Chapter 22
Adair then thought to herself in her head, "On your mark, get set, GO!" and she started to sprint down her makeshift racetrack. Seconds later, when she got to the end, she realized that what she did was quite dumb. She made a full-out sprint without stretching or preparing beforehand; while she did not feel like she was in any pain, she still had to make sure that she would not get injured when she was training.
This is because it was one thing to pull a muscle but a completely different thing if she broke a leg or arm if she tripped. She didn't know much about the healing properties of her new body, which made her worried that maybe it wouldn't heal.
Maybe only magic could heal people in this world. If this was the case, would she forever be unable to do normal functions like a walk? Or would it heal improperly and just cause a lot of pain to walk. This led Adair down the rabbit hole of wondering if there were even wheelchairs in this world or can magic heal all wounds, or was she in an era where disabled people were not treated as people.
At least she was positive that Hank would carry her everywhere they needed to go and provide for her if necessary, but she still did not want to rely on Hank for everything, so she shortly began stretching. Once she felt like she was warmed up enough, she started to jog around and not follow the short raceway she made at all. She continued to jog around until she got tired, which was a surprisingly long time.
While she couldn't track specifically how long she was running, an estimate she gave herself was at least for two hours, maybe even longer. She then tried doing situps and realized that these were also extremely easy, but when she tried to do a pushup, she realized that she could not do one.
This confused Adair because she would have thought that since she could run for so long, she should have also been able to do something as basic as a pushup but apparently, that was not the case. After thinking about this, she finally made the mindset change that she was no longer a human. She was a new species that happened to look like humans but had very different genetic evolutions compared to humans.
This also made her question why she had very little arm strength but was able to run extremely far. Does this mean there is a predator on this planet that moves slowly but is extremely strong, and this is how my species adapted to it? Maybe I am just thinking too much about it, Adair thought.
She couldn't drop this topic though and thoughts such as is my race the dominant species on this plane"? Or is it the species that Hank was before he transformed into a bear? Or some other species entirely? As she thought about this, Hank came up and asked her what she was doing. Adair then looked around and didn't think she was doing anything funny, so she asked Hank what he meant.
You started making these weird poses, and then you started running around like your life depended on it, and then you just stopped and started making those weird poses again.
It took Adair a second to wonder what Hank meant by poses, but she quickly realized that he meant stretching. This confused Adair greatly. Was there no such thing as stretching in this world? And if this is the case, then does that mean people do not get pulled muscles? Or do people get pulled mussels and not know how to stop it from happening. If it is the latter option, this could be very complicated to explain.
Adair thought of several different ways to say it and concluded that her best course of action is saying that it is a way to prevent herself from getting hurt when she is training. Hank seemed to understand this and asked what she was training for.
She responded that she wanted to be able to protect herself just in case something happened to him. When she wrote this, Hank gave her a stern look as if trying to say. You have to be kidding me. If I can't protect you, how do you expect to protect yourself in that situation? But no matter what, Hank thought, Adair wanted to give herself a chance to escape or help Hank in case a situation came up.
She did not want to feel useless and just watch if something came up. She wanted to be part of the action. So she kept on doing the training that she did back in the Galactic Empire. While the motions were the same in both cases, Adair did miss the full-immersion virtual reality training back in the Galactic Empire.
Being able to climb up famous mountains, rock climb down huge valleys, or even just have different settings to run in was a major improvement compared to the same landscape that she had been in for almost her entire new life.
After months of training, Hank eventually asked her when or how she learned how to do her movements. When Hank asked this, Adair froze up, not knowing how to respond. She knew she should have come up with a response to this if Hank happened to ask, but she kept on postponing it over and over again, eventually dropping it because she eventually thought that maybe Hank wouldn't ask her about it.
She first thought that maybe now was a good time to tell Hank that she had reincarnated, but she didn't know the word for reincarnated in the new language if there was a proper word for that in this language, to begin with. She then thought that maybe she could partially lie and tell him that her mom taught it to her.
But she decided not to say that either because if Hank was even asking her about it first, that probably meant that what she was doing did not exist on this planet.
The last option she had was to say that it came in a dream to her. She briefly thought that maybe transformed people on this planet don't have dreams, but she quickly threw that idea aside and decided that this was the best course of action for her.
So she wrote to Hank that during the last storm when they were both sleeping, she saw herself doing these exercises, and since that was the case, she thought it would be a good idea for her to do it. This caused her to realize that there was a major hole in this logic that if it came to her in a dream, how did she know that stretching would stop herself from hurting herself, but she hoped that Hank would overlook that.
Adair again briefly thought that maybe the beings on this planet didn't have dreams which would make this explanation much harder but as Hank seemed to know what she was talking about, she quickly put this thought away as she described her dream.
Based on the look Hank was giving her, she realized that he may have realized the gap in this logic, but didn't care to act on it. At this point, Adair realized that she was still a little kid, and little kids can get away with a lot of crazy things just by being young.
When she realized this, she knew that she would take full advantage of this and keep on training and do other things that may be unlike the things people do on this planet. After keeping up her training session for a couple more weeks, she decided it was now time to start training more than just her legs in case she needed to climb something quickly.
During this time, while she was training, Hank finally trusted her enough not to go wandering throughout the forest randomly and that she would keep on doing these random exercises. Hence, he decided that now was a good time to go and explore the surrounding area a bit.
The first time Hank went exploring, Adair was a bit worried that Hank left her, but she quickly found the note explaining that he was just exploring the surrounding area, and eventually, she got used to his coming and goings.
Every once in a while, Hank brought back some more fruit for him to eat but other than that, all Adair thought Hank was doing was exploring the area to make sure everything was safe.
While Adair knew she needed to get stronger, she also knew that she needed to make sure that she did not hurt herself, so she started keeping a calendar of sorts to determine time passing and what happened every day just to keep her distracted because while double the amount of time in a day sounds great that also equates to double the boredom which was not fun.
She also thought about how nice she had it back in the Galactic Empire, where at the touch of the button, you could get almost anything you wanted to do.
Adair kept up this routine of exercising and strengthening, tracking the days, and journaling until the storm clouds came overhead again, and she realized that another storm was starting.