InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Burger, fries, and a Coke."

Riley Harlow (punchout) wrote in paxletalelogs,
@ 2010-08-03 16:18:00

Entry tags:

ares, morrigan

Who: Samuel and Riley
What: A good old-fashioned spar
Where: A local gym
When: Early afternoon
Warnings: Snark, egos clashing, and discussion of fighting techniques.

To Riley, laziness was a strange thing. When she was being lazy, she would skip out on one workout with another. So instead of performing a bench press, she would curl. Or instead of push-ups, she would do sit-ups. And today, she decided that she was far too exhausted to walk all the way to her preferred gym; so instead, she walked to another gym that was just two blocks closer. It didn't occur to her that this was a ridiculous compromise until she entered the unfamiliar territory, realizing that all gyms were not created equal.

The manager of the gym recognized her, allowing her passage inside. But that didn't change the fact that everything was different. The weights were somewhere else, the punching bags were hard to find, and all the machines were wrong. She could have just left and sucked up the extra two blocks to her home base, but that would mean admitting defeat. And Riley did not admit defeat.

If she were thinking about this clearly, she might have found an amusing "we're not in Kansas anymore" message in all of this given that her fire engine red hair was arranged in two French-braided pigtails. And really, she did feel a bit like Dorothy in Oz. The other patrons looked at her with a mixture of annoyance and amusement as she stumbled around, awkwardly craning her neck to try and read labels and find things. Finally, she had found the wall of dumbbells and was looking at them, squinting to try and read the numbers. They were faded, which automatically made them annoying. Resting her hands on her hips, she leaned forward to squint at them. This was going to be a long work-out.

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miaiphonos
2010-08-03 04:58 pm UTC (link)

She was a hard person to miss, red-haired and well built - and female, of all things, a rarity in this particular sweatbox. Samuel noticed her at once, having taken a brief break in his own grueling routine to hunt down water and something remotely resembling an air-conditioned breeze. He had found a minuscule patch of cool air and planted himself firmly beneath it, and in the process of sizing up his fellow gym rats his eyes had alighted upon her. She seemed vaguely familiar, although he could not begin to guess where he might have seen her before. To him it was an impossibly annoying lapse in memory, and a useless bit of trivia that would nag at his mind until the matter was settled. There was nothing for it but to cross the humid space and go to her, striking up some sort of conversation that would, he hoped, jog his memory. What came out when he reached her, though, was certainly no proper introduction by anyone else's standards.

"You new to this gym in particular, or just all of them in general?" Samuel asked. "I'm Samuel, and you look lost." He leaned down to where the dumbbells lay neatly arranged, pointing at them in ascending order. "Fifteen pounds, twenty, thirty, forty, and on up." Looking back to her, he grinned brightly, an impish gleam lighting his eyes. "Don't hurt yourself, kiddo."

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punchout
2010-08-03 05:10 pm UTC (link)

The question caused her to turn, eyes wide. "What?" she asked, momentarily taken aback. It took her a moment to realize what he was saying, and she had to resist the urge to roll her eyes. She did not like being condescended to, but she wasn't about to lose her cool. Though she made a living beating people up, Riley prided herself on being fairly non-confrontational. It was largely due to the fact that she was well aware of her expertise - if she lost her temper left and right, she could very easily do something incredibly stupid.

"Yeah, I've never been to this one before," she said breezily as he introduced himself. Rather than comment on his "lost" remark, she just looked to the dumbbells as he gestured to them, nodding along. "Okay," she said with a light laugh. "Thanks, I appreciate it." However, at his last remark, she froze.

A very faint twitch was visible in her right eyebrow as she took a deep breath, looking to him with an expression that could easily have been classified as "wtf." "I promise you I'm not going to hurt myself," she said as evenly as she could. And just for that, she picked up two sixty-pound weights with a soft grunt, hefting them competently in both palms. With a bright smile, she tilted her head towards him. "But thanks for your concern."