Chapter 4: NightTime Surprise
As the day continued, it seemed that the boredom was starting to kick in. Jake had a good three-hundred songs to his music player, and it seemed that the music was taking him nowhere with killing time.
When Clemens got back to take them to the gym, Jake asked if he could come. Clemens reluctantly agreed, and after finding out what Jake needed to train with, he then began to train.
Training with a sword is rather easy if you have the right stuff. What Jake used was a board, hung from a rope, tied to a pipe on the roof.
Jake drew his katana as he approached the training station he'd set up. Assuming an en garde stance, he imagined the station not as a board on a rope, but as an opponent with a similar sword.
Jake swung first, a high-diagonal slash. The opponent's sword, being represented by the plank, did a mid-stab.
Jake blocked, and quickly stabbed, and blocked a perfect horizontal, then pushing back. Next, as the plank-sword proceeded to vertical up-slash him, or fly towards him in an arc, he slashed a perfect horizontal, bifurcating the plank. At this point, Jake was drenched in sweat, and heard cheers from behind.
Turning around, he saw Hudson and Vasquez both cheering for him from their exercise equipment. Vasquez was using a weight center. Hudson was on the treadmill, running like hell, as if something was chasing him. Hicks was doing pull-ups on a pipe, stoic as a stone.
Jake looked at the time on his cellular. Local time was at 6 pm local time. It seemed that he'd been at the training station for a good hour. "I need to use something else." Jake admitted aloud, to where everyone could hear.
Vasquez seemed to have a solution. She picked up a five-pound free-weight, and said "Here, tie this to the rope."
Jake accepted it, and after five minutes of gimmicking with different knots, he began again.
This time, it's a metal weight that he has to worry about being hit by. He drew his Katana again, and started to practice.
When he slashed it left, it swung back around, requiring a right block, and vice versa. He'd spent a good two more hours at the station, and at the end of that, he found out that was all the workout that they were going to do.
They made their way back to the infirmary as part of a cool-down. When they got back, it seemed that Ripley had put Newt to bed.
"She's sleeping." Ripley whispered "Try not to wake her up." Jake walked over to his cot and began listening to music again. Trying to tune out the world made quite a difference in patience, especially now that you didn't have to watch your back at every possible moment.
What he listened to however, was even older then the prison itself. He listened to rock music from the 1960's to the 1980's. He was what people called a Retro. He liked it though, and to be honest, the stuff that is out these days was all a bunch of electronic crap.
Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out a ration bar. Unwrapping it and taking a bite, This is dinner he thought. The ration bar was mostly a sweet meal, had to be to make it enjoyable. It had peanut-butter, and Chocolate mixed in on top, with a sort of gel-paste in the center that had the consistency of nougat, yet tasted like apples.
Jake had grown tired of ration bars back on Archeron, yet they sure beat that stuff the prisoners had to call food.
He started to reach the Musical Nirvana state, when it seems that Clemens, Andrews, and Aaron had come in with a prisoner who was saying that he's telling the truth. They brought him in, and the questioning began.