Get Your Gun, attn: Kei

[Molly Grimm]

Molly's second encounter with the nurse was in a more comfortable and familiar environment than that of a medical ward. Ever since her augmentative procedures, she ventured into the harsh glare of hospitals only when absolutely necessary or when dictated. It wasn't that the invasive ministrations had traumatised her, quite the contrary. The genehancements bestowed upon her had been for her own betterment, but the procedures had been taxing and Molly was reluctant to relive the experience or recount to medical personnel what exactly had been done to her.

So when the nurse suggested that they meet again, Molly was surprised at the timid things boldness. It was only when Kei clarified her suggestion and the firing range was mentioned did Molly loose a bit of interest and understand what Kei wanted. She was taking the major up on her offer of guidance. Molly was willing to give the nurse a few pointers, she wouldn't have proposed so if the offer wasn't genuine.

Besides, the firing range wasn't terrible and it would give an opportunity for Molly to show Kei the only thing in her life she was good at. Of course, they would only be firing at targets today and targets rarely fire back. There was no risk and that was one thing that Molly lamented over. There was something more gratifying and thrilling about killing something other than paper targets and droids. However, given the nature of her partner for this exercise, live targets were sadly out of the question. It did bring a sickening smile to her lips to imagine the outrage and disgust on Kei's face at such a prospect.

Molly was a few minutes late and when she found Kei made no apology for her tardiness. It was as if she arrived at the exact moment of her choosing and it was the galaxy that either early or late. She was wearing much the same thing she had wore for their first meeting, layered tank tops, loose fitting cargo trousers, standard issue combat boots, and a light leather jacket. Her hair was bound into a scalp-locking ponytail that brushed the shoulders of her jacket. With hands pushed into the pockets of the leather jacket, Molly approached the timid nurse with a small and confident smile.
"So, you ready?" She asked with a slight raising of her eyebrows.

[Kei Dioddai]

There had always been something about mechanics, electronics and machinery that fascinated Kei. There was just something so ingenious, so appealing about a combination of capacitors, circuits and manual conductors. They always did the same thing, and reacted predictably to changes made on their design or within the environment they performed in. With her natural knack for technology, the young medic had often wondered why she had not invested more time into learn the intricacies behind modern technology. The answer was obvious when more than a moment's thought was spent deliberating it. While machinery and electronics were predictable and balanced, Kei had settled upon medicine because machines did not feel pain. When one considered her unintentional abilities regarding others and their 'feelings' such a decision might have seemed questionable, and her resolve to willingly expose herself to the pain of others likewise bizarre, but it made sense to Kei and that was what mattered.

As Kei rolled the sleek metal across the lengths of her slender fingers, feeling the smooth surface and knowing that the components within were well serviced, her mind started to wander. The weapon was a model 34 WESTAR Blaster Pistol, a weapon designed with prolonged periods of close quarters combat in mind. It's design was simplistic and lightweight, with and kind of heat sinking performed by the sturdy alloys within its barrel, rather than some weighty device near the grip. It was one of the first weapons which Kei had actually taken apart and then successfully reassembled, with the second being RLW style wrist mounted laser, and the young medic had admired its simple and straightforward design ever since.

At the moment of Molly's arrival, Kei was lightly tweaking the sight upon the weapons back, to try and compensate for a fault she knew to be inherent to the WESTAR's design. That being that the sleek pistol's shots were best at close ranger, and did less and less damage the further they flew. The obvious answer was to aim for more vulnerable regions on her intended target, seeing as the shots would almost exponentially lose their striking strength after a certain distance, but the difficulty was with the innocuous variations in aiming. The WESTAR had never been designed to be fired at range, and was extremely unreliable when it came to precision targets. Kei had always wanted to teach herself to augment the pistol to make up for such a short coming, but she had never had the time to do the research and testing required.

