fandomtownies | Warehouse District, Tuesday Afternoon

Appropriately enough, Ringo herself arrived on her own ATs, the whine of electric motors accompanying her as she sped down the street, vaulted off a dumpster, and arced over a length of chain link fence to land in a spin a dozen feet from Kathy. She widened her stance, bleeding speed into an ever widening circle before sliding to a stop nearby.

"Kathy! Hi!" she exclaimed with a huge grin in Kathy's direction. Someone was really excited about this.

Was that someone Kathy? Because she had watched Ringo's approach with wide, excited eyes, gleeing at the acrobatics and already working out something like a routine in her head.

"Hi!" she said, finishing pulling up her hair into a high ponytail so it stayed out of her face. "That was so, so awesome!"

A lot of exclamation points would be abused today. Woe.

It wasn't abuse. It was loving appreciation.

"I know!" Ringo agreed, swinging the backpack off of her shoulders and zipping it open. She reached in and came up with a pair of rather plain-looking ATs. Light grey boots with black laces, the mechanical bits all painted a darker grey. Kathy could decorate them later if she wanted.

"I hope these fit." She really did. Because this would be a lot less fun if they didn't.

And decorate them she would. Soon these suckers would be covered in rainbows and look amazing.

Kathy was already kicking her shoes off and reaching for an AT to pull on. "They feel fine so far!" she said, wiggling her toes while she laced them up. "Plenty of room, but not too loose. These should be fine, Ringo, thank you!"

Ringo was shifting her weight back and forth, that familiar itch building in her feet as Kathy took the ATs from her hand. By the time they were laced, she was already idly spinning in place.

She grinned, stopping the spin, as Kathy finished lacing up. "Well, there's only one way to know for sure," she pointed out with a grin.

Her lips pursed thoughtfully. "You want an explanation or a demonstration?" They'd probably have to do an explanation either way, but Ringo realized that they'd only talked about AirTrek so far.

"Demonstration first?" Kathy asked, clapping her hands. "I mean, I need to know how they work and everything, but please! I want to see what these things can really do!"

Said one adrenaline-junkie to the next.

That was sort of what Ringo had hoped she would say. "Okay!"

Ringo let her eyes sweep across the are around them, mentally planning her run. She also had a brief internal debate with herself about just how serious she wanted to get. She liked Kathy, and despite how short a time she'd known the other girl, Ringo sort of admired her. That, combined with her innate desire to push herself, made the decision easy. She'd show Kathy what it took to be awarded the title 'Queen'.

Which was why she changed her breathing. That made her "Here I go, then" a little breathless, and then she was off.

Accelerating ~~literally~~impossibly fast, Ringo headed directly toward one of the nearest warehouses. She kicked up into a lazy-looking flip and landed on the very edge of a loading dock, grinding along it and picking up speed. About halfway down the building's length, she kicked out a foot and threw herself into a spin, maintaining most of her forward momentum as she hurtled toward the wall.

A little hop and mid-air twist was all it took to transition he feet from the ground to the wall, and Ringo continued her spin, seemingly as comfortable accelerating along a vertical surface as she had been on a horizontal one. Of course there was only so much wall to ride, so Ringo timed things so she ran out of vertical and horizontal room simultaneously, launching herself from the upper corner and continuing her arc into empty air.

An impossibly intricate series of flips and twirls shifted her center of gravity to pull her cleanly over to the roof of the next warehouse where she landed in a crouch, accelerating now that her wheels were in contact again.

The next couple of minutes were more of the same: twisting, spinning speed as Ringo bounced off walls, accelerated along railings, and threw herself into long acrobatic arcs. And if her movements were a little too controlled for someone with a natural sense of balance, a little too flexible and graceful for natural joints, well, hopefully Kathy wouldn't mind.

After bleeding off speed with another series of spins, Ringo twisted her hips and power slid to a complete stop by Kathy, her breath coming in huge gasps, and her face beaming. "What," she managed between breaths, "did you think?"

[ooc: Apologies for the wall o' text, I sort of got carried away!]

Edited 2015-05-19 23:08 (UTC)

Was it rude to wonder if this was how people felt when she was she did? Because Kathy was half-out of breath just watching her, eyes alight and hands clasped tight to her chest.

