A Day For Shooting Guns

Alright, so he'd given her the utter basics. He could work with that.

"That guy," Jude said, pointing out a brown haired man near the side of the range as he ushered Zora out onto it. "Is the range safety officer. You do whatever he says, no matter what. When you're on the range, you never point your gun to the left and right, because you'll have people there. You just go up and down. If they say cease fire, you unload your gun, and you lock the slide open. Then you step back behind the line. That means they need to deal with something on the range."

Jude paused for a moment, considering if he'd missed anything before gesturing.

"Step up, get ready to shoot, but don't actually shoot. I'll stand just behind you, make sure you've got good posture, and then we can shoot."

Jude's demeanor was pretty different. He was more in control, less uncertain. The element of danger--even if there was no real danger--helped a lot to calm his nerves in a bizarre way.

Jude wasn't going to touch her. No no. But he was going to verbally correct her posture as he did, pointing out the stiffness of her shoulder... but mostly the focus of her eyes.

"You should be keeping your eye on the target. Your instinct is going to be to look at the gun, but you need to keep your focus. Look just at the target."

He made sure her posture was good before he gave her the go ahead to start firing.

Good posture, after a few corrections.

"Alright. Take a breath. As you exhale, fire. Repeat. Not too fast, you want steady fire."

He waited for her to finish the clip, simply watching without much commentary before he gestured for her to pull back. He gestured for her to fully disarm the gun (even if the safety meant it wasn't really necessary, and then pulled away from the range, pulling his ear protection off.

"You did good. By the end of the clip you started flinching a bit, but that's usual. Your body's getting used to the recoil, so you start anticipating it, and then you twitch. It throws off your aim--that's why you seemed to get worse. If you want to aim straight, you need to stay lose, and you need to keep yourself from flinching. Don't anticipate the recoil."

Guns. lots of people were uncomfortable with guns, but to Jude they were like a second home. A reminder of a life he'd been torn away from. Everyone else had powers, but Jude? Jude had guns. He wasn't super strong, or super fast. He couldn't shoot fire, or use magic. He could defend himself--he'd taken plenty of self defense classes--but he was bad at going on the offensive.

But shooting? Shooting was something he could do.

He'd been trained. He'd practiced. He'd gotten to use it as an actual honest to god skill.

And he was good. He'd thought about competition shooting once upon a time. You had to be that level of good if you were going to use a gun as an honest to god superhero, and it was only his father's desire to keep a low profile that kept Jude from actually doing something with it.

If he'd been more cocky, he'd probably have said something along the lines of watch and learn, but instead he was silent as he accepted the gun, sliding on his ear protection before double checking the gun and stepping up to the line, reloading neatly like he'd done it a million times.

Because he had.

Jude's first shot hit the target, but not near the center, and he took a moment to readjust his aim. It had been a while since he'd used an actual gun, but his second shot was much closer, and his third dinged center mass. From there it was quick and methodical, two shot bursts until he'd emptied the magazine entirely.

Every shot after the first two hit center-target.

Jude pulled back, the gun down, and shook out his hand as he stepped away from the line, handing the gun back to Zora safely before pulling his hearing protecting back.

"It's been a while."

God he wanted a gun.