The quiet woman raised her eyes slowly from the sleek gun, and she offered Molly a smile in greeting, and tilted her head very slowly. She had not noticed the delay in her compatriot's arrival, mostly because her mind had been somewhere else entirely while she waited. "I am..." She replied simply as she moved the blaster pistol into its holster, pushed herself away from the wall she'd been leaning upon with a shrug of her shoulders and stepped closer to the athletic soldier. She was dressed in the standard uniform which she wore on most of her missions, that being a khaki pair of trousers which were just a little bit too big for her and had to be secured by a thick leather belt, a pair of dark brown combat boots and a forfitting shirt of gray synthetic fabric. She'd neglected her uniform's jacket due to the fact that they were unlikely to leave the base together. "How are you?" she asked before Molly could say anything else, in a tone which was so genuine that it almost added color to her piercing emerald eyes. It wasn't the way a friend passingly asked, or the way a doctor surgically asked, but rather a tonal marriage between the two. In such, Kei wanted to know how Molly was, without making any kind of implications by doing so.

[Molly Grimm]

"How are you?"

There was a playful glimmer to the younger's eyes that Molly paused on for a moment. It brought a smile to the normally dourer expression the major wore.
"I'm fine." Molly responded without much thought seeing the question as a simple enquiry. It was a truthful answer, however. The last few days had been utterly uneventful for the major, occupied mostly with the duties the Alliance put upon her.
"You?" She was reminded to ask, falling back on whatever manners had been bestowed upon the woman in her pained existence.

Delicate wasn't in her vocabulary and such a statement was represented in the weaponry she wielded. Little in her arsenal compared to the sleek chrome of a WESTAR 34. She was intimately familiar with the blaster pistol though and could appreciate the ergonomic curves and impressive design. Molly's pistol of choice was a far more utilitarian model of dull gun-metal, informally known as a Commando pistol, which held firm in a shoulder rig.

As Kei moved closer to her, Molly was reminded of their brief and intimate encounter in the nurse's sterile quarters. A grin flashed across her lips and the thoughts pushed away. There would be time for that later. With her mind focused firmly on the task that had drawn them together on this day, she motioned Kei further into the brightly lit structure with a nod of her head, swishing the tightly cropped pony tail.

They moved through the lobby of poured concrete, whitewashed and stark with bright lighting and sparse, utterly military, decor. A number of medals and plaques for marksmanship and sharpshooting competitions lined one wall. The wall was bisected by a chrome Alliance eagle that sparkled not unlike Kei's choice of pistol. She was reminded bleakly of another reason why such an elegant and eye-catching weapon was shied away from. Molly's treatment of such a weapon would have been to the disgust of every WESTAR aficionado in the galactic sector. The WESTAR would reflect again after Molly had her way with it.

Through a set of double doors the pair moved into a darker lit section of the facility. Behind reinforced glass, Molly glanced out onto the enclosed firing range and tracked the screeching bolts of devastating energy tearing up targets against the far wall. Molly paced the room slowly, her eyes fixed on the few other sentients in the walled stalls that opened onto the relative safety of the range. Removing her leather jacket, she threw it over a low seated bench and turned to Kei with a hand on her hip.
"So I think we're going to skip the basics'n'shit because I'm going to assume you at least know where to point that thing." Molly announced playfully, dropping her eyes to the WESTAR 34 holstered at her hip.

[Kei Dioddai]

Kei offered Molly a light acknowledgment as the major moved into the gun range and eagerly followed her lead like an anxious student would.
"I'm well rested..." the minute nurse offered softly as she followed closely, just to the taller soldier's side and just under a foot behind her. Had she really tried, she might have been able to perfectly match Molly's direction and speed, but Kei doubted that such acute mimicry would not exactly be appreciated, so instead she settled to stay in the major's shadow.