This was perhaps the closest she'd come to being attracted to a girl since the pollen had gone away.

"Wow," Kathy breathed, eyes wide. "Just...wow. I kinda just wanna go up there with you, even without an AT. Just to..." She shook her head, still grinning. "That was amazing."

Ringo was laughing and beaming already, and Kathy's expression had her already flushed cheeks growing a brighter pink. "I was kind of showing off a little," she admitted, suspecting that she couldn't actually blush any more than she was.

"But you can learn to do it, too." Most of it, anyway. Ringo shifted slightly, her shoulder popping audibly and drawing a wince, but then she went back to beaming. "That's what makes AirTrek so amazing!"

"That makes me feel a little better," Kathy admitted with a laugh. "Because if that's what you do as the AT equivalent of an average Tuesday night jog, then I was going to be a lot more concerned about how good I'd ever be able to get."

"I might even have cheated a little," Ringo admitted.

"I suspect that you could learn some of the basics pretty quickly though," she pointed out. "Rail grinding and wall-riding aren't too bad to figure out if you have a good sense of balance and range of motion."

Kathy couldn't help but give a wry grin at that. "I'm pretty good at both of those things," she said. "I've been a gymnast for over a decade now and I still do yoga pretty frequently, so...I feel like I'm prepared."

Ringo beamed. "You ready to learn the basics, then?" She kind of couldn't wait to get Kathy past the basics so that she could see what the other girl could really do.

"Heck yeah I am," Kathy enthused. She was pretty sure that if she could go from never having been on a bike before to popping wheelies before the end of class, she could pick up the basics of ATs. Just balance and momentum, right? "What's first?"

"Okay, so the first thing is to get used to moving. The motors, brakes, and transmission are all tied to shifts in your weight. Once you've had some practice it all becomes second nature, but for now lean your weight forward slightly and press down with your heel." That should produce a nice, smooth acceleration with top speed controlled by how far forward Kathy was leaning.

Kathy stood up, immediately finding her balance on the row of wheels, her body making minute shifts to her stance and posture in order to let her stand straight and tall without moving, as if she were still wearing regular shoes instead of ATs.

"Press with my heels?" she repeated, putting her weight as instructed even as her upper body leaned forward. "And then--?"

Ringo leaned forward, too, letting herself roll forward slowly. "The motors should engage automatically," she answered. "The farther you lean, the more speed you'll get, but before you tear off, we should talk about brakes."

Though at high speeds they often didn't help that much. "Do the reverse of that, press down with the balls of your feet and lean back for those."

Kathy tried that, pressing harder on her heels. She heard the motors click to engage and then start to hum. She began moving forward slowly. Rolling forward a few yards, she pressed down on the balls of her feet, leaning backwards, and came to a stop.

"It's working!" she cried, lifting her head to grin at Sonia. "I'm moving!"

"You are!" Ringo giggled as she let herself roll past and spun around to face Kathy.

"Starting and stopping figured out, the last basic thing to know is how to turn. There are a bunch of techniques, but the main ones are leaning into the turn, to brake with one foot while keeping the other one rolling, or to turn your trailing foot to the side and drag it to pivot."

Roughly in order of ascending difficulty.

"Okay," Kathy said, nodding as she went over that again. She leaned back on her heels to get some momentum going again. "Leaning into the turn..." she leaned to the right and started skating in a long, slow loop.

Yeah, that made sense and was easy--it was pretty much the same thing she'd done with the bike earlier in the day.

"Brake with one foot..." That took a little longer to master. Kathy kept forgetting to brake with only one foot, so she kept coming to a complete stop. Then there were the few times she would brake with one foot and accelerate with the other and that was just fun all around. But soon enough, she'd gotten decent enough to start zigzagging.

Awesome!

The last one... "Drag trailing foot as pivot," Kathy repeated. She tried to do just that, but she put too much weight on her dragging foot and overbalanced. She'd been leaning backwards at the time, trying to slow down, and her feet slipped right out from under her. "Whoa--!" Kathy yelped.

However, rather than falling over and landing squarely on her butt, her body writhed, almost unnaturally, turning her fall into a back walkover, landing firmly on her feet once more.

