to throwing five first wave spawn and each of them was about twenty percent more powerful than the four that I’d proudly shown Josh and the rest of the team. I also had each one of the five throw three dry spawn now instead of two.
First of all, I was working hard on increasing the strength, durability and longevity of my dry spawn. So far as I know, no one had worked on that idea—at least not very hard.
Say that my dry spawn lived five or six minutes instead of four to five minutes. Lets say that it took three or four blows to slay one instead of two or three.
Lets also say that now my dry spawn were born with eight mini Kunai instead of six and throw in two or three of the cheap stamped throwing stars while you’re at it…
Say they could all throw about five percent harder from three or four feet further out.
Those are all what Jeff Cooper called “Inconsequential Increments” abbreviated “II”. The marvelous thing about Inconsequential Increments though is that they multiply each other. One by itself doesn’t matter much, but a half a dozen of them can be a game changer.
Also, I was talking about making each of more than two-dozen dry spawn somewhat more formidable.
My second project was what I called “The Big Kahuna”. I don’t know why I called them that. I’ve never been that interested in either Hawaii or surfing culture—but the term just seemed right.
It is axiomatic that wet spawn can throw dry spawn, but not another wet spawn.
I could throw out two big kahunas in my second wave spawn and each of the big kahunas could throw three wet spawn. Of course the big kahunas’ wet spawn were on the weak side and could only throw two dry spawn each.
After throwing two big kahunas I would still be a good solid “3” by the old rating system that Ladonna and I had used. When you get that high though, that expedient rating game becomes increasingly inaccurate and irrelevant.
Oddly, I couldn’t throw a big kahuna yet unless and until I off loaded the first wave of wet spawn.
The good solid—and exhausting training that Ladonna and I had put in continued to pay dividends in growing chi for some time after the training stopped-though of course every month, week or even day by day the return diminished.
.....RVM45
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Chi
Aug 4, 2015 22:20:25 GMT -6
Post by millwright on Aug 4, 2015 22:20:25 GMT -6
Good stuff RVM.
I have stories about wanting out of the army at any cost.
Pretty amusing many years later.
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