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The Preserve - Saturday

Kaidan still had misgivings about this whole sparring thing, but he'd agreed and there was no real good way to wriggle out of it. He had a half-hope that Kanan wouldn't show, but - he knew better. So Kaidan had thrown on his guard and some loose clothing, loaded some protective gear into a duffel and headed to the preserve.

A teal deer wandered by, incurious about the human and his bag of stuff. Kaidan snapped a picture of it and texted it to Kanan. "Aw look, it matches your eyes."

Then, to burn off nerves, he began doing a warm up set of stretches.

[OOC: expecting 1, open to others if you have reason to wander by. Kanan's thread to be chrono last.]

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Kanan smiled faintly and turned the hilt around so that Kaidan could see it.

"A button, there," he explained, pointing. "And turning that knob adjusts the length of the blade."

Because he'd been a shorty when he'd built it, and hadn't given up on the possibility of getting taller. Which had been good, because he sure had ended up doing just that.

"But only Force-sensitive people can make them work, do I have that right? If I picked it up and pushed the button.. what happens?" he asked, tilting his head back against the trunk.

"If you picked it up and pushed the button, you'd turn on the lightsaber," Kanan replied. "Only Force-sensitive people can build them. But once it's made, it's still a piece of hardware."

He shut the blade off and held the hilt out to Kaidan.

Kaidan arched a brow and took the hilt. It weighed more than he expected, but less than he imagined. Aiming the about-to-be-burning end away from anything it could cut, he pushed the button and ignited it. He gave it a couple seconds, absorbing the feel of it, and then pushed the button again to turn it off. "I don't know how your hands don't go numb from that," he said, handing it back.

"What, the hum?" Kanan smirked faintly, and then shook his head, taking back his weapon. "That's nothing. If you'd actually tried to move it around, it probably would have resisted you."

Yes. The blade would have. They often had ideas of their own.

"Yes, the hum," Kaidan agreed, "And I wouldn't. I don't mess around with plasma unless it's very quickly moving in a direction away from me."

"The hum, you get used to," Kanan shrugged. "It isn't a vibroweapon, at least."

His galaxy really liked things that buzzed while they killed you.

"We have vibro weapons only as attachments," Kaidan noted, "I don't use them. Mass effect fields are deadly enough without adding a moving component to them." He made a 'roll on' gesture with a hand, "Less talking, more bzzbzzzzzbzzzzzz, please."

Kanan rolled his eyes and resisted the urge to give Kaidan a smack upside the head through the Force.

"You asked a question," he pointed out, but ignited the blade again. "And," he added, slipping into his Form III opening stance, "understanding the weapon is an important factor in understanding how it's wielded, too."

"You can answer and show me the forms, I'm sure," Kaidan noted, watching the opening stance with clinical interest, "I'm going to have more. This will take years if you have to stop moving every answer."

"Maybe I can, maybe I can't," Kanan replied, even as he slipped into the first few steps of his forms. "I might get really into this, you don't know."

He didn't get that into it.

Kaidan snorted, "If you couldn't, you'd have no business with a weapon in your hand. That kind of situational unawareness will get you dead, fast."

He tilted his chin, "But if you want to go into some sort of sword-wielding happy place, by all means. I'll just throw acorns at you if I need your attention."

Kanan rolled his eyes, but smirked faintly.

"You're welcome to do that anyway. Go on, try to interrupt me."

He pivoted on one foot and slid easily into the next movement, his blade swinging out wide, stopping just a centimeter away from the trunk of a nearby tree. He pulled it in again, in front of himself, and continued on with his forms.

Kaidan rolled his eyes. He was very well aware Kanan was doing his 'one with the universe' thing, but he had just invited acorns.

Kaidan picked a handful of acorns out of the detritus under the tree, popping off the scaly little caps to make them slightly more aerodynamic.

He lobbed one at the center of Kanan's back.

The acorn never met its mark. Almost faster than the eye could percieve, Kanan had turned around to intercept it on the blade of his saber, a small crackling hiss and a puff of smoke being the only evidence that the acornd had ever been there at all.

Without missing a beat, he continued on with his form, adjusting his step to account for the change in direction, bringing his lightsaber up, and then down, a defensive pose, then a strike, a small smile at the corners of his mouth.

Kaidan tilted his head a little, because that turn hadn't been human average. He wasn't sure Kanan even realized that, but figured he probably did.

Curious, he threw another acorn into what should be Kanan's blind spot.

Kaidan didn't expect it was a blind spot, he just wanted to see Kanan do the thing again.

And again the blade flew out, this time to the side, cleaving through the acorn and leaving, once again, little more than smoke in its wake. This time, Kanan played it off as being another step in his form, following through and then turning his body to meet it.

Kaidan picked out three acorns and fired them off in rapid succession, in three different directions.

He was still watching Kanan's movements critically, examining the way lines of muscles moved with the forms.

So far as lightsaber form went, given that he'd only had about a year of brushing up behind him after eight years of total neglect, Kanan was still considerably good.

So far as swordwork went, he was superhuman, two more acorns burning on the blade, the third avoided completely only to have his lightsaber swing behind himself for a... well, a finishing strike, more or less. Three acorns were thrown, and no acorns fell.

Once again, the blade followed through, twisting in his hand to come up over his head and down in front of him again.

"Do you always return to point?" Kaidan asked, throwing four acorns this time.

"Not always," Kanan replied, four more acorns falling to the same fate. They had nothing on blaster bolts in several respects; he was mostly just enjoying that someone was finally willing to toss things at him. "I'm interrupting the pattern to fry these things, I'm just returning to that, right now."

Because Kaidan had wanted to watch him run his forms, and all.

Kaidan was perfectly happy to keep pitching acorns at him. He threw five in a star pattern, mostly just to watch the afterburn of the saber make pretty pictures in the air. "Do all Jedi do these same patterns, or are they different for each, uh, temple?"

Kanan answered that question with five vaporized acorns and a wry smile.

"We would all at least learn the basis for most of the lightsaber forms," he replied. "There were seven main forms in all, all developed and perfected by Masters over the years. This is Form III, Soresu, the way of the Mynock. It's the defensive form I was telling you about. The one meant to wear people down, to settle a fight without bloodshed, if possible. My Master favored Soresu, so we'd train together in this form more than any other."

Every motion punctuated a word, now, so that Kanan's speech was clipped, almost lyrical as he flowed from one step to the next.

"We would start with Form I, Shii-Cho, the oldest form in the Order. If Soresu were to fail me, the back-up plan would be to cut back to Shii-Cho, preferably, though I might attempt Form IV, Ataru, depending on the opponent and how much room I have to move."

Kaidan grinned a little as Kanan went into teacher-mode. "But any other Jedi you'd fight would know that was the backup plan?"

Since Kanan seemed to enjoy the acorns, he bounced the rest in his palm and tossed them all at once.

"Well, I wouldn't be fighting Jedi," Kanan pointed out, twisting on his heel again and leaving a smoking puff in his lightsaber's wake. A few of the acorns did hit the ground this time; he'd prioritized the ones that were actually going to hit him. "If I was fighting anybody with a lightsaber at all, it would most likely be a Sith, and they're not exactly what I'd call numerous."

And yet, there were still fewer of them than there were Jedi. Not that Kanan knew that one way or the other.

"But that's why we studied multiple forms. Form I would be a last resort if all else failed. Something tried and true and comfortable. The basics."

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