Derek put more focus on his martial arts and primitive weapons instruction over the next few weeks.  His debriefing had reminded him that he had almost lost his one hand-to-hand fight, and he wanted to be better at this if there were a next time--which, he realized, in the eternity that lay ahead of him was bound to happen eventually, and in his present job likely to happen sooner rather than later.  As Derek, he looked about seventeen, but was still only about five feet tall, and although he had greatly improved his agility since his awkward days, he had not done much about his strength.  He started working on this, as well, since the fight was not always to the strong, but, as someone once said, that’s the way the bet.

He also added linguistics training to his curriculum.  Of his six passports, only one was American, and it was not the one he would be most apt to use; but he sounded American, and he would need to know how to sound British, plus pass for each of his other identities.  Beyond that, it seemed as if it would be useful to learn a few languages--Russian, Chinese, Arabic, French, Farsi, and Japanese were the top of the list, which meant learning new alphabets, or rather, orthographies, as some of those languages didn’t really use alphabets when written.

Again the time stretched from days to weeks to months, during which he honed skills he expected to need but which he suspected someone somewhere hoped would never be needed.

There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #243:  Verser Redirects.  Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter.  It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.

As to the old stories that have long been here:

The Online Games

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M. J. Young Net

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