Summer was a lovely season, Cafas' favourite if he was honest. Once it had been winter, some time ago (His favourite, not the season, though admittedly it had been winter some time ago as well.) It was the epitome of a wonderful summers day that day, and there he was, training those two. Again.

"How many times Persi? Raise your guard and watch his face, not the ground. I know there's no one there, but pretend."

Cafas wished once more this lesson that he had the danger room available, but someone had it booked. It was kind of odd to check that book and find that someone had bothered with a booking. More fool him for not. So he had them fighting shadows.

Aiden is taking to this so much faster, but you can see the improvement in both. Tempted to start them lifting weights, but it's so boring to start with and these two don't seem like they'd persevere.

Still he might bring it up.

"Persi, you know I can tell when you don't put any effort into your shots,stop trying to get away with it. Aiden if that's as high as you can get your leg then I'm a lobster."

They were standing in the shade of the tree outside his very own room. They'd only just finished the warm up, which had gone really well, he'd had nothing but praise to give out during the warm up. Now they were getting slack, or at least it seemed so. Both were shaping up into competent fighters, the improvement was easy to see.

Bit more time and effort I might get them to a point that the x-men could work with.

Not that he was training them for the X-men. "Those kicks are much better Aiden, but you're getting the combo out of order. Persi, that's perfect, keep that up. 60 more seconds until water break. Remember water breaks are 60 seconds long. Drink, towel down, and back in your places in that time or you'll be working twice as hard."

He was intending to work them just as hard either way, but if they believed it would be easier, their brain would go along, and that was all that mattered.

Bi-weekly gym classes hadn't become any more tolerable as they got through more of them. Or semi-weekly, or whatever; Persi was aware that one of those was correct and the other wrong, but not which was which, nor did he care enough to learn. Anyway, whatever it was called, two months of lessons twice a week had not made the lessons any easier. Not for Persi, anyway, though he had begun putting a bit of effort into making them easier (or at least more amusing) for Cafas and Aiden, instead of trying to drag them both into misery with him. Not that it wasn't still tempting at times, seeing how skilled Cafas was and how quickly Aiden improved and how Persi perpetually didn't was incredibly frustrating, and at those times he shut up because Persi was aware enough to know that his sense of humor could be cruel when he was feeling hurt.

This wasn't one of those times, though. So far all they'd done today was attack air, which looked silly and awkward no matter who did it, so Persi didn't have any (immediate) examples of spectacular skill to compare himself to. So he was talking. "Maybe his face is on the ground." It was always possible, with mutants, even if what Persi was actually looking out for were rocks and tree roots.

It wasn't that he was trying to not put any effort in, it was just that keeping his head up to look at a face above him was weird and awkward and distracted him from everything else. He raised a hand to flip Cafas off over his shoulder; it wasn't like the pink guy was offended by it. If he was, Persi would've had a lot more broken fingers. As for Aiden's kicks... well, Persi couldn't see him either, but he didn't really need reality to interfere with his humor anyway. "So then," he had, in contrast to everything else, gotten much better at fitting words around breaths, "who gets to eat you?"

And since no one could see, Persi had no reason not to make a face at the reminder of water. Granted, the break was nice, but the water... there wasn't time to actually drink it, and most of the time it just ended up sitting in his stomach, sloshing and feeling weird and vaguely nauseous. His stomach just didn't seem to like anything recently; it was difficult enough to remember to make himself eat every meal, and even then he could never really eat enough to be a meal without his stomach threatening to make him sick if he ate any more. It was exceedingly annoying, but he hadn't found anything that his stomach wouldn't clamp around and start refusing any more food after five minutes. At least it normally relaxed by the next meal; there were occasional days, generally when Persi was already miserable, when his stomach turned at the idea of eating anything for the entire day. As if he needed more problems.

Anyway. Those days were rare, at least, and while water might make him feel bad, and his mouth taste like he was sick, he hadn't actually thrown up from it yet, so it was probably just his brain playing tricks on him or something. Really obnoxious tricks, but still just imaginary.

Kind of like that imaginary enemy Persi had forgotten to look at again. He would have sighed, if he'd had the breath left for it.

It was hard to tell if he were getting more tolerant of the heat or sort of just floating along in a perpetual haze of borderline heat exhaustion occasionally wandering to the heat exhaustion-heat stroke border instead. The only upside was that the random bursts of snow were getting a bit more common and almost always coming up at least a little during Cafas' lessons, so at least he was managing to be physically active outside without dying.

