#i am having so much fun in the kiddie pool that is notw

[lassieposting]

not to get all emotional about notw again but one thing i love about the single parent vesemir dynamic is that the kaer morons would end up having a completely different training experience to basically every generation of witchers that came before them.

like. netflix!vesemir seems to grow up towards the end of the golden age of witchering. for him personally, witchering seems to still be a lucrative profession - he makes a very robust living, and he can afford to live in the lap of luxury in his off-hours, but he does also admit that he's built his brand on taking only the most dangerous contracts, which will bring in the most money. deglan, however, complains that he's "down two dozen witchers" in one year because they're struggling enough to take employment elsewhere, as sellswords or criminals. he's down enough manpower that he forces ves, his golden child, to join in with training the baby witchers - a chore he's spent most of his adult life skiving with zero consequences. so like. they're not doing great, overall.

but when vesemir was training, there were still plenty of witchers at kaer morhen, with a tried-and-true system for teaching youngsters. he probably would have had a mixture of academic classes (the three Rs, history, politics, languages, maybe some law? everything he'd need to keep out of trouble in various kingdoms once he's on the path), and then both theory and practical classes for things like alchemy, weapons training, monster lore, etc. there's lots of time spent poring over old bestiaries and potion recipes, lots of rote memorisation, before he's ever allowed to try anything out for himself.

(he's old for a newbie - twelve or thirteen and with zero fighting experience - so he's actually in some remedial classes as a kid. he's in the same group as Luka and Sven, both a few years younger, for all his fighting skills, because he's got a lot of catching up to do. at some point, once he's shown enough promise to impress, deglan gets personally involved in his training, gives him extra lessons, etc. It works out for him - he's a fast learner with a natural talent.)

but at the end of notw, kaer morhen is a smoking ruin, and vesemir and the four surviving baby witchers are? basically on the run. they wouldn't be able to go straight home; the humans are still riled up, and there's no way to know that they won't come back to finish the job if they realise some of the witchers survived. ves is an unparalleled fighter, but he's only one man. they'd swarm him, get around him and kill the boys easily. he'd have to give them time to calm down and lose the thirst for mutant blood before even considering bringing the last hope of the wolf school back into potential danger. so they'd be on the road for? quite possibly a long while.

so the kaer morons don't have access to the massive library at kaer morhen during that time. they don't have a bunch of trainers who've become highly educated experts in their respective fields. all they've got is vesemir. and while he's got a working knowledge of all the things a witcher needs to know, he's only an expert in one field, and that's fighting. he's also still got to work to support them, so the amount of time he can actually spend tutoring is, well, limited. they have to learn on the fly, often by trial and error.

they learn what happens when a witcher overdoses on potions the hard way: watching the fallout of vesemir actually doing it to survive a fight. he's sick as a dog for days, heaving like he's trying to bring up his own innards long after there's nothing left in his belly. they're young, but they know witchers aren't supposed to get sick, and it's horrifying for them. they're not entirely sure exactly why he reacted that badly - not like the long lecture on biology that vesemir got when he was in training - but they sure as shit know they don't want it to happen to them.

they learn healing the same way - by the seat of their fucking pants, more often than not. vesemir uses himself as a practical example, because he's never been all that spectacular at the theory side of things - when he's taking post-battle healing potions, he'll explain which ones he's using and why, or if he has a small injury he'll use it as an opportunity to demonstrate how to properly stitch or cauterise a wound. he's grouchy and short-tempered a lot of the time, sore and tired and with a hundred paces he'd rather be than airing his scars to fascinated and grossed-out little boys, but he does his best, because this, this practical shit, this he can do. they'll need this knowledge, eventually. but there are also times where he comes home on the verge of collapse, using the wall to stay upright and struggling to get out of his armour before keeling over into bed, and they have to learn to keep calm and put that new knowledge into practice independently and fix him up themselves.

eskel learns igni early, long before they're sent to nenneke, because sometimes the fire goes out while vesemir is off hunting or scouting or taking a moment to go out of earshot and grieve in fucking peace, and if he doesn't figure out how to relight it, his little brothers will be cold. he's seen ves do it. he knows how to make the sign, more or less. he just figures it out, trying to replicate what vesemir does until it works. he's naturally inclined towards magic, which is probably why it works for him, but he still works it out by himself.

geralt picks flowers for vesemir when they're on the move, between villages. he knows ves is struggling with balancing everything, and he thinks he recognises plants that he's seen in vesemir's alchemy kit, the ones he makes potions out of. he collects as many he recognises as possible, and when vesemir is stabling the horse at the next inn, geralt tugs his sleeve and hands them over. some of them are useful. some of them are useless, and some of them are poison. ves gets down on geralt's level and shows him how to spot the differences between this white flower and that white flower, and geralt gradually brings him fewer things that would probably make him sick.

lambert doesn't initially learn to fight in a safe, structured class with padded armour and a little wooden practice sword like ves did. he learns to fight by picking fights with eskel and geralt, both a few years older, and getting his arse handed to him, until he figures out how to use their bigger size and greater strength against them. by the time they get back to kaer morhen and vesemir has somewhere safe to actually do some proper training, lambert has already become pretty adept at just…getting out of the way of whatever is trying to hit him.

vesemir gets them all little daggers, for when he's not around to protect them - live steel, a big responsibility for a small child. remus watches how vesemir looks after his gear after a hunt and starts to copy him. vesemir oils his sword, remus oils his dagger. vesemir checks his armour for damage or wear and tear, remus checks his clothes for the same. he'll come sit by ves and just. copy him. eventually vesemir starts showing him how to mend a tear in a gambeson courtesy of the business end of a forktail, and he'll matter-of-factly rip a side seam out of a spare shirt so remus can practice fixing something that ves doesn't have to wear into battle again anytime soon.

just? baby witchers who get back to kaer morhen eventually and start their training proper, only to realise that they've learned a bunch of this shit out of order already just from living on the road with vesemir for a year or two, having to see the really ugly side of his job, and trying to make his life easier. witchering 101 baptism of fire edition for all of them