"I think I'm going to need to practice that one a few more times," she called to Ringo.

Ringo was sort of following along, grinning excitedly at how quickly Kathy was picking things up. She really was a natural! Sure, it was just the basics, but if she learned everything at this pace it wouldn't be long at all before they could maybe do a couple of face-offs.

Which would obviously be awesome!

When Kathy over-balanced, Ringo's eyes went wide and she started to move to help. Which gave her a perfect view of that twisting little move. Ringo's hands clapped together in excited surprise, and her lips pulled up in a huge grin.

"That was amazing!" she exclaimed, eyes shining, voice a bit breathless. There weren't all that many riders of the Sonia Road, even back home, but it was more than obvious that Kathy was perfectly suited to it.

The hardest thing about learning anything like this was how to keep your balance, how to get your body to work with you, not against you. When that was no longer a factor, it became a lot easier to pick up the basics. And the moves Ringo was showing her now were nowhere near as complicated and intricate things she'd be expected to pick up in a yoga or gymnastics class.

"Thanks," Kathy said, flashing her a V-sign so Ringo would know she was okay. "But it feels weird taking credit for it? It's just something I do, you know?" Her powers made it incredibly difficult for her to fall. She still could, but it was generally off of something, rather than a result of losing her balance. "But still, thanks!"

"A useful something you do," Ringo pointed out with a grin. She cocked her head slightly, considering. "If I didn't know better, moves like that might make me think you were a Gravity Child."

Ringo did know better, though. She knew all the Gravity Children that had been produced, but it was interesting to think that other people out there might have similar abilities.

She shrugged, "But that's a good thing! It probably means you'll learn a lot faster." She leaned forward, ATs humming as she rolled closer, hands clasped behind her back. "Want to try something more fun?"

"A Gravity Child?" Kathy asked, pausing in place. She didn't know what that meant, but she was wild to know where her powers came from. Barry was still running tests, so nothing definitive there yet. But if Ringo had heard of something... "What are they? What do you mean?"

Oh, right, another thing from back home. "Sorry." Ringo shook her head. "Gravity Children are humans who have been genetically modified to ride ATs. They basically have an additional sense organ that's like gyroscope, which gives them basically perfect balance, and enhances kinaesthesia."

Ringo paused. The silence dragged out just enough to be a little bit uncomfortable before she spoke again. "We don't get dizzy, and we can maneuver in three dimensional spaces pretty much on instinct."

Ahh. That 'we' explained the weird silence there.

"I think you're kind of lucky," Kathy said. "I don't know why I am the way I am. Over a few weeks last summer, I went from being nothing special to being able to outrace cars and having to work to fall down." She shrugged a little and offered Ringo a tentative smile. "You don't happen to bounce, do you?"

"Bounce?" Ringo shook her head. "Not that I know of. I mean, I'm more durable than a normal person, and I mentioned the enhanced senses. And my eyes are weird. But, um, I don't think I bounce?"

She managed a half-smile at Kathy. "And I guess it's probably a bit scary to just, well, wake up to something like that. At least I've always known what I was. And I had a sort of family like me."

"Yeah," Kathy agreed, a bit ruefully. "I didn't want to acknowledge that something was happening to me. It was...complicated."

She frowned, the more Ringo explained it, the less it sounded like what she'd gone through. "I'm about as durable as I was before," she said, thoughtfully. "Except for, you know, the bouncing."

[On vacation so slow!]

"I, well, I could ask around at home? See if anyone's heard of anything." But Ringo wasn't exactly hopeful, not based on what Kathy had said.

And now she felt like she'd gotten the other girl's hopes up, and then dashed them. Ringo looked down, studying her ATs. "Sorry," she murmured.

[Yay vacation! Hope you're doing something awesome!]

"Oh, no!" Kathy exclaimed, scooting forward a little on her ATs to reach for Ringo's hands. "It was a pretty unlikely scenario anyway! There's nothing for you to be sorry for!"

Please don't look sad, Ringo. It made Kathy feel horrible!

"It's interesting anyway, even without it possibly being...what I am."

Ringo let Kathy take yer hands and squeezed back. She attempted to rally, managing a mostly genuine smule. "Well, I know it probably doesn't help, but I think that what you are is awesome. Like, really, really awesome."

