The Dance - Part 2

"This dance is horrible."

"No it's not, the dance is great. This has nothing to do with the dance."

"That may be, but that doesn't change the fact that the dance is also bad."

Sylvia just sighed as she heard Octavia's frustrated voice, frustration building up within herself as well as she watched Octavia stop practising.

There were problems. Problems they expected. It was just that the solutions to them had not revealed themselves yet, causing annoyance and frustration between the pair.

While Sylvia lamented over all that had happened, all Octavia could do was think back to the start of all this and remember how right she was that this whole thing was going to be hard.

…

The song rang through the ballroom once more, and Sylvia stepped forward and as she did this, Octavia slithered back.

As the song continued, Sylvia took another step, and Octavia followed by moving back again.

The only problem was that this wasn't part of the dance.

"Why are you backing away."

"I-it's just impulse."

"What do you mean its 'impulse', get over here so we can start your dance practice."

There was something about Sylvia's look when they started to get down to business that managed to cause shivers down her spine, and she knew this would end badly for her. The only problem was that Sylvia was right, she had to do this. Sorting herself out, Octavia moved back to the centre of the room and stood before Sylvia. She was ready. Hopefully.

"This song is obviously done with a partner. Now I-I don't want to presume, but on the day of the ball, would you want to be mine."

"Definitely."

While this was all well and sweet, it wasn't like Octavia had actually met anyone else that she could take to the dance, unless of course Lord Desmon or Lady Bethany decides to ditch their partner, or Andrew his crush on Sylvia, but neither was going to happen.

But nevertheless, even if she had a flock of other people to choose from, she was sure she would still pick Sylvia.

"Now, put your hands up. Hold your hand out like this, then you place yours around my back. Then I do the same to you…there. That is our starting pose for the dance."

"Ok, simple enough," Octavia thought.

"Now for the steps, I step here…then you step…ah."

Sylvia stepped back and looked at Octavia's tail trying to figure out how to do this.

"Maybe doing the steps by yourself will give you an idea, of how I should move my tail."

At Octavia's suggestion, Sylvia went ahead and started the routine. It looked a bit silly on her own with her arms up as she moved around, but she decided not to comment on that, since it was for her benefit and all.

Watching Sylvia she saw her move around a good deal of the room, twisting and turning all about. She was very graceful as she did it, gliding across the floor, and Octavia could tell that she had practised a lot to be this good at dancing. Octavia had no clue about ballroom dancing, but as she watched her, she could see no faults with what she was doing. But one thing she did learn from seeing her dance was that there were two main problems Octavia had to look forward to solving.

One was obviously translating steps to work with her tail, but the other hadn't occurred to her yet, and that was to figure out how to not trip everyone up as she moved. With her tail as large as it was, if she spun in a circle with it spread out, she would knock multiple people down, which would not go down well.

"So, that's the whole dance." Sylvia said as she, rest the crystal and moved back over to her, pulling Octavia out of her musings. "I think I have an idea of how you should move for it. Shall we do it step by step and figure out how you can move for each one?"

A quick response of sure was given as they gathered in the centre again and assumed the same pose as before. This was followed by Sylvia putting her left foot backwards and to her left, twisting her body slightly as she did.

"Now…, can you move sideways and follow me."

Octavia, a master of movement with her tail, did just that, slithering sideways and meandering her tail to do so.

"Ok, we'll that's seemed fine. That keeps you with me at about the same pace, which is what we want."

"Sure, but I probably tripped a couple of nearby dancers doing that."

"Huh." Sylvia looked behind Octavia and saw how stretched her tail was. It wasn't the longest it could be as she had to bend it in places to move. But it was enough. "Yeah. Yeah, that probably would have happened."

Both of them took five to think, but this eventually turned to twenty minutes as they tried to come up with a way to solve this problem. Octavia continued the move, trying to figure out if there was another way to move her tail a shorter distance from her body.

It took a while but after seeing Sylvia get up from the floor where she had been contemplating this issue, Octavia managed to come up with an idea.

"That's it. I've been so focused on it moving my tail side to side, I didn't even think about up and down."

It was something so simple yet easily overlooked when you had been travelling the same way since being born in this world, and hopefully, it would solve a lot of problems.

"Sylvia, let's try that again, I think I have a solution."

Back in the centre again, they gave it another try. This time though, Octavia bunched her tail up, placing a good deal of it against her back. It then curved, running down and bending against the floor. Doing this she managed to get three sections of her tail on the floor, and as far as she could tell, she was still stable.

"That looks very strange. But, you are much less likely to hit someone with it as it's not moving all around on the floor."

Continuing with the dance, Sylvia made the first move again, and Octavia moved to follow.

Well tried to.

"How do I move like this? Bending my tail just doesn't do anything as it's all vertical now."

She gave her tail a wiggle in several locations but did not budge from where she was. She tried to bend the already bent sections touching the floor, but again it didn't budge. Frustrated, she put more force into it, but the shaking of her tail, unbalanced her, causing her to drop to the floor.

"Ahh,"

She thankfully let go of Sylvia as she did, meaning it was only herself that was hurt by her own actions, which Sylvia quickly knelt down to help her out of.

"How did that happen, you were standing still?"

Octavia explained what she was trying to do and so they both spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how to slither with most of her tail off the ground.

This very quickly led to annoyance and frustration, which Octavia took out on the dance itself.

…

They tried and tried to solve the problem. They ended up going back to her normal slithering movement and tried to work on how to compact it.

But while a good idea, when your whole movement is based on large bends in your tail, compacting it just reduces your ease of movement greatly as well as still being sizable on the floor creating a large trip hazard.

They tried a few other ways of movement but eventually came back to the one with her tail bending upwards.

More fiddling around with that, and Octavia finally had an epiphany.

She stood there concentrating hard. She had to go against all her base instincts of how her tail should be used, as she needed it to move in a very different way.

Willing her tail to not bend in order to move, she focused on lifting one of the sections touching the floor.

It put a lot of strain on her, as the movement just felt odd as if the snake part of her couldn't understand why one part of her tail should shift if another is not. But eventually, she was able to push past the feeling and lift it from the floor before depositing it to her right.

In effect, she had taken a step, with a snake tail.

Focusing again, she then went to move the other, then the other, and finally repeated it all over again. It was strange, it felt weird, but she had managed to do it and take a few odd steps with three 'feet'. There were some wobbles here and there, but as she practised, these dissipated quickly.

"This looks so weird." Was Sylvia's reaction upon seeing her do this.

"Just doing it feels even weirder. But… it solves all the problems right. I mean, I'm not going to trip people up, and now that is like stepping with your feet, it should make the moves easier." Octavia replied to Sylvia. She missed adding hopefully to the end of the sentence though.

And so they headed back to the middle…again, and started the dance. This time though, she was no longer frozen, unable to move and nor did she topple over. When Sylvia made her move, Octavia was able to follow it albeit with a couple of additional steps, keeping her in front of Sylvia with their hands still grasping each other.

"Yes, you did it. Great. Now we can really get down to dance training." Sylvia said with another smile.

Octavia seeing this realised that all the problem-solving had made her forget all about how Sylvia looked at the start of all this. It also probably stopped whatever Sylvia's face meant she had planned, but now, with the movement for her tail sorted, there was nothing stopping the dance practice.

The only option now was to leave her fate in Sylvia's hands. She could only hope she wouldn't be stuck doing this all night. Or end up with bruises like from the spar.