“Okay, so remind me again what the point of this exercise is that you’ve got planned?”

Crimson Cur huffed and quickly reached up to poke Mach several times in the forehead, “Specialized speed training! If you’d been paying attention I told you that there is more to super speed than just moving really fast.”

Mach winced and held his forehead as he followed the Burmese mountain dog into the BOS breakroom. “Um, ow. I was paying attention, I just didn’t understand what you meant by that.” Mach shook his head as he propped the whiteboard Ji-Lin had asked him to bring along the wall next to a table, “Did you really have to poke me five times like that?”

“Seven, and yes,” Crimson Cur replied with a giggle. “Okay, to recap what I was trying to tell you about specialized speed training, it’s important for you to not just be fast. Your reactions, thoughts, timing, and so forth should be able to keep up with you. What’s the point of being able to run really fast if you can’t move out of the way of the tree you’re about to hit?”

“That’s a really good point,” Phil muttered as he thought some more about what she had said. “So how do I train myself to think fast?”

“Are you familiar with how to play chess?” Crimson asked as she held up a box. When the desert coyote nodded, she smiled and with a quick blur of her hands the game board and pieces were set up neatly between them. “There are some speed tournaments where a player only has a certain amount of time to make their move. We’re going to play a little more extreme version of that.”

Phil grinned wide as he sat down at the table, quickly writing ‘Crimson Cur’ and ‘Mach’ on the whiteboard. “I think I see what you’re getting at here. Let me warn you though, I won’t go easy on you and I happy to be pretty good at this game.”

“That’s good,” Ji-Lin smirked as she returned his confident glare with one of her own, “because instead of a time limit on plays, we’re setting a five minute time limit to play period. If we finish more than two hundred games in that window I’ll consider it a successful training session.”

“Okay, now I’m starting to get psyched up,” Mach cheered as he readied his hands over his pieces. Crimson Cur placed a watch on the side of the table and set it to the stopwatch function. “Ready when you are.”

“Okay then. Three, two, one… GO!”

Instantly there was a blur of motion across the board. Pieces exchanged places, moved forward, were placed on the side of the board, and then set back to a starting point as a game was finished in extreme, rapid fashion. A low, buzzing sound filled the room of wooden pieces constantly hitting the board created their own, high speed frequency. Tally marks on the board under Crimson Cur and Mach’s name were added with almost no stop in the action.

“Check. Check. Checkmate. Checheckcheckchmatechateckematkmachekcmemkeea…”

BEEP! BE-BEEP! BEEP!

As the stopwatch started to beep both speedsters came to a halt. Crimson Cur stopped the watch and then happily started counting up the totals on the board. Mach on the other hand had slumped backwards in his chair, panting and hold his head.

“Oh God, feels like my brain just turned into a smoothie!”

“Just like when you haven’t stretched a muscle in a while isn’t it?” Crimson Cur asked as she smiled at him. “It will get better in time, I promise. For now though, you passed. Totals were one hundred and eleven wins to you and one hundred and twenty-four wins to me. I may have won more games, but we broke the threshold so victory is yours.”

The coyote weakly held his shaking hand up and gave a thumbs-up.

“Personally I think you’re doing fantastic considering you’ve been holding back your powers for so many years. I think doing this two or three times a week from now on will help you bridge the gap between…” Ji-Lin stopped mid-thought when she noticed that Phil had seemingly passed out and was already deeply asleep. Giggling as he started to snore she added, “Well, it’s still a good start.”

-

Art by  fcsimba
Crimson Cur/Ji-Lin Hue © Computer Dinosaur
Mach/Phillip Clark by  gamegod210