Someone was pretty rapidly developing a crush.

Aww! Kathy would be so surprised and flattered if she knew that Ringo was developing a crush!

"Awww, thanks," Kathy said, blushing a bit and tucking her hair behind her ear. "I hope I'm not coming across as ungrateful. I mean, I'm really happy with what I can do and I think it's awesome, too."

She said you were awesome, Kathy, not what you could do, sigh.

"Just it seems like everyone else knows where their cool powers came from and I'm still unsure."

Kathy was smart! And mature! And talented! And pretty! And Ringo was pretty sure now that she'd be an amazing AT rider! So Ringo couldn't really help herself.

"I know it's not really fair of me to ask, since I do know, but does it matter that much? I mean, it's who you are, right? And that's awesome. I," Ringo paused, chewing at her bottom lip in thought, "I like to think that if I didn't know where I came from, that it'd be okay? I'd still have my sisters. I'd still have AirTrek. I'd still, well, be me? I think?"

Maybe?

Edited 2015-05-25 02:51 (UTC)

"I have a little sister, too," Kathy explained, slowly skating in circles while she talked. It was hard to stay still these days. Too much energy to keep bottled up. "Will what happened to me happen to her? It'll be a lot harder for her to keep that under wraps in front of our parents. Will I pass it down to my kids? If it's some kind of mutation, is there something else going on? Other changes to worry about?"

She sighed and began skating backwards without thinking about it. "It's not something bad, exactly? It's just...it's something inexplicable about me. And I don't like not knowing things if I don't have to. The nerd in me, I guess."

Ringo had held onto one of Kathy's hands, following her movements almost instinctively. In some ways ATs were easier than just walking for her. More natural.

"I guess," Ringo said, voice soft, "I hadn't thought about, well, kids." She blinked. "Or, um, hiding who I am from family. We don't really talk about it in public, or anything, so I know about, well, keeping things quiet. But it never occurred to me to do that with family since they're like me."

"I wish there were something I could do to help." But while she'd ask around at home, she didn't think she'd learn anything useful.

"My parents would freak," Kathy said, looking horrified at the very idea. "They'd probably call me a freak if they found out about it. I certainly wouldn't be allowed to keep being Banzai. I love them, but telling them is completely out of the picture. I might tell Sarah sometime, but I might wait till she's a little older. Thirteen's still kind of young."

Squeezing Ringo's hand, Kathy offered her a smile. "No worries, Ringo. It's something I'm curious and I've got a friend looking into it. It's not a big deal. Just curious, you know?"

Ringo wasn't entirely sure she believed that it was that simple, but she smiled and nodded.

Because she'd just thought of something that maybe she could do to help.

"Well, maybe I can at least provide a distraction?" She pirouetted, spinning underneath their joined hands, and smirked. "So tell me, Kathy," she almost tacked on a senpai there, but caught herself. "Want to learn how to do a wall-ride 360?"

"You know there's only one possible answer to that question, right?" Kathy asked, her smile turning into a wide grin. "Heck yeah I do!"

[Night!]

"I knew you'd know the right answer!" Ringo beamed, tugging Kathy with her toward one of the warehouses. "Come on!"

[Sleep well!]

"So, what's a wall-ride 360?" Kathy asked, happily allowing herself to be towed along. "Like, all the way up one wall and down another? Or a circle on a wall? Or..." She tried to think of another way the three terms could be used together.

Ringo's eyes lit as she explained. "Wall-rides are the general class of tricks that involve accelerating on vertical surfaces. You can use them to give yourself more ways to move horizontally, and you can use them to actually climb things."

She slowed as they neared the building. "The first problem anyone runs into with a wall-ride is that you don't have gravity to keep you pressed against the wall, so eventually you lose traction and can't keep accelerating." Made sense, right? "So if you want to go for a longer wall-ride, you need a trick that keeps your wheels pressed against the wall. And the way most people do it is with a spin. If you're making a wide loop as you move, centripetal force ~~and canon magic~~ will sort of replace gravity, allowing you to continue accelerating for as long as you can keep control of your spin."

Warehouse District, Tuesday Afternoon

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