Nathan had to ask for directions. Twice. He was sure that someday he’d manage to remember a route that he’d walked the day before. Probably. Okay, fine, so he would be doomed to forever carrying a map around with him. He grumbled, since he couldn’t even blame that on his mutation. That was just him being made of fail. And why had he gotten such strange responses? He’d asked, perfectly innocently which way Meld’s room was. The first person, a woman of maybe 25 had seemed frightened and pointed him down a corridor to his left (back the way he’d just come). When he’d reached another fork he’d gotten better instructions from a grinning man with a sinister looking smile. He’d said he wanted to come and see what she did to Nathan, but had better things to do.

Nathan had shrugged and taken the guy’s directions with the best of intentions. Where mutants were concerned, it seemed the most charitable thing to do. After all, you never knew when someone was being forced to act/dress/speak a certain way because of their mutation. Always assume the best. I mean look at Meld. She was frankly terrifying if taken at face value. All metal and bionic with a veined hand and a metal spiked arm. Not to mention the tail or the eye. But Nathan knew better. He knew that behind that spikey dangerous exterior was a caring individual who had picked him up and protected him. She’d fought people hell bent on killing her and managed to disarm and subdue them, even though they’d been after her life. She was a good person.

It was in this regard that Nathan was looking for her now. He’d realised that, with all the best intentions in the world, he was going to get into more fights. It happened. He was a mutant. Pacifism was a crutch available only to those who weren’t relentlessly persecuted through no fault of their own. He would work on the wider problem as well, but in the interim it was important he learn how to defend himself. And, more to the point, to defend himself without killing anyone. He’d done that before. It still hurt.

He stopped outside the door he’d been directed to. He raised a fist and gave a tentative knock before his inner monologue stirred inside him, shaking him about. “Dude. Stop being such a woman. You’re about to get 10 kinds of snot kicked out of you. It is going to hurt. You have to decide now. Either man up and be affirmative, or just give up and go back to bed. Because, honestly, I’m getting tired of your constant whining.”. Hating his inner monologue, he reluctantly acknowledged it had a point. He made a decision. No turning back. He was going to set out down this road and master his mutation. A large part of that was mastering himself so he took a deep breath and knocked hard on her door.

“Meld? I need you to teach me how to fight!”

Most people that happened to look into Meld's room, or at least those that did without feeling her significant wrath, might have had the impression that she wasn't doing much of anything useful. She was sitting at her art desk, the only piece of furniture aside from her bed and chair in her room, drawing. She wasn't just drawing anything, however, she was planning her next and most ambitious flesh meld yet. The details she had yet to reveal to anyone, though she had begun planning in detail several days ago. She had been working on her plan for several hours on the present day alone.

Meld hadn't been expecting anyone to come visiting her when she heard the knock at her door. Very few people outside of Aur and occiasionally Lori when she was needed for some kind of mission tended to visit her. Maybe it was because she was so intimidating or maybe it was because most in Sanctuary were of a more private sort. When she opened the door to see Nathan, however, and heard his declaration that he needed training, she smiled. It was yet another thing that she could do to help out a fellow mutant and it was something she was certain she'd be good at. After all, there were few better fighters than she when it came to hand to hand combat.

"Meet me in the training room in 15 minutes," Meld informed the teen. Once he was gone she began preparing, wrapping her blades carefully in cloth because he wasn't near ready to take her on fully bladed, metal man or no. Wrapping her blades served two purposes in this case. The first and most obvious was that it prevented her from hurting the kid to badly. Of course a lubbing from a titanium arm could still do some damage, but it wasn't quite the same as having to worry about accidentally severing an artery. The second purpose was to prevent him from accidentally transforming. One had to learn to walk before one loearned to run, and in the case of mutants that meant learning to fight without powers before learning to fight with them.

Once Meld was prepared she made her way down to the training room. "If you want me to train you I have a couple of guidelines in mind. First, in this room you do what I say. Second, I need your full dedication. I don't do anything half way and I expect you to treat this training with the serious dedication that it requires."

>> "Meet me in the training room in 15 minutes.

Nathan nodded. She was to the point, but then he’d expected nothing less. And she was smiling. He shook his head and knew he’d been foolish to let himself be thrown by the way the people he’d asked had spoken. She sounded serious though. And what’s more, she’d given him a challenge. Granted, he should have realised that Meld’s room wouldn’t be much larger than his, and they’d have to find somewhere else to train, but…hell, he didn’t plan that far ahead. So now he had a mission. To find the training room. And he only had 15 minutes? This was gonna be tough.

He began by wandering and looking for someone to ask. The first few people he saw skittered away to lurk elsewhere at his approach. Great. This was really going swell so far and he only had 13 minutes left. He then decided maybe a systematic search of the building might be a good place to start, headed to the staircase and began trekking up. He intended to get to the top and work his way down, but after 2 floors realised that if it wasn’t on the top floors then searching the whole building would take more than 15 minutes.

And he only had 10 left.

