Meetup at Venisha's

Alex holds up the unbroken tonfa in his right hand. "Because if it was a Do move, I want to try and break this one. Fine. I will assume that either your pride refuses to admit I hurt you or that there's some sort of secret code that prevents you from speaking about Akashic techniques. But my intellectual curiosity doesn't like to be ignored, so at some point you're going to at least explain the basics of what you can do with Do ."

He tosses the tonfa to the side and picks up his food. "Chance, if you don't mind, I'll wait a bit and see if Dr. Stake is able to make it. Anya, give me a bit and I'll beat you with clubs until he shows or I get bored."

Alex moves a generous portion of curry and rice onto his naan, holding it almost like a taco. "Actually, you put up a pretty decent showing wrestling with Venisha. How are you weapons?"

Alex shrugs. "I don't hit things with my hands if I can avoid it. Thus, any sparring we do is lopsided. That's made even worse if you have a problem with escalating the level of violence."

Alex looks over at Anya and sighs. "I have no doubt you are a hellion who can bust heads, even when the odds are against you. You've probably got a nasty scar of two where someone smashed a beer bottle on you. But let me show you something."

He walks past Venisha, taking a towel to wipe off the sweat as he goes. He reaches down and pulls back a rug, revealing a patch of floorboards that are splinter and cracked in a circular pattern and a hole that's punched straight through. Alex point at the hole. "That's where I tried to stab her. Looks to be a few inches deep. She retaliated by slamming my head into the floor as hard as she could. She luckily seems to have healed me before any brain damage set in."

He looks back to Anya. "I'll spar with you of you like, but I don't need another fighter. I need to figure out what you do better than anyone else here."

"Looks like you have the ability to make things escalate quickly, too," Venisha says to Alex with a frown. "Can you do me a favor and think before you speak?

"Anya probably can beat me in a fight. Especially if she's using her magic. If we'd stuck together in the last fight, you would've seen the measures she'll go to get things done. And if you think I've got stamina, it's nothing compared to her."

Standing, she pulls herself up to her full height and squares her shoulders. "It was Do. And no, I'm not going to teach you. Not because it's some Akashic secret code. Because Do is more than a fighting system, its more than magic - it's rooted in who you are. And if you're not going to start with the philosophies behind the fighting, I'm not going to explain anything to you."

She sighs, her posture collapsing. "Alex, you think you're intellectually curious but you're also abrasive and insulting. You probably don't even realize when you pissed off Anya, do you? This is what I meant by saying that you need to trust us and treat us right."

During all of this, Alex has just stood there nodding. When Anya finishes, he speaks. "This is the point where I was originally going to attack you, to see how well you can actually handle yourself when your completely enraged. But apparently, Venisha thinks that's a bad idea, unless I'm totally misreading that look."

He crosses his arms and stares at Anya. "So where were you going to hit me?"