He wasn't really a fan of dying, after all.

But anyway. It had been insanely awkward to go to Cafas' second lesson, what with how things had turned out at the end of the first, but things were settling down, at least for Aiden. So long as no one made a big deal out of anything, everyone could just move along and not make all of this more emotionally hideous than it could already be, and he could at least internally enjoy some of what was going on.

Not the fighting part. The thought that Cafas was eventually going to want him to hit someone was horrifying. He was still working on some way of actually getting out of that. He had had absolutely no success thus far, and feared he wouldn't have a plan by the time Cafas reached that point. Or just got fed up with something and went after him like he had to Persi before all this had started. Aiden really didn't want to attract that kind of attention.

Sometimes, though, it was hard to pay complete attention to what he was doing when he was also trying to find ways to stop the snow thing just after cold air - which was very nice, however it worked - before it made it to snow that would actually get in the way. Cafas' water breaks were nowhere near long enough to shut it down, though if he wasn't careful he could apparently outrun the cold air or something. That was a horrible experience, stepping from his nice personally-air-conditioned spot into the full heat of the summer. He only did it once; now he made sure he kept his water rather closer. Saved a bit more time for letting the snow start to melt too.

Cafas' jibe about Aiden's flexibility and his own identity as a lobster had Ai flushing; Cafas had, of course, picked really the one shot where he had been distracted by an irregular clump of snow in an interesting shape. Being watched while he did this was bad enough; he really didn't need to be mocked or critiqued about it too.

.... okay, the combo thing was entirely his fault. He didn't have the faintest clue when he'd slipped and started on the new, inappropriate order, but switching back was annoying and took too much concentration. Better than the alternatives, anyway, and at least he wasn't feeling too tired. Yet. Stopping for the day never seemed to go well when the weird white thing happened, if it happened all the way.

"Come ON, we're going to be late!" the spork shifter all but whined, dragging her girlfriend by the arm, down the halls and outside. She was excited about her first class, but refused to tell the poor Butterfly at the end of her arm what it was. She'd merely said 'You'll see' to each of Chloe's attempts to figure out what it was.

But fun had quickly turned to panic as Paige realized they were running late for the one thing she really wanted to do right now. Finally, though, she made it, and saw two boys training with--oh no.

She froze, eyes narrowing as she recognized one of them. That was the boy she'd beaten up that day. Instead of being irritated though, or trying to beat him up again, she felt a smile pull across her lips. "Talk about irony," she murmured, more or less amused.

Looking at who had to be the instructor, Paige's face turned apologetic. "Sorry we're late...we're here for the self defense class..." her voice trailed off, biting her lip.

Chloe had been just lounging about when her girlfriend came and grabbed her by the arm and was talking about being late to something. Chloe looked at her confused because she wasn't aware of any plans that they had made for tonight. "Paige, Honey, where are we going? Going to be late to what? What are you talking about? Should I change clothes? Do we need to take any money?" Chloe struggled with being confused, but as her girlfriend said you'll see, Butterfly finally just let her girlfriend drag her by the arm and followed her, thinking that maybe she was trying to surprise her with something.

As she followed Paige, she began to wonder if maybe Paige had made dinner reservations for them or something sweet for them to do as a couple. But as she and Paige finally got there, she saw people coupled in pairs and then heard Paige speak to someone about them being there for a self-defense class. Butterfly perked up and smiled at her girlfriend. "This is gonna be so much fun. Paige, when did you find out about this?" she said as she and Paige walked toward the group of people beginning to train.

Evelyn was not thrilled by the idea of this group training session. It was one thing making herself look dumb in front of Mirror. It was another doing it in front of other students. But she needed more training, and it was a good opportunity, so grumbling aside, she unhappily made her way outside where they were meeting, and stopped just a short way off.

She couldn't do this.

It was ridiculous.

She recognized the two 'students' working already. She wasn't sure which one she had the worst conversation with, to be honest. Mr. 'Doesn't-like-mutants-but-is-one' or Mr.'self-esteem-problems'. That was probably being a bit harsh on them, but she pushed it aside as she watched two more girls joining the group. At least she wouldn't be stuck with just the guys... She couldn't quite get herself to take the last few steps forward though.

This was dumb.