Knowing Your Enemy
Carefully folding the line, he slid his fingers along the paper. He was focused. Tigress could see that from his weird thinking look; the one where he stuck out his tongue to the side. "You know you're not supposed to do that during a meeting," The feline kung fu master whispered. Po rolled his eyes and focused on his project. The panda sat along with his comrades in a row of seats and tables. Po, Shifu, and the Furious Five had agreed to come to a meeting of the Kung Fu warriors to discuss better protection strategies for their villages. After calming the ursine Kung-Fu enthusiast, Tigress had to deal with Po's other tendency at these kinds of meetings: boredom. "Po." She warned.
"It's okay, Tigress," Po whispered back, finishing the project; it was an origami swan. "It's just paper."
"Would you please pay attention? I don't want to repeat this to you on the way back," Tigress said. Po huffed and looked at the long-winded deer presenting the facts.
"And as you can see, there's an all-time high with bandits in the lower region. Now, I know that this is a well-known trouble spot for us partly due to better food range, but there are several factors that we can start attacking and blah, and blah."
Po nearly dropped his head onto the table. "Huh wha?"
"Po, stop dozing off," Tigress murmured.
"Why do I have to come here again?"
"Because you're the Dragon Warrior who is supposed to bring balance to the world."
"Ugh," Po grumbled. The panda and his friends were in the back of the long table rows. They sat there partly because they knew Po would be bored out of his mind, but now they were regretting it. At least, if he were in the front, he would be alert. "Hey, I got another paper. Want to play tic-tac-toe?"
The tiger pinched the bridge of her muzzle. "Po, I would think that a grown twenty-something-year-old man would pay a little more... attention to these things. This is very important."
"Why?"
"This is a meeting about bandit and villain incidences, remember?"
"Yeah, but we've been doing good so far in the Valley of Peace."
"Po, crime anywhere disrupts peace everywhere."
"I know that, but why are we talking about stuff like this?" Po mumbled as he drew the lines for the game.
"Because it's important." Po rolled his eyes as he passed the paper to Tigress. The tiger rolled her eyes as the meeting carried on.
"Wait, I just realized something."
"That you're being unprofessional?" Tigress asked.
"Oh I knew that already. I mean, you," Po smirked. "You called me twenty-something."
Tigress rose her eyebrow. "So?"
"How old do you think I am?" The smug grin on his face fueled the tiger's simmering anger.
"I don't want to have this conversation right now, Po."
"Come on, how old do you think I am?"
"Are you not twenty?"
"Mmmm, maybe."
"Ugh," Tigress muttered.
"Master Tigress," said the deer giving the presentation. The two masters snapped to attention. "Did you have something to add?"
"Uh... yes, is there... anyway this can... be applied locally?" Tigress asked.
"Ah, yes! I was just getting to that," The deer continued. A long low groan came from the other masters as the deer went on.
"See, even they aren't excited about this," Po whispered.
"Po, that's not the point," Tigress murmured sharply. "People's LIVES are on the line here. We're trying to figure out how to fight back bandits and raiders, and you're over here just trying to play paper games!"
"So what do you want from me?"
"Maybe some useful ideas instead of doing useless things like origami!"
Po narrowed his eyes. "Alright, you want an idea? Why not just have a lot of guards in the places that we know are trouble points at night."
"Why at night?"
"Because bandits obviously do more crime in the nighttime. And don't waste your time on a broad local area. Crime always happens in a concentrated spot, not in a broad area. People do things by habit and tend to focus on one thing. So the bandits, no matter what gang they're in, will only attack one small place so they can overwhelm it. Bandits and raiders are fast and quick, so you have to build up for fast and quick responses. Lighter armor, mobile tactics. As for the raiders, you need a force that's able to move quickly. The guards we have are too stiff and stay in one place. Raiders do hit-and-runs, so you have to have constant patrol, probably through four people to make sure people take their time sleeping. That's three people well-rested to one person alert. Or you have a similar hit-and-run move for attacking the raiders. You have to move fast and hard, but no amount of armored defense is gonna work. No point in making a wall when they can walk around it!"
Tigress couldn't find any to say. She just stared at Po with a slightly dropped jaw. That's when Po noticed the room was completely silent. He looked and saw all of the masters staring at him with their own shocked faces; the deer had stopped talking. The panda nervously grinned with all the eyes of the council on him.
"That's... that's actually a good idea," said the deer presenting. "If we trained our armies and officials for a moveable offense and defense rather than an immovable defense, it could work."
"We'll start looking at other strategies for it," said another official, a fox. "The Dragon Warrior is right about the nature of bandits and raiders. We can't use some of the traditional ways of fighting. We have to fight like we know our enemy, and the Dragon Warrior has shown we're lacking in that sense. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
"Wow, thanks General Sun-Tzu," Po smiled.
"Well, with that in mind, I think there's a lot we have a lot to reexamine," The deer said. "This meeting adjourned." With that, all the masters were dismissed.
"Well, Po," Tigress sighed, "I was... wrong about you."
"It's okay, Tigress," Po yawned, stretching his back. "I just didn't think my idea was that important. That's why I didn't say anything."
"How did you figure all that out, though?"
"Simple. Most of these guys don't remember what it was like to live in bandit-infested areas. They're far away from the problem. I mean, think about us. We live up on this high mountain and looking down at people. You guys were fixing a problem, but you never lived through the problem."
"And... you have?"
"Several times," Po said with a wave of his hand. "I know all of the bad places in the village. Why do you think I have to take so long doing my dad's errands?"
"Why didn't you tell us?"
"Like I said, I thought you guys already knew. Or I... didn't think you guys really cared about my opinion," Po nervously chuckled as they walked out of the meeting hall.
Tigress smiled, "Po, we care about you and what you think. I'm sorry for picking on you during the meeting."
"It's alright. I was being a little... okay a lot childish," Po replied.
"So... did you still want to play that game of tic-tac-toe?" Tigress smirked. The panda's face beamed as they passed the piece of paper between each other on their journey home.
He lost, several times actually, but it was a nice time together. "Maybe I could learn more from you, Po," Tigress said. Po just smiled.
The End