She was feeling a strange feeling of excitement in what they were about to do. Though she had taken the steps to ensure she would be able to defend herself in the field, medics did not receive quite as much training focused upon marksmanship as soldiers. She was expected to be more familiar with the body of those who might get injured around her than the use of weaponry. Such a distinction in training made sense, but it also meant that Kei had never actually fired anything much bigger than her obsessively polishes WESTAR. Larger and more complex weaponry had always fascinated her however, especially the heavy repeaters mandalorians seemed inclined towards or the hefty blaster rifles wielded by some well trained alliance scouts, but it such intrigue was born from the mechanical workings of the weapon itself, instead of its stopping power. Still Kei thought that maybe she saw this as the first step towards getting more acquainted with something a bit heavier and effective in ranged combat. As a medic, it would be useful to be armed with something that could keep the enemy at bay and out of firing range. On the opposite hand, Kei saw training with Molly as a better and, more importantly, legitimate way to get to know her. She was not about to make the same mistake she'd made in the mess hall nearly a week before, and wanted to have a apparent reason for knowing things about Molly. Maybe that made it a date of sorts but Kei was not about to label it as such seeing as she hardly fit the conventional definitions of social terms, not even at the best of times. Maybe if she paid attention, she could determine whether Molly thought of their meeting at the range in the same way.

"So I think we're going to skip the basics'n'shit because I'm going to assume you at least know where to point that thing."

The straightforwardness of Molly's words made Kei smile, despite the coarseness of her language. The nurse's emerald eyes slowly followed after the soldiers and fell upon the weapon holstered upon her hip. With one hand, she pulled it delicately but quickly free and, after ensuring that it would not unexpectedly fire while she casually held it, indicated the tip with a finger upon her free hand.
"Point this end at your enemy." Kei said simply, in a paraphrase of the first line of instruction she'd heard revolving around a live weapon, as her gaze drifted back up to Molly's face, "And squeeze her to fire." The weapon itself seemed to fit rather comfortably in Kei's hand and was even fitted with a slightly smaller than average grip to accommodate her unusually small and slender fingers. The WESTAR was one of those weapons which was definitely developed with fingers in mind and the young medic made sure to keep her fingers free of the firing mechanism, despite its disarmed state at the time.

It was almost as though she'd been yelled at more than once for unsafe handling of a firearm, as she was equally astute with ensuring that the business end did not point at anything she didn't want to maim or kill. That was how it looked but the truth was that Kei had always been, some would say obsessively, careful with her weapons. Even her wrist laser remained uncharged until it became absolutely necessary. Such caution simply came naturally to Kei, who held her WESTAR erect while she displayed it to Molly, so that any stray shot, however unlikely, would strike the permacrete above their heads and not one of them.

"I don't know if soldiers are taught any special techniques when it comes to using something like this..." Kei said softly as she cautiously dropped her weapon and, in one smooth and gentle movement, returned it to the holster upon her hip and looked towards one of the firing stalls, opposite Molly's discarded jacket.
"It's tricky to aim after about fifteen meters." she added thoughtfully with a few tentative steps towards the stall, almost as though she were silently asking if they should use that one.

[Molly Grimm]

"Point this end at your enemy, and squeeze her to fire."

"Cute," Molly said with a little smirk as she watched Kei handle the elegant blaster pistol. The way that Kei held the weapon was somehow repugnant to Molly. Her grip on the weapon was indecisive and weak, almost as if she was afraid of it. While there was little doubt in Molly's mind that the nurse had fired the pistol on the range, she found it hard to believe the barrel had ever been trained on anything breathing, let alone a sentient being capable of firing back. Hitting a target was one thing, hitting a target with a face and family was something quite different. Luckily, Molly had overcome such hurdles at a relatively young age.

As in such things between them, Kei and Molly differed greatly when it came to firearms and their handling. Of course she observed proper etiquette when cleaning or maintaining her small and personal collection, but in normal practice they were always loaded with her finger on the trigger. She didn't know any other way and such precautions had saved her life on more than one occasion. Now it just seemed stupid not to have a loaded weapon on her person at all times.

"I don't know if soldiers are taught any special techniques when it comes to using something like this..."

Shrugging casually, Molly declined to answer a question so obvious; at least to her it was. Molly had received a great deal of training, more so than many of her colleagues thanks to the countless hours of immersive virtualisation and cortical reinforcement she underwent with the Reapers. There wasn't any doubt in the woman's mind where she stood and just how good she was. Many would have called that arrogant. And they would have been right.

