Bk1: Ch11: Pg 7
1b.
Maeye: OZ, where is Arayanna?
OZ: She is in the gym, Maeye.
Maeye: The what?
OZ: It is a place for one to exercise.
Maeye: Ah. That sounds like her.
2a.
Maeye: OZ, how do I make the bath work again?
OZ: Turn the handle to the right. Then pull forward for cold water or push back for hot water. It functions the same as the shower.
Maeye: What's the shower?
OZ: The glass cubicle to you right. It is similar to taking a bath only you remain standing and the water cascades over you.
Maeye: That sounds nice. Let's try that.
2b.
Maeye: Oh yes, that's nice.
3a.
Maeye: Ugh. I look like death.
Maeye: OZ, is there any make-up in this place?
OZ: Yes, Maeye. In the cabinet beneath the sink.
Maeye: Thank you.
3b.
3c.
Maeye: Hmm.
4a.
Maeye: OZ, is Aray still in the gym?
OZ: No, she is now in the firing range.
4b.
Maeye: What's that?
OZ: It is a place to practice the use of firearms - modern projectile weapons.
Maeye: Oh that sounds interesting. Can you lead me there?
OZ: Of course.
5a.
6a.
Maeye: That's really loud.
6b.
Arayanna: Maeye! I wasn't expecting you.
7a.
Maeye: Tada!
Maeye: I'm up and about.
7b.
Arayanna: You cut your hair!
Maeye: Yea. I thought some changes might help me feel better. Do you like it?
Arayanna: I love it.
8a.
Maeye: So, whatcha up to?
Arayanna: Just getting refamiliarized with Earth weapons.
Arayanna: Wanna try it?
Maeye: Definitely.
8b.
Used to be a range safety officer and instructor, and lemme tell ya, if I had a nickel for every time I got that close to a smokin’ hot redhead in daisy dukes and a bikini top during a lesson…I’d need to borrow a nickel to have five cents. Sigh.
Also, Aray – put your ears back on, you’re still on the line.
Not sure if Aray can take her ears off, they are kinda attached to her 😛
Cereally, believe she is just getting Maeye set up before putting the second set of earmuffs on
LOL! Right! I mean, according to the internet, this kind of thing happens all the time in firing ranges. LOL!
I was an RSO, Instructor and Armourer.
Military and civilian, for more years than I care to remember.
Distractions on the range can be annoying, especially when hot brass ends up between them and they start doing the ‘dance of the flaming arsehole’ with a live weapon in their hand. Entertaining, but hardly safe. I remember one rather well endowed young Cpl literally stripping bare chested on the firing line after taking a hot 7.62 from her neighbour’s FN down the front of her shirt 😉
I’d assume that given their presumed enhanced senses, elves can shut off or dampen their hearing with magic or some natural ability, or she uses plugs, she’s going to have a hard time finding ear defenders to fit regardless 😉 That doesn’t explain why she isn’t wearing eye protection on the range though, unless there’s magic for that too 😉
It might be 5.56, but Maeye’s going to have to learn to put her shoulder forward, get the butt into the pocket and ‘lean into it’ or she’s probably not going to get the results she’s going to need later on and get discouraged. Luckily for her, that scope probably won’t give her a case of ‘Weatherby eyebrow’, but she needs to watch the relief anyway, I doubt that’s the only calibre she’s going to be introduced to, or at least I hope not.
Aray shoulda started her off with the peashooter handguns
Apparently I shoot far better than I model. 🙂
Hot brass anywhere will get you dancing. Shooting wearing shorts once – had one land in my boot. That was pretty funny (for everyone else).
Hoping Maeye doesn’t break her shoulder (or even simply bruising it) when that firearm goes off
The M4 and its like are surprisingly gentle. Now if she was holding a 12 gauge, that would be a different story. 🙂
You can hold the butt of most 5.56’s against your chin and fire it and I know one RSO used to fire an FN one-handed like a pistol, granted he was 6’9″ and almost 500 lbs, but still…
The trick is to hold the weapon firmly but not so hard you start shaking and spoil accuracy. If the recoil is a push instead of a punch then it’s generally manageable.
We used to qualify on 12ga using high base buck, I’ve seen some very large men wince when they moved their shoulder after finishing 25 rounds and I’ve seen ‘five-foot-fuck-all’ women handle it with ease. Technique and training is everything.
It’s all in the way you hold your lower lip 😉
I always said I’d rather have a woman with no experience but who’s willing to learn as a student than some swaggering macho steroid junkie who assumes things work the way they do in the movies and won’t listen. One makes you feel good about seeing your teaching come to fruition, the other just pisses you off and generally ends up a safety hazard.
One time I was teaching some cadets and I happened to have some of my own pistols with me.
There was the usual teenage tough guy in the group (this was pre-Rambo) and one very motivated tiny young girl.
I broke out the Blackhawk…
I loaded a light wadcutter for her and after the first round you could see the big grin while she waited for me to load it fully and she fired them all fairly quickly.
He got the heaviest magnum load I had with me…
I had to stick my hand in to stop the frontsight from leaving a divot in his forehead and one was enough for him.
There was quiet on the range when I started the next part of the course and the loudmouth stopped telling everyone how it was ‘really done’ and let me teach 🙂
Aray does have her hearing protection – she was wearing it when she was shooting. She’s still in instruction mode. We are going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she will put them back on before Maeye fires.
The real questions is – why didn’t OZ warn Maeye before she entered the range? It was in the script – I just ran out of room and thought the continued conversation between OZ and Maeye was dragging a bit.
