Chapter 18: Ch-11 Who gets the Chick? Part 1
Chapter Text
"Alright, you can open your eyes now," Jon quietly said to his two students sitting cross-legged in front of him, who slowly opened their eyes, "Now Emily, focus on the wolf figurine in front of you and try to remember all the details that you missed or weren't able to visualize,"
Emily looked intently at the small toy from Jon's childhood for a while, before she started, "Umm... The color was a bit wrong a-and the length of the wolf was too long... and maybe the texture was a bit off..."
"Very good! That's way better than the Last time," Jon said and she gave him a huge smile at his praise, before he turned toward Becca, "And what about you Becca?"
"Ugh... the same thing happened again," Becca moaned while looking at the Shadowcat figurine in her hands with disappointment, "The Shadowcat I imagined just wouldn't stay still and didn't want to stay in one place at all, it kept on running around and then an unending green field appeared out of nowhere and t-then a rabbit appeared and it turned into a hunt from there..." Becca trailed off, wondering if she was too stupid for the technique no matter how hard she tried.
"No, it's alright," Jon said patting her head after seeing Becca get sad, "I think we are going at it the wrong way. You don't need to have the exact same results as Emily. It's fine as long as you're improving,"
A couple of months had passed since Jon had discovered that his students had a talent for the art of Warging. And while they were both very young, they were a lot more mature than kids their own age and he had come to trust them a lot over the past few years.
So a few days after taking everything into consideration he had told them that he was a warg and explained what warging was and had even done a live demonstration with Frost at his side.
They had both been a little surprised at first when his eyes turned completely white, but after they overcame their shock, they started to accept that Jon was actually telling them the truth and he really was like one of those Legendary Wargs from their childhood stories.
He had then offered them a chance to become a warg like him and promised them that he would make sure to teach them to the best of his abilities.
Becca didn't even let him finish his proposal and immediately started jumping around with happiness while giving him her consent, as the prospect of having this kind of magical ability was too exciting for her to let go.
And while Emily was a little bit scared initially at the idea of her soul leaving her body and going into the body of an animal, she said that she trusted him and that she would also like to experience the feeling of being able to fly above the clouds, like he had described while he was explaining warging to them.
And so for the past few months, after their usual classes had been completed, he started teaching them the skills he had used to get started. The first thing he had them try was the simplest of his techniques, just doing complicated calculations in their head.
Jon had found in his experience that using this technique regularly was very useful in making his consciousness a lot more flexible and made it easier for him to process a lot of the information he gets when he is warging.
Emily had thrived while using this technique, and while she was already very smart, the speed at which she had improved had left Jon a bit in awe of her. She had gotten so good at solving difficult problems in her head that Jon kept on having to find new stuff for her to practice.
But on the other hand, Becca had really struggled with that, as she already had a hard time cracking normal problems with the help of a slate and charcoal, so it wasn't really much of a surprise when she didn't excel at it.
When they had gotten a hang of this technique, he started teaching them his second technique, Image Training, which was also one of the techniques he had found very useful in laying down the foundation for future training.
Emily didn't excel as she usually did in this one as she had difficulty getting the whole picture and while she was really good at individually getting the textures and colors of things that she was supposed to visualize right, she had a lot of trouble focusing on all of the details of the object at once.
For example, she would be able to imagine the structure of the object close to perfect but it would comprise the color of the object, and vice versa if she started to focus on the color, the structure seemed to go away from her, so Jon had Emily mainly focus on getting her mind used to multitasking and focusing on more than one thing at once.
Becca, on the other hand, had a very active imagination, whenever he gave her an object to visualize it seems to come alive in her imagination and it was especially potent if the object represented a living being.
Like the Shadowcat this time, or the rabbit the last time, when he had told her to just focus on creating just the image in her head, and instead she had ended up unconsciously creating a complete scenario in her mind about the cute rabbit and its family, and how they escape the various traps placed around their home by the hunters.
And while at first, he had tried to make Becca try and focus on making the images in her mind motionless. Lately, he had started to understand that she wouldn't be able to learn like he and Emily did with still images, and instead needed a completely different approach.
While he mostly depended on their honest evaluation of their own faults and the various mistake they made in their execution of these techniques. By regularly using his Mind Sense on them, he had found another way of tracking their progress as they got better at Visualization and Mental Arithmetics.
They were still a little shy of being 11 years old, the age that is said to be safe to start practicing the techniques written in the Maester's Journal. So until that time, he would get them used to utilizing their minds as much as possible, which was sure to help them when they actually started.
"Alright, Now let's try that once again but this time—" Jon started saying but mid-sentence he suddenly felt an intense spike of emotions in his head that weren't his own. He felt a bit disoriented for a few moments before he understood where the anger and aggressiveness he was feeling were coming from.
He quickly ran toward his usual rock, before hurriedly sitting down while leaning against it and without telling his confused students anything closed his eyes. It didn't even take him a second to enter the zone, and the moment he did, he saw that the needle representing Frost was pulsing rapidly as if a flickering light.