Her neck twitched as forced memories recalled specifics about the WESTAR that few could confidently recall. She could feel the seamless machined grip in her hand and her index finger traced the curve of the trigger as the sense memory was brought back to the surface. Shrugging a little, Molly took a step towards the range.
"Yeah, I could show you a thing or two, chickadee."

"It's tricky to aim after about fifteen meters."

Making a face, Molly thought that was a little on the short end and instantly wondered what Kei was screwing up. She had to constantly remind herself that Kei wasn't a soldier and things that came naturally to her, would be so intuitive to the nurse. This was going to be a test of both Molly's patience and Kei's ability to learn on her feet.
"Go on then, show me what you can do," said Molly, waving Kei into the stall with a short gesture.

[Kei Dioddai]

"I have to admit..." Kei said quietly as she approached the range under Molly's instruction, lifting and readying her blaster at the same time, "I was a bit apprehensive about asking you to shoot with me." the diminutive nurse lined up her shoulders, raised the WESTAR which lay cradled in both of her small hands and narrowed her left eye. Squaring off in such a fashion was definitely unrealistic as far as real combat practice went but the range was hardly built or intended from cover and fire techniques. The small woman drew a slow, deep breath and, still taking her time in taking the shot, lined up her sights with a target just over twenty meters down range. It became clear why Kei preferred a weapon as compact as her WESTAR when the wrathful red bolt ripped from the finely maintained tip of the almost ornate weapon.

Kei kept herself fit and healthy, but that did not equate to physical strength, which was demonstrated with the rather dramatic fashion with which her arms seemed to collapse behind the sudden release of chemical energy that produced the laser bolt that fired from her blaster. Though she was methodical with taking aim, it was obvious that the trajectory suffered more than just a little bit with her inability to hold the blaster steady when she fired. As Kei fired, her arms bent slightly back towards her body as though they were shock absorbers and the tip of her blaster pistol tilted quickly back, sending her shot up and to the left of where she'd been aiming. With such a clearly deficient technique, it was a wonder that Kei had hit the target at all.

"What I mean is..." and then, as she leveled out her shoulders again and took aim once more, the diminutive nurse with a blaster pistol in her hands continued her previous thought as though it had never fully left her mind. "With your training and your record," Yet another reference to Molly's recorded combat abilities, "Watching me even handle a weapon must be exasperating." Kei finished her words off with another deep breath to steady her shot as she fired again and once again fared poorly due to her flawed method of dealing with the WESTAR's recoil.
"Some things aren't so easily self-taught..." Kei sighed quietly in reference to yet another poor shot at just over twenty meters. Granted her weapon was designed for close range but such a shot was poor by any military standards. "At least I hit the target this time..." she added with a hint of disappointment as she readied to take yet another shot, all without turning to look at her company. In the time they had known one another, this was likely the longest time that Kei had kept her eyes off of Molly for.

[Molly Grimm]

"I have to admit... I was a bit apprehensive about asking you to shoot with me."

Molly made a face as Kei spoke, her lips curling in distain at the young nurse's words. Although she was more than curious to their meaning, the simplicity of them and the implied fear was more than a little off putting. Her grip on the pistol in her hand tightened ever so slightly as she began to wonder what exactly Kei was apprehensive about. They were in public, hardly an ideal place to kill someone. Molly could have understood her feelings a little more if they had managed to find some deserted strip of land away from civilisation to shoot on.

Meanwhile, Molly observed Kei's posture and how she held the pistol. There weren't any devastating flaws in her stance. Whatever drill sergeant instructed her to shoot had done their job well enough. It was only as the nurse gingerly squeezed the trigger and fired the weapon that the problem became visible. The kickback, even from a blaster pistol, was more than enough to buckle her arms. Molly groaned a little.

"What I mean is... with your training and your record, watching me even handle a weapon must be exasperating."

