The tour-group was exploring a floor of the student centre occupied by members of the visual arts department, their studios colourfully cluttered.
"If you're reconsidering majors, please rule out art," the chancellor joked. "We're much happier paying for ink than paint. This year, the..."
Henry, disengaging from the goth kid and resuming The Provocation, snuck back beside the beauty. “You’re not an artist, that’s for sure.”
The young woman sighed. “I’m not.”
“Oi, Candace, guess how I knew you’re not an artist.”
“No.”
Henry clutched one of the beauty’s hands and raised her fingers with the greedy love of a desert-wanderer scooping water from an oasis. “They’re too flawless.”
A Compliment Play x Skin Contact Play, potentially comboing into a Ki—
The young woman snatched them back.
Henry smiled. “And mine are a bit heavy.”
A Humour Recovery.
”More than a bit,” the young woman huffed.
Through the window of one studio, a lone painter could be seen reproducing on canvas a still from The God-Emperor’s latest promotion tournament.
Henry, at the reminder of Karnon's long-standing rival—
He poked the beauty in the shoulder. “Pst, Candace, ever thought of picking up a brush?”
”No. Not a pencil either; not a chisel.”
“No artistic interest? That’s weird.”
“Mhm.”
Henry snapped his fingers in epiphany. “Let’s sign up for an art paper together!”
Joint Class False Finisher: By convincing the beauty to enrol in a class with him, he would solidify later opportunities for romance. This was a false finisher because Henry didn’t intend to go to classes and was using this as a set-up employing The Low-Ball social-manipulation technique. First, he would have her comply with the small request, then escalate to one much larger.
“Nope,” the young woman replied.
Into One-on-One Art Session Finisher.
“Oh, you’d prefer one-on-one tutelage? My schedule’s a—”
“No.”
Henry looked down in defeat, at the face of the toddler in his arm spectating in silence. “Hear that, Little Larry? A decisive no. That gambit was a flop. What's your advice to recover this one? I'm drawing a blank.”
A Flagrant Indifference Recovery.
Little Liu, grimacing, glanced away, refusing to participate in his uncle’s latest disaster.
Henry poked the beauty again. “Hey, Candace, which papers are you signing up for?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Let's haggle. If you tell me one, I’ll give you a two-minute break.”
Joint Class False Finisher (Reprisal) with a Door-in-the-Face modification: Start with a large request bound to get refused, then compromise by descending to a smaller request that, by comparison, seems more reasonable.
“Etiquette 101,” she replied sarcastically.
“A real one.”
“No.”
“Two?”
An Absurd Escalation Humour Recovery.
“No," she declared definitively. "Not three, either. No number.”
Henry sighed, his head sinking despondently to the toddler once more. “Once again, we failed. I'm sorry, Little Larry. At this rate, you’ll have to pick a different aunt.” He snapped towards the beauty. “Hey, Candace, let me share a secret.”
The young woman caught off guard, flinched. “Please don’t.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Classes? I’m not planning on attending any of them. Even if these geriatric hacks had techniques worth stealing, physical proximity is unnecessary for the theft. It’s the year 2050. Camera tech has been adequate for decades to snatch techniques remotely. That’s why I’ve decided to study while travelling, flying back only for exams. As for the nuisance attendance credits – a doppelganger.”
Set-up for Romantic Globe-Trotting Study Finisher.
“No, thanks.” The young woman headed off the invitation.
Henry used his e-assistant to project a slideshow on the back of the person in front of them. “A bungalow in Maui, an onsen in Yuzawa, a yurt on the Kazakh steppe – with modern technology, anywhere can be a classroom, Candace. Anywhere!”
Romantic Globe-Trotting Study Finisher: Studying while adventuring, no one could resist such a thrilling offer!
The young woman waved in the projection beam, cancelling it. “No.”
“Don’t worry about the doppelganger. Matching your full beauty is obviously impossible, but a resemblance close enough to fool these short-sighted professors shouldn’t be a problem.”
Con-Fixing: Demonstrate ingenuity and persistence by anticipating the points of resistance to one’s plays and resolving them.
The young woman grimaced. “Henry—Henry was it? Are you aware that these sorts of solicitations are inappropriate to give a stranger?”
“Obviously.” He laughed. “I’m teasing.”
A Humour Recovery.
“But you remembered my name,” he continued, “that’s progress. Soon enough, we won’t be strangers, and I’ll ask again without having to pretend I’m teasing.”
A False-Humour-Double-Down-Back-Into-Re-Offer Manoeuvre.
