CHAPTER 90: TRAINING DUMMY

After returning from Club Velvet, Jack, and Miranda had taken a quick shower then gone to bed, both tired. They disabled parallel self and entered his soul space directly, then enabled Linked Self.

Before maxing his time ratio, he notified Nora, Rina, and Madison. They didn’t mind because their physical selves were already sleeping and they could sync memories once Jack reduced the time ratio.

As he was climbing into bed, he noticed Miranda eyeing him hungrily.

He was truly exhausted and just not in the mood, so he said, "Miranda, not now. I’m tired. Go to sleep. If you can’t keep your hands to yourself, go sleep in your own room."

She pouted, but said, "Okay, I’ll behave."

Then she climbed into bed next to him, but stayed on her side of the bed.

However, several hours later, he woke to the sensation of lips wrapped around his already rock hard cock, and he was already half-way to the finish line.

Is she never satisfied? He asked himself as he pulled her up and pushed her onto her back.

After satisfying Miranda, they both went to sleep for a few more hours.

When they woke again, it was still very early in the morning in the physical world, and he still had about three hours before he needed to get ready for his second day of school.

So, instead of going back to normal time ratio and using parallel self, he decided he would spend the whole day in his soul space at the max time ratio. That way, he wouldn’t mess with his internal clock and he could spend uninterrupted time with all his soul bonds.

First, Jack went to see how Rina and Madison were doing.

When he got to Madison’s office, he found the two of them huddled in front of a monitor, speaking gibberish to each other.

After prodding them to get their attention, he learned Rina was helping Madison get the simulation software she wrote working on one of Madison’s super computers.

Happy that they were getting along and that they needed nothing from him, he went to his lab. Nora was in the middle of an experiment and he didn’t want to disturb her, so he decided to play with the training dummy and environment controls.

So far, he had only used normal environmental controls, even in Madison’s solar and server rooms, because light and temperature ranges provided by a normal environmental control were large enough for what they needed in those rooms.

And he had found that the surface control was limited to color and texture. So, he could make the floor feel like carpet, and he could make the walls look like a mirror, a solid color, any pattern, or picture he could imagine.

He created a temporary room and added the Weather version of the environment control.

When he mentally connected to the control, he found that besides the light, temperature, and surface options, there was also a weather option. And there were more surface options. Besides texture and color, he could also specify terrain!

He pushed an image of a beach with waves and a soft ocean breeze into the control. Immediately, the room transformed into a beachfront.

He’d wanted a large room because he was testing the weather control, so he made it two hundred meters in length, width, and height.

As soon as he pushed his mental image into the control, the room transformed into a sandy beach with half the room turned to water. Waves rose out of the far wall, crested, then crashed onto the wet sand.

He was standing outside the room, looking in through the doorway, and when the room transformed, it was silent. As he watched the waves crash and the breeze stir the sand, he heard nothing.

When he looked down, he noticed that the sand stopped right at the edge of the doorway and it was like the sand was pressed up against glass.

When he stepped inside the room, the thunder and hiss of waves crashing washed over him and the smell of salty sea air filled his nose.

The sun was bright and the warmth against his skin reminded him of a hot summer day.

He was half tempted to just forget everything else he was going to do and wade into the waves, but the room was costing him nearly three thousand EP per second.

When he stepped back out of the room, he noticed that the sand that was sticking to the bottom of his bare feet disappeared. That was convenient.

As he played with the controls, he found that he could fill the room with water, or turn it into a baking desert.

When he maxed out the rain level, it rained so hard you could not see the other end of the room, and the water level in the room rose at a visible rate. It seemed a bit extreme to be called non-disaster level. If it rained this hard in the physical world, it would quickly cause massive flooding.

When he cranked up the wind to max, it blew so hard he had trouble remaining standing. He’d seen videos of people trying to walk in hurricane-force winds, and the maxed room wind felt just as extreme.

He tried hail and snow after wind and found that the room could produce hail up to the size of a soybean, and snow fall so heavily that the room filled with snow in a matter of minutes.

The only weather type that seemed restrained was lightning. He could make clouds and cloud to cloud lighting and just the sound of thunder, but the room refused to generate cloud to ground lighting.

He considered testing the Extreme environmental control, but the EP cost for the Weather control was already close to a third of his total EP generation when maxed.

He’d learned that death inside his soul space would just reset his manifestation, but he also learned that while most weather effects didn’t cross the door boundary, light did. And he wasn’t interested in burning his eyeballs staring into an artificial sun. So he tabled his fusion experiments for later.

Done with his weather control experiments, he deleted the large room and replaced it with a smaller room, about the size of a basketball court, then entered and accessed the training dummy template.

He found he could mentally specify its shape and size and had access to several pre-configured body plans to choose from.

Choosing a humanoid body plan and mentally visualizing the image of a male manikin, he activated the template. What appeared in front of him looked much like what he imagined. A plastic manikin, mostly faceless, nothing between its legs.

After it appeared, he felt a new mental interface appear.

The new interface allowed him to control the training dummy, and there were several combat categories available on the list.

Each with level-of-difficulty and style-of-instruction that ranged from demonstrate-slowly all the way up to kill-or-be-killed. The combat categories include Unarmed, Sword, Saber, Spear, Bow, and several others.

Curios he selected Unarmed, Demonstrate-Slowly.

When he did, the interface changed again, and presented him with a long list of moves and combinations. The first item on the list was an option to have the dummy do a full demonstration of the full array of moves.

Thinking this might be like Karate Kata’s, he tried to select it only to learn that he needed six training dummy for the full demonstration.

He scanned through the options and eventually found one that would demonstrate all single combat movements and techniques. So he instantiated a second dummy, then configured them both to do the demonstration.

The dummies moved to the center of the room, made fists with their right hands cupped with their left hand, and bowed to Jack. Then they began moving.

Their movements were faster than old people doing Tai Chi in the park, but slow enough that he could clearly see everything they were doing.

As Jack watched, the dummies first went through a bunch of punch, kick, and pure movements, striking and maneuvering around each other.

They also demonstrated leg sweeps and what he thought might be aikido style deflections, redirects, and joint locks. They also demonstrated rolls, tumbles and grappling.

As the demonstration progressed, they blended together individual movements and techniques until it looked like they were going through a choreographed fight.

When they finished, they bowed again, then stood still, waiting. Their demonstration had been both fascinating and exhilarating. He wondered how this Unarmed combat art compared to the various Earth martial arts.

He wanted the see them go through first few moves again but didn’t want to search through the long list of options, so he tried just mentally pushing his intent at them. To his pleasure, it worked. The two training dummies started at the beginning and went through the first set of moves.

He had them repeat the sequence a few times until he thought he had it memorized. Then he had one of the dummies stand aside and tried going through the sequence with the other dummy.

He thought that, since he had the sequence memorized, it would be easy to replicate, but soon found that even though he could visualize what he saw, his body had trouble replicating the moves.

So he had one of the dummies slowly repeat the same move in a loop. Then he practiced trying to mirror the dummy. Once he thought he could at least mostly mirror the move, he would move on to the next move. He was working on the fifth move when heard Miranda.