Immortal and Scary

Riffing off the cane-cutter, sorta. Two subjects, connected, and a small lesson in how my writer's mind works. I'm gonna throw out several things here, and then then try to assemble them into an idea ...

You've probably heard the alliterative Seven-P Rule: Proper planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance. Thus the notion that learning a skill and practicing it in an effective manner is apt to lead to mastery of that skill. The Ten-Thousand Hour hypothesis offers evidence that such is the case, and there are a host of corollaries that make such a notion a reasonable and common belief: Practice makes perfect; If at first you don't succeed, try, try again; Slow practice leads to smooth -- smooth leads to fast; Just do it ...

Years ago, after coming across a science article, I wrote a story called "Darts," about a psychologist who uses the idea that standing in front of a target and pretending to throw darts at it will improve your ability to throw darts almost as much as if you threw real darts. Which is true.

Even shadow-practice works, to a degree. (The old saw is that you fight like you train; but there are myriad ways to train, and these can be layered to give different skills. Visualizing a thing might not be enough to make it happen, and if it doesn't, you could be in trouble if you are too attached to the specifics; however, visualizing a thing can help make it happen -- everybody and his kid brother have done research to indicate that this is true. One of the bones of contention amongst MA guys is what and how to train. I have come to believe that training to do something -- anything -- is an effective method. Doesn't matter so much exactly what the move will be, but that push come to shove, the trained person does something rather than nothing ...)

About that time, I wrote another short piece called "An Eye for Detail," which I always thought of as "the coffee cup story." It was an exercise mostly in dialog -- it got picked up for a radio play in Germany, as I recall. The tale was told from the viewpoint of a private eye, who while following somebody, noticed something unusual about a diner in a restaurant: Someone eating lunch ...

The reveal takes a while, but the gist is that the detective is caught by how smoothly the woman he sees is eating. The question upon which I based the story was, if somebody was immortal and several hundred or a thousand years old, would there be a way to tell by looking? And my answer was, yes -- because even common moves, after being done several hundred thousand times, would eventually become so practiced and smooth that just watching somebody who wasn't trying to hide it would be like watching the best Olympic athlete perform her event. Using a fork, picking up and replacing a glass, everything she did would be smooth, practiced, precise. To a man used to watching people for a living, the difference would be instantly apparent.

Observe somebody who was born into a culture wherein chopsticks are primary eating tools, as opposed to somebody who learned how to use them recently. Watch them pick up a pair and work on a bowl of rice. You can tell who has done it twenty thousand times and who has done it twenty times, even if the tyro has the hang of it.

One of the reasons my guilty pleasure in watching the old TV series Highlander wasn't less guilty is that none of these guys were good enough with swords, given how much they had practiced. If ever there was a need for EFX in a fight, that was it. Guy has been practicing for four or five hundred years at anything ought to be able to do it slicker (and faster) than hot oil on glass. You'd need stuntmen who were sword experts and an overcranked camera pushing the speed up by thirty percent, and even in slomo, it ought to look impossible.

Put that aside for a minute and go to:

Scary: Three of the scariest things I have ever been close to: Taking a shortcut across a neighbor's yard one night when I was a teenager and seeing her come around the corner with a shotgun. Her dogs had been barking earlier and she was frightened. Her hands were shaking. The gun wasn't even pointed at me, and it took only a few seconds for her to realize I was a neighbor kid and not a threat, but --

A frightened woman with a shotgun. In such a situation, you don't want to make any sudden moves. Amateurs are unpredictable. A trained assassin in control probably won't shoot you unless he wants to; somebody scared and without training is apt to do anything.

Scary: Being approached by four CHP officers unsnapping their holsters as I sat in my VW on surveillance when I was a private eye in SoCal. Unbeknownst to me, I was parked next to a spot where two CHP cops had been shot and killed a couple days earlier. Armed professionals who are nervous might not be as unpredicable as amateurs, but a man with a gun who has been taught how to use it, given leave to do so at his discretion, and knowing he can probably justify it is a man you don't want to startle. When I flashed my PI badge, the CHP's relief was palpable.

Mine, too.

Scary: At a silat class, and one of the students, showing off a new knife, handed it to my teacher. Guru smiled, took the blade, and did a little manipulation. No threat intended, he didn't point it at anybody, nor wave it around, he was just getting a feel for the balance. There were eight or nine of us gathered round.

Those of us closest took an involuntary step back.

Later, my son, who was in the class, allowed as how the atmosphere of the garage had undergone a sudden and noticeable change the second Guru took the knife. Like standing next to an electrostatic generator spinning up and feeling the hair on your arms dance.

Yeah. I noticed -- being the first guy to step back ...

So, what can I make out of all this? If I want a scary literary guy, here's one that works for me:

Postulate an immortal master martial artist; one who who has practiced his or her art on battlefields and mean streets for, oh, say, a thousand years. Used and become adept with a club, spear, sword, bow, and assorted boomware, his bare hands. He has killed thousands of armed opponents. He's immortal, but not impervious to harm or pain. He can recover from injury better than most, but he can be killed. He has been practicing his art or arts, proven to work in tens of thousand of encounters, every day for ten times ten thousand hours. Anything you can throw at him, he's seen fifty variations of, and he has an answer for them all. He knows anatomy and physiology better than a room full of doctors.

He has better body control than an ashram full of yogis. He can hold his breath for six minutes. He can slip in and out of zanshin in a blink; his awareness of his surroundings, the ways in and out of wherever he is, his eye for details, are unmatched. He has the physique of a twenty-five- year-old in peak condition -- he is stronger than any man his size and effectively faster, too.

He isn't bored with his longevity and he doesn't want to die, but he has come to terms with the possibility. He doesn't want any normal human to know he exists, and will do whatever is necessary to keep his secret. He isn't psychopathic nor psychotic, but his morality isn't like yours or mine -- he has a long view that, as far as he knows, is unique -- save for one:

His wife.

She is a beautiful and intelligent woman who, like him, is immortal. She has been around for eight hundred years, but thorough a freak set of circumstances, has been discovered and collected by a bad guy who wants to figure out how he can become immortal. He's perfectly willing to open her up and slice her into hamburger, if that's what it takes.

The villain in the story -- for the sake of drama, let's make you the villain -- has the woman locked away. The immortal martial arts master has figured this out, and anybody who gets in his way when he goes to free her is going to get his full attention.

The deadliest man alive, the most experienced fighter and killer on the planet, is coming for you, and how you figure this out is that half your crew of tough and trained mercenaries are pushing up daisies everywhere you look. Is that apt to make you nervous?

It would me.