He had to make a quick call: Was he going to go up or back down? He made a snap decision, abandoned the upper floors and just for the sake of testing circumstance made a cursory exploration of the floor he was on. No dice. He rushed back to the stairs, with 7 minutes to go. He hustled back down to the floor he’d started on and charged back through the halls, bustling past several mutants on his way to the front desk. He couldn’t have more than 4 minutes left, so he slammed his hands down on the wooden surface, startling Lisa the secretary. “Sorry Lisa…no time…where’s the training room?” he managed between breaths. Lisa answered quickly and told him that it was 3 floors down, the fourth on the left as he came off the stairwell, and he was gone before she finished talking.

“Come on, come on…” he said as he raced down through areas of the sanctuary he’d never been in before, taking the stairs 3 at a time, reckless considering that the metal handrail was something he wasn’t keen to touch. He tripped on the last flight of stairs, but rolled to his feet, feeling fine. He could almost feel the seconds ticking down in his head as he made his way past door after door, counting them in his head.

1…2…3…

4. Bingo. Nathan burst in and surveyed the training room. Meld wasn’t there yet! He pumped his fist in the air and caught his breath. He was warmed up, at any rate. He heard footsteps and turned to see Meld enter. She wasted no time or movements and stepped up in front of him, addressing him seriously.

>> "If you want me to train you I have a couple of guidelines in mind. First, in this room you do what I say. Second, I need your full dedication. I don't do anything half way and I expect you to treat this training with the serious dedication that it requires."

Nathan gulped. She was serious. So was he, but he mentally knew that this was it. Last chance. He could still back out now, but if he didn’t Meld was going to mould him into something…someone else. It wouldn’t be easy or fun, but it was something he needed…Besides, could he live with himself if he did back out? Not a chance. Do everything she said? Done. Full dedication? Well, that was just a fancy phrase for determination, and that he had in spades.

He looked squarely back at Meld, meeting her gaze. She had wrapped her body, and he was slightly confused by that. He’d assumed that they were going to spar with him in his metal form. If he was meant to be vulnerable and squishy while she was wailing on him, he was going to get hurt. Some more. He didn’t care though. He was resolved, and that was all that mattered. “You got it Meld. Obedience and commitment. What should I do first?”.

Meld hadn't planned the deadline to get to the training room as any sort of a test. While she knew that Sanctuary was somewhat confusing to navigate and designed just a little like a labyrinth, it simply didn't occur to her that her soon to be new student would have any problems finding the place at all. It had been one of the first places she had sought out when she had first entered the golden doors and it didn't even occur to her that it might not be the first place others would seek out. The time limit had merely been established in order to allow herself time to prepare for the lessons to come and for no other reason that that. Had she known what difficulty it would cause, she quite likely would have been amused but only because her new student had, in fact, managed to make it there in time.

Meld was pleased to find Nathan in the training room when she arrived and he seemed ready for whatever she was going to throw at him, but she could see immediately that they had a lot of work ahead of them. He didn't even know how to stand properly, let alone actually throw an effective punch or, for that matter, block a punch. He had the advantage, of course, of being able to transform into a nearly completely impervious metal form but there may be instances when that simply wasn't possible, such as if he were to ever encounter and adapted. It was always better to have a foundation of knowing how to fight without powers and once that foundation was built, powers could only add to it. If not for a solid foundation, then the rest would inevitably topple when too much stress was placed on it.

"We start with the basics," Meld stated, looking Nathan up and down and responding to his question. She walked up to him and attempted to place her hands onto his arms and shoulders, molding his body until it conformed to a proper defensive stance. "First you need to know how to stand. Everything that I have to teach you will be built off of that stance, offense, defense and take downs. You won't stand a chance against anyone who knows even the basics if you don't get the stance down perfectly."

Meld knew she had the knowledge to make a good teacher and knew she had the patience for it as well. The one concern she had, however, was not always knowing her own strength. In the beginning when Nathan wouldn't have the skills for proper sparring it wouldn't be a problem, nor in the end when he was permitted to use his powers. In the middle, however, is where the difficulty might lie. It wasn't going to happen soon but she thought about eventually getting a sparring partner for Nathan to help once they reached that point. Perhaps Aura would be willing.

Nathan felt himself under the scrutiny of an expert gaze. He breathed in and tried to make himself look as imposing and ready as possible. Then he gave up. This wasn’t the time to try and impress Meld, or to pretend to have anything he didn’t. Besides, she was a seasoned veteran, so she’d just see right through him. Instead, he simply allowed himself to flop and await instruction.

>> "We start with the basics,"

Meld moved around behind him, and he nodded in agreement. That sounded like a good plan to him. He knew absolutely nothing and the basics seemed like the sensible place to start. That said, what had he been expecting? “We’ll start with some advanced throwing techniques?” Meld was a good enough teacher at least to properly assess his abilities and work out what needed to happen. He’d let her dictate the speed and order of learning. That was her job. His was being an attentive student.

>> "First you need to know how to stand. Everything that I have to teach you will be built off of that stance, offense, defense and take downs. You won't stand a chance against anyone who knows even the basics if you don't get the stance down perfectly."

