"...Usually I'm stopping fires, not starting them, but if it comes down to that, I can make something that ought to at least be theoretically viable."  Blowtorches or laser beams, probably.  "Though I don't trust that they'll necessarily work quickly enough, on a wide enough scale, to be viable.  I'd have to make a lot of lasers, if I wanted to melt an appreciable chunk of the mass of a person, made out of sand, in combat time.  It could be done.  But I'm not sure anything else I have is capable of melting sand that's being controlled by a skilled and hostile -kinetic, off the top of my head.  It's not something that's come up before.  ...I suppose I could also try throwing a Kaminari's-worth of electricity at him; I know lightning can vitrify sand.  But hopefully we'll have better tools by the time we're facing anything like that."

"Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully there aren't any hostile shapeshifters or self-material-kinetics until we hit DR4 or 5, so we've got time to pick up more options."

"...Hopefully."

"Is there something in particular that you think would be particularly useful to pick up?"

Yang taps her thigh a bit in thought. "Some source of stasis on demand, whether tech or powers or runic magic or whatever else, some kind of emergency teleportation, Aura, the catalog power that lets us designate an area as pocketspace and access it through the scroll, shadow clones to accelerate training…"

"I meant 'to expand our combat versatility', specifically, but those are all very good things to have - though I don't think I've heard of whatever a shadow clone is, before.  Is it something like Ectoplasm-sensei's Quirk?"

"If I'm remembering his Quirk right, it's at least similar. Shadow clones are a technique from Naruto, where you make clones that can go do separate things, and a good-enough hit can dispel them, but when they dispel, you get the memories. If you can handle processing the memories well enough, you can use them to multiply your training time."

"That would be very useful.  I wonder how that would interact with my Quirk, actually.  If I could work with 'myself' and have more surface area to work with, I could make a lot of things that are currently just too unwieldy."

"Oh huh! That would be awesome. Depends on how the different physics and metaphysics play with each other, I guess."

"We'll have to hope they'll work out in our favor."

"Yeah, here's hoping. As for combat options, the big thing I think we're missing is a real stun, point-and-shoot unconsciousness, rather than approximating it with tazers or webbing. We can pick that up with Hogwarts magic, among other things. If you go all-out on your creations, we can do scorched earth pretty easy, and between Mei's tazerbeam and our webs we've got at least some ways to disable at range. If we want lethal ranged, either you already know modern firearms or we pick a few up for you to disassemble in a modern world. Better mobility for you would be good, probably?"

"What do you currently believe my mobility situation is?"

"Good point. My instinctive guess is somewhere around really well trained baseline with arbitrary grapples or maybe jets whenever you need 'em and think to make 'em? Which is good, but we want you to have better. Aura will help a bunch, once you train that up."

Aww.

"That sounds about right, though I think it bears mentioning that, while neither 'in vacuum' nor 'underwater' are conditions I spend a lot of time in, I do have equipment sufficient to survive there for long enough in my blueprints.  And, yes, I know how guns are made, I should have said."

"...How is Aura going to help with mobility, do you expect, beyond just giving me more force and survivability to work with?"

"Enhance your limbs with Aura to move faster, enhance your senses and mind to react faster. On top of that, it's tricky, but you can get a sense when someone's watching with hostile intent, or about to attack. It's not quite to the level of spider-sense, but it's a lot better than baseline."

"Faster reflexes and an actual danger sense are very good things to have in this line of work!  I have to say, I'm looking forward to it."

"Yeah! It's pretty great. We all miss it, for sure, for all that we have other upgrades now. Can't think of a power it can't improve, at least indirectly. We'll have to make sure to get some missions done quick so we can get that started."

She nods, silently.  There's little else that needs saying, on that front.

"In the meantime..."

Go catch some falling dummies, again.

Shit!

Lunge for the edge! Webs, webs, catch them and slow them carefully!

She's really getting the hang of that.

Yang comes back, not quite panting but maybe breathing a tiny bit more heavily, after hauling the dummies back up hand-over-hand. "I think maybe a good kind of training would be like... flexible reactions, if that makes sense."

"...I think I do know what you mean, if you mean 'the flexibility is in your variety of possible reactions' moreso than 'reactions that take advantage of physical flexibility', but what I'm not sure of is where, precisely, training that trait could be escalated from the training we've already done.  You were managing to handle pretty much everything I could throw at you, earlier."

"More like... judgment calls? Practicing being surprised with funky situations where it's hard to tell whether the right move is punching a baddie or something else. All the stuff we've done so far has been pretty clear, just surprising."

"Ah.  I had thought that you might have meant that, but I'd say that the phrase you might be looking for is tactical and-or strategic flexibility.

"Judgement calls are hard to train, especially when it's just the two of us, a tiny island, and possibly some robots.  There are a few virtual simulators of things like that, but I'd have to check to see if I had the software to run one."