She was pleased that the nurse had decided to clarify her position before Molly had a chance to respond. Molly felt a little foolish after misreading the situation but decided to blame it on Kei and her choice of words. It was clear that Kei had a much firmer grasp over linguistics than Molly did and possessed a vocabulary that far outweighed that of her hot-tempered partner. That was something the genehanced soldier had little time or patience for. She liked plain speak and valued its curtness.
"Yeah, you could say that,"Molly said and allowed her features to fall into a natural grimace.

It was only after the nurse spoke that Molly began to wonder how much she knew of her training or record. She wouldn't have expected such details to be found in a medical database and her paranoia spiked. She knew Kei was skilled in intuitive leaps of thought that were uncannily accurate. That still disturbed the woman and lurked in the back of her mind and she was still a little wary of what she told Kei. Slowly she calmed, playing through whatever analytical logic she possessed. Molly was special ops and advanced training and matching record could be extrapolated from that.

"Some things aren't so easily self-taught... at least I hit the target this time..."

Her eyebrows raised at the enthusiastically optimistic tone to Kei's voice in spite of missing. Just hitting the target wasn't good enough in her eyes and if she would have been wholly embarrassed if she had made such an abysmal shot. Playing though one or two scenarios based off the few shots the nurse had made in her head, Molly nodded and easily accepted that Kei was as good as dead.
"Congrats, you're dead," Molly said in a surprisingly upbeat tone. Wedging her blaster pistol into the back of her khaki pants, she approached Kei without a second thought. "Stop buckling your frelling arms."

Moving beside Kei, she adjusted her stance a little, locking her dominant arm rigid and shifting the supporting arm a little on the grip.
"There. Tense. Okay," said Molly quickly and quietly as she made one or two final adjustments and stepped back.

[Kei Dioddai]

Kei almost wished she could ignore some of the negativity coming from Molly, as the slow boiling sensation permeating the air surrounding the soldier was uncomfortable. It wasn't even so much the fact that the older woman was being so judgmental either, seeing as the empathic nurse was extremely familiar with dealing with unspoken criticism, but more the concept that rested behind being so sternly analyzed. She had asked for Molly's help after all, and been entirely upfront with how much she was lacking when it came to fire arms. Considering she had just beneath what most soldiers would consider basic training, had self taught herself to maintain and protect her weapon and learned all the safety procedures for weapon use on her own accord, maybe Kei had thought she might be able to impress Molly. Instead, she could feel the critical burn of the soldier's experience gaze staring through her the way a doctor would stare at a duracrete mixer trying to suture a gash. Disappointment and Disheartened were two words to easily describe what Kei was feeling as she lined up and tried to take her fourth shot, though she made sure to keep wearing her happy smile.

That smile couldn't weather Molly's contempt for her lack of training when said contempt came in audio form. The word 'Dead' especially stung the young nurse, who's expression almost immediately fell to a more concerned and maybe even a little hurt look. What exactly was it that she had been expecting from a nurse who was barely taller than most girls in their early teens? It wasn't like shooting had ever been a big part of her combat strategy, especially not as a field medic. Her job was not shooting, but to maintain those who were shooting and stay out of their way while they did it. Kei's posture slackened noticeably as Molly got closer while the younger of the two envisioned her companion wresting her WESTAR from her hands and discarding it like a child's irresponsibly used toy. The joviality Kei had displayed before similarly died right then, the final nail in its coffin coming with Molly's plain and coarse analysis of what her medically inclined peer was doing wrong.

Kei had been in the process of dropping her weapon, to quietly step back and let Molly shoot, as she did not immediately realize the soldier's intent was correction and not exemplification. It was for that reason that the smaller woman became rigid as soon as she realized the soldier was reaching towards her. After a moment however, Kei relinquished to Molly's instruction and adopted her slightly altered pose. In comparison to the text book posture she'd held before, Kei honestly couldn't see the implied difference such minor changes could have, but then she wasn't the one who shot at others for a living.