“Don’t,” she begged.
In another studio, a collective of artists were costuming and bodypainting a dancing troupe into intergalactic xenomorphs. The tour-group were invited in by an artist setting up her make-up station, who’d arrived late after watching Henry’s moose-step-jazz-fusion-poetry improv concert, which she praised. This artist—not a puppet hired by him, but whose appreciation he was more than happy to capitalise on for The Provocation—enthusiastically showed them around, explaining they were testing designs for an upcoming space opera. (In this case, ‘space opera’, not to be confused with the 20th-century sci-fi genre, described operas about space, rapid improvements in robotics having renewed interest in cosmic exploration.)
Many of the dancers, expressions of youth’s physical prime, had undressed for their painting. While the other bookworms of the tour gawked at these specimens, Henry, despite what one might assume from his teenage age, was unaffected. In his rarefied gaze, the only curves visible were those outlining the fine form of the patrician beauty. Worldly temptations could not distract him.
For the same reason, really, he'd been blind last night to Rose using the Earthfriend training as a set-up for a grope session. Henry was just too darn pure of heart. ‘Beauty is only skin deep’, he genuinely believed that, the corporeal form, so fragile and temporary, being low in his priorities. ‘Beauty is only skin deep’ - a second, literal meaning to this adage had been drilled into him repeatedly over recent years as he’d stripped countless youths, as attractive and guiltless as these danc—
Wincing, he took one deep breath, refocused.
Henry, an ordinary teenager chasing an ordinary Aphrodite, shielded Little Liu’s gawking gaze and slipped in beside the patrician beauty, who’d been side-glancing at him past the temples of her sunglasses during the artist’s explanation.
“They’re dancers,” he whispered in clarification. “It’s a performance art based around challenging and aesthetic physical movements.”
Gift-Giving (Knowledge Variation): Give people valuables and make them indebted to you according to the social rule of reciprocity.
“I’m familiar with dancing…” the young woman answered in disbelief.
“Ay, it was a reasonable assumption if you were ignorant of popcorn.”
The young woman blinked vacantly. True…
“So you used to be a dancer?" Henry probed. "That explains your developed gross motor skills.”
A peculiar observation to make, but after he’d logged so many hours into Saana, there was a stark difference to him in the gait of people who did and didn’t underutilise their motor neurons.
“Ballet as a kid,” the young woman answered after a delay.
“Why the delay?” Henry poked figuratively.
“It’s been years,” she answered through gritted teeth. “Took a while to remember.”
“Why the gritted teeth?” he poked again.
“Annoyance.”
Henry chortled. “Hey, Candace, why’d you stop ballet?”
“I lost interest. That can happen, you know. People lose interest in things.”
“Seduced by the books. Me, too. I also moved onto literature.”
Shared Connection Play into Joint Class False Finisher (Dancing Redux).
“Then again,” Henry continued, “dancing might be fun with the right partner.”
“I’m not signing up for a dancing class.”
Into Indignation recovery into Tour Ditching Finisher (Dancing Variation).
Henry gave the beauty a look of indignation. “I wasn’t setting that up. Jeez. My inquiry was going to be whether you fancied ditching this snoozer of a campus tour to go salsa dancing.”
“No.”
Tour Ditching Finisher (Misc Variations).
“Skydiving?”
“No.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Hunting?”
“No.”
“Kayaking in the Kimberley’s?”
The young woman gave pause at the absurd logistics of that proposal. “…No.”
The artist who’d invited the tour-group to observe approached the pair.
“Hi, again!” Grinning at the charming guy, she tilted head to indicate her make-up a chair. “If you’d like, I can facepaint something for the cute little fella’s—"
“I can do that myself, thanks,” Henry interrupted. “Little Larry, 1), dog, 2) racoon?”
The toddler coolly held up two fingers.
“Raccoon, it is.” The uncle plopped the nephew down in the make-up chair and, obstructing line-of-sight to the toddler’s celebrity visage with his back, began his masterpiece.
The artist, shrugging, gave up and went to help a dancer fit their costume. The young woman, meanwhile, pretended not to be spying from afar.
A few minutes later, Little Liu ran excitedly back to the uncommunicative aunty and posed like a racoon.
Henry reappeared beside the beauty. “Candace, how do you rate the racoon? 5 out of 5? 6 out of 5?”
The young woman frowned. “That’s not a racoon.”
Little Liu, sensing foul play, sprinted to the nearest mirror.
In the reflection was a ghastly image of himself with a pair of round brown ears rising from his eyebrows and a white rodent snout.