All the conveniences that every modern home should have – hot and cold running water, flush toilets, big screen TV and DVD collection, gym, firing range and weapons collection…
Next visit I’ll bring the .308 M1A, although the range looks a bit short to really test that out.
That’s probably for the best, one of the reasons the M14 never lasted as a service rifle is it had a ‘wandering zero’ at the best of times, granted the M1A was an inprovement but I’ve fired an FN at 800 yards and consistently hit paper, a lot of the time even in the part of the target that counted 🙂 I’d take an FN or G3 or an AR-10 or even a Garand in 7.62 any day.
A friend of mine had an M1 some 35 years ago with a custom 7.62 barrel, a Millett if I remember correctly, wonderful shooter and even used the same clips as .30-06 but at prone, every time it ejected one it landed squarely on the bill of my cap 🙂
All are welcome….all are welcome.
I’ve often thought that in a apocalyptic situation it is going to be the solid oldies but greaties that make a difference like the M1A. Thus, I carry a 1911. 🙂
At the target range I recommend a long-barreled .22 rimfire rifle. The reason why? It lets you practice your target shooting, but doesn’t hurt your shoulder, your wallet, or your hearing. With a long barrel, firing a .22 rimfire will cost a few cents a round, will barely kick at all, and makes less noise than coughing.
I’ve had a couple of police officers who were also on the range stop and verify that I was not using a silencer. I had to demonstrate by sending a couple rounds downrange, and they were very unhappy about it. Even a .22 is potentially deadly and they really didn’t like the idea of a rifle report that wouldn’t even be heard from 30 feet away.
Also apropos of police officers whether on or off duty, here is a lesson I once watched an idiot learn:
Do not set your cell phone ring tone to the sound of a semiauto firearm racking. You will inevitably get a call while standing near a police officer, they will turn around and see you reaching for your phone. They will respond before you even have time to say the words ‘cell phone.’
The idiot I saw this lesson taught to got off with being thrown to the ground and tazed. He’s lucky the officer wasn’t a coward.
If the officer had been a coward I have no doubt the guy with the ‘funny’ ring tone would have wound up dead.
That doesn’t make them a coward
It takes courage to try to de-escalate or clarify. Just shooting someone is way easier. It’s something you don’t feel like you have to do, unless you’re afraid.
When you hear the sound of a firearm racking right next to you, you don’t always have the time to think but to react
Anyone stupid enough to have a ringtone that sounds like that deserves everything that happens to them, and they were fucking lucky it was only a tazer and not a dozen bullets
Cops have the hardest job in the world and get no respect these days.
Yeah: no one wants them around until they are needed, and then they are never there quickly enough to have prevented the problem (or were the ones who created the problem in the first place) or do their work fast enough (just so they can go away again)
Don’t get me wrong; I do like cops and want them to be around. I believe laws and law enforcement on the whole make society better. But I’m also very aware that my own appearance scares a lot of people, and very aware that when people are scared of others there is often shooting before trying to understand what’s going on. Cops are not the exception to that.
So I am very upfront and friendly with officers; I go to the same firing ranges, for example. I attend the annual policeman’s dinner. If at all possible I want them to know who I am and not be scared of me¸ before we ever have to interact in any kind of stressful situation.
It doesn’t make you ‘chicken’, it makes you ‘owl’ and alive to get close to pension.
I’m more than a little sick and tired of everyone taking three weeks to overanalyze something an Officer had less than a second to respond to.
There’s a very good clip available of some ‘cops are pigs and cowards for shooting people instead of ‘defuzing’ the situation’ loudmouth being invited to attend a training session with video shoot/no-shoot scenarios. He ended up shooting everything that shouldn’t have been shot and dying a bunch of times by not reacting to the threat.
Monday morning quarterbacks are all to ready to call an Officer every name in the book but offer to send them onto the streets in a uniform with no training since they know so much and they’ll decline the offer immediately.
Years ago some friends and I were out target shooting. This wasn’t at a formal range but in an area of a national forest that had been designated as an area where target shooting was allowed. During one of the pauses to reset stuff to shoot at I grabbed a discarded soda can, filled it with water from the creek, and set it up as a target. I had a box of CCI Stingers for my .22 that I was shooting. The first Stinger that hit that soda can literally blew it in half, with the upper half flying off in one direction and the lower half going elsewhere. I was amazed by the amount of energy those Stingers produced in that can of water to make it explode like that. I’ve been a fan of them ever since.
Gun *and* fantasy geeks? Feori, you seem to cultivate quite the interesting crowd. Makes me wonder if you’ve ever met Nerdrotic–seems like you and he would hit it off wonderfully.
Gotta love how unique Prentil is compared to most other fantasy fare (especially the webcomics…webtoons has become an utter morass of derivative schlock). I do wonder if there is enough of an audience to create a dedicated platform for more hard-boiled type comics from western authors considering the current sentiment is that manga is eating everyone’s lunch b/c of all of the stupid activists ruining western media (RIP the Witcher–also, being a Jewish person, those same far left lunatics have ruined far more than western media)
Thank you very much! That is quite a compliment!
The beauty of the relationship between our heroines and The Merchant is that The Merchant can take them anywhere and anywhen. So we can switch settings as often as we like and mash up fantasy with all the other genres I love. Although as of right now, I only plan to do this genre hopping one more time before we settle back down to Prentil home base for a bit.
I try to stay moderate in life and in art. My tendency to display lesbians has nothing to do with leftism – I simply like naked women. Otherwise, my characters follow a pretty basic classic chivalrous code. 😀