Kei swallowed hard as Molly stepped back, before her attention fell away from the soldier and was instead directed towards the alterations in posture and stance that had been implemented. She still couldn't pick out the immediate benefits of such a change but accepted them from their more experienced source and turned her attention towards aiming once again. She was once again quite meticulous in her aim and breathed out slowly before she fired. This time she did what she could to resist 'buckling her frelling arms', which admittedly wasn't all that much. Knowing the problem and correcting the habit which formed it were two different things, and for Kei it was a matter of over riding her own thought process to force her arms to remain straight. The key reason being that her first time ever firing a blaster had resulted in a surprisingly severe strain in her shoulder because she hadn't been quite loose enough. The last thing Kei wanted to do with Molly right beside her was hurt herself again during target practice, so there was a rather distinct dilemma in her mind.

Finally after what seemed like an eternity of second guessing, which lasted just about two seconds in reality, Kei squeezed the trigger and, unsurprisingly, missed her mark yet again. She had resisted buckling her arms, but her aim was thrown off still by the uncomfortable tilt her wrists acquired directly after the weapon discharged. Kei's eyes narrowed and her aim steadied as she tried a second time, with similar results. Everything about keeping her aim straight as she fired seemed to be a problem, but she persisted with two more attempts, with the third actually falling the least shy of her mark, and actually producing a direct hit upon the target she was aiming for.
"I think..." she said quietly, almost as though she were addressing herself and not Molly, "That I might need a weapon with less kick..." a glance in the soldier's direction directly after her commentary made it clear that it was indeed she whom Kei had aimed her statement at and not herself. It wasn't entirely her fault at least, seeing as the WESTAR was hardly designed for long range.

[Molly Grimm]

There wasn't anything inherently wrong with Kei's stance or positioning when she fired. If anything, it was textbook. However, that was part of the problem that Molly subconsciously considered. It was mostly inexperience that made the young nurse fall back on basic training and what she had read to supplement her meagre knowledge. She had yet to develop her own style and discover what worked best for her. Besides, there were countless differences between shooting on a range and in real combat and as Kei would no doubt discover one day, all the training in the universe couldn't prepare her for live fire.

Molly had yet to accredit her gruff and straightforward attitude to the noticeably downturn emotions the nurse was displaying. Molly put those traits down to Kei's inexperience and frustration at such a dismal performance. She had wanted guidance in her shooting and what was what Molly was providing. She had yet to consider the manner in which she was providing those lessons or the effect her words would have on someone not accustomed to wholesale murder.

"I think... That I might need a weapon with less kick..."

She raised her eyebrows and gave a little shrug.
"Yeah, probably a good idea, at least for now; until you are more comfortable. And maybe the WESTAR is a little too close and personal for your tastes." She was making an assumption at that point; that Kei wouldn't want to get up close and personal and actually feel the kill. Killing didn't come naturally to many people and most found it easier to do their killing from a distance when the situation called for it. But for all she knew, Kei had a sadistic streak that she kept well hidden from the rest of the galaxy.

[Kei Dioddai]

Kei, despite the initiative she'd taken as far as learning to defend herself, knew unsurprisingly little about blasters. It wasn't her forte, and things like firepower, accuracy and kick-back hadn't really been considered by the quiet nurse when she picked out her WESTAR. She had merely asked one or two soldiers what an effective, close quarters blaster was. When told it was a WESTAR, who was she to question it? How was she to know that those soldiers hadn't considered what difficulties the less physically inclined would have utilizing it.

"Yeah, probably a good idea, at least for now; until you are more comfortable. And maybe the WESTAR is a little too close and personal for your tastes."

Kei paused for a moment and considered what Molly had just said. Not the words she had chosen or the tone she used, but rather what she had meant by it. The young nurse cautiously lowered her weapon and looked at her companion questioningly, having been wise enough to not miss the implications in her words, though perhaps foolish enough to display that she had noticed at all.
"Do you know something better I could use? I have my wrist blaster..." Kei offered, despite her pronounced desire to investigate what Molly had said, and the rather self conscious desire to correct any assumptions she had made. But the young nurse tried to ignore it and put aside the things she could sense out of Molly that the soldier had made apparent she didn't want people peering int.