The toddler’s mouth—the bottom half painted into two goofy, bucktoothed beaver incisors—fell open in the shock of betrayal.
“An aquatic racoon, Little Larry,” Henry. “海狸.”
He'd made the kid into a beaver, like his father's atrocious haircut. This was a cross-language joke, the Mandarin word for beaver containing the character for racoon.
Henry wasn't flexing for any romantic play here. In the longer ploy of The Provocation of The Injudicious Heart, he merely needed a premise to give the beauty a break after her succession of refusals.
Little Liu stormed back over to the lame uncle, shoving two palms up expectantly.
Henry deposited the sunglasses back in one hand, a bribe to maintain loyalty in the other. He explained the joke to the patrician beauty, adding the reference to the obnoxious haircut of the kid’s father.
The young woman looked suspiciously between his and the toddler’s matching, obnoxious hairstyles.
“Who cuts your hair?” Henry inquired. “It’s even.”
Another minor Compliment Play.
“…a hairdresser.”
“Radical. Me, too.”
Another minor Shared Connection Play: build common ground to associate yourself with the target’s memories and thereby hijack the positive feelings attached to said memories.
Henry, pausing The Provocation again, broke away to join the other literature students as a space opera track started to blast through overhead speakers and a section of dancers began to practice. Their nimble spins, flexible contortions, and agile laser-gun dodges mesmerised the spectators, who, with the addition of the earlier concert, felt their creative drives begin to resurge, the art inside burning anew.
He teleported back beside the beauty. “Psst, Candace, want to ditch now?”
Tour Ditching Finisher (Revival): This was a play worth persisting in. By convincing the beauty to participate in a slightly naughty act, he could invoke the pleasure of endorphins, which could then be hijacked to himself through association.
“No.”
“They’re distracted; escape will be easy.”
“No.”
“Come on. What have you got to lose?”
The young woman, losing her temper, pointed at the dancers. "The sight of those hot guys.”
Henry noted mentally that the beauty was heterosexual – nice, he’d screwed that part up twice today. “Hey, Candace, top three contemporary authors, list ‘em!”
“Yeah, I’m just not going to do that."
“My favourites first? The Sicilian satirical historian Herodotus Livius, a local Maori fabulist by the name of Henare Haepapa, and an anonymous scribe of an epic I stumbled across online called The Invincible Cripple Saga. Despite the low-brow videogame subject matter of the latter, the writer exhibited a divine feel for logos, ethos, pathos, and plot pacing.”
The young woman stared at him blankly, hiding her contempt and second-hand embarrassment behind the glasses.
Henry maintained a straight face, showing no hint that he’d listed three of his own pseudonyms.
The Self-Clout Revelation: If this beauty recognised one, he could claim ownership and steal the clout, becoming his own hype-man.
The young woman stared at him blankly.
“Oh?” Henry faked a tone of surprise, as if his pseudonyms were in the same pool of common knowledge as popcorn. “Never heard of them? That's cringe.”
And if the beauty didn’t recognise them, he might still gain the consolation prize of tricking her into reading him. A celebrity endorsement could do wonders expanding his tiny fanbase. This was a tactic from the duelling school of One-Stone-Multiple-Birds.
The young woman stared at him blankly.
“You’re missing out,” said Henry. “Ever published?"
“Nope.”
“Why not? New climb jitters? Scared of the critics, Candace?”
“Maybe I’m a perfectionist. Maybe I don’t rush things.” The young woman punctuated the last sentence with a sudden wince.
Henry nodded, both at mutual commiseration with the struggles of perfectionism and him having finally baited the beauty into confirming her interest in writing.
A budding authoress…that might be enough info to end this baby on the spot.
This next epic move was called The Silver Wolf Finisher.
“Well, Candace,” he began the set-up monologue in the mood of paternalistic reflection, an industry senior advising a junior, “most will tell you that you should ease up on yourself, that you should take your time, that you shouldn’t set unhealthy standards that can’t be met. That’s loser advice. Ignore it. The sole remedy for perfectionism is more perfectionism. The same cruelty with which you demolish and rebuild a sentence ad infinitum, take that mindset and apply it perfectionism itself. Amplify what is beautiful in it: the tirelessness, the focus, the love for the mountain. Excise what is ugly: the concerns for worthless judgements, the terror of the start and the end, the care for the small at the neglect of the large. The last...isn't the last the perfectionist’s greatest flaw? By over-fixating on the sentence before us, we miss the rest of the book around it; by over-fixating on the book around it, we miss the books afterwards. Candace, our entire life is one prolonged work of art, and what we owe perfectionism to is everything inside of it, everything that could be inside of it. Expanding perfectionism far enough, it becomes undeniable that to make the whole flourish fully we must, at times, choose to neglect its parts. Triumph is the youngest sibling of defeat. This sentence clinging to your hand for too long...you have to abandon it, wish it farewell, allow it to risk its existence on its own so that those other sentences not yet written can learn from where it gloriously succeeds and where it tragically does not.”