He felt Meld moving around him, shifting his weight, adjusting his balance, moving the positioning of his arms and checking his eyeline. She circled him several times, making changes and getting him to move until she was satisfied, before changing it again, tightening and focusing his stance. Making it perfect. Finally she was happy. His mind was going into overdrive, his muscles forcing the memory of the position into themselves, locking it in. He’d need to resume this position again and again, and if it did form the base of everything it’d have to be damn good.

Nathan took this in. It was clearly very important or she wouldn’t be stressing it so much. He was tempted to just try and mimic how she was forcing him to stand, but tightened his mental focus. “Come on! Buildings with poor foundation are weak no matter how well polished they are.” he felt his inner monologue shouting at him. He was caught between two hard taskmasters. One in the room with him and one in his head. What had he got himself into?

He relaxed out of the stance, realising that he needed to be able to get into it on his own if this was going to have any benefit at all. He couldn’t expect Meld to be there to correct him every time, so he needed to get it right. He resumed the stance, breathing slowly, his muscles finding their positions as he tried to remember exactly what his body had felt like.

“How’s this?”

Nathan was to be Meld's first real student. While she still believed herself to be human and taking martial arts classes, she had sometimes been involved in assisting the novice students in their training, but they weren't really her students. With them it was an occasional helping hand while with Nathan she was expected to take him right from being a complete novice to whatever level of mastery he desired and was capable of achieving. It was a daunting task for one who had never tackled such a thing before, but it was a task she was determined to live up to. Failure was neither something she accepted well nor something she was used to experiencing.

“How’s this?”

Meld looked at Nathan critically before making a couple of minor adjustments. Stepping back, she nodded her head, satisfied. "You need to be able to do that even in your sleep. Any time, any place, at the slightest provocation, you need to be able to get yourself into that stance. An enemy is not going to stand around and wait for you to adjust yourself, he's going to jump you from behind and you have to be ready. Now, stand normally and then return to the stance I just showed you."

Explaining to Nathan such things brought back memories that Meld found to be surprisingly painful. She had lived in a loving family once, with a mother and a father and a sister. If she had always been just a little more obsessed with her martial arts than her family would have liked, she had nevertheless had a family who loved and cherished her. At one time, in that distant past, they had actually been tight knit. Then she had to go and almost cause the death of her sister and had to discover that she was a mutant, the greatest sin of all in their happy little household. That had ruined everything in her life. That had forced her to become the person she now was.

Meld waited patiently for Nathan to obey her command, trying to dispel the phantoms of her past. That was behind her now. She was no longer a part of that family and she was no longer human. The Order was now her family. She had no one else nor would she ever have anyone else. She fought for her kind because she had nothing else to fight for and nothing else to live for.

It was seven or eight times, but he wasn’t really counting ¹ that Meld had made him revisit the stance. On each occasion, a foot would be inched just too far forwards, or his arms wouldn’t be held quite right. He remained silent and appreciative, obeying without question her every instruction. He was under no illusion here. She was the master and he the pupil, and he’d promised to do as he was told. So he did.

And he was happy to. He knew this was a long road, and Meld was the best person he could think of to teach him. In addition to being a skilled combatant, she was a mutant who knew about him so that wouldn’t be an issue, she was kind and compassionate – she’d demonstrated that towards him when she took him in, but she had other qualities that made her the perfect tutor. She was strict. She brooked no argument and expected nothing less than total compliance. Even a centimetre of difference in his posture and she corrected him ². And she was patient. This last one was perhaps the most important. Nathan was a fast pupil and utterly willing to learn, but he was completely inexperienced.

Perhaps in some way this was an advantage? Perhaps it was better to start as a blank slate and be constructed from the ground up than to come with preconceptions and half-learned principles to conflict with and mess up fresh instruction. He nodded to himself. Better by far to start from a position of admitted inexperience than pretended knowledge.

He now felt happy that he could jump in and out of the stance at will. The last time Meld had had no complaints, though she had made him hold the posture for a good two minutes while she examined him everywhere, before finally with a nod, she allowed him to relax out of it.

>> "You need to be able to do that even in your sleep. Any time, any place, at the slightest provocation, you need to be able to get yourself into that stance. An enemy is not going to stand around and wait for you to adjust yourself, he's going to jump you from behind and you have to be ready. Now, stand normally and then return to the stance I just showed you."

She was a cruel, cruel taskmaster. He got into the stance once more, for the eight or ninth time that day ³ letting his body move for him, knowing that if he tried to think about it his brain would take too long. Meld wouldn’t be happy at that. She was really hammering home the importance of the stance here and he knew that he had it down to instinct now. She was confident in the stance she’d given him and he was certain that it was a gift he couldn’t lose. Between fear of failure and fear of Meld, his body would remember this stance in any situation. It was time to move onto the next step…however painful that would be.

“Okay Meld. Now what?” he said, not putting on any bluff or bluster, but eager to consolidate his stance and learn.



¹ Okay, fine. He had been counting. And it was eight.

² He’d tested this by deliberately and oh-so-subtly modifying the stance. She’d spotted it in a heartbeat. She was that good.

³ It was the ninth.