The young woman stared blankly. Arsehole…
Henry, changing to a cheerier tone, clicked his tongue. “But that’s all easier said than done, right? Haha.”
The young woman stared blankly. Disloyal arsehole…
“Unless…” He abruptly switched to a meditative pose. “Unless you have the assistance of somebody who’s already been through it, someone willing to temporarily adopt the clinging sentence.” He motioned through several artificial considerations. “I could…but…ooo...with my current packed schedule…editing assistance might be…ooo...and my usual day rate...ooo...it could be waved, I suppose…payment from the pursuit of higher ideals…charitable humanism yet again…”
The Silver Wolf Finisher: Here was the top finisher Henry’d prepared today, one based on a tactic whose efficacy had already been proven unlike the ridiculous ones he'd been winging. In his seventeen years on earth, he’d managed to dupe two ladies into falling for him – to his knowledge; he could be oblivious to many others (improbable). One of these was Rose The Assassin, seduced by his proficiency at violence, his crazed drive and psychotic tenacity that’d allowed him to devour monsters like her brother by becoming an even stronger monster. The second was Silver Wolf The Pleb, seduced by his proficiency at literature, by him being way better at writing than her as had been proven—although Silver would never confess it—during their mutual editing. The first was not legally demonstratable in the real world and required a niche psychology to admire. But the second…this patrician beauty was also a confirmed writer, couldn’t he therefore borrow the arrow that’d pierced the wolf’s heart and reuse it to slay another?
The young woman tried her best to continue staring at him blankly, but her foot kept urging her to kick this pretentious, cocky, rude, slow, dumb, disloyal arsehole cheater in the shin. Unable to stand any more of him, she diverted the blood flowing to her lower limbs into spinning around and walking off to the opposite side of the room.
Arsehole!
“It wasn’t a set-up for anything rude,” Henry clarified as she marched off. “I was offering unpaid editing assistance.”
“No. Thanks."
Arsehole! Arsehole!
Henry didn’t detect any appreciation in the ‘thanks’. Realising that The Silver Wolf Finisher had failed to finish her off (for now), he let the patrician beauty escape to cool off and conceded to a request by Little Liu to join those spectating the dancers. Bored, he had a conversation with a professor from Nigeria about the traces of the dude’s country’s cinema in its literary scene, which Henry’d studied for Infinite Leaves' segment dedicated to Africa’s post-revolution authors.
One might deem that last rejection from the beauty and the others before abject failures. In fact, they were all progressing roughly in line with Henry’s plans using Twenty Tool’s Provocation of The Injudicious Heart.
To understand the technique, one should first know a bit about Twenty Tools.
Twenty Tools, old Tael Heavy-Fingers’ style, was relatively unique in being both a cerebral martial art and a melee one. Its method for overcoming the inherent conflicts between the two was through the exploitation of ‘Inducible Fatal Habits’. These were habitual actions performed by an opponent in reaction to specific stimuli, events, and situations. More specifically, they were those habits picked up from training against certain weapon types, every functional martial art having a basic set of strategies for the different troops one might encounter - e.g. longsword-styles, as a rule, rushed spears but kept distance against daggers. A Twenty Tools practitioner, having mastered many weapons, having dissected with this experience the opponent’s learned patterns, used one weapon to trigger an IFH while simultaneously juggling to another weapon exploiting the IFH’s openings. It was a kind of feint-counter-counter, uniquely possible in Saana unlike real-life fighting because weapons could be juggled much more rapidly by materialisation and dematerialisation from the Spatial Bracelet. Framed in terms of the Rule of Parity, one generated a spatio-temporal disparity window by forcing the opponent, through their conditioned instincts, to momentarily misallocate their finite resources. Rather than prediction, a Twenty Tools practitioner used through IFHs a type of calculated manipulation which, on a superficial glance, resembled prediction.
That'd been Heavy-Fingers' fix for the impaired reaction speed that'd earned him his epithet. Through his research into IFHs, he'd tried to swing the balance of melee away from reactive actions to more planned, proactive actions.
Henry, the similarly-crippled student, had used several IFH exploitations in his duel against Artemis/Loki/Ex-Spy-Bro/Loki. Loki had opened in the assassin style of Challarudi Hearth Dagger. Henry, in Mutambi Death-Grappling, utilised one of Challarudi Dagger’s main counters to neck-clinches—ducking abruptly—to knee Loki in the face and initiate a Nine-Fists combo. He then, after Loki switched to Water Tiger Style to disengage from the Nine-Fists combo, triggered two of that style’s disengagement IFHs based around footing availability in order to move the spy into the panther-mauling. To achieve all this, Henry’d spent the lead-up to their duel reviewing Loki’s documented arts and clips of the spy’s personas fighting to identify which IFHs he’d picked up.
The primary challenge of Twenty Tools, beyond learning to handle a ton of weapons, was the practical triggering of IFHs. To fully comprehend and overcome the difficulties involved, one would need to draw from a myriad of techniques spread across dozens of martial arts - seven dozen, perhaps. A small aspect, though, which held relevance to Henry’s present assault on love, was that IFHs were easier to induce when the opponent felt flustered and rushed. When the battle in the mind had become too rapid for conscious thought to process, one was forced to act from quicker instincts – instinct being the unconscious composite of experience, and experience, for a martial artist, being the fatal habits of training.
Provocation of The Injudicious Heart was Twenty Tool’s routine for manipulating the opponent into that susceptible state. In the fight’s opening phase, the practitioner would gradually close in on the enemy from afar, transitioning from longer-ranged weapons to increasingly shorter-ranged ones, all while delivering probing attacks. On one level, the opponent would read this as the practitioner being cautious, measuring their ability, checking for potential weaknesses, trying for a lucky hit – and that was all correct. At another level, though, at that of The Provocation, the opponent was being nudged into the ideal impulsive state, their locus of action moved from their mind to their body. As they slipped into a pattern of responding faster and faster and faster to one’s assault, which, as the distance shortened, came faster and faster and the IFH was triggered. Dead. Depending on the length of The Provocation, the routine could consist of many sub-phases of accelerations and decelerations, advancing and retreating.
Henry was doing this to the beauty right now. Adapting the technique, he'd been carefully nudging her away from the cerebral starting point where her psychological guard was lifted, to the more unconscious heart, from which her refusals flowed out spontaneously and naturally.
He'd made several modifications since seduction wasn’t 100% translatable in its structure or aims to a fight to the death. Instead of the physical proximity of his attacks, he was alternating the romantic proximity of his utterances and actions. At one end of the romantic-proximity spectrum, he'd formulated sat dry commentary on the scenery; at the other—not yet reached—was lovemaking. Instead of the pace and intensity of the opponent’s defences, he was calibrating the expected exertion of the beauty's rejections, which ranged from non-verbal rejections, to one-word rejections, to multi-word, to complete-sentence, to multi-sentence rejections. And most crucially, as Henry'd surmised, the pacing was not the same.
Could duelling be an accurate analogue for love? Henry’s constant failures today in incorporating plays and finishers would suggest no. However, The Provocation routine actually seemed to be achieving its desired effect; the further he'd pushed, the more natural, less congested his interactions with the beauty had felt. Thus far, he’d successfully baited her from beyond her wall of total silence, raising her average refusal length from non-verbal rejections to multi-word rejections. If this strategy continued to succeed, she would soon be rejecting him in multiple sentences on average. Then, with her actively engaging with him, he could begin implementing the romantic analogues of Twenty Tool’s counters to the Inducible Fatal Habits – romantic actions that weren’t rejected.
The specific mechanisms of that last part, he hadn't figured out yet. But once he did, the love-attacks that’d previously ricocheted off the beauty’s shield would be inflicting direct damage, lowering her romantic health-bar which, upon reaching zero, would expose her for the fatal coup d'amour.
For now, the task was to soldier on with the indelicate process of escalation.
Henry, resuming his pestering of the beauty, riled her up to a complete-sentence refusal average in the next exchange.
Nice.
Bring out the haters who’d claimed this guy’s social IQ was trash. Let them witness how, in a single day, he was cracking the code of love, whose dynamics and neurophysiology were, perhaps, not so distinct from duelling.
Tour V – Moderato
The tour-group reluctantly moved on from the dancers’ studio and the student centre. Henry, feeling confident as he baited the beauty further and further beyond her defences, upped the tempo again.
Sending out the call to arms, he summoned the mightiest of the puppets